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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Meanwhile, in hopes of avoiding her own criminal charges, Jennifer had promised Philpott, who was still worried that he didn’t have enough evidence to convict Mitch, that she wouldn’t tell Mitch about her confession and that she would let Philpott know when and where Mitch would be doing his next burglary. Instead, Jennifer broke down and told Mitch at least part of the truth. She said the police had somehow found out about them and were trying to get her to talk.
For weeks, she and Mitch didn’t go out of their apartment except for quick trips to Jack in the Box. They peeked out of the window shades at the unmarked police cars in the parking lot. They became convinced that two young women who had just moved into a nearby apartment were not topless dancers as they had said but undercover cops who might try to seduce Mitch and get him to confess. Because Mitch believed that the satellite dish the two women had installed on their balcony was designed to pick up his conversations with Jennifer, he turned up the stereo whenever he and Jennifer talked.
Figuring he would get nothing more, Philpott obtained an arrest warrant for Jennifer and then one for Mitch. If he thought the arrests might get them to talk, he was mistaken. At the intake area of the jail, Mitch and Jennifer saw each other. Mitch suddenly broke away from sheriff’s deputies and ran to Jennifer, shouting, “I’m so sorry. I love you.” Just as he reached out to embrace her, the deputies dragged him away. “I love you too, Mitch,” Jennifer cried.
For most of the trial, which was held last summer, Mitch looked like he belonged behind a computer, sitting hunched forward in his chair, resting the side of his pale face against the palm of one hand. He was so devoid of expression that one attorney later said he seemed autistic. Because Dallas’ most successful jewel thief owned no dress shirt and no tie of his own, he had to borrow them from an attorney. In a holding tank outside the courtroom, Mitch complained to a bystander that his shirt was too tight. The man answered, “Hey, if you can squeeze through a window, then you can squeeze through a goddam shirt.”
Mitch’s lawyers were the legendary Dallas defense attorney Doug Mulder and his son Chris. The elder Mulder told the jury that Mitch couldn’t possibly be a jewel thief. He was so poor that his grandmother was paying his legal bills. (But Nancy Wiener later told me that she had never heard of Mulder and that she didn’t pay him a cent. The police speculate that Mitch’s legal fees were paid for by his fence in return for Mitch saying nothing about him.) Once testimony began, the Mulders had a field day mocking the drug dealers who arrived to talk about the jewels Jennifer sold them. The trial did seem to go badly for the prosecution. Jennifer refused to testify, citing her Fifth Amendment rights, and according to the police, the fence had conveniently disappeared for several weeks and could not be found in time to testify. But how could the Mulders get around the fact that Annette’s wedding guards had ended up at the pawnshop? In a hilarious last-gasp maneuver, the Mulders brought out a man who identified himself as a jeweler; he stared at the rings, blew on them, and pronounced, “They’re fake. You could get these at a Kmart.” The socialites who had come to the trial to support Annette gasped: Annette had been accused of wearing costume jewelry! The prosecution quickly called Bill Noble, the jeweler to Dallas’ moneyed class and one of Annette’s closest friends. He strutted into the courtroom in a beautiful Italian suit, performed a scientific acid test on the rings in front of the jury, and pronounced them authentic. Annette’s daughter, Amy, rushed out of the courtroom to tell her mother, who was anxiously sitting on a bench in the hallway. “They’re real,” Amy exclaimed. “They’re real!” The two women hugged.
The twelve jurors, mostly middle-class citizens who chuckled through much of the testimony, found Mitch guilty, but in the trial’s biggest surprise, they decided that he deserved only probation. The judge gave him a ten-year probated sentence, then ordered Mitch to pay $400,000 in restitution to the Simmonses as compensation for the stolen jewels that their insurance didn’t cover, which caused the socialites to gasp again. One of Annette’s close friends, Sandra Tucker, turned to me and said, “Oh, my God, this means he’s going to rob other people’s homes to get the money he owes Annette.”
