Diamond Girl

The following story is pretty good. What happened after could only happen in the Twilight Zone of the Internet.

From the 5 December 1999 issue:

A Girl’s Best Friend

A clerk at a jewelry store inside the Caesars Palace casino in Las Vegas, Nev., said Lori Carroll, 32, asked to see a one-carat diamond ring. He handed it over …and it immediately disappeared. Police searched her, but didn’t find it, so she was taken to a hospital and X-rayed. Sure enough, police say, she had swallowed it. Carroll was charged with burglary, grand larceny and possession of stolen property, and the $4,000 ring “reappeared” in the jail’s medical ward 10 days later. “We went down and identified” it, the store manager said. “It still had our price tag on it.” (AP) …Ten days? Lori, you’re eating the wrong kind of carrots.

Not the actual diamond ring in question. (Photo: Steven Yu via Pixabay)

This week I got the following letter from “D.S.” in Arizona:

This is true — how I found you: I decided to correspond with a woman in prison whom I found through a site set up for that. I thought, what the heck. Anyway, she wrote me back and gave me some song and dance about how she’s incarcerated for something or other relating to abuse of self-medicating drugs. Just for the fun of it, I typed her name into Google and got lots of hits, most of them irrelevant. However, [one hit was] your newsletter from Dec 99. Seems this lady tried to steal a one carat diamond ring from a jewelry store in Caesar’s Palace by swallowing it! I called the Nevada Department of Prisons and they confirmed that this was the same person. She’s doing five-to-ten for burglary, although her ad says she’s getting out after two years. (DOP says it’s unlikely she’ll be paroled before five years.) Another article I turned up said she’s got several felony theft convictions in her home state as well, although Nevada chose not to prosecute her as a “career criminal” because she’s not done time before. So, your fine newsletter saved me a ton of hassles!

This is True — is there anything it can’t do?!

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