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.
To the cops who patrolled Dallas’ richest and most exclusive neighborhoods throughout the 1990’s, Mitch Shaw and his cute girlfriend, Jennifer Dolan, must have looked like a couple of rubes. For one thing, they cruised through the neighborhoods in a turquoise Toyota Tercel. Turquoise! Jennifer always drove, usually with her window down, her magnificently teased hair and dangling costume earrings fluttering in the wind. Although no one would have called Jennifer a knockout, she had a big, inviting smile, and she clearly knew how to handle herself around men. When a Dallas police officer stopped Jennifer and Mitch a couple of years ago to ask why she kept tooling up and down one particular mansion-lined lane, Jennifer gave the officer a little wink and said in a voice as sweet as syrup, “Officer, we live in a little apartment, and sometimes we like to look at big, pretty homes. Is there anything wrong with that?” Then she pursed her lipstick-red lips around a straw and took a drink from a big cup of Diet Coke that she had wedged between her thighs.
If the officer was able to take his eyes off Jennifer—and, in all honesty, it was an effort to not look at her, especially when she wore one of those bras that pushed her breasts together—then he would have glanced over and seen a slightly pudgy, unmuscular young man with soft brown eyes, long eyelashes, thinning dark hair, and a gentle, almost perplexed expression on his face. Mitch Shaw was not exactly a threatening figure. His friends said he was a computer geek who spent most of his time creating Web sites on the computer that sat on the kitchen table of the one-bedroom apartment in far north Dallas that he shared with Jennifer. For relaxation, he watched Jeopardy, dabbled in abstract painting, played with his tabby cat, Sweet Pea, and took Jennifer to the Galleria, where they wandered through the stores and ate fast food down by the skating rink. They looked like so many other young couples you see at the mall, couples still trying to find their footing in life, the type who often drive through rich neighborhoods at the end of the day so that they can dream about what their lives might be like someday. As the wide-eyed Jennifer exclaimed to the police officer that day, “Just look at these homes with all these big columns. They’re bigger than Ramada Inns.”
Actually, Mitch and Jennifer were not that interested in the way those homes looked—not from the outside, anyway. According to statements that Jennifer would later give to Dallas police detectives and subsequently confirmed to me, she would often park the Tercel on a side street with little traffic and watch as Mitch, who usually wore a rumpled T-shirt, baggy shorts, and tennis shoes for their evening drives, put a black baseball cap backward on his head, pulled on a pair of gloves, and then snapped a fanny pack around his waist that was filled with just three items: a flashlight, a screwdriver, and a pack of cigarettes.
“Be careful, honey,” Jennifer would always say, leaning across the seat and giving him a kiss.
“Don’t you worry,” he would reply. And then Mitch would jog toward one of the mansions, scale the outside wall or gate, slip unnoticed through the back yard, expertly knock a hole in the window of the master bathroom, hoist himself through, and meticulously begin hunting for jewelry. He’d pick the locks of cabinets, rifle through closets, pull up carpets, and then make spectacular last-second getaways, racing back out the window just as police helicopters and squad cars were closing in.
Professional jewel thieves aren’t supposed to exist anymore. Confronted with a state-of-the-art combination of electronic locks, infrared motion detectors, and hardwired detectors on doors and windows, most criminals are lucky to get inside a wealthy person’s house, let alone have the time to figure out where the jewels are. But the police are convinced that Mitch Shaw, who’s now 31, was one of the shrewdest and most daring jewel thieves of our time and that Jennifer Dolan, who’s now 26, acted as his “wheelman,” dropping him off and then picking him up at prearranged locations near the targeted homes, so confident a driver that she’d wave flirtatiously at the cops as she drove away with Mitch crouched on the floorboard.
