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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No one in Dallas loved jewelry more than the glamorous Annette Simmons, the welder’s daughter from Tyler who met Harold in 1975 in a luxury box at a Dallas Cowboys game just as his fortune was starting to explode from his corporate investments and hostile takeovers. Annette adored fine jewelry the way Jennifer adored costume jewelry. She had jewelers from New York, Beverly Hills, and Dallas who called her regularly. She perused Christie’s and Sotheby’s catalogs for estate jewelry on the auction block. She was so well known for her interest in jewelry that husbands from Dallas’ mega-rich circles often asked her to buy jewelry for them to give to their wives.
Although Annette kept her most expensive jewels locked in safes and safe-deposit boxes away from the home, she still had a whopping two hundred pieces in four drawers in a closet of her large dressing room. “Some of those items meant the most to me,” she told me one afternoon, sitting in her living room, which is filled with the kind of French furniture tourists see at the Palace of Versailles. Her eyes reddened with tears. “There was a little diamond watch that my daddy gave me when I graduated from high school, the first piece of jewelry Harold ever gave me [a bracelet containing thirty small heart-shaped diamonds], and my first wedding rings from Harold [which she later replaced with bigger rings].” But there were also some monster rocks, including a forty-carat pink sapphire ring circled with diamonds that was worth at least $150,000—a jewel thief’s dream.
The January 1998 burglary, done while Harold and Annette were at their second home, in Santa Barbara, California, was Mitch’s masterpiece. He timed the entry to avoid the officer making one of his twice-hourly tours around the grounds and persuaded the dog not to bark (perhaps by feeding him cookies). Then he approached Annette’s dressing room window, cracked two panes with the sharp edge of his screwdriver, and removed the glass and part of the window frame so delicately that he didn’t trigger an alarm. He was in and out so quickly that Jennifer, who had driven over to a McDonald’s half a mile away to get a Diet Coke, had barely made it back to the pickup spot when he came flying out of the bushes with a pillowcase bulging with jewelry.
Although many wealthy victims of jewelry heists swallow their losses and ask the police to keep their names out of the newspapers, Annette was too distressed to do nothing. She hired an FBI agent turned private investigator, Michael Miles of Dallas, to make inquiries throughout Europe and Asia, send photos of Annette’s most valuable pieces to diamond merchants in Paris, Hong Kong, and New York City, and take out advertisements in jewelry magazines and the Dallas Morning News announcing a reward for information leading to the return of the jewelry. Meanwhile, the chairman of the Department of Public Safety, perhaps embarrassed that the robbery had happened on one of his men’s watch, okayed a team of DPS divers to search the pond behind the Simmonses’ house for jewels or any other evidence and assigned a DPS officer to assist with the Dallas Police Department’s investigation.
The lead investigator in the case, Joe Philpott, was a soft-spoken but relentless burglary detective who had been with the DPD for thirty years. Philpott ran all the usual traps: He had some of the employees at the house—from the housekeeper to the gardener to the gardener’s assistant—take polygraphs. He also took a look at two of Harold’s daughters from his previous marriages who despised him and Annette. A year and a half earlier, they had sued their father over the way he ran the family trust, in part claiming that he had used money that belonged to the daughters to buy Annette $1.6 million in jewelry. One of the daughters used to turn the photos of Annette toward the wall whenever she visited the home. Annette had found it curious that a photo of her and Harold on her vanity had obviously been picked up and moved during the burglary. Could it have been a calling card from the daughters? Or was the burglar so well informed about the Simmons family feud that he moved the photo to cast suspicion on the daughters?
As the weeks passed, Philpott found himself without a single decent lead. He tried to find out if a known jewel thief from Connecticut who was said to work on the East and West coasts had been making stopovers in Dallas. He checked into rumors that a legendary Dallas jewel thief from the sixties known as the King of Diamonds—a man who had never been identified but who had been bold enough to burglarize homes while the residents were throwing a dinner party—might have come out of retirement. Perhaps the most comical rumor that circulated through Dallas was that Annette herself had staged the robbery so that she could get insurance money to buy more jewels. (The Simmonses did receive $600,000 from the insurance company to cover their losses.)
