Cars plus crime form a typical combination in urban legends. Here are three recent car/crime stories. Each comes from a different country and involves some kind of faulty assumption.
The first, which I call “The Stolen Speed Trap,” is of British origin. While driving home on the highway one afternoon, a woman sees what looks like a microwave oven left on the roadside. Assuming that someone has abandoned it, she stops and picks it up. Maybe her husband, an electrician, will be able to restore it to working order.
She hurries home with her prize, but she exceeds the speed limit and is stopped by the police. While writing the ticket, the officers notice the microwavelike unit in the back of her car. It is a radar speed-checking device. In spite of the woman’s protestations, they arrest her for stealing government property.
In a variation, the woman mistakenly picks up the first unit of a two-part speed trap. Though she drives very carefully, the paired radar units are disrupted because one part is moving in her car. The units miscalculate her speed and electronically alert the police to stop her. While the woman is trying to talk her way out of a speeding ticket, the police spot the stolen speed trap in her car and book her for theft as well.
The second story, called “Stripping the Car,” has been described as the classic New York City driving legend. It commonly spreads in large cities, where cars that are abandoned by the side of the road become prey of semiprofessional “strippers,” who move from car to car, stripping them of tires, accessories, and other parts of
value. Oddly, the people who recount this story to me usually say something like, “I don’t know about your part of the country, but in ours ….” as if car-stripping thieves are unique to their city or region.
In New York, I am told, the story goes like this:
In the middle of traffic on the Long Island Expressway (or the Bronx River Parkway), a man’s car breaks down. He steers it onto the shoulder, gets out, and opens the hood. As he bends over the engine searching for the trouble, another car pulls up. The driver of the car gets out, offers to help—then walks to the back of the car and expertly jimmies open the trunk. He shouts around to the driver, “Okay, Buddy. What’s under the hood is yours, but I get what’s in the trunk.”
In a variation of this legend, the stranded motorist is jacking up the rear end of his car to change a tire when he becomes aware that someone is jacking up the front. He walks around the car to investigate, and the stripper says to him, “You take the back wheels, Mac, and I’ll take the front ones.”
In a variation, the car stripper says, “Take it easy! There’s enough here for the both of us!”
The third story, “Stopping the Detroit Car,” takes place in Canada. An officer of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police’s highway patrol is cruising for speeders on the TransCanada Highway in Saskatchewan, where the road is straight as an arrow for many miles. He spots a large luxury auto with U.S. license plates and signals for the driver to pull over.
The car, perhaps a long white Cadillac or Lincoln Continental, is usually said to have Michigan plates. Its occupants supposedly have driven north from Detroit, though in some versions their place of origin is some other notoriously crime-ridden city—generally Chicago, Miami, or New York.
Both cars stop, and the Mountie walks up to the huge
vehicle to speak with the driver. He merely intends to issue a warning about some minor infraction—a loose license plate, for instance, or a burned-out headlight.
But all four of the car’s doors fly open, and four very large men in dark suits and pointy-toed, expensive shoes slowly emerge. The driver and his three passengers turn to face their car, lean over it, move their legs into the spread-eagle position, and place their hands on top.
The Mountie is astonished, since he is not used to the current arrest routine of high-crime U.S. cities. And the four men from Detroit are astonished, too: they are accustomed to being stopped and given a thorough going-over, not just a warning for a minor violation.
Aside from the obvious pattern of theme and variations in all three stories, it is the stereotyped characters in them that most clearly suggest that they are urban legends. “Woman drivers,” victimized New Yorkers, naï
ve country police—these are common clichés that urban legends so often arise around.
What remains puzzling, though, is the way that all three of these stories arrive at a dramatic moment, and then abruptly leave us hanging. What happens to the wrongly charged woman? The car stripper and the owner of the car? The mysterious travelers from Detroit? We’ll never know, since these are folklore, not fact. It seems that the endings to these car-crime stories have headed for the open road and stolen away in the night.