STOLE ALLIGATORS

Dominion, Volume 32, Issue 148, 18 March 1939, Page 6 (Supplement)

STOLE ALLIGATORS

Two Youths’ Unusual

Misdemeanor

Pleading guilty at Manchester Police Court to stealing two live alligators, valued at £4/10/-, from Belle Vue Zoo, James Whitworth, aged 19, and George W. Ford, 22, were placed on probation for twelve months. Whitworth said that, after wrapping the reptiles in cloth, they took them to a house and let them walk about the floor. Later they carried them to his house, and, after swimming them in the bath, placed them in a cupboard. When they saw the report in the newspapers that the alligators bad been stolen, he wanted to take them to the Zoo headkeeper’s front door, leave them on the front step, knock, and run away.

Finally, they dropped them over some railings, and Inspector Yarwood said he went with Whitworth to the spot where a sack containing the alligators, which were dead, was lying in the snow.

Whitworth told the magistrate: “I was interested in the alligators and wanted to keep them in my room as pets.” During the hearing the dead alligators lay on a table in the court. Mr. Bertram Gale, of London, ou reading of the theft of the alligators, offered to replace them with two alligators which he acquired in Florida, and which he himself brought to England.