Dumb criminals usually do their best to avoid arrest, but there are exceptions even to that rule. Charlie Hackett, chief of police in Kokomo, Indiana, remembers a criminal who decided the police were by far the lesser of the evils confronting him.
“There was a guy in town we’d had some problems with,” Hackett recalls. “He was only about eighteen or nineteen years old, but he’d been arrested several times as a juvenile and was generally a troublemaker. And now he was wanted on a warrant for a burglary. So I was surprised when he called me on the phone at the station.”
At the time, Hackett was a lieutenant working the detective division. His desk was in a large, busy room, and the room was so noisy he could hardly hear anything.
Hackett answered the phone and barely heard someone whispering, “Hello? Hello? Is this Lieutenant Hackett?”
The lieutenant put a hand over his other ear and shouted into the phone. “Could you speak up a little bit?”
“This is Joe Miller,” whispered the voice on the other end.
“Joe, why are you being so quiet?” Lieutenant Hackett asked. Then he added, “We have a warrant for your arrest, you know.”
“I know,” Joe answered. “That’s why I’m calling you . . . to turn myself in.”
Over the phone, in the background, Hackett could hear a strange boom, boom, boom—like someone pounding on a door.
“C’mon Joe,” he repeated, “speak up. I can’t hear you.”
“I can’t talk very loud. I just wanted to turn myself in— come get me right away.”
It turned out that an angry father and his son had caught Joe messing around with the man’s daughter. Now they had Joe cornered in a room. One was at the front door, and one was at the back door. Turning himself in was just Joe’s way of asking for police protection.
He figured—no doubt correctly—that almost any amount of jail time would be less painful than five minutes alone with that woman’s father.