Then, in the spring of 1998, Philpott got one of those nutty phone calls that detectives often get from citizens who claim to have inside information on cases. A man said he had seen the advertisement in the newspaper about a reward for missing jewels and he thought he knew who had them. The man told Philpott that a pretty girl named Jennifer had been coming to a couple of North Dallas apartment complexes known for drug dealing and was trading jewels for little bags of crack cocaine.
The man’s real name was Essie Evans, but he was known as Chickenman because he delivered orders for a small fast-food chicken restaurant near the apartment complexes. Over the years, he had gotten to know the drug dealers in the complexes, and sometimes when he’d make his chicken deliveries he’d tell customers that he could get them some nice crack for dessert. One evening, he saw a well-dressed young woman slowly driving by in a turquoise Tercel. She rolled down her window and told him she wanted to try some crack herself; soon a relationship was born. Once again, Jennifer was sneaking off from Mitch. “I don’t know what it was that made me do it,” Jennifer later told me during one of our conversations. “It started, I guess, a few months before the Simmons burglary, when a girlfriend of mine, who’s pretty wild, asked if I’d like to do some crack. I thought it would be fun to see what it was like, and then as time went on, I sort of, well, lost it.”
Mitch eventually found out where Jennifer was going, and whenever she disappeared, he’d drive through the parking lots of the apartment complexes, looking for the telltale Tercel. He’d knock on apartment doors asking if she was there. “Come home,” he’d say when he saw her. She always did, letting him put his arms around her as he took her away.
She’d tell him she was sorry, he’d forgive her, but then she’d keep returning to do drugs with Chickenman. He introduced her to different dealers, almost all of whom were women. (One of the most prominent dealers was a black woman named Blue; her chief rival was a black woman named Black.) A couple of days after the Simmons heist, before Mitch sold Annette’s jewelry to his fence for a paltry $25,000, Jennifer grabbed several pieces when Mitch wasn’t looking and hid them. Then, on subsequent visits to the apartment complexes, she’d pull the jewelry out of her Gucci purse and offer to make a trade.
Soon, throughout the apartment complexes, female crack dealers were wearing Annette Simmons’ rings, earrings, brooches, bracelets, and necklaces. “It was nice ice,” said Becky Reno, a dealer who took a necklace and four rings—two of which were matching ruby guards that she wore next to her wedding band—in return for a $40 bag of crack.
But in what would turn out to be a fateful decision for Mitch and Jennifer, Becky tired of the rings and pawned them at a nearby Cash America pawnshop, which offered them for sale for $29.58 each, advertising them as “ladies fashion rings.” Philpott checked pawnshop sales slips and hit pay dirt—a description that sounded like Annette’s rings. As is required by law, the sales slip listed the name of the purchaser, who turned out to be an employee of Mrs. Baird’s bread. Philpott got the rings and took them to Annette, who identified them as hers.
Realizing he would still need some leverage to get Jennifer to talk, Philpott told Chickenman that to get the reward, he’d have to agree to set up Jennifer. The next time she came to the apartment complexes to meet Chickenman and buy some crack, undercover police officers were waiting. They arrested Jennifer and took her to Philpott, who told her he could recommend to the district attorney’s office that the crack cocaine possession charges be dropped in return for her full cooperation in the police investigation. For nearly four hours she dodged Philpott’s questions. (Jennifer said she asked for an attorney: Philpott said all she asked for was her mother.) Finally, Jennifer broke down, told Philpott about Mitch, identified Mitch’s fence, talked about their previous burglaries, and then wrote out a confession about the details of the Simmons burglary.
The Simmonses’ property manager met Chickenman and gave him a reward of $25,000 along with a sweet thank-you note from the always-polite Annette, encouraging him to find Jesus and be saved. Chickenman had told Philpott he was going to use the money to go to drug treatment and buy a car so he could visit his mother in Mississippi. But he was so overcome with remorse about betraying Jennifer—she was such a nice girl, he kept telling Philpott—that he tracked her down one last time, gave her half of the reward money, and disappeared.
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