WTBL - Walking the Blue Line

WTBL Walking The Blue Line (00:11)
Welcome back everyone to walking the blue line. We are here enjoying a springtime day. The Sun just came out. Yeah, it's looking nice We're trying to get our springtime bodies ready for the summertime swimsuit bodies Oops, I'm a little worried about that Well, we've been trying this dieting thing. Hey do any of you out there?

diet regularly. The end thing now is the Mediterranean diet. don't know. Every year or every five years there's a new one that everyone says you got to do. Even the doctors are, well have you tried this? Yeah the carnivore diet or the Atkins diet a few years ago. it's the Mediterranean. Grapefruit diet. Can't stick with any of them for too long. I know all the diets and what you're supposed to do. It's the

portions that get me. Although don't feel like we binge eat or anything like that. We're not eating all day long. We just like to eat bigger meals than most people. portion control is probably the hardest thing. And it doesn't help that I like to bake and cook. And so that's really tough for me because if I stop doing it, then I'm kind of bored. Right.

We were talking earlier about how much you do know about ⁓ cooking and all of those kind of things. Do you ever find yourself getting into a position though where you have overextended your knowledge maybe? ⁓ absolutely on just about everything I've ever done, know, about the time like sourdough. I seriously let it's a love hate thing.

I know how to do the starter. can get that sucker going and it'll quadruple in about three hours. And I can make a good loaf, but mine just don't seem to look like everybody else's. And that goes true with crocheting.

Baking cooking. I mean you said you had that with cars, right? Yeah automotive Experience I do quite a bit of my own home repair on my cars and such like that and every now and then you just get into a situation where You feel like you know what you're doing. You're pretty confident You're very confident and all of a sudden something comes up that says maybe I don't know as much as I thought I did right exactly

Well that kind of takes us down the road of today's crime or several crimes really. Dumb criminals. Well back in 1995 there was this guy by the name of MacArthur Wheeler. it was April 19th of 95 Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.

And he felt like he knew a little bit more than he really did. Yeah, he had heard that lemon juice could be used as an invisible ink. And I have to say, as a kid, I played around with this. And what what I did was you would take a plain white piece of paper. You take lemon juice and a paintbrush or something and you write a message on it and you let it dry and you can't see anything.

Well, I actually got in trouble because I scared my nieces and my cousins with this thing. So anyway, they came over. We're all playing. I'm like, hey, let's let's ⁓ have a seance or something. don't know. So the devil. Yes, I know something stupid. And that's why I got in trouble. So anyway, they came over and I'm like, yeah. So you just ask questions and I run this piece of paper over the candle and it'll give you an answer. Well, it does work. It works pretty well. So of course, I'm running this paper over the candle.

and an answer comes up, yes, no, maybe, whatever I wrote down, and I scared the bejeebies out of my family members, and then mom proceeded to come in and probably whip my butt, because I shouldn't have been playing around with it. so leading into that, this guy thought it's invisible ink, so if I put it all over me, I'm gonna be invisible.

Right. It's not how that works. Well, it's not how it works, but he put it to the test. did. That's the funny part. He puts the lemon juice all over his face and in doing so, he gets some in his eye, but he's trying to see if this experiment works. So with the lemon juice in his eye, he gets his camera, he takes a quick photo. And when he looks at the photo, lo and behold, you can't see him. He's not there.

But the funny part is he put the lemon juice only on his face, but since he had it in his eye, he's not in the picture at all. So I'm thinking, why doesn't he realize that it wouldn't make his clothing invisible? you know. Well, in his haste and confusion due to the lemon juice being in his eye and probably burning the crud out of his eyeball, he pointed the camera in the wrong direction, snaps a photo.

and he doesn't appear in the photograph. He thinks he's good to go. So logically we could come to the he doesn't understand the basic chemistry concept here. No, he doesn't. But he goes ahead and he tries this again. He puts lemon juice on his face and he marches down to not one, but two of the local banks and proceeds to rob them at gunpoint. Not only that, he sees the camera

He looks at the camera and he smiles. So he walks out of the bank feeling pretty confident. Nobody can see me. I'm good to go. And then lo and behold, later that evening, the evening new shows his photograph all over town saying, if you know this person, please call the police. Well, it wasn't too long after that that the police come knocking at his door.

