I heard a great story yesterday afternoon, "studying" in the library, from a friend of mine.
I have to describe my friend in order for one to appreciate how suprising the story was...and how marvelous.
My friend has a PhD in environmental sciences - I like to call him doctor...he seems to like that I call him doctor - Dr. "Bob". He's in his late thirties, early forties and is very intellectual - literally one of the smartest people I've EVER known. I've seen him lecture on various water issues, drainage patterns, the long term effect of the oil industry in Alberta - stuff An Inconvenient Truth was made of - except this was Dr. Bob's own research. He boggles my mind on a regular basis because he is so smart.
OK...so he's also...umm...how can I put this?? Not the burliest of men. Thin, tall, glasses, long face, small eyes...he's a cyclist. He's also very disarming...innocuous...the anthesis of "trouble." But he does have a wicked dry sense of humor and, as far as I'm concerned, a mischevious side that is just itching to get out.
Ok...so there's the description...now for the story.
Dr. Bob spent a whole bunch of time in Australia a few years back...sort of wandering and working and then some working and wandering. At some point he found himself in rural southern Australia, outside a small village near Melbourne working on a farm that sported vineyards producing delicious bottles of Shiraz. A quirk of the little hamlet was that a lot of Italian Mafioso apparently also own vineyards in this area...farms that grow lots of grapes, but nobody ever seems to pick the grapes, and yet they report stunning profits from the sale of their wines. Hmmm.
One day Dr. Bob was walking into town to run some errands: get a haircut, take his sleeping bag to a tailor for some repairs, pick up the mail from the post office. As he was walking down the main (and only street) in town, he approached the motel which was surrounded by every police vehicle within a 3 hamlet radius. He walked past the motel, and then thought to himself that he would like to speak to a police officer about an individual that had been working on the farm who had stolen some items from fellow workers and then fled town just days prior. Dr. Bob wished to know how to file a police report, so he turned back towards the motel and just as he was doing so two police officers pulled towards him in their vehicle. He approached the car, and placing his hands on the edge of the open drivers window, he said "good morning officers." However, rather than replying in a similar friendly tone, the two officers eyed him suspiciously. The one in the passenger seat said to his partner, "he matches the description," upon which Dr. Bob (slightly alarmed) said, "Pardon me?" Bad Cop gruffly snapped at him, "We ask the questions here, not you!" Good Cop (aka the Driver) then proceeded to ask him a series of questions about who he was, where he was from, why he wasn't carrying identification with him...all which were answered by Dr. Bob honestly and completely (from canada, living on a local farm, and he wasn't carrying identification with him because he was just out for a walk). Abruptly Good Cop asked Dr. Bob to step back from the car, and sped off.
Dr. Bob, slightly uneasy, carried on with the rest of his day.
Next day, he came back into down to pick up his repaired sleeping bag and stopped in at the post office. Postman knew Dr. Bob...heck as the only foreigner in town everyone knew Dr. Bob. "have you seen the paper today," asked postman. There on the front page of the paper was a story about the incident Dr. Bob had come upon the day prior. Apparently a very wealthy business man had been found murdered in the motel. The only witness to the crime was the prostitute he had hired, and she had identified her jealous boyfriend as the shooter...a man now on the lam. The article went on to describe how the police had "unknowingly" stopped the suspect and went on to describe in detail (right down to the clothes he was wearing and the green sleepingbag he was carrying), my friend, Dr. Bob. Dr. Bob was the prime suspect in a murder investigation and the supposed boyfriend of a local prostitute...Dr. Bob of the tree hugging, and spandex bike pants...Dr. Bob of the Nalgene water bottles and the left wing politics...Dr. Bob...a murder suspect.
So Dr. Bob went back to the farm and hid out (I'd like to think under the hay in the barn...but probably not) until the real killer was caught...just a few farms down the road...one of the Mafia vineyards. And the funniest parts of the story is the description of the real suspect - was he tall, and thin with round glasses and bike pants? Nope - he was a short, stalky, swarthy Italian with more hair than a grizzly bear. So much for matching the description.
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3 comments:
That's crazy! Dr. Bob sounds like a real character.
Dr. Bob should write a book titled "If I did do it"...
I swear you'd laugh at some of the suspect descriptions that we get sometimes and what the actual suspect looks like :P He does sound like quite the dude. Tom and I had a guy we called Father Bob at the school we used to go to and he had that tall thin, glasses and sport shorts, but I don't think he was as much of a dude.
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