The Speeding Duck, the Hungry Javelina, and “Leonardo da Pinchy”

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Hello, Phoebe. Here is Sven from Switzerland.
Hi, Hi, Sven.

Sven Montgomery is the head of the police inspectorate in a town near Bern, Switzerland. The municipality of Koenitz.

So what is a typical day like at your job?

Oh, my typical day is actually

drinking coffee first and then I get my computer started. And normally I'm always

writing emails, answering phone calls to people who are upset about getting a fine. Sven says he and his colleagues mostly handle things like speeding tickets and parking fines.

Each week, they go through a batch of photographs of speeding cars captured by the speed radar cameras around town.

One day last April, Sven's colleague, Susan Haubecker, was looking through the photos and she noticed that one speed radar's camera had been triggered by something that wasn't a car.

There is a duck on the photo.

What is the duck doing in the photograph?

He is flying.

I'm

flying through the street.

In the photograph, there's nothing else on the road, just this duck right in the center with its wings stretched out.

So to trigger the speed radar camera, you have to be going a certain speed?

Yeah, the speed limit there was 30,

and the duck went 52. kilometers per hour.

That's a fast duck.

That was I don't know how fast ducks are, but there

duck was way too fast.

What's the penalty for going that fast? Oh, that would have been a heavy penalty because normally if you compare it to a car driver, it would have given given a report to the public prosecutor.

And normally, I think the duck would have lost the driving license. And even fine,

like

much more than 1,000 Swiss francs, which is like $1,300 US dollar or something like that.

Have you ever seen any other animals speeding like that?

No, no. Sometimes we have a Santa Claus

in December, but not the Santa's slate in Taipei Corner, for us.

Just Santa, not his sleigh.

Yes, there we have also a good picture.

I heard someone put up the picture of the duck.

Yes, it's on the wall.

We have a hall of fame with the pictures, also with the Santa Claus. Oh, so the duck is next to the Santa Claus.
Yes, yes, exactly. Sometimes Fenn is up there too.

I'm doing a lot of biking, so sometimes I'm also in the rudder. My team, if they think there is a funny picture, they put them up.
So remember me that they shouldn't go too fast.

I want to see a race between you and that duck, the duck, and you on your bike, and see

it depends. If you go downhill the other direction, as the duck went, then perhaps I might be fast enough to follow, and otherwise, no chance.

The duck isn't contending with hills like you might be. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
She has a easy, yeah, she don't have to follow the roads. And then me, unfortunately, I have to stay on the road.

If this is your first December listening to Criminal, you might not know that we have an annual tradition of creating these animals episodes, dating back to 2021.

It all started with a story from 1908 we saw when reading an old archival newspaper. A dog, a quote, splendid Newfoundland outside Paris, saved a small child who fell into the Seine.

The dog was rewarded with a stake.

Two days later, the same dog saved another child from drowning in the river. Then it happened again.

Quote, whenever the dog saw a child playing on the edge of the stream, he promptly knocked it into the water and jumped in to the rescue.

He had thus established for himself a profitable source of revenue, end quote.

The headline was, Dog, a fake hero.

We're now on our fifth annual animals episode. Last year's included a dog that ate $4,000.

We've brought you stories about bees, seagulls, camels, foxes, and pigs.

This year, the episode hit a little close to home, when the building where we record had a sudden and unexplained flea issue.

At first, someone thought kittens had snuck in or been let in.

Eventually, it was discovered that the source of the fleas was a possum living in the HVAC system.

As of this recording, the possum has outsmarted multiple professionals. It's an ongoing mystery, and as a result, I'm recording this episode in my guest bedroom.

Happy five years of animals really going for it.

I'm Phoebe Judge, this is Criminal.

In April of 2022, the Yavapai County Sheriff's Office in Arizona got a call about a car in a vacant lot in a town called Cornville. An officer went to investigate.

