It was another routine day on patrol at a shopping mall. Officer Dusty Cutler had just grabbed a quick lunch and returned to her squad car when she saw a blond woman sprint out the mall entrance and into the parking lot.
“She was an attractive woman,” Cutler remembers. “She wore a nice print dress, high heels . . . and she was very tall.”
But why was she running? Seconds later Cutler got an answer when two men ran out the door and pursued the woman across the parking lot.
At first, Cutler thought the two men were harassing the woman. Then they got closer, and she heard them shouting, “Stop her! She robbed us!”
Cutler later learned that the woman had shoplifted women’s clothing from a store in the mall and then assaulted one of the managers. The two men chasing her through the busy parking lot were the store’s other manager and a salesclerk.
As the suspect ran in front of Cutler’s car, she hiked up her dress in order to run faster, exposing a large pair of women’s underwear. They were bulkier than normal, and Cutler could see a sleeve from a woman’s blouse sticking out through the leg opening.
As the shoplifter sprinted away, the large baggy underwear stuffed with stolen merchandise slipped down over the suspect’s thighs. At that point the officer noticed something extra that obviously didn’t come from a store. The woman shoplifter, evidently, was not a woman.
By now the officer was having a difficult time calling in the report because she was laughing so hard. And the fleeing shoplifter was rapidly losing ground. With every step, the loaded underwear slipped farther down the suspect’s legs. Finally, they fell to the ground and sent their wearer sprawling.
Still trying to make a graceful getaway, the fugitive scrambled back up, kicked off both the offending underwear and the high heels, and ran faster. But by this time Cutler had pulled the patrol car into the suspect’s path, and the fleeing criminal slammed across the hood of the car. She/he was arrested and charged with shoplifting.
Cutler still speaks of that shoplifter-in-drag as the strangest criminal she ever—literally—ran into.
The woman had shoplifted women’s clothing from a store in the mall and then assaulted one of the managers.