Stepfather of the Year, the Dog Poop Bomber, the Identity Swap Murder

(upbeat music) Hey, I'm Tara Sarabhan, and you're listening to World's Dumbest Criminals. If you're keen to hear about the most ridiculous bizarre and downright stupid criminals and crime stories in the world ever, you've come to the right place. In today's episode, you'll be hearing about a man who delighted in secretly doing things to mess with his family's heads, including replacing his step-son psychiatric medication with laxatives. A man who created a homemade dog poo bomb to get revenge on a former friend, an Indian woman who killed her husband, then consensually disfigured her lover with acid so he could steal his identity and more. Alrighty. Let's get cracking. This case is one of the most truly bizarre stories I've ever come across, and I don't mean to blow my own trumpet, but I've spent a lot of time seeking out bizarre stories. It went down in Florida because, well, of course it did. In 2018, 50-year-old Craig Ripple was married to a woman who had two children from a former relationship. One of the kids was a 14-year-old boy who had a mood and behavioral disorder and had been prescribed lithium to help manage it. For around a year from 2018 to 2019, the son suffered from a mystery illness that caused him abdominal pain and persistent diarrhea. His mother had taken him to see numerous medical professionals in an effort to find out what was wrong. It even undergone intrusive procedures, including colonoscopies and endoscopies, but the illness remained in a nigma. And to top it all off, the family Pat had developed an incontinence problem and was constantly weighing on the kid's beds. The son got to the point where he refused to take his medication because he believed it was causing him to be sick. A lot of people who suffer from conditions treated by lithium, such as bipolar disorder, object to taking their medication, but thankfully his mum didn't dismiss his concerns as an excuse to go off his meds. According to the Miami Herald, and instead she took a closer look at his lithium capsules and noticed that they'd been tampered with. She pulled the outer coating of them apart and found several small round-pink tablets inside. They were later identified to be over-the-counter laxatives. Realising something very strange was a foot, the clever woman started slew thing and secretly set up security cameras across the house. What she saw on the videos was incredibly shocking. The cameras had captured her arsehole husband Craig using his sweaty sausage fingers to empty her son's lithium capsules and replace their contents with the laxatives, which is obviously a shitty thing to do. Particularly to a teenager with a mood and behavioural disorder, it could have worsened his condition and resulted in him harming himself or others. But that's not all. The loaded chia pet Craig was also responsible for other peculiar incidents that regularly occurred in the household. He was caught on video taking and hiding the kids' clothes, homework and jewelry so he could sit back and statistically delight in watching the children and their mother try to find them. Fun! Court documents stated, The investigation revealed that Craig Ripple had been engaging in malicious acts with no real purpose other than to cause emotional distress to his wife and stepkids. Upon investigation, his wife found many of them missing items in the boot of Craig's car. He probably liked driving around listening to some reprehensible rongin' like Arkelli and getting off on how incredibly clever he was for fucking with his family's heads. Undesmart is guy and the whole wide car. As if that wasn't enough, he was also caught on camera pouring liquid onto the children's beds to make it seem like the family pet had peed on them. What the hell did poor snowball ever do to you, your nasty potato? Their sick fuck seemed to delight in causing chaos and confusion in the household and trying to pit the mum, kids and pet all against each other. After discovering the twisted true colors of the man she'd married, she promptly divorced his ass and got the authorities involved. And snowball was like a tried to warn ya bitch. She provided the Flagler County Sheriff's Office with the capsules he'd tampered with and the security footage of him doing so and taking things from the kids' rooms and framing the poor pet. When detectives questioned Craig, he crumbled like a cookie and admitted to messing with the teenager's medication. Ladvival reported that Craig blamed his sadistic behavior on spite for his wife, due to feeling disrespected for her accusing him of the sadistic behavior that he was doing. So he was spiteful towards his wife for accusing him of the things he did, which is why he did those things in the first place. Hmm, does