Sure enough, as I rounded the corner, there was a Zubaru hatchback off kind of under some trees, and it looked like it had almost been parked under the trees or left there abandoned.

It was looked to be a little odd to say the least.

This is Sergeant Zebediah Dickinson. He said it looked like it could have been a getaway car that someone ditched.
He parked his own police car nearby. And

got out of my own vehicle and walked over and there was a javelina inside of the subaru.

Havelinas technically aren't pigs, but they do look just like them. Here in Arizona, there's an abundance of them.
How big are they? They range from 40 to 80 pounds and are they nice

they're nice maybe from a distance i they're known to be a little aggressive if you stop you get up close to them got pretty large teeth that i'm sure if they got a hold of you would be a uh wouldn't make for a good day for somebody

Zebediah remembers when he walked up to the car, it looked like the Havelina had chewed up parts of the inside.

All of the doors were closed. It didn't seem seem like it could get out.

It took a little bit of investigating and just, I guess, imagination to say the least, how and why the vehicle was where it was with the javelina trapped inside.

He tried to figure out where the car had come from, asking neighbors who were around.

He learned that it belonged to a man who lived across the street. He said that when he knocked on his door at first, the man seemed like he didn't want to talk.

I don't think he was very understanding initially that there was a javelin in his car.

I'm sure if I told that to anybody else, they'd think it was a joke. He also didn't understand how his car had ended up in the vacant lot.

Zebediah learned that the man had left the rear hatch of his car open overnight in his driveway across the street.

And there was a bag of Cheetos that were

inside the car.

So doing my

investigation there, it seems that the Javelina was having a midnight snack, for lack of better terms.

Zebediah thought the hatch must have closed when the Javelina jumped into the car for the Cheetos, and that it spent the rest of the night trying to get back out.

The vehicle was a manual, so all the crouching around that kicked the vehicle in neutral, rolled from the driveway across the road and down into the under the trees on the opposing side.

Zebediah says getting it out of the car was much harder than he'd expected. The Javelina wasn't moving much until I got closer to the window and then it kind of snarled out the window.

Zebediah decided to tie a rope to the handle of the rear hatch, run the rope through the window of his own patrol car, and from the front seat of his car, pull the rope and open the hatch.

You didn't want to just open the door?

No, after that initial walking up to this car and it trying to like, I don't want to say eat me, but it felt that way through the window.

i i aired on side of caution for that part so you protected yourself with a rope and you sat in your car yep and cracked the latch pulled and and just said a little prayer that hopefully he'll just live along his day so

and did he absolutely i i think he was more excited to get out of there than i was so he jumped out and he went running away long gone never to be seen or heard from since

did you get a pretty good look of the car once he got out of there what he had done The dashboard itself had been chewed on. Some of the seats were torn up.
The bag of stuff torn open.

So kachitas were gone.

One of my favorite stories of the year happened in Bavaria, Germany. People in an apartment building were woken up late at night by someone ringing their doorbells.

When they looked, they couldn't see anyone. It didn't make any sense.

One resident said she thought it was teenagers playing a prank.

But then her upstairs neighbor called to say someone was ringing her doorbell. Quote, it kept ringing even as we telephoned, despite the fact no one could be seen at the door.
We became really uneasy.

That's when we decided to call the police.

Two officers arrived. The bell kept ringing.
No one saw anyone. The motion detector wasn't activating.

And then, looking very closely, everyone noticed a trail of slime and a slug taking a walk across the doorbell panel.

A police spokesperson said the slug had been taught about boundaries and placed on a nearby stretch of grass.

We'll be right back.

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Did he come with the name Joshua, or did you give him that name? No, it did did Joshua. That was his name when we got him.
It's kind of a funny name for a goat. I know.

I have no idea where that name came from.

This is Heidi Taylor. One day a few years ago, Heidi's father was buying goats for their farm, and one of them was Joshua.
Actually, after him, we had a female goat with him, and we called her Dolly.

