The Imperfect Crime

(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 Texas couple who came up with the most truly absurd insurance fraud scheme in order to pocket some life insurance money and prevent the husband from going to prison. This case has body snatching a fake car accident, some epic gas lighting, and the worst disguise that you'll ever hear of. Alrighty, let's get cracking. Molly got together with her husband Clayton Daniels when she was in her late teens. By June 2004, 20-year-old Molly and her 22-year-old husband had two children and lived in a small town in Texas. She worked as an office receptionist for a gutter company and he was an unemployed mechanic who stayed home to look after their kids four-year-old son Caleb and one-year-old daughter Harley. Harley was named in honor of Clayton's favorite thing on Earth, motorbikes. Harley Davidson's in particular. I guess it's just lucky for her that he wasn't as fanatical about Moto Gutsybikes. But not everyone was as charmed by Clayton as Molly was. On an episode of forensic files, Molly's mother said of Clayton, absolutely he's a loser. I've always thought that he was not the best material for her and I wondered about him being daddy material but it was her choice to make. Many other friends and family members felt the same way about him with Molly's sister saying that he gave her the HBGBs. And they had good reason to feel that way. Years earlier, Clayton had sexually assaulted his seven-year-old cousin. She'd only recovered from the trauma of the incident enough to press charges several years later. Clayton had recently pled guilty to aggravate an sexual assault of a child and under a deferred adjudication deal was sentenced to 30 days in prison and then 10 years probation. So he got the old, "Maybe it was a one-off thing." "Slapp on the wrist sentence." However, his name would appear on the sex offender's registry. Clayton's a laughably light prison term was due to start on June 21st, 2004 and he wasn't much looking forward to it as the rock spiders aren't very popular in the pokey. You'd think the month he was in prison would be a good opportunity for Molly to pack up the kids and either move house or move his stuff out of their place and change the locks. You'd think the last person you'd want looking after your young daughter would be a child rapist. But no. That's not the case here because Molly is a special kind of stupid. The kind that believes things they're told by a child abuser over evidence presented by the authorities. Molly told Dateline NBC that the legal system had railroaded poor, innocent Clayton, and that a good man like him could never have sexually assaulted a child. Which must be why he pled guilty to the charges. Both Clayton and Molly were worried that the fact he was a registered sex offender might cramp their style when it came to where they lived and that the authorities might prioritize their kids' safety over her romantic delusions and separate Clayton from his children. And we all know we can't have that happen. So Molly used her pee brain to come up with a hair-brained insurance fraud scheme. Even a frozen pee and a handful of hair would have come up with a better plan than this. But here we are. In order to cash in on Clayton's life insurance, stop him going to prison and being on the sex offender's register and ensure that he had lots of unsupervised time alone with their kids, they decided to fake his death. After they got the insurance money, he and Molly planned to start a new life in Mexico and he'd have plastic surgery to look different and fix his wonky tombstone teeth. She was going to get in on that sweet cosmetic surgery action too and get a tummy tuck, hashtag couple goals. In order to do this, they needed to acquire a dead body. Anatomy is a thing that exists. As such, biological males and females have differences in their skeletons. You'd think when procuring a corpse to pass off as a 22-year-old man, you'd have certain specifications in mind, such as the age and gender of the body. But not these two. It seems such a thing had never even occurred to them as they decided to dig up the corpse of an 81-year-old woman to body swap with Clayton. The body and question belonged to Charlotte Davis, who had been innocently minding her own damn business, lying dead in her grave in Pebble Mound Cemetery in Burnett, Texas for six months, when these two brain-dead fox decided to weaken that Bernie's hair. After digging her up, they took her decomposing corpse home. Then they dressed the corpse in Clayton's clothes, which included tennis shoes, faded glory jeans, and a Harley-Davidson baseball cap with a fish hook attached. I'm assuming that there was also a T-shirt involved here, but it's probably not safe to assume that. It's entirely possible that Clayton generally wandered around shirtless. Early on the morning of June 18th, they put the body behind the wheel of a Chevrolet Cavalier, along with some of Clayton's belongings, and slowly pushed the car over a cliff. Then they braced themselves for the big explosion that movies and TV shows had taught them came next. But there was no explosion. Well, fuck, must be something wrong with the car. You would have thought an unemployed mechanic like