The Man Who Loved Cat Burgling
By day, Mitch Shaw was a colorless computer nerd. By night, he teamed up with his sweetheart, Jennifer Dolan, to rob Dallas’ rich and famous of their jewelry.
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Throughout most of his teenage years, Mitch stayed mostly to himself, quiet and introspective, the kind of kid who rarely had photos taken of him for the high school annual. Eventually he quit school and received his GED. Because he loved abstract painting and could knock off remarkable imitations of Picasso masterpieces, some of his friends thought he might grow up to become an artist. His biggest love, however, was the computer. Long before the Internet became popular, he worked on his computer into the late hours, teaching himself to create graphic designs and to write HTML code, the computer programming language used to build Web sites.
Then, in 1987, Mitch’s father began to get horrendous headaches and was diagnosed with an incurable brain tumor. For the first time, Mitch, who was then nineteen, got into some trouble. He was arrested and given a year’s probation for breaking into an automobile and stealing a camera. Mitch was hardly a competent criminal: When he hocked the camera at a pawnshop, he wrote down his correct name and address on the pawn slip, which led to his easy arrest once the camera was reported stolen. “We wondered if Mitch was just so angry at not having his mother around and seeing what was happening to his father that he decided to lash out at something,” said his stepmother, Nancy. “We didn’t know what made him do it, and we couldn’t imagine that this was something he planned to do again.”
Indeed, one act of teenage rebellion does not a professional jewel thief make. But in 1990, a year after his father died, a friend introduced 21-year-old Mitch to a cute, sassy teenager with big brown eyes and soft pouty lips. Her name was Jennifer Dolan. And Mitch fell so crazy in love that he found himself willing to do just about anything.
AS THE GUYS FROM MITCH’S NEIGHborhood liked to say, Jennifer Dolan was the kind of girl who gave you an instant buzz in the gonads. She was a 16-year-old who acted 26. She smoked, she drank, and she liked to stay out late. “I thought she was going through a stage and that she would grow out of it,” her mother told me. “Well, I figured wrong.” It was hard to believe that the two would ever get along. Compared to Mitch and his blueblood background, Jennifer was middle-class: Her widowed mother supported the family by operating a couple of low-income apartment complexes. Mitch liked spending his evenings reading computer books; the gregarious Jennifer prided herself on getting into bars with her fake ID. Many of Mitch’s family members have not forgotten their first sight of Jennifer, at a Christmas luncheon thrown by one of Mitch’s austere great-aunts. Jennifer sat at the end of the table, her body curvy and a little plump, her hair wild and wavy, her eyes rimmed with thick black eyeliner. The bracelets on her arm rattled each time she lifted her fork.
Mitch was infatuated with her. “I think, considering the lonely times he had been through, he liked having a young, frolicsome, pretty little thing who was impressed by him, who let him take care of her,” said Nancy Wiener, Mitch’s grandmother. Every afternoon, Mitch picked up Jennifer at Lake Highlands High School in northeast Dallas, where she was a freshman, and took her shopping at the Galleria. Dipping generously into his inheritance money—he reportedly had received $60,000 after his father’s death—he bought what she asked for, usually colorful Fila sweatsuits and more costume jewelry than she could possibly wear. “I loved big fake earrings, the bigger the better,” Jennifer matter-of-factly told me, nibbling on a club sandwich and drinking a Diet Coke at a Bennigan’s restaurant. “That’s what people don’t understand about me. I didn’t want to wear big old socialite jewelry. One day Mitch gave me a fifteen-hundred-dollar Rolex watch, but I liked my fake thirty-dollar Rolex better because it was flashy and had all these fake diamonds embedded in it. So I took the plain Rolex back to the store.”
When she was seventeen, Jennifer dropped out of high school and moved into Mitch’s apartment. “There was nothing I could do to stop her,” said her mother. “And in a way, I couldn’t blame her. Mitch treated her like a queen. He gave her money, which she’d never had before. If she got mad at him and moved back home, he’d come over and stand out in our yard all through the night, tapping on her bedroom window, begging her to come back.”