I don't know if you know, well, you know the singer Dolly Parton. She sung a song called Joshua, and that was why she was called Dolly because of him.

Joshua lives on Heidi's farm, Taylor's Pumpkin Patch, in Newfoundland. People call me his person because he watches me wherever.
I'm also the one who gives the treats.

At the pumpkin patch, Joshua spends most of his time outside,

but he does have his own little house. And Heidi takes him for daily walks.

Like on a leash?

He's walked with a leash, but even though there's a leash on him, I don't hold it. Joshua walks with me by my side, and when I turn around to come back, he'll come back.
If I run, he'll run.

If I stop, he'll stop. I don't have to tell him.
He just does whatever I do.

One day last year, Heidi was at home with her husband about a mile away from their farm. It was a Sunday, and the pumpkin patch wasn't open.

And then her husband, Colin, asked Heidi to come over and look at something on his computer.

And he says to me, I think we have a problem.

He was looking on Facebook. Just somebody said there's a goat on the loose.

And he said, Joshua is down at the intersection in a community called Long Pond, and he's in the intersection on the crosswalk. And he's running.
And I thought, no, no way.

And when I looked at the picture, it was him.

Heidi says she was surprised because Joshua had never escaped before. Whenever he got loose on the farm, he never went anywhere.

But that day, the town was holding their first half marathon. Over 200 people had signed up.

They were running along an old railbed, and the course went right by Joshua's house on the pumpkin patch.

And when they were running by, he must have thought, I'm going with them.

So

he broke

his rope or his leash. There were more photos of Joshua popping up on Facebook.
Heidi and Colin posted asking anyone who saw him to send them tips if they saw Joshua.

They decided to head to the last place where they'd seen photos of him.

We got the truck, and then at that time, Joshua loved cheesies.

So we took cheesies with us.

him he loved what

he loved cheesies what is that soft cheesies

like potato chips but a cheesy he liked a bag of cheesies

cheesies a Canadian version of Cheetos

when they got to the last place Joshua had been photographed he wasn't there

but they found a crossing guard who had seen him

spoke to the crossing guard where the pitcher was, said that he kept going with the runners and stayed on the trail. He didn't wander off.
He kept going with them.

Heidi and Colin kept following the race course.

At another intersection, one of the volunteers said they'd just seen a goat go by.

Another volunteer at a water station tried to stop Joshua, but he seemed to want to keep running.

People posted videos running with him. Some of the runners would form a little ring around him.

At one point, he seemed to be getting tired, so they slowed down to stay with him. Because they were afraid something would happen to him.

And when the next group of runners would pass, he would take off and chase them.

So he.

He just wanted to run.

He just wanted to run. Yep, he did.

And then they heard that a runner had gotten a hold of Joshua and handed him over to a police officer. They were waiting up ahead.

When Heidi and Colin caught up to Joshua, they decided to let him finish, if he wanted to. He kept running.
He kept running, and we let him do it.

And he crossed the finish line with some of the runners and was awarded a medal. How far did he end up running that day? Five kilometers, so roughly three and a half miles.

That's a long time for a 150-pound 11-year-old goat.

It's very long, and actually, goats only lived to be 14 to 15 years old. So

he's kind of an old man.

He is an old man. He is an old man.
And actually, the veterinarians, we had them come in and check him out and to see he was okay. And they said for his age, it's a wonder he ran that much.

And he was fine.

He was totally fine.

What did he do the next day?

He slept the whole next day. The whole day.

Heidi says it was the first time she'd ever heard him snore.

After the race, dozens of people came to the pumpkin patch to see Joshua. They brought him apples and bread.

Do you think he would tolerate a little pair of shoes?

No, I don't think over those hooves. No,

he's got some pretty good hoofs that we have to keep trimmed.

Well, Heidi, I hope that I get to run with Joshua someday. He seems like he'd be a good companion.