They arrest him and he has the famous line of I put on the juice I had on the juice He couldn't understand how they could see him. I think he got famous for that line, right? Well, this crime happens in 1995 and four years later a couple of researchers hear about this as well as some other instances and they decide to run a research study as

What is going on here? Why would a normal person be so? Ill-conceived to think that you know lemon juice is gonna make him invisible. Yeah, so this was called the dunning kruger effect, right? Their study they went out and got some college students and such and they gave them actual tests and then what they did was they Would have them

rate themselves before they graded them and gave them their scores. Right. And what they found are that people who are not self aware that are unable to judge their own competency usually believe that they're doing better than they really are. And so they would rate themselves as above average or higher than average. And people that actually do have some competency in whatever the test area was.

and realized how either poorly or how good they did, usually rated themselves below average. And so it had to do with self-awareness and their ability to tell where their strong suits are, their weak suits are, what they do know and what they don't know. And so they titled this study the Dunning-Kruger Effect and since then, numerous criminals have been caught.

because of the Dunning-Kruger effect. Yeah, and even though there's a couple of them we're gonna highlight besides the ones we've already talked about, but the BTK killer, he was the guy who he beat, tortured, and then killed these people. But he wrote letters to the police all the time, like antagonizing them, kind of baiting them, thinking, I'm so smart, I'm never gonna get caught.

And there was actually a case that we did earlier where one of the detectives said, you know, the guy was smart. He was really smart. He was probably smarter than any of us, but not more than all of us put together. Right. And that was BTK in the fact that he probably could have gone undetected, but if he wouldn't have written the letters several years later after his last homicide, he wrote another letter to the

Police and it was through tracing that letter that they were able to capture him and man am I glad because this definitely deserved ⁓ But then there's some other ones out there that weren't so notorious But they got a they got a little bit of notoriety such as the Craigslist hitman Yeah, and that was actually a lady, right? Delilah de Bolido

Right out of Florida. She took out a Craigslist ad to have someone kill her husband and so and she got a response right and unbeknownst to her the guy that responded was either an undercover agent or an informant they basically do a sting on her they end up recording her video her and ⁓ audio

They get her hiring this guy. They actually go as far as to fake her husband's death and take graphic pictures. Right. So they set up this fake crime scene. They tell her that the job has been completed. They go through with all of this. And then when she's arrested, she is actually presented with all of this evidence of her on

the hitman and such and she is Probably more on the narcissistic side where She thinks she can talk her way out of it that basically because she says something she thinks people are gonna take it as the truth and so all of these Surveillance videos none of that seems to matter to her. Well, she thinks that she has the ability to manipulate everything the police the situation and I've actually talked to people like that where

I feel like they think if they say it, it's true. And if they tell it to enough people, then that makes it even more true. And they believe this in their minds. Right. So this is an overinflated ego beyond belief. But it does play out out there. And she's just one example of someone who thinks that no matter what she does, she's not going to get caught.

And when she does get caught, she can just deny it and everyone's gonna believe

This one really kind of surprises me because every bit of the evidence is right there. they have her and she still thinks that she can out-talk them. But that leads me to think the guy that we had did the case on, the one who poisoned his wife,

Yeah, he did the same thing he thought that he could just talk and talk and talk and you guys were just gonna believe everything He said yeah, he's pretty good at diversion You would ask him a question and he would take your question and go off in a different Direction or something and his feeling was that as long as he could keep the conversation going That you weren't gonna be able to pin anything down on him and such well

That isn't necessarily the way it works and the more that they talk quite frequently the more lies that they get caught in really. I remember asking you when I watched the interview is like why do you guys let this guy ramble on and you're like oh the more rambling the better we love it he's like he's gonna talk himself into a corner. Right so usually the smarter ones shut up shut up and ask for an attorney you know if they've done something

there are those, like I said, that have the overinflated ego, they're narcissistic, and they've believed that you should believe them just because they say so. Right. There's another guy, Rodney Bradford, and he doesn't lie as his is that he kind of used it to his advantage. Right. In this particular case, it kind of shows how maybe the police didn't have as much as they