he have a time machine? According to FlaglerLive.com, the case was due to be battled out in court when Craig agreed to plead guilty to one felony count of child neglect. A judge sentenced him to 14 months behind bars followed by three years' probation. He was also ordered to take parenting classes and have no contact with his former stepson who has since moved into state with his family. Craig's just lucky, his now ex-wife, didn't decide to give him a taste of his own medicine. His life depends on him taking 17 prescribed drugs for diabetes, blood pressure and heart issues. He best hope whoever's dispensing them to him in jail is a kinder and more level-headed person than he is. - MX, one, all 718 transportation. Evergreen, North of Bristol. - Portland resident Rob Stout used to be good mates with a guy not named in media reports. So let's just call him Kevin. Rob and Kevin loved hanging out and watching YouTube videos of people pulling pranks on each other. They'd laugh their arses off and try to come up with extreme pranks of their own. But all that ended when Kevin borrowed something off Rob and did not return it. Now what do you do if you lend a friend some unnamed thing and they refuse to give it back? Do you get the police involved to try to regain possession of it legally or do you start making a bomb? In April 2019, Rob decided to go with option B. He later said in court he didn't contact the police as he had 14 previous convictions, including 10 felonies. He'd also recently rekindled an old meth habit after losing his job, meaning he and the law were not on good terms. So Rob decided to deal with this shit himself and when I say shit, I mean it quite literally. Dubbed the dog poop bomber by the media, Rob stockpiled his dog's feces and also went around collecting dog droppings that careless owners had left around his neighborhood. That's a fun twist on an Easter egg hunt. He obtained an old car airbag from a wrecking yard, covered it with his vast collection of dog poo and assembled it with a battery, wiring and switches inside a toolbox. He set it up so that the toolbox would explode upon opening before placing it in the back of his former friend's Camaro. On April 16th, the shit went down. Well, first it went up and out and all over Kevin, but then it went down. Fortunately Kevin was unharmed in the stinky explosion, but it certainly scared the shit out of him. When he called the police to report the crime, he told them it exploded with such force that it sounded like an M80 going off and the dog's cat was blown out of the toolbox. It seemed Kevin didn't have to think too hard about who might have had the motive and know how to do such a thing. Rob was arrested and charged with unlawfully manufacturing a destructive device, but as often happens in the cases covered on this podcast, while the police were investigating Rob for this crime, they uncovered some others that he was secretly committing. A search of his house yielded methamphetamine and a sword off shotgun. He was subsequently also charged with meth possession, being a felon in possession of a firearm and unlawfully possessing a short-barrelled shotgun. In court Rob explained his unusual predicament to judge Edward Jones who was pretty gobsmacked by the whole thing. Let's take a listen. and go for and get it, but you can see my history, I'm not really on that site where I'm calling the cops, unfortunately. So I took it upon myself rather than be violent, like I could have been. On the street, that's way a lot of that stuff's handled. But I didn't, I just did this because him and I used to make these things just for fun. So I wouldn't try to hide the fact. You know, I wanted him to know it was me. You know, and it was just me to hurt his ego and give me my stuff. Like, I wake up call and I was like, you know, between two friends basically. So it just got out of hand, I guess. I like his logic that, hey, you should just be glad I didn't get violent. Rob pleaded guilty to the charges against him. Despite facing a minimum sentence of 10 to 12 months in jail, the deputy DA agreed to give him three months probation instead, as he had no history of violence. I guess what he said in court did work. Either that or the judge in the ADA secretly found the crime too hilarious to come down hard on him. 21-year-old Swati Reddy married her 25-year-old husband, Sudaka Reddy, in 2010. The couple had two children and appeared to have built a nice life for their family in Tellingana, India. But by 2017, their relationship had gone to hell in a hand basket. Sudaka worked long hours as a contractor, which left his wife feeling neglected. Through her job as a nurse, she'd met a physiotherapist named Rajesh and they began an affair in 2015. A secret steamy, sexy affair that smelt like