Well, this run this year was bigger than last year, and a majority of the runners, half of them, said to us, the reason why we've done it is because we were hoping Joshua would be in this race.

Earlier this year, Tony DiNardo and his family set off on a road trip from their farm in Pennsylvania to New Hampshire. Tony was planning to run a marathon there.

He's trying to run one in every state.

Tony packed their van the night before they left and strapped their luggage to the roof. He, his wife Margaret, their daughter, and a few of her friends started driving at 5:30 in the morning.

Here's Margaret. It was about 45 minutes of country road, uphills, downhills, turns.

It's a really mountainous area to get from where we are to Interstate 80, which goes the whole way across Pennsylvania into New York and the upper New England states.

So we were on that for about 45 minutes, and then we got on Interstate 80, which is a busy interstate. You know, the speed limit is 70 miles per hour.
There's lots of semi-trucks.

How long were you driving before you made your first stop? A little over two hours. It was 105 miles.
And Tony, what happened when you pulled over? Nothing out of the ordinary until I saw the cat.

What do you mean you saw the cat? Well, I went ahead and got out of the van and got my wallet out and I just started walking towards the back of the van and the pump

and I was getting my card out of my wallet and then I looked up to the left and Ray Ray was just standing there looking at me. Ray Ray, their cat, on the roof of the van.

On the back of the roof behind the luggage carrier.

I just, at the first, just couldn't believe it. And then I started laughing.

And at that time, Margaret and the girls were walking around the front of the van. And she looked over and said, what?

And I just raised my hand and Ray Ray looked at Margaret, wanted someone to get him down and hold him, I guess. Well, what was it? Did he seem scared?

He was just standing on the van like he normally would. Yeah, he, when, by the time I got to the back, he was stretching.
You know, cats will put their head down and stretch.

He was just walking in circles, rubbing his head against the luggage like nothing had happened.

Here is Tony and Margaret's daughter, Sophia. I don't get up to go to the bathroom a a lot during road trips.
I technically sleep a lot.

So I was just waking up when my mom opened the door and got into the car with the cat. And I look at her and I didn't notice at first and she's holding the cat in her arms.

And I was like, where did Ray Ray come from?

Before they left home that morning, Tony remembers tightening the straps, securing the luggage to the car.

And he wasn't there.

We got in the car and started driving so he had to have been holding on to the back of the luggage carrier with his claws right because no one saw him either i could see no one seeing him on our rural trip but on the interstate you would have thought somebody may have seen a cat on the roof and tried to alert us but that didn't happen at all someone behind us right someone behind you like beep beep there's a cat on your roof

passing us but no they did not beep at all. No.

Nidhi, you said this was 105 miles that you had driven. Yes.
Windy roads on the highway, going 70 miles an hour. Yes.

My family liked to joke that they were glad that my husband was driving, because if I was, Ray Ray for sure wouldn't have made it.

When the Donardos found Ray Ray, They talked about turning around to take him home. But Tony said, he's just going to come with us.

And how was his trip? I mean, did he take part in the activities? He did everything with us.

Everything. We went hiking when we were in New Hampshire to a couple state parks.
Then we decided that Ray Ray should cross the finish line with my husband, which is exactly what he did.

We waited for him right, you know, before the finish line. I passed him over the fence and Tony ran right through the finish line with Ray Ray in his arms.

We'll be right back.

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Of course he did, right, Santa? You know, my elf Drushki here, he handles the nice list. An elf? I'm 6'3.
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Tu mereces tis frutartus favoritos por menos. Ja sel na Bic Mac, McNuggets, oh un sausage, egg and cheese, McFriddles.
Bidet one to hocomo un meal, y a hora.

Oof, nada comodarte un gustaso, por tam poco. Los extra value meals están de regreso.

I had just completed my inspection of the Redwood Skywalk. I was finishing up walking the remaining pathways of the zoo.
And my last stretch tends to be going through the bare boardwalk.