Clayton would have known a thing or two about this topic, but hey, nobody ever said he was a good mechanic. The couple that assumed the car would blow up on impact, exploding the dead body inside it and burning up the remnants of it. The perfect crime, it was not. Molly and Clayton got their hands on some lighter fluid and climbed down the cliff to the car. Then they poured it all over the body and set it a light. Because cars are just designed to have the driver catch on fire whenever they crash. Even the frozen pea and the handful of hair knows that's not how this works. As the sun was coming up on the morning of June 18th, the Burnett County Sheriff's Department and local firefighters responded to a call about a fire in a crashed vehicle. When the authorities arrived and looked inside the car, they saw the remains of a body which had been charred beyond recognition. Around the same time Clayton's mother reported him missing after Molly called her saying that he hadn't come home that night. As he had been driving a Chevy Cavalier, investigators assumed that the body in the car was his. Clayton's family identified a baseball cap, a shoe, and the remnants of some books found in the car as being his. Well, they certainly weren't books on a anatomy, were they? Investigators believed that the car wreck seemed fishy from the start. There were no skid marks on the road. The petrol tank was intact and the fire had started in the driver's seat and was obviously helped along by an accelerant. There wasn't much left of the body they assumed to be Clayton's. An autopsy revealed that there was no smoke in the lungs, which led them to believe that the body was deceased before the fire was started. In order to prove the body was Clayton, the blood sample was taken from the victim's hip. However, the result of that analysis was a process that would end up taking nearly five months. As investigators continued to look into the case, Molly played into the poor widow angle to get what she caught out of the situation. Her co-workers and neighbors rallied around her to provide financial help and childcare for her two young children. Kind strangers even sent her money and groceries to help her during this difficult time. A woman named Jennifer Pannis offered to babysit the children soon after Clayton's apparent death. She noted that four-year-old Caleb was particularly struggling with the loss of his father. She said he tormented the dog, tried to push the other children down the stairs and would point to the ceiling and say, "I love you, Daddy." It's entirely possible he did this because he'd seen his father go up into the ceiling. See, Clayton was hiding out in the house while all of this was going on. Molly's sister even saw him sleeping in the closet of their bedroom facing the wall. She was startled and told Molly that there was a man sleeping in her closet. Molly was sure to be very loud in assuring her sister that there was nobody in her closet, which alerted Clayton to go hide under the bed. So by the time Molly and her sister came into the bedroom, there was nobody in the closet. And Molly got to act like her sister was crazy. Win-win for Molly. Around 100 people attended Clayton's memorial service, which was held in his hometown of Burnett, Texas. Unlike most funerals, there were no grand speeches celebrating all the wonderful things Clayton had bought to the world. His best friend even made a speech where he admitted that Clayton was an arse. whole. Among the flower arrangements, there was a Confederate flag draped over Clayton's favorite dirt park displayed at his memorial, as his favorite song, Leonard Skinner's Freebird played. When investigators interviewed Molly, she showed no emotions and seemed annoyed that they wouldn't just leave the case alone. She was all like, "Yeah, like my husband's dead. Get over it." They found out about Clayton's life insurance policy when Molly was pushing for the company to pay out. But the terms of the policy stated that no check would be issued until DNA confirmed the crash victim was indeed Clayton. Well, they're screwed then, aren't they? The authorities theorized that if the body was Clayton's, maybe Molly had him killed for the life insurance money. After learning Clayton was about to go to prison for sexual assault and hearing of his laughable sentence, they then wondered if maybe the victim's father had killed him. About a month after her husband's apparent death, Molly decided to deboo a new boyfriend named Jake. This raised more than a few eyebrows around town, and it wasn't just because people thought it was too soon to be bringing a new guy around her kids. Molly's new man was the spitting image of Clayton, and I don't just mean that they looked identical. I'm pretty sure he was one of those guys that regularly just hocks up loogies and spits them on the ground like I don't know thing. Instead of laying low somewhere else for a while and maybe moving to a town where nobody knew him, Clayton had simply died his brown hair black and reappeared on the scene telling everyone that he was now a completely different person named Jake. That's it. That's the whole disguise, dying his hair a few shades darker. And he wouldn't just look the same, that he'd have the