In a later plea bargain, Jennifer pleaded guilty and also received ten years’ probation. She and Mitch were ordered by the judge not to contact each other during the length of their probation. Jennifer went to a drug rehabilitation program and then to a halfway house, and Mitch moved to a small apartment building owned by Jennifer’s mother that was behind a cheap Chinese restaurant near downtown Dallas. Some Mexican Americans who lived in the same building took pity on him and got him hired as a laborer at a construction site where they were working on a new home. The site happened to be in the Preston Hollow estates area that Mitch knew all too well.
But the story was hardly over. Late last fall Philpott arrived at Mitch’s apartment with a warrant for his arrest. The detective had been so disturbed over Mitch’s probated sentence that he had pulled out the files of every unsolved burglary in North Dallas in the previous five years—the period that would still be under the statute of limitations for burglary. He found a February 1997 case in far north Dallas where the burglar had cut himself as he came through a window and dripped blood through the house. When Philpott learned that an enterprising officer at the scene had collected blood samples, he ordered DNA tests. The DNA from that blood perfectly matched Mitch’s DNA. This case, as the cops like to say, was open and shut.
If no plea bargain is arranged, Mitch’s new burglary trial will begin later in the year. (Chris Mulder is again defending him.) It is unlikely that Mitch and Jennifer will be arrested for their other burglaries. Some are protected by the five-year statute of limitations and others cannot be prosecuted because of a lack of evidence—no jewels have been found, and it’s likely that neither Mitch nor Jennifer will testify. Jennifer’s oral statements are not enough to produce a conviction, and her only written confession was limited to the Simmons case. Nevertheless, Philpott remains obsessed with Mitch’s earlier burglaries, and he still suspects some of the jewelry was hidden in Dallas. He got a court order to dig up the yard of one of Mitch’s great-aunts, where he thought some jewelry might be, causing a minor scandal in her neighborhood. There is also the question of whether Mitch had received any inside information about where to look for the jewels once he got inside these large mansions. By all accounts, he did have an uncanny knack for finding the loot. Was it possible that someone who was part of Dallas society, someone who went to lunches or parties at these homes, had passed on to someone else, who then passed the information on to Mitch, details about where the jewelry might be?
Mitch isn’t talking about any details of the crimes. He still insists to his friends and family that he is an innocent victim of a vengeful Harold and Annette Simmons, who are trying to use their muscle around town to keep him behind bars. In one letter to his grandmother, he wrote that the police were “using the other inmates to harass me, intimidate me, question me about my personal life and case. In one case they were trying to use an extremely well-built black man, to threaten me with bodily harm and un-natural sex …” At least in his letters to his grandmother, he seems desperate and even terrified. “I have suffered a nervous breakdown for 3 days in a row now because of this matter,” he wrote in one letter. It’s as if the daring persona he put on as a cat burglar is now shattered, and he is once again the quiet, unassuming computer nerd who wants to spend his evenings designing Web sites. In fact, Mitch recently made a collect call from jail to a friend to remind him what still needed to be changed on a Web site that Mitch had created for him. Then, after a pause, Mitch asked if his own computer was in a safe place.
As for Jennifer, she should be out of her halfway house shortly and on to a new life—one that she says will be free of drugs and crime. She started writing poetry (“I’m no longer a fallen angel/ I can spread my wings and fly”). And she got a job at a sandwich shop. After a few weeks she was asked to be an assistant manager. It seemed that all the other employees kept getting fired for stealing.
When I met her for the last time, just before Christmas, she was wearing a batch of costume jewelry. On each of her fingers (except for her thumbs) were little silver rings, one shaped like a butterfly, another like a frog. She wore large hoop earrings and a gold bracelet adorned with fake diamonds. “Nothing cost me more than ten dollars,” she said proudly.
I asked her how it was going to feel living without Mitch. “It’s best for both of us if it happens,” she said, but her face was pensive. “You know, I’ll always look back on those days and think, ‘How in the world did we do all that? How did we pull it off?’” She told me that she had heard Mitch had sent a letter to a mutual friend in which he wrote, “Tell Jennifer we were always a team, and they can’t take that away from us.”
For a moment, I thought she was going to cry. “Oh, well,” she said, “we were a team, that’s for sure.” Her Adam’s apple bobbed up and down. Then she took another sip of Diet Coke, her straw making a snerkling sound as she fished for the last drops among the ice at the bottom of the glass.
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