Jennifer told me that she and Mitch would argue over her desire to go out with her girlfriends and “um, get in a little trouble”—her code phrase for meeting another guy. “Mitch would ask me why couldn’t I just be with him all the time, and I’d tell him I didn’t want to sit around at nights watching him work on his computer.” After one argument, she dramatically pulled off some diamond jewelry Mitch had given her, tossed it down the garbage disposal, flicked on the garbage disposal switch, and squealed away from the apartment complex in her car. When Mitch began paging her over and over to persuade her to come back, Jennifer stopped the car, threw the pager out in the street, and then ran over it.
Yet she always returned. “I put him through some hell, but he cared what happened to me,” she told me. “There was no one sweeter than Mitch.” Still, like so many other lovelorn young men wanting to win over a girl, Mitch clearly felt the need to do something—something that would add a dramatic new dimension to his personality, something that would make Jennifer’s eyes shine with admiration.
But was it really possible that Mitch Shaw the computer nerd thought he could turn himself into the dashing Cary Grant character from To Catch a Thief? His grandmother told me he didn’t even dance well. “The one physical talent he had was his ability to type very quickly on his computer keyboard,” added a close family friend. “This was not someone you could ever envision climbing trees and jumping over walls and entering houses that had armed guards. I promise you, the Mitch I knew was scared of my medium-sized dog.”
In truth, the possibility of becoming a jewel thief might have been nothing more for Mitch than a Walter Mitty-esque dream had it not been for a middle-aged man who lived in Mitch’s old neighborhood and who from time to time had stopped by the neighborhood park where teenagers congregated. The man was distinguished-looking, easygoing, and always interested in the kids’ lives. He also possessed one other trait, according to Dallas Police detectives who spoke to me: He had a rather extensive knowledge of Dallas’ criminal underworld. The man’s own father had been a mobster during the fifties gangland wars over the Dallas gambling rackets. The man himself had been sentenced to the penitentiary for five years in 1977 after fatally shooting another man who, depending on whose version of the shooting you want to believe, was either a renegade heroin dealer or a police informant.
Although by all accounts the man’s violent days were behind him, he remained a subject of great curiosity to the kids at the neighborhood park. Many of them had heard that he had married into a Mafia family. Others had heard that he was a fence who would purchase stolen jewelry and then have it cut up and resold to dealers he knew on the East Coast and perhaps as far away as Europe, people who didn’t particularly care where the jewelry came from.
It is no secret that every good jewel thief needs a fence; otherwise, the thief might end up unloading his merchandise at pawnshops for pennies. What’s often forgotten is that every good fence needs a thief; otherwise, he won’t have any jewels to sell. Was it possible that the man in the neighborhood came to the park to recruit a thief? Had he heard about Mitch’s earlier run-in with authorities over the stolen camera and decided this was a kid he could groom? Did Mitch, in turn, see in this man his lucky opportunity to create a new life for himself?
When I spoke to the man—who is now 48 and has not been charged with any crime related to the jewel heists—he stated that he was working in “private business” and that he didn’t go to the neighborhood basketball court and that he had never fenced jewelry. “What in the hell would I do with all that jewelry? I have trouble enough keeping up with my Seiko watch,” he said with a good-natured chuckle. He said he did become friends with Mitch but not for nefarious reasons. “I felt sort of sorry for the kid, with him losing his dad and his mom being gone,” the man said. “I talked mostly to him about his computer work, which is about the only thing he liked talking about.”
But detectives believe that the man from the neighborhood taught Mitch how to break into homes and then offered to buy whatever jewelry Mitch brought him. If so, the man saw a talent in Mitch that no one else did. Indeed, Mitch turned out to be a precocious burglar. The police believe he first broke into smaller homes around his old neighborhood—“training homes,” he called them. His modus operandi was to enter a home through a bathroom window, in part because he had learned—or had been taught—that motion detectors are rarely installed in bathrooms. With his screwdriver, he learned to crack the window panes almost as noiselessly as a chef cracks an egg, then he carefully would pull out the shattered pieces until he had a hole big enough to crawl through. Sometimes, he’d remove the weather stripping and take out the entire bathroom window to get in. And more often than not, he’d get lucky and discover that the homeowners had simply neglected to turn on their alarms.
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