Better late then never

Below are some of the weird crime stories of 2005. Yeah, I know, normally these kinds of roundups are published before the new year, but hey, its not my fault. Dude just wrote 'em this week. As weird as these are, can't wait to see the treats that 2006 is sure to bring.

• As a registered sex offender in California, James Andrew Crawford was required to notify authorities if he adopted a new "domicile" for more than five days. He was arrested in May for noncompliance after he had been camped for two weeks in a theater line waiting for Star Wars: Episode III to open. - North County Times (Escondido, Calif.), May 19

• Daryl Atkins, a Virginia capital-murder inmate who had previously registered an IQ lower than the minimum-70 needed for execution, scored a 76, and a jury then sent him to death row. Legal experts attributed the improvement in IQ to the intellectual stimulation Atkins received from discussing his case with lawyers. - ABC News-AP, Aug. 14

• In an early-morning shootout on June 4 in the Homewood housing complex in Pittsburgh, two undercover officers and a suspect exchanged a total of at least 103 gunshots but never hit anyone. - Pittsburgh Tribune-Review, June 5
  

• William Woodard, suspected by police in the Trenton, N.J., area of more than 50 burglaries, was arrested after authorities said they could match him to one of the "signatures" of the crime spree - random splotches of excrement at several crime scenes. (In the course of the arrest, a nervous Woodard failed to control his bowels.) - The Trentonian, March 11
  

• A judge gave Vickey Siles of New Haven, Ind., a suspended sentence and probation, ostensibly out of pity at the lousy job she did altering a check from Globe Life and Accident Co. Siles had badly obliterated the "$1.00" amount of the check, written in "$4,000,000.00," and then tried to cash it at a neighborhood check-cashing store. - Fort Wayne News Sentinel, March 19

• Police in Twin Falls, Idaho, confiscated almost $1 billion in counterfeit money (which a man tried to leave as collateral for a loan) in a scheme doomed from the start because all bills were of the nonexistent denomination of $1 million. -Twin Falls News-Times, Oct. 17

News of the Weird: 2005 in Review [United Press Syndicate via Relish]