⁓ Thought they did so this is kind of almost the inverse in which he is accused of robbing a store and when the robbery takes place He is actually at his father's house Posting on Facebook and so his defense attorney is able to subpoena Facebook and Get a record of the exact time and location of his posting

It is able to prove his innocence. So in that instance it he was smart enough to do that But but it kind of leads us into some other stuff. I don't know about you I'm sure everyone has experienced this really if you post much you post something on Facebook or YouTube or tik-tok and you always have the people that come on and give their opinions I always say everybody has an opinion and they usually stink right and so they'll contradict you

or they'll tell you, that's not right, and they'll argue with you about it, and you might be totally right, but that doesn't stop them. there's always someone out there, like you said, with a different opinion, but some of them believe that they have the facts, and I've seen a lot of these in terms of people that are armchair lawyers. yeah. It's the armchair quarterback for the football game. Football, yeah. It's like, ⁓ know, should've, well.

You weren't in their shoes, you don't know what they were facing and so, yeah. Or the ones that are like, why did they shoot him so many times? Or why did they do this or why did they do that? Well, I have to tell you, if you're not in that situation, if you don't have that adrenaline pumping, if you don't think you're the life that could be taken if you don't get this situation under control, there's all kinds of things that go into why people do things. Exactly.

the social media end of it, you know, the people that always think that they know better. But the other part of that is with social media or the internet as a whole is the number of people that don't understand how it works. every time you see a homicide anymore, especially like a domestic violence homicide, one of the first things they're doing is gathering up all of the computers and the cell phones. Checking their history. To see what they've googled.

And again, Mr. Pettis was a prime example of that when he was googling to see how much medicine that would kill someone or knock them out? ⁓ Yeah, the effects of hydrocodone Over a period of time and especially if it was ground up, you know, what it works faster Yeah, what would crushing the pills do?

that kind of thing. So a number of people don't understand that when you delete that from your computer, that doesn't necessarily delete it from the internet. keeps a record or a lot of times of what you're searching

Other things that can come into play here is if you forward it to somebody or what if somebody just sees it and takes a picture of it? a lot of people think oh I can send this or that it'll disappear but someone might have more than one computer or phone people search weird things all the time to get them caught like how long does DNA last or how

delete your search history permanently. I don't know if you can really. Maybe years and years or something. Well, you can delete it from your particular computer. But permanently,

like someone who you sent it to. But that comes down to phones too. tracking, like they still have IP addresses. They can...

ping your phone, where you're at. There's all kinds of stuff like that. Well, and a lot of times people take incriminating photographs of the crimes that they're committing

pictures. Right. those pictures can be found and when they are found, they'll say, well somebody else forwarded that to me, but.

A lot of times there's what they call metadata in there, which tells the GPS location of where the photograph was taken, what time it was taken, what camera it was taken with, what all the camera photo settings were. it is like everything. There's a ton of data in each and every photo out there. There's also the movie and pop culture influence where you watch, CSI or something and you're like, I know how this works.

It's like well, that's kind of a glorified version of how that works, right?

I don't know if you've ever seen the movie HEAT but that movie actually Could have been the inspiration for one of the other dumb criminals that we were looking at in HEAT They go to rob an armored car and they have this elaborate setup where they tip the armored car over on its side using the big semi and they are gonna blow open the doors and steal all the money. Well an individual in

2010 by the name of Eduardo since eon Thought that he was gonna try to do this same thing by blowing the doors off of an armored car and Actually, what he did was he failed miserably basically because he didn't have the technical knowledge or the expertise on how to make a bomb how to blow the doors off what the design of the armored car was like and such and so He was caught

in very short order. But it was just another example of someone who saw something on television, thought, yeah, I can do that, and tries to put it into practice without actually having any knowledge. Again, that knowledge base is important. I think it turns confidence into ignorance. Right, it does to a certain degree, yes. Yeah, you're get caught because you don't really know what you're doing.

of your own true abilities. When you guys kind of go to some training on how to spot some of that stuff, how to spot overconfidence, like we already hit on letting them talk and talk and

we're trained on spotting real-world patterns. A lot of the criminals that are out there, they make very simple mistakes that add up. And not understanding at all how some of the forensics in such work.

