The Haywood County Sheriff’s Office has been hard at work reuniting residents’ with their hard-earned property.
The criminal investigations division has returned $195,602 worth of stolen property to victims of theft since newly-elected Sheriff Bill Wilke took office in December.
“We’ve had 44 cases this year,” Detective Taylor Yates said. “It’s absolutely a sense a pride for us when we’re able to recover something and get it back to that person. These are physical items I am able to return to them.”
While the monetary value is impressive, it is not the only thing that matters.
In one specific case, there was a number of things stolen, including guns and tools. The one thing that stood out the most was a handcrafted coffee table made from a barn door.
“We asked him a value on that and he said it was priceless,” Yates said.
Detective Heath Riddle tacked on to the same point, saying that the victim had prices for everything else that had been stolen.
Stolen property can range widely in value. At the lower end, some clothes and tools stolen from Tractor Supply were recovered the same night, totaling around $3,000.
“It’s still our job,” Yates said. “It’s still property crimes. The price doesn’t matter. It’s still items that were stolen.”
On the higher end, the detectives recovered an $80,000 excavator.
“That was a really big excavator,” Riddle said. “It was our big ticket item. There were some good feelings getting that one back.”
The time frame can vary as well. Sometimes, like with the stolen products from Tractor Supply, detectives finding their rightful owner that night, while other cases can take months to recover.
Although it might take months, the detectives jump on their reports immediately and start the hunt.
“Once we receive the report, we try to do it right then,” Riddle said. “Some of these items, if you don’t get them within 48 hours, they’re gone.”
The detectives said they often have to track stolen items through multiple people as they are resold quickly on the black market.
“You have a very short window,” Yates said. “I know it seems like something like [the excavator] can’t disappear too easily, but it can. It will go to the next county, the next state.”
Riddle added that items can ‘go through six or seven sets of hands in a week.”
This means detectives must do a lot of legwork to follow the transactions. Sometimes, they start with a suspected thief and work through purchases to find the item.
Other times, they find a stolen item and work backwards through the transactions to find who originally stole it.
The detectives said they recover stolen items at an average pace of about once every other week. Occasionally they’ll get a couple of items in one week, with other stretches where they are striking out.
The slumps can be disheartening to detectives looking for items, similar to a baseball player who can not seem to find a hit over the stretch of a few games.
“It’s frustrating,” Yates said. “I’m doing, in my mind, everything that I can and I’m coming up empty no matter what. When you go weeks of doing that for someone that has serial numbers and you can’t seem to locate it, it’s frustrating.”
Like baseball players, detectives will occasionally get cases that are like their fastball down the middle where they can knock it out quickly and get back on the front foot.
“Randomly, we’ll get assigned one we can run with and find within a day or two,” Riddle said.
The two detectives also pointed to the help of the community in their jobs. Yates said roughly 80% of their cases are helped out in some way by the community.
“I’d credit the community a lot in the things we are able to recover,” Yates said. “We live in a really good community as far as watching after each other. You get to see that when you’re in our position.”