same gate, the same posture, the same voice, the same vocabulary? How he was probably even wearing the same clothes. Molly was all, "Here's my new boyfriend. I certainly have a very exact type. Hair color is an important but everything else has to be identical, including his wonky tombstone teeth and his arm tattoos which are visible when he wears a t-shirt." Molly even introduced their kids to Jake and told them that he was someone they'd never met before and definitely not their father. Are there international awards for gaslighting children? Because that's a gold medal winner right there. A witness came forward and told the authorities that Molly had started dating a very suspicious looking man named Jake. They now wondered if perhaps Molly and Jake had plotted to kill Clayton together, but they were soon to find out that the truth was far more stupid than that. In early December 2004, when the DNA test on the body and the car came back, the police found out that not only was the body not Clayton, but it wasn't even a man. This begged the question, "Who's body was it?" They looked through missing person reports, but didn't really come up with much. Investigators staked out Molly's place to get a look at her new boyfriend, Jake. When they saw him, they were like, "Oh look, it's Clayton with dyed black hair and they're trying to pretend he's a different person. This is the dumbest shit I've ever seen. It's so stupid that I feel like it's made me more stupid for just knowing about it." On December 30, 2004, investigators tailed Molly and Jake to a taco bell in North Austin. When the cops entered the fast food joint several minutes later, they found Clayton deep throaching a burrito. One of the cops told forensic files, "If he could have crawled into that burrito, he probably would have." When an officer asked him if he was Clayton, Jake denied it and showed them a fake driver's license under the name Jacob Alexander Gregg. The cops were not buying it and they arrested Jake and Molly. The couple held out for a while, but Clayton'd eventually cracked first and told the cops all about their ridiculous plan. Searchers of the couple's home and Molly's work computer also revealed more evidence of the planned crash and the scheme to create a new identity for Clayton. Molly ended up pleading guilty to insurance fraud, arson, and desecration of a cemetery and was sentenced to concurrent prison terms of 15 and 10 years. She divorced Clayton while in prison and was released in 2016 after serving 12 years. Clayton pleaded guilty to arson, desecration of a cemetery and insurance fraud. As it also breached the conditions of his parole, he received a sentence of 30 years and remains in prison way belongs. The victims of Molly's family took custody of their kids and what remained of Charlotte Davis was lead to rest again in a casket bought by Burnett County Law Enforcement. When Molly finally confessed, she told the authorities that they got the idea for this whole ridiculous scam from watching law and order in CSI. But I guess they didn't watch them hard enough. To finish up, I have a few punchline crimes for you. These are short cases that sound more like jokes than something that actually happened. Hello. Hi, Portland police. Yes, I need to fire department, please, because my pussy's on fire. I need to make sure that one is a weapon. Hello. He's at home for fire. What is on fire? I need to fire department because my pussy's on fire and I need somebody to put it out with their phones. OK, I need the, um, edra. Oh my god. That was a 50 year old Ohio woman named Katrina who called 911 to tell them that her pussy was on fire and she needed someone from the fire department to come and put it out with their hose. Very subtle work there, Katrina. I've only ever heard RuPaul and other drag queens on drag race say that their pussies were on fire and trust me, googling the origin of the phrase didn't teach me anything else, though it did remind me why I don't read erotic fiction. Unlike the car fire in the first story, this pussy fire was not fueled by lighter fluid but rather alcohol. It seems Katrina had been getting on the booze with some friends in Fort Lincoln in May 2020 before deciding to call 911 about her firecrotch situation later that evening. As you heard, the call was interrupted, but don't worry, she called back. I'm at Courtney lolly's house and I need to be caught up with my pussy out because it is on fire. Worst Courtney lolly. After tracking Katrina down at her friend Courtney's place, the cops arrested her, but she did not go along with them quietly. She was only after they threatened to tease her that she accepted her fate. Katrina pled guilty to a misdemeanor charge of disorderly conduct with persistence. She was given a 10-day jail sentence suspended for a year and a $250 fine. I'd say getting arrested is a surefire way to put out your pussy fire. She was right to avoid getting tazed though, as that could have just exacerbated the problem. A 27-year-old guy named Trent from the Sunshine Coast in Queensland matched with an unnamed woman on Tinder in December 2021. They moved their communication over to other social media including Snapchat and would send each other pictures and videos. At one