Claim: Thief drowns in submerged pool after looting the home of disaster victims.
Example: [Collected via e-mail, 2005]
Lori works with a lady whose relatives live in Lakeview [Louisiana]. When they evacuated, they put all of their valuables, jewelry and things of that nature, up on the second floor of their home. When the water went down enough to walk through, one of the "brothers" looted the home and stuffed most of their valuables into a pillow case and went out the back. The water was probably at about
Last week, the home owners had a pool service come in to drain and clean the pool. They found the body at the bottom of the pool with the pillow case filled with their valuables. Just goes to show you, there is some justice out there.
Or, as my mother would say...
'Be sure your sins will find you out.'
Origins: One
popular genre of urban legendry is the "
property is caught and
The example cited above, coming in the wake of
bottom of a flood-submerged
"brothers" also suggests the looter was black and thereby introduces an element of race found in other Katrina-related
legends.)
Unless some key element is missing from this account (such as the looter's pillowcase full of booty was tied securely to him or stuffed into a backpack strapped around his body), this scenario doesn't sound plausible as a real-life event, as the thief could simply have let go the sack of valuables and floated free. We also note that this scenario is so timeworn that it was mentioned in a 1945 collection of "tired and tiresome plots which constantly turn up on editors' desks":
(31) The same story as the one just outlined, except that the killer is so loaded with gold that when he flops accidentally into a pool of water or a wild river he cannot swim. The gold pulls him down, and he drowns.
(30) A man on the verge of starvation with some companions in a desert shoots his friends and takes what little food remains. All is well for a time. Unfortunately, in attempting to find his way to a settlement he becomes lost. For days he fights for his life. He plunges through the hot sand without losing hope. On the twentieth day, near sundown, he sees signs of human beings. He gropes his way toward them and finds
(The same basic plot shows up in literature well before the 20th century, as a similar fate also befalls Dunstan Cass, a character in George Eliot's 1861 novel Silas Marner, who steals Marner's gold but then falls into an abandoned quarry and drowns, with his body remaining undiscovered until years later.)
But of course, what's important here (in a folkloric sense) is not the anecdote's truthfulness, but the moral it expresses: Had the crook not taken advantage of others' misfortune and made off with their property, he wouldn't have lost his life. No one relishes the thought of being victimized in a crime, and compounding that distaste is the knowledge that all too often the perpetrators get away with their misdeeds. But in these legends, at least, the wrong-doers are brought to justice by their criminal actions.
Last updated: 5 September 2010
 | Sources: |
Young, James. 101 Plots Used and Abused. Boston: The Writer, Inc., 1946 (pp. 14-15).