ELDERLY WOMAN ACCUSED OF TRAINING HER 65 CATS TO STEAL FROM NEIGHBORS
In October 2019, World News Daily Report published a story that has remained sensational to date. According to the story, an 83-year-old Ruth Gregson from Columbus, Ohio, was accused of a fascinating crime. The elderly lady had trained her 65 cats to steal shiny jewelry from her neighbors. The story hit the headlines of many blogs, articles, and social media posts. However, the account was flagged as false by Facebook fact-checker. The World News Daily is known to be a satire site. They have a disclaimer that all characters that appear in their articles are fictional. The resemblance between the characters and any real people is a miracle. The woman whose picture appeared in the report is 92-year-old Helen Staudinger. Helen was arrested in 2011 for shooting at her neighbor’s house in Florida. It is assumed the picture used in the article was Helen’s mugshot from her arrest in the incident. The article also has a photograph of former Columbus police chief, Kim Jacobs. Kim retired in February 2019.
The Article
In October 2019, the Columbus Police Department opened an investigation on 83-year-old Ruth Gregson. Several of her neighbors reported that shiny valuables such as cutlery and jewelry would disappear when Ruth’s cats visited their houses. The investigators were skeptical of the claims. However, they carried out a surveillance operation, and their discovery was beyond shocking. Ruth’s dozens of cats would always leave her house and bring back any shiny objects they would find in other people’s houses. Columbus Police Chief Kim Jacobs described Ruth as Fagin of Oliver Twist but using cats to steal instead of children. The detectives surveyed her home for less than three hours, within which the cats brought over a hundred objects.
The detectives searched Ruth’s house and found jewelry and precious metals worth $650,000. There was also a pile of worthless shiny items. A total of 65 adult cats and 17 kittens were at her home. The cats have been entrusted to the Columbus Humane Society. Ruth confessed that she trained her cats to steal so that they could earn their meals. She only fed her cats if they brought home valuable items, so they had to steal daily to survive. The ploy was quite easy since most neighbors would pity the skinny cats and let them into their houses. The cats could have stolen in more than 5,000 residences in the area.
Ruth Gregson is the first person to be accused of training cats to steal in America. However, it wouldn’t be the first time that animals were trained to commit crimes. In 2009, CCTV cameras caught footage of a monkey stealing plants from a nursery in Texas. The monkey was trained to pick up the plants and hand them over to a waiting human accomplice. The plants were worth hundreds of dollars. In 2013, a man was sentenced to a five-year jail term in Chicago. He had trained ferrets to steal cell phones from people in the streets.