hospital. A rotic! When her husband discovered she was stepping out on him, Swati said she became fearful of the potential fallout. Inspired by the 2014 film Yavadu, where one of the characters has plastic surgery to assume the identity of another man, she and Rajesh came up with a devious but far from foolproof plan. In fact, it was so far from foolproof they couldn't even see foolproof from there. They decided to murder Sudaka and have Rajesh get plastic surgery to look like him. Then he would seamlessly assume his identity and nobody would be any the wiser. Also they thought. But the pair were not rocket surgeons or brain scientists and they had overlooked a few key details. You know, just little inconsequential things like the men not being the same height or having the same build. But who notices things like that? Nobody. She'll be right mate. But she was not right mate and said the whole thing was a painful clusterfuck from go to woe. On the night of November 26, 2017, the lovers murdered Sudaka with a blunt object, rolled his body up in a mat and took it to a nearby forest where they burnt it. Two days later, with his consent, Swati poured acid on Rajesh's face and body to disfigure it. Before hand, they put a cream on his face and plaster on his lips just to make sure that his face wasn't true, Bant. She then told her husband's parents that a violent gang of acid attackers had come into their home and assaulted him. For. reasons? Believing their son was still alive, his parents rushed to the hospital to be by his side. He was all wrapped up in bandages which helped keep up the identity stealing charade. But it wasn't long before Sudaka's family grew suspicious. I mean the fact he was a different height and build to their son was probably a bit of a giveaway? Unless Swati had convincingly told them, "Oh no, your beloved son has been terribly injured in an acid attack. Not only did his face and body get burnt, but he also became taller and heavier due to their motiveless violence." When they started asking him questions about relatives that he couldn't answer, Rajesh stopped speaking altogether and instead started communicating through signs. Doctors could find no medical reason for his sudden loss of speech. After all, it was surely a miracle that his lips and mouth weren't burnt during the harrowing acid attack. But the thing that really confirmed Sudaka's family's suspicions that he was not their son was how he reacted when they bought his favorite food to the hospital. See, Sudaka absolutely loved Mutton Soup. Yum! He couldn't get enough of it. He'd never refused the meal in his life. How he'd even eat Mutton Soup if it was dressed up as lamb soup. But after 11 days in hospital when his family tried to spoon-feed him some of his beloved Mutton Soup, he refused it. When they asked him why, he told them it was because he was a vegetarian. What a special kind of stupid this dude was. He's totally fine with killing a guy and having himself disfigured with acid, but he won't eat meat. Oh no, he's far too much of a moral person to do that. Is this what Meatloaf meant when he's saying how he would do anything for love but he won't do that? Sudaka's family informed the police of their suspicions and an investigation was launched. After officers took Rajesh's fingerprints and compared them with the ones they held for Sudaka, they arrested his "daft vegetarian" ass. Under questioning, Swell the admitted murdering her husband and told the police where they could find his body. She and her "daft meatloaf" lyric of a side piece were both arrested and charged with criminal conspiracy, murder and causing disappearance of evidence. The thing is, no matter how much you may want to, you can't just replace your husband with another guy. He's not a light bulb. To finish up, I have a few punchline crimes for you. These are cases with hardly any information available and they sound more like jokes than something that actually happened. 48-year-old career criminal David Owens was arrested in January 2020 for dealing drugs in swancy whales. He was busted selling heroin to a customer after plain close officers saw the two men taking part in the exchange. When officers identified themselves by yelling "Please", the customer tried to leg it out of their throwing away a package containing £150 worth of heroin. David on the other hand was pretty chill and just stayed put. Or maybe he was too out of it to move. He looked so high in his mug shot he legit has a-ness eyes. While the cops were arresting David for his 160th offense, his phone rang with a ringtone that said, "Hello, it's your drug dealer. I thought I'd call in case you needed anything at all. You know you can always call me just to talk. But I mostly want to sell you drugs. One morning in 2011, a woman