The Debbie Burglars Follow Me To Springfield

In our first home, we came home from a restaurant to find someone had popped the glass door in our walk-out basement and made off with a sack of old coins. The paper called that sort of thing Debbie burglaries, since the people knocked on the door and if it was answered, they would ask for Debbie and leave when the fictitious Debbie wasn’t there. If no one answered and no dog barked, they’d go around back.

In our second home, scurrilous people knocked on the door on occasion with questionable sales brochures and poor dress.

Now we’ve moved out in the country to be safer, and the tactic has followed us here:

Rural residents beware: That salesman knocking on your front door could very well be casing your home to burglarize it.

The Greene County Sheriff’s Office has dealt with about 30 rural residential daytime burglaries in the past two weeks in widely scattered areas of the county.

They’re being perpetrated by small crews of thieves who typically knock on the front door to see if anyone’s home, according to Greene County Sheriff’s Capt. Randy Gibson.

“If there’s no answer, they go to the back door and break in,” he said. “In some cases, they’ve broken through locked doors. In some others, the houses were unlocked.”

We’re home most of the time, so we’re in sort of good shape to avoid this sort of burglary. But, damn, I thought I’d be able to let go of a little of my internal city boy grit out here. But I’ll need to continue to suspect everyone, I suppose.

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