The Story
This is an oldie, but goldie so I had to include it. This is the story of McArthur Wheeler and Clifton Earl Johnson. On Jan-06-1995, these two criminal masterminds strolled into several banks in broad daylight. No disguises, no ski masks, not scratching their faces with dirt, not even trying a bandana or, like, a baseball cap. Nope.
McArthur Wheeler
These guys had a plan so utterly confused it could only come from believing your high school chemistry teacher was actually a secret magician. Their disguise of choice? Lemon juice. They were convinced that since lemon juice can be used as invisible ink, it would magically make their faces invisible to security cameras.
If you didn’t know, lemon juice can be used to write messages that only appear when heated. Somehow these two believed it would make their faces invisible to security cameras. Wheeler said he even tested it by taking a Polaroid photograph of himself after applying lemon juice to his face.
They held up two banks in Pittsburgh arm-in-arm, guns drawn, faces gleaming. Tellers cooperated and they got the money. And then they just strolled out easy as could be. Not surprisingly, they were recorded on the bank’s cameras, which did a great job of recording their lemon-covered ones.
Clifton Earl Johnson
The cops rounded up Johnson a few days later. Wheeler managed to stay free for a bit — until police broadcast the security footage on the local news. Within less than an hour of that airing, tips poured in. When police finally caught up with Wheeler and showed him the tape… he was stunned.
He gasped, blinked like a cartoon character, and said the words that would go down in criminal folklore: “But I wore the lemon juice.“
Police theorized that Wheeler’s Polaroid test failed because he accidentally pointed the camera away from himself, had bad film… or maybe just wasn’t great at photography. Or because Polaroid cameras are unreliable.
Reactions
Some of you may not remember a time when social media wasn’t around, but it wasn’t really at this time, although this was cited by psychologists David Dunning and Justin Kruger used this case to illustrate a now-famous cognitive bias – the Dunning-Kruger effect.
It seems fitting to end on this.
“If Wheeler was too stupid to be a bank robber, perhaps he was also too stupid to know that he was too stupid to be a bank robber — that is, his stupidity protected him from an awareness of his own stupidity.” – David Dunning
Sources
1.) https://www.newspapers.com/article/centre-daily-times-lemon-juice-didnt-wo/111378933/
3.) https://news.google.com/newspapers?id=EYRIAAAAIBAJ&sjid=n24DAAAAIBAJ&pg=4993%2C3140175
4.) https://www.newspapers.com/article/pittsburgh-post-gazette-dumb1/73185038/
5.) https://www.gq-magazine.co.uk/article/stupidity-for-dummies
6.) https://historicflix.com/the-lemon-juice-heist-the-bizarre-case-of-mcarthur-wheeler/