from Livingston in Scotland noticed that the gate to her yard was open and a padlock on her garden shed had been snapped off. When she peaked inside, she saw that three mini motorbikes worth £600 each were missing. Because it had been snowing heavily overnight, she could clearly see the thief's footprints in the snow. She was able to follow the footprint trail all the way to his front door. Not wanting to get vigilante on anyone's ass, she called the police and told them the address of the man who had robbed her. Police arrested the resident, 20-year-old John Honeyman. He admitted everything, then took them to a lock-up garage where he'd hidden the bikes. His defence lawyer said that although John had a criminal record, his offending had now calmed down. Which is a weird thing to say while in court on criminal charges. But it seemed to do the trick as Sheriff David Hall stated, "It's quite clear from the narrative that this was a somewhat botched attempt before only finding him £300. That's got to be one of the most simple and easier arrests ever made." Where do you stand on bus sex? Are you pro or con? Getting it on while the wheels of the bus go round and round? I'm not a big fan. I am very miserly when it comes to public nudity or exhibitionism so I wouldn't want to be actively involved in it. And I don't want to watch it either. That's way too awkward. But it doesn't make me as angry as it makes this guy. He was on his morning commute to work earlier in the week here in Melbourne when a couple started going out at hammer and tongs up the back of the bus. The other commuters just ignored it and tried to make their souls leave their bodies for the duration of the ride. But not this guy. Oh no, no, no, no, no. He was not having it. He didn't even care when the man he quit his interruptus said he was banging on the bus because he was homeless and had autism. In fact, that just pissed him off more. I'll play it for you now. Listen, brother. You don't fuck on the bus, mate. I don't care if you're fucking homeless. I ain't fucking on the bus. I don't care if you've got autism. That doesn't mean fucking on the bus. Get the fuck off and go fucking the park or something. You fucking chat. Have some fucking respect for yourself, you fucking chatty. That is some serious bus sex rage he's got going on. The video was posted to Facebook by a guy named Nathan Armstrong. Having looked at his Facebook profile, I'm surprised he's not actually super into bus sex. He lists his job as SNIP SNIPS of Dupussy Lips at vagina cleanse, so he's clearly a gentleman and a scholar. But sorry ladies, his profile says he's in a relationship. And he fucking hates bus sex. This brings me to the end of the episode. I'm just going to take a sec to give you a quick programming update. Over the past year, a lot of listeners have reached out to let me know how much this show cheers them up or helps them deal with their anxiety. Which is not something a pervere or fuckery like myself is used to hearing. Hell, a woman wants message me to say that I deserve to have my vocal cords cut out because she didn't like an episode of my old podcast. So thanks everyone for all your heartwarming feedback. I'm really stoked that this show is having such a positive effect on people, and it's inspired me to work even harder. From now on I'm going to be releasing an extra episode a month. But I'll give those of you who save up episodes to listen to when you've had a bad day, a little bit more to work with. If you're up for more dumb criminals action, you could follow me on Twitter at WD Criminals Pod and Instagram @WorldsDumbestCriminalsPodcast. Or you could join our World's Dumbest Criminals Podcast Facebook group. That's where I spend most of my time. And thanks to the wonderful Lorraine Leadwell for running the group with me. And I tuned out to the closing music to hear a promo for the podcast True Crime B&B. Till next time, look after yourself. Stay out of trouble. And whatever you do, don't commit a crime that makes you end up on this podcast. Hello fans of World's Dumbest Criminals. We know you're here to listen to Tara, but allows to introduce ourselves. I'm Beth. And I'm Bailey. And we are True Crime B&B. We do a podcast every week. We release on Fridays. And every week we'll bring to you two different True Crime stories. First we'll bring you a disturbing story. And then one that will hopefully uplift your spirits a little bit. We'd love to have you listen to our podcast. Yes, so join us every week on Friday, find us anywhere you find your podcast on Spotify, Apple, Google Podcast, Amazon. I don't know anywhere else. And also you can find us on Instagram, Twitter or Facebook at True Crime B&B. Did you mention that we're mom and daughter? No. Okay. Hope you join our crime family. Bye. Bye.