Woman Turns in Husband in Bizarre Burglary Case

As home burglary cases go, this one is more sad than frightening – a strange intersection of the lives of two people who have never met.

One is a woman who owns a home in one of Wauwatosa's most pleasant neighborhoods but has all but abandoned it.

The other is a Milwaukee man who recently retired and, his wife says, rapidly changed in personality.

How these two paths crossed without actually meeting is detailed in police reports and the accounts of family and neighbors.

A worried wife calls police

For Wauwatosa police, the story began on Wednesday when they were brought in to the investigation of a burglary reported by a Milwaukee woman. She had called police to report that her husband had brought stolen merchandise to their home.

Milwaukee police interviewed the couple and learned that the property had been taken from a home in Wauwatosa, in the 400 block of North 89th Street. The theft amounted to 30 Spanish porcelain figurines worth up to $500 each.

The husband, 55, told police that he just happened to be walking by the home in Wauwatosa when he noticed that it appeared vacant. The grass was overgrown. He could hear animals in the attic. He was curious. He knocked and got no answer.

He tried the side door and found it unlocked. He went in.

A familiar find; a troubled mind

By his own account, he explored the home upstairs and down, and when he came across a cabinet filled with porcelain figurines that he knew to be valuable – in fact, a type that his wife collects – he said he took them "for safekeeping" until the owner could be found and the property secured.

But his wife told a different story.

To begin with, she said, her husband had retired in March from a job with the City of Milwaukee. He had very soon begun to smoke synthetic marijuana and developed signs of paranoia. He worried obsessively about weatherproofing their home against thunderstorms. He climbed up and sat on the roof for hours, watching the sky. He left and went on long, aimless rambles. And he had been writing fraudulent checks on the account of a charitable organization to which he belonged.

On May 28, she said, he came home and asked her: "What would you say if I told you I had more Lladros?" Lladro is a brand of Spanish porcelain figures that she collects.

The woman became upset at the thought that her husband had spent a lot of money on the pieces, and then he told her, she said, that he had found them in an unlocked storage shed. Then they are stolen, she told him, and she wanted no part of them. They should be returned.

On Wednesday, she found the figurines still in their basement and called police.

The man was cooperative and took police to the home on 89th Street. He described what he had done, and then officers entered the home.

Collecting turned to chaos

It was, they said, clearly a "hoarder's house," so piled with junk in every room that they had trouble moving through the home. There were cobwebs everywhere, and the noise of raccoons living in the attic. And they found a cabinet with 30 neat circles in the dust where the Spanish figurines had stood.

Neighbors named the woman of the house and told officers she had gone to live with her parents in West Allis. Attempts to locate her were unsuccessful. A background check showed many police calls to the address that had abruptly ended in 2008. Police reported that they were unable to secure the home when they left because the lock to the side door was broken.

Later that night, as the man was being held for further questioning, multiple calls came in to the Wauwatosa police about involving dangerous weapons. Every patrol officer was needed, so the questioning of the man was halted around 10 p.m. while the arresting officer was sent to the scene of the street fight.

At around 11:30 p.m., the man grew bored, he later said, unwound a roll of toilet paper, wadded up the cardboard tube, stuffed it in the sink drain and turned on the water, flooding his holding cell.

Officers on other duty were called in and tried to handcuff the man so that he could be moved to another cell. He resisted strenuously, and finally mule-kicked an officer in the knee hard enough to send him to the hospital. He was arrested for both burglary and battery of a law officer.

A neighborhood takes notice

As for the home he had entered, on a quiet, neat, tree-lined street in Ravenswood, a neighbor told a reporter that the owner hadn't been around for a long time and that her home had been foreclosed upon, but she had filed for bankruptcy the very day the foreclosure was to have gone into effect, holding up the process.

The lawn had been mowed the day after the man's arrest, he said, and a city inspector had showed up to take pictures and leave his card in the door. He said he and other neighbors hope the city will finally take action to keep the property from being a nuisance.

The woman's mail piles up until someone picks it up in bundles, he said. During the last year that she had been at the home, he said, she had apparently run out of room to store things in the home and had rented a Dumpster and parked it in the driveway. She had filled it with junk until one day it was hauled away.

"We rejoiced," the neighbor said. "Hurray, the Dumpster's gone!

"The next day she brought in another one."