San Xavier Beat
9:52 p.m.
A possibly paranoid housewife-turned-amateur-detective gave law enforcement a complex story about some very random items that she believed had been stolen by her husband's mistress—whom she also believed was also spying on her—as well as by one oddly described neighbor, according to a Pima County Sheriff's Department report.
When sheriff's deputies came to her home, the woman declared her belief that a female was dating her husband—whom she was about to divorce—and had at least once entered her home unescorted by way of a key her husband had left in a blue toolbox in their carport (the reportee didn't explain her detailed conjecture about the key).
Now, she said, some of her possessions had disappeared, and she believed this mistress had stolen them: her grandmother's ring, a terracotta bowl, three pizza pans and a pizza shovel. Perhaps oddest of all, the woman believed the purported mistress had purloined a single artificial flower from a vase in her kitchen and replaced it with a chopstick. She said this chopstick made her feel threatened. (When deputies looked in the vase, they indeed saw a collection of fake flowers with all their stems stuck in holes in a Styrofoam holder in the bottom—but in one of the holes, someone had inserted a decorative ceramic chopstick.)
The reportee was also convinced that her husband's girlfriend had been spying on her, since a neighbor's child had found a pair of binoculars near her fence. She said her husband was currently out of town.
She hadn't yet surmised exactly who the alleged mistress was, but she said she believed she worked for a dry-cleaning business because some of her husband's clothes had gone missing, and in their place were wire hangers with dry-cleaner emblems.
In addition, she told deputies, she believed one of her neighbors—whom she deemed "motorcycle man"—had entered her home and stolen more items. In the case of this man's involvement, however, she offered neither specific suppositions nor even descriptions of what she thought had been taken.
She requested that one deputy look inside a light socket in her bedroom in case someone had hidden a camera in there. When he complied, assuring her that there was no camera, she said she "felt better already"—although she also asked a different deputy to check her phone for a tracking device (he advised her to contact her service provider for that).
The woman admitted "she was not certain on all of her facts," and without any demonstration of anything actually amiss—other than the chopstick—deputies couldn't help solve her missing-items case. She stated she understood and would call again if she had any more concrete clues. According to the report, "she was very, very thankful" to deputies for listening to her story.
