hantom Burglar

ome time ago Baron Von Lodge was the head of a small country near Switzerland known as Lilliland.

An alert was announced to all the people of Lilliland about some burglaries that had been taking place. Each of the burglaries was being done by the same criminal or by a gang member. The burglar always left a strange calling card at the scene of each robbery.

The card that was left said, “The Phantom.”

A police investigation indicated that the typical items stolen were from tourists staying at hotels, although some private homes had been included.

The Baron discussed this situation with his chief advisor, Professor Hamblin. “There is a pattern to the robberies. They all occur late at night and they only take gold watches. Other valuable jewelry, left along side the gold watch, seems to be overlooked or of no interest to the thief.”

Since there was no trace of entry to the room from where the items were stolen, and no one had come forward with an eyewitness account, everyone was baffled.

Professor Hamblin started collecting the Phantom’s calling cards and noticed that they all looked the same and were printed on the same card stock. The cards were shown to all the Lilliland printers and no one could identify the printing job or the card stock.

Finally, one printer said that the card stock probably came from Paris. Paris print shops were checked out and one said that he had printed the cards fro a circus performer with a pet chimpanzee.

With this information, the identity of the thief was becoming apparent. A man with a chimp, in the Lilliland area, was a prime suspect.

It was not too difficult to find the man with the chimp, and he was secretly followed for a few days until the fence for the stolen jewelry was identified. Then everyone was arrested, including the chimp. The robber had carefully trained the chimp not to be seen at night and to only steal the gold watches.

The chimp, when apprehended, had to be retrained that stealing was wrong. The chimp got a light sentence and was turned over to a pet handler to find a new home with an honest owner.