Crime of the year:How does a bank get robbed in broad daylight
I wrote this almost 11 years ago, when yet another cyclist was struck and killed by a driver who claimed that ‘I didn’t see him’. It is part satire and part venting.
How does a bank get robbed in broad daylight and there are no witnesses Citizens of Mathers, Massachusetts are trying to figure this out.
Great Northern Bank of Mathers is your typical neighborhood bank. They have been at the same location on Main Street for the last 40 years and are considered one of the pillars of the local economy. However, this last week a crime was committed that shocked the whole neighborhood. The bank was burglarized and robbed of approximately 4 million dollars. No one is even sure whether the bank was robbed over the weekend, just that at the end of close of business on Monday evening the crime was discovered.
Mr Jason Smith, the bank Manager, has been put on administrative leave while police investigate the crime. By all accounts it looks like an inside job. The bank vault does not show any evidence of tampering, the security alarm was not tripped, and the motion detectors in the building were not triggered. However, Frank Waldorff, a neighborhood community activist, has some ideas about how the crime was committed, though everyone we spoke to, including the police have brushed off his theory as ‘wild conjecture’. However, Mr Waldorff is telling his story to anyone who will listen.
“It was Monday morning and I was sitting outside the coffee shop a few doors down when I saw a group of 6 cyclists riding down Main Street. A few drivers almost run into them but that is nothing new around here. They rode up to the bank, parked their bikes in order to help up one of their number who had been hit slightly by an SUV pulling out of the parking lot. They then each took their bicycles and walked into the bank. They were in there for about 30 minutes and then they walked out carrying black plastic bags of something. As they did all this I noticed that they maintained an almost maniacal grip of their bicycles. They then mounted their bikes, rode out of the parking lot, getting narrowly missed by a driver driving a small sedan before disappearing up the street.”
Other people present at the scene corroborate part of Mr Waldorff’s story. Mrs June Orbus was driving out of the parking lot when she noticed 5 people dressed in spandex help another one off the ground but she doesn’t seem to remember where they went after that. “It was like they just disappeared.” However, she does remember hearing a faint thump against the side of her SUV just before she saw the six individuals “And when I got home, I had a minor dent on the side of my SUV. I didn’t think much of it at the time.”
Jason Brock, the town police chief, has dismissed both stories out of hand “Come on, 6 people walk into a bank in broad daylight and only TWO people see them. I don’t give any credence to this wild theories.”
Mr Waldorff, while not outright calling it a conspiracy, thinks that there is more going on here than the police are willing to admit. “How many times has a cyclist been involved in a car accident and the driver claims that they never saw the cyclist? It even happens with pedestrians who also do not see cyclists in broad daylight. It happens all the time. I think that those six individuals managed to figure out that being on a bicycle renders you invisible. It’s the perfect way to do something and not be seen. The clincher is the fact that they took the bicycles into the bank with them. They probably held onto them while they committed the crime. The police chief knows I am telling the truth, he is just scared that once people catch on there will be a rash of crimes as people realize that being on a bicycle renders them invisible.”
We checked Mr Waldorff’s assertions with Dr Grant Beck, an eminent neurologist, etymologist and expert in the field of insect camouflage.
“He is on to something. Insects and animals do it all the time. Certain species of octopi are adept at blending in with coral. They are plainly visible to us but to their predators they are invisible. My theory is that the shape of bicycles triggers previously unknown neural pathways in the cerebral cortex that essentially cancels out the signals from the optical nerves. The canceling effect is very selective, and leaves the subject unaware that they are missing something. The same thing happens with our ‘blind spot’ where the mind adapts such that you do not realize that you are effectively blind in the retina where the optical nerve connects to it.”
Mr Waldorff’s assertions have garnered some attention outside this bucolic New England town, and there is talk of regulating the sale of bicycles at the federal level and implementing a 24 hour waiting period in order to perform criminal checks on all prospective customers. The leading bicycle manufacturers, headed by Trek and Cannondale, have gone on the PR offensive and have hired Frank Greystock, the former lobbyist for the NRA, to fight against the legislation on Capitol Hill.