Mitch is the lead suspect in the break-ins of some of Dallas’ best-guarded homes over the past decade. Police detectives believe that he snatched jewels from the lavish residences of such society-column notables as Nancy Brinker, the wife of restaurateur Norman Brinker and the founder of the Susan G. Komen Breast Cancer Foundation; Clarice Tinsley, a popular Dallas television anchor; and the flashy charity ball hostess Sharon McCutchin. His crowning achievement came on a rainy night in January 1998, when Jennifer dropped him off just down the street from the Preston Hollow-area estate of Dallas billionaire Harold Simmons, whose wife, Annette, is renowned for her magnificent collection of jewelry. The 12,000 square-foot Simmons home seemed impenetrable. It was guarded 24 hours a day by an off-duty trooper from the Department of Public Safety, who walked the grounds twice an hour. In the back yard was a German shepherd guard dog. Wired to the windows and doors was an alarm system that was designed to go off even if the window panes rattled too loudly.
But Mitch made friends with the dog, avoided the DPS officer, deftly popped out two window panes in the master bedroom, found a key in the powder table that fit a locked closet, and then used his screwdriver to pry open five locked drawers, each one containing jewelry. He dumped the jewelry into a pillowcase and raced back to the Tercel, where Jennifer was sitting patiently, slurping on a Diet Coke. Back at their apartment, they dumped Mrs. Simmons’ jewels on their bed—nearly two hundred pieces, worth at least $1 million. Mitch and Jennifer had just pulled off the biggest jewelry heist of a residence in Dallas history.
Until now, the story of the duo’s improbable crime spree has never been told—and even those who know the story still have trouble believing it could be true. How could two young people, dreamy-eyed with love but amateurs in crime, execute the kind of heists that would daunt even the most highly skilled European cat burglars? How did they elude the cops for so long? Were they just lucky, able to evade police officers because they looked like two bumbling characters out of a lowbrow comedy? Or was there something far more ingenious about their methods and manners?
“It’s like a dream, thinking about what we did,” Jennifer told me not long ago, speaking publicly for the first time about her life with Mitch. “Here we were, living in a little $525-a-month apartment—it was all we needed, really—and then we’d go out at night and live this other life. It was sort of romantic, you know? Someone told me it’s like we were Bonnie and Clyde.”
Mitch Shaw is not one of those thieves who grew up on the wrong side of the tracks. He is a descendant of a family that once was as well known in Dallas as the families whose jewelry he is now accused of stealing. His great-grandfather was a respected Dallas judge named C. V. Compton who owned a grand three-story mansion on Lakeside Drive, the most elegant street in Dallas’ Highland Park area, where most of the well-to-do families lived. The judge’s three daughters were presented as debutantes to Dallas society. One daughter, Clairine, married a successful young lawyer named Thomas Mitchell Shaw, and their second son, Thomas Mitchell Shaw, Jr., was still a teenager when he met Melanie Trauman, a striking young woman who had moved to the Highland Park area with her mother. She became pregnant, a marriage was quickly arranged, and in 1968 she gave birth to Thomas Mitchell Shaw III.
Many of Mitch’s family members—including Melanie’s own mother, Nancy Wiener, who now lives in California—told me that Melanie, who had ferocious social ambitions, went for Shaw because she thought there was money in his family. But Mitch’s father received little inheritance. After graduating from Southern Methodist University with a degree in accounting, he went to work for the state comptroller’s office, and when Mitch was still a toddler, Melanie asked for a divorce and eventually moved to Houston, where she married a successful real estate developer and had her photo taken for a 1974 Town and Country magazine story about the boom times. (She posed in an off-white Geoffrey Beene coat and beret in front of the Houston skyline.) Mitch remained in Dallas with his father and barely saw his mother.
Mitch’s father married again—his new wife, Nancy, was a former high school classmate—and they moved to a pleasant but not ostentatious neighborhood in northwest Dallas. According to Nancy, who gave birth to two daughters after marrying Mitch’s father, Mitch was a shy child who played the piano and the guitar and took art lessons at school. He did have mild dyslexia and briefly took Ritalin for a minor attention-deficit disorder, “but he was really no problem,” she told me. “He was this physically gorgeous boy who liked going on weekend camp-outs with his father, loved the Dallas Cowboys, and loved to swim laps in our backyard pool. We called him a little dolphin.”
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