point the woman sent Trent a 10-to-15 second sexy alone time video of herself. For some reason Trent thought it would be a good idea to send her a photo of himself defecating on the toilet with the caption "Poo time". It looks like Old mate Trent here confused sexy time with toilet time, or maybe he meant to send the picture to his mother because every time he does a poo in the potty he gets a little treat. The Tinder woman was interested in sharing Trent's poo time with him or giving him a little treat, so she unfollowed him on all social media and stopped communicating with him. This seemed to confuse Trent. He messaged her on Instagram and asked why she'd stopped following him. There he got really pissy. He told her that not only was she not hot enough to be rude, but that she should be careful because he had a video saved and he would hate for it to be sent to her family. And he sent her back the sexy alone time video of herself that she'd sent to him to show her that he'd saved it. The woman went to the police with screenshots of the threats which led to Trent's arrest. He ended up pleading guilty to threatening to distribute a prohibited visual recording. Of course his lawyer argued that he should get off with a fine and not have a conviction recorded because heaven forbid his action should have any consequences. And steady was given a suspended prison sentence of 4 to 6 months, fined $2,500 in order to pay the victim $1,000 in compensation. conversation. Magistrate Rod Madsen said that a conviction was to be recorded because the offense was an indication of Trent's character. "I wonder how hot Trent reckons you need to be in order to not have to pretend to like receiving pictures of him taking a shit. Is this a measure of attractiveness now?" A guy's like, "Oh dude, I saw the hottest chick yesterday. Oh, she's so hot that if I sent her a photo of me taking a crap and she stopped talking to me, I'd be cool with it." Um, pretty sure that level doesn't exist. "Vac in January 2018, two brothers broke into a house in Fulton County, Georgia, to take part in a spot of burglary. The police said that the young men broke into a window and rifled through rooms and furniture searching for valuable items to pinch. Somebody caught onto the robbery and progress and called the cops. This led to a high-speed chase along I-285 as the robbers tried to outrun the police. After reaching speeds of over 100 miles an hour, the suspects lost control of the car on a turn and crashed into another car, sending it off the road into a ditch. Then they bolted from their vehicle, jumped over a fence and tried to hot-foot it out of there. The cops were able to catch up to the brothers and arrest them." As one of them, who said his name was Paul, sat handcuffed in the back of a patrol car, channeled to his Tom Reagan, moseyed on up with a camera crew to interview him. And the result was this iconic exchange, where the suspect, who may or may not be named Paul, denies any wrongdoing. My favorite part is when Paul asked the reporter why he has hair coming out of his nose. Let's take a listen. "Why are you running for the police?" "Bug. Did you break into a house? Did you bring your house in a house?" "Heal now. Bug. Get away from Cuba. I don't want to talk. I don't want to talk." "We were talking before you, just talking to these officers." "Well, I don't want to talk. You don't." "Did you break into rounds?" "No." "Why are you in custody now?" "I don't know." "You don't know. You have no idea why you've been arrested." "No idea, sir. Why are you got hair coming out of your nose?" "I'm going to break out of my nose." "I'm going to break out of my nose." "I'm going to break out of my nose." "No, I ain't breaking into a house though, man." "You didn't break into a house." "What's your name, this is you?" "Chill too." "Chill too has to do." "Hey, man." "Y'all want to say anything to your mom or anything like that or do you know?" "My bad, man." "I'm bad." "I have me on couple days." "When you're hurt, when you're on your way from. " "I'm a bite." "When it. " "Tain in a knit." "What?" "I just was it." "All right, will you have a good one there?" "What's your name?" "Paw." "What?" "Paw." "Paw, what you lost that part?" "I don't know. Yeah, I gave you the first one." "All right, good luck to you." This brings me to the end of the episode. Thanks for listening. Make sure you subscribe if you want to stay up to date with our future episodes. And if you dug what you heard, please leave a review. If you'd like to support this independent podcast, head on over to patreon.com/worldsdummascriminals. All levels get access to monthly bonus episodes and add free episodes and higher levels also receive a snapchat from Trent and the world's greatest disguise. A bottle of black hair dye. No body will recognize you. If you're up for more dumb criminals action in your life, you could follow me on Instagram @worldsdummascriminalspodcast or Twitter @wdcriminalspod. Or you could join our World's Dumbest Criminals Podcast Facebook group. And thank you to the two legit to quit Lorraine Leadwell for running the group with me. Thanks also to Chris Schneider for suggesting the insurance scam case. 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.