On April 26, the Department of Homeland Security launched its new Victims of Immigration Crime Engagement (VOICE) office. According to DHS, VOICE will “assist victims of crimes committed by criminal aliens.” DHS Secretary John Kelly said in a statement, “All crime is terrible, but these victims are unique—and too often ignored. They are casualties of crimes that should never have taken place—because the people who victimized them often times should not have been in the country in the first place.” I suppose the same might be said of crimes committed by children born of unplanned pregnancies, but I digress.
The fact is, most credible reports show that immigrants commit crimes at a lower rate than U.S. citizens. But never mind that. Today, I am concerned with another group whose below-average crime rate masks its otherwise sinister nature. You guessed it, I’m talking about America’s grandmothers.
To shed light on this menace, I’ve decided to create a new website called VOGUE – Victims Of Grandmothers’ Unscrupulous Ethics. The website will track crimes committed by mommoms, babas, memoms, geemas, and savtas throughout our great country. And I’m not just talking about the Little Old Lady from Pasadena, though her reckless driving certainly terrified everyone on Colorado Boulevard. Rather, I want the public to know that America’s bubbies are a real threat to our society. So in the spirit of disproving statistics with anecdotes, I present to you the Top 5 nana-related crimes of recent memory. Be afraid. Be very afraid:
(1) In 2010, a 64-year old Long Island woman was arrested for stealing boxes of jello, replacing the contents with sand and salt, and then returning the boxes for a full refund (of $1.40 each!). According to authorities, Christine Clement disposed of the evidence by cooking up and eating the contents of the boxes she had emptied. Ms. Clement’s husband of 40 years served as her get-away driver.
(2) Griselda Blanco was a drug lord (drug lady?) from Colombia who relocated to Miami where she dominated the violent cocaine-trafficking scene in the 1970s and 1980s. She was supposedly responsible for over 200 murders, including the murder of at least one of her husbands. Ms. Blanco was finally deported to Colombia where she was assassinated at a butcher shop in 2012. Catherine Zeta-Jones is slated to play her in an upcoming movie called The Godmother (fittingly, Ms. Blanco’s youngest son is named Michael Corleone Blanco).
(3) Velma Barfield, also known as “Death Row Granny,” used arsenic as her weapon of choice. She confessed to killing four people, including her mother and a boyfriend. It seems likely she also killed at least one of her two husbands. In 1984, she became the first woman executed by lethal injection and the first woman in the United States executed since 1962.
(4) Another killer who preferred poison was Nannie Doss, known as the “Giggling Granny.” All together, she killed four husbands, two children, her two sisters, her mother, a grandson, and a mother-in-law. The first murders took place in the late 1920’s and the last occurred in 1953, when she killed her fifth husband by poisoning his sweet-potato pie (given my own feelings about sweet potatos, I am unlikely to die this way).
(5) Career criminal Doris Payne has been a jewel thief for more than six decades. Her most famous theft involved a $500,000.00, 10-carat diamond ring, which she stole from a jewelry store in Monte Carlo in the 1970’s. More recently, in 2015, she allegedly stole another diamond ring valued at $33,000.00 from a store in North Carolina (at age 84!). Her modus operandi is to pretend to be a well-to-do person looking to buy jewelry. She has the clerk take out various pieces, and then somehow causes the clerk to lose track of a piece or two, which she carries away.
So as you can see, America’s grannies are a notorious bunch. Whether they’re clandestinely replacing our jello with sand, murdering rival drug lords and annoying husbands, or walking away with large diamonds, they clearly represent a danger to us all. But hopefully, VOGUE will help. By shining a light on a few bad (Granny Smith) apples, we’ll soon have you convinced that the whole barrel is spoiled. At least that’s what they tell me at DHS.