When I was a patrolman back in the early 90s, I remember responding to a ⁓ store burglary in which the burglar was still inside the store when we show up. But this is a two-story building, one story at the front, two story at the back. So he decides to go out the second story on the back and he breaks out the window and he throws himself outside the window, but he's hanging onto the ledge.

and the broken glass cuts the ends of his fingers off as he jumps down to the ground level. He takes off running and a canine catches him a couple blocks away. I can imagine, it followed the blood trail. Right, well he's bleeding like crazy. And he his fingertips. He left his fingertips and that was the big thing was that when we go in there we find his fingertips and he's going to the hospital because he's bleeding like crazy.

So one of

deputies picks up the fingertips and they rush them to the hospital with the idea that they could reattach them. And he denies that they're his. ⁓ my gosh. In his mind, if the fingerprints aren't on his person, then he is ⁓ not guilty. And he thinks that he's going to get away with this. little DNA thing there. Well.

could go DNA, but this is back in the 90s. But what he's failing to recognize is that he's been booked into jail before. We have his fingerprints, we know what they look like. So now we can take the fingertips so we can compare them. Not to mention we have his name, we had his photograph from previous arrests. A blood trail. Yeah, this isn't rocket science, but he was very adamant and did not have his fingertips sewn back on.

because he thought that that made him innocent. again, overstating his competence when it came to a legal analysis of what his fingerprints really meant, believed he was the exception and he wouldn't get caught. Yeah. But that goes as well to part of this Dunning-Kruger effect in terms of legal aspect is, a lot of people think they know the law.

much better than they do. ⁓ yeah, that's the ones that are sitting there video and everything. I have the right to video this, that and the other and they have a right to do some things, but they don't have a right to do everything that they're doing. and that's part of it. Part of it is like, when the officer can ask for their identification and when they can't, what warnings do they have to give them and when do they have to give them and such.

that reminds me, it was a funny one and I don't know if it was true or not, but it seemed about dumb enough to be true. These two guys are in a car and a policeman pulls them over and the guy driving has a cat collar on, And so the policeman walks up, man, this guy handles it really coolly. And if, if this is true, it's hilarious. So he goes, Hey, I need to see your license and registration. And the guy goes, well, I don't have that. I'm a

and he goes what and maybe you remember this

somebody made a youtube video of of this and so Tends to make me think that it was set up

Then he goes so is that guy your owner and I he says yes, right? Right and then he goes Where's his cat license? I'm gonna have to take you to the pound now and we're gonna have to neuter you this guy keeps his cool and it was really hilarious at the end the guys just give

Or get a fine for not having this license Yeah, and and he says something about well, you're a cat You can't drive anyway You gotta come and take you in for that and my gosh It was pretty good comeback if that was actual video if not real stage, but even if it's staged it was a funny It was a funny

these are some of our dumb

across the nation and we hope that you've enjoyed some of the stories today. Not to make too much light because just being a criminal isn't right in the first place. No it isn't and we always say you know it's the dumb ones that we catch actually we catch a fair number of the smart ones as well because the fact is is when you're committing crimes especially large-scale crimes it is so difficult to do everything without leaving a trace.

without leaving some evidence or making a mistake

So when it comes to the Dunning-Kruger effect, basically a short way of summarizing it is dumb people are just too dumb.

to that they're dumb. And they're going to get caught. So don't be a dumb person. Don't do crime. No, don't. Don't do drugs. That's the best way to not get caught. So but we hope that you find these stories somewhat entertaining and feel free to look any of them up if you like. There's a bunch of them out there besides these that

people do dumb things all the time.

hopefully you're enjoying some springtime weather the same way that we are and that you have a good week until next week. And hope you guys find your swimsuit bodies before summer. Absolutely. So, well, God bless and we will see you later. Bye.