So the bear habitat spans

two sides with a boardwalk that crosses between them. So I had just been finishing that route.
And so it's a place I expect to see bears. I'm used to seeing bears.

Just that day there was a bear on the wrong side or the other side of the fence from where I normally see them. This is Christine Noel.

She's worked at Sequoia Park Zoo in Northern California for nine years.

The zoo has boardwalks that let you walk up high in the trees, in some places, about a hundred feet off the ground.

Someone at the zoo has to check them every morning to make sure nothing's broken overnight.

One morning in October, Christine went out to take a look, and that's when she saw a black bear walking along the boardwalk.

I looked at him and could recognize immediately that this wasn't any bear that I knew who lived at the zoo

and was an outsider who had come by to visit. What was it doing?

He was just taking a stroll. Yeah, he was just very relaxed and calmly visiting each of our three bears, going from sort of one to the other.
They were safely in their own quarters.

So all of those interactions were happening through a barrier, through a fence.

Was he acting? I mean, did he have pretty good behavior? Oh, he was very calm, very comfortable. At one point, he laid down and looked like he was getting ready to just take a nap.

He thought he's spending the night in a hotel or something.

Yeah, yeah. I think he thought he found a pretty good place to live, but unfortunately, we are all full.

Christine says the bear stayed on the path. and never tried to climb over the railings to get into the bear habitat.

There's a picture of him with his two back feet on the ground standing up with his two front paws resting on the railing, peering down, looking into the enclosure.

He looks like anyone else, just there for the day, enjoying the zoo.

How did the bear get in?

You know, we have a perimeter fence that goes around the zoo that's topped with barbed wire that's there to be keeping, you know, our animals safe.

But there are trees that are close to to that perimeter fence. And our best guess is that he had scaled a tree near the fence and was able to get past the barbed wire on top.

They have a pretty thick fur coat, so he probably got over without encountering too much of the barbed ends.

And if he's motivated enough, you know, bears are pretty intelligent and pretty physically capable of a lot.

The zoo has plans and drills for what happens if an animal escapes their habitat. But they'd never planned for a wild animal coming into the zoo.

Christine radioed other staff about the bear. Someone radioed back, is this a drill?

The zoo delayed opening while Christine, along with four other zookeepers and the zoo director, got to work.

They closed the gates except for the ones on the path that led back to the forest. Whenever the bear went the wrong way, they made loud noises to redirect it.

What kind of noises do you make to keep the bear away?

We have some air horns. We have a leaf blower that we use for just cleaning the pathways, but it makes a startling sound.
So between all of that, we're able to discourage him from staying too close.

Eventually, after about 45 minutes, the bear did leave.

The zoo posted about the bear online. They said they had had an eventful morning, but that the bear was, overall, a very polite visitor.

One day, earlier this year, Wendy Ballard was on an important work call from her home in Auckland, New Zealand, when she heard her 11-year-old son shouting.

Finished my call, and I said to to my son, that was really rude. I told you not to interrupt that call.
What was going on?

And he goes, Leo came running through the house and he stole your jacket, mom. And I'm like, what are you talking about?

Wendy has security cameras in her house. She opened up her phone and looked at the footage.
And there's this video footage of Leo running out of our house with my brand new $300 mohair jumper

running down the stairs of our house and up the driveway, dragging it along the concrete and my son going,

Leo!

Mom!

I'm Helen North and I have a lovely little cat called Leonardo who's rather naughty. He was named Leonardo initially by my daughter because he used to lie on his back like a ninja turtle.

But then when he started

being a little bit of a criminal, he changed it to Leonardo di Pinchi because it fitted him better.

From the very beginning, Helen says she knew there was something different about Leo. The moment he came into the house, he was hunting down all of our socks.

So he would find our socks, bring them to us, and then we would throw them away back across the room and he would bring them back. So he was very much into fetching.
He loved that.

And he wasn't really into your kind of normal chase cat toys like things that roll along a floor or fluffy mice. He always liked socks and gloves.

