Dollar Bill Pool Butcher

A headline ran on the Indianapolis Star’s Web page today that read, “Police: Man robs gas station with pool cue, butcher knife.”\nNow, my first thought was that in listing the weapons used to commit this crime, shouldn’t the butcher knife have been listed before the pool cue? I guess that’s just me being a journalism \nmajor, though.\nAnyway, apparently what happened was that a man began to rob the gas station with a broken pool cue. The clerk somehow locked the guy in the store, began beating him with a broom handle and then somehow took the butcher knife from the robber’s sweatshirt. As if this isn’t ridiculous enough, the intruder then managed to break through the locked door and get away, leaving the cue, the knife \nand a dollar bill.\nThis story is so ridiculous I don’t even know where to begin. First of all, the guy is holding up a gas station with a broken pool cue. I mean, you have to question a guy who can’t even get a whole pool cue to threaten people with. Clearly he’s already turned to a life of crime; would it really hurt him to steal some\ndecent equipment? \nMaybe the broken stick was more menacing. I mean, the break implies it’s been used to hit something before. And besides, splinters can really hurt.\nThis isn’t the only interesting weapon choice we see in this story, though. The clerk, apparently taken by the robber’s choice of weapon, decides to retaliate with a broom handle. Now, in all fairness, the story does say that he had been sweeping the floor prior to the attempted robbery, but how hard would it have been to put down the broom and pick up something a little more threatening? I mean, this guy had time to lock the robber in the store. Why not grab a folding chair?\nNot that it did any good, of course. The robber was apparently able to break out of the locked door in order to get away. The natural question here seems to be if he could break out of the store, wouldn’t it have been just as easy to break in? Maybe not. I don’t know – I don’t have much experience robbing gas stations.\nReading this whole story, I kept thinking to myself how many decisions I would have made differently, were I the robber. The first being, of course, not to rob the gas station at all. But maybe I was a bit too hasty in judging this robber. Maybe I am being a bit too harsh. Just like Sherlock Holmes, I am stuck with one clue that doesn’t fit into the puzzle.\nThe calling card. All master criminals leave them, and this guy was no exception. Like I said, the only pieces of evidence left behind were the weapons and a dollar bill. Do you really think a guy robbing a gas station would have been lazy enough to leave a dollar behind just on accident?\nPerhaps. I’m not convinced, though. Instead, I think what we have here is a criminal mastermind at work, and I’m eager to see how the “Dollar Bill Pool Butcher” strikes next.