When Leo was about four months old, Helen and her family started letting Leo outdoors. One day I came home from work and there was about 10 single socks on the lounge floor.

And I thought to myself, my husband Tim, I thought, why would he leave all his socks there? That's weird, but I didn't really think anything of it.

And then Tim came home and said, none of those are my socks.

And then we sort of were settling down for the night to have dinner and Leo walked in with a t-shirt and we were like, oh, oh, dear.

Helen and her family didn't recognize the t-shirt either.

Leo started bringing more and more clothing home, sometimes every day, sometimes as many as 15 times a day.

How many items of clothing has he brought home at this point? About 300.

Yeah.

Including from Helen's neighbor, Wendy Ballard.

Leo's taken more than just her mohair sweater.

He has come back back quite often, takes things off the clothesline, so does fixate on my husband's socks.

He hasn't taken any of our underwear, but he has definitely taken other neighbors' underwear. Helen says Leo's also taken pants, shirts, boxers, gloves, a gym towel, even a big stuffed animal.

Wendy says she's seen him scaling their fence to grab things off their clothesline.

So he's just like dragging the stuff in his mouth? Yeah, in his little mouth. So he he's a very little cat.
He's not a big cat.

And so some of the things he's bought home, he's bought him big, really big jerseys, like brand new jerseys with the tags on them and things that were worth a lot of money.

And he just drags them in between his legs and he jumps over fences with them. He's quite agile and determined.

Like our neighbours, he's run away, like he's been caught in the act a few times and he's sprinted off still with them in his mouth. You can't get anywhere near him.
Yeah. He's fast.

Leo has been bringing stolen items home for more than a year now. What do you do with all of it?

Well, for a while, we just kind of went around the neighbors and asked if it was theirs, if things were theirs. And we did get a few hits, get a few people going, yeah, that's mine.

But then he went a bit wider. So I started posting on Facebook about once a month.
And we realized he was going to about 40 different places. And now I have a WhatsApp group.

Every week, Helen lays out all the clothes that Leo has brought home, takes a picture, and people respond with their items circled. And say, That's mine, and that's mine, and that's mine.

And then you do the drop-off.

Yeah, or they come sometimes, people come around and see us because often they want to meet him because a lot of people have heard about him.

Our neighbors that just bought their house, he sold their sock last week, and they were thrilled because the real estate agent that sold them the house said, Oh, the house comes with the cat burglar.

So, hopefully, he'll visit you. And they were so thrilled that he turned up.

We'll have photos and videos of all the animals from today's episode up on our Instagram and TikTok at criminal underscore podcast.

Recently, we've said goodbye to some friends. Lena Sillison's dog Disco, Jackie Sejiko's cat Jack Burton, Katie Bishop's dog Coco, Lauren Spohr's dog, Ardell.

Thank you very much for listening this year. Happy holidays and see you in 2026.

Criminal is created by Lauren Spohr and me. Nadia Wilson is our senior producer.
Katie Bishop is our supervising producer.

Our producers are Susannah Robertson, Jackie Segico, Lily Clark, Lena Sillison, and Megan Kinnane.

Our engineer is Veronica Simonetti. Julian Alexander makes original illustrations for each episode of Criminal.
You can see them at thisiscriminal.com.

And you can sign up for our newsletter at thisiscriminal.com slash newsletter.

We hope you'll join our membership program, Criminal Plus, now on Patreon. It's the very best way to support our work.

You can listen to Criminal, This Is Love, and Phoebe Reads a Mystery without any ads.

Plus, you'll get bonus episodes, behind-the-scenes photos, and videos, and you'll be able to talk directly with us and other criminal listeners.

We recently had a live event where we shared an animal story that we had to cut for time from this episode. If you missed it, you can watch the recording right now.

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I'm Phoebe Judge. This is Criminal.

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Book your next vacation rental home on Verbo.

Average savings, $396. Select homes only.