Two months before he died of lung cancer in 2021, Thomas Randele made a shocking confession to his wife and daughter: He’d been living under a fake name for almost five decades after robbing an Ohio bank of $215,000.
I don’t know this for certain, but if a study were ever conducted on, say, the top 100 most commonly-committed crimes, I suspect the number of which you’re more likely than not to get away with would astonish you.
Wage theft accounts for more stolen money then all other theft combined, so this is bog standard true. Our very economic and legal system lets white collar crime go unpunished by design.
This particular sort of crime, though, I imagine is much harder to pull off today. No one can really just disappear and start a new life like they used to. Your prints are known, your DNA can be tested, everyone's location can be traced, and records are all stored in databases that are easy to search and hard to tamper with.
Yeah, but if you look at clearance rates for cops they're significantly lower than crime dramas would have you believe. Cops unbelievably incompetent, they regularly botch DNA and completely destroy evidence. Some crime labs don't even have manuals. When you read police accountability reports, you start to realize tye CSI thing is a total lie and they usually just torture or terrorize random black and brown people in to confessing to things they didn't do.
It's rare and newsworthy when they actually do detective work and crack a case, and even then it's usually because they had tons of help from people who aren't cops. I'm not at all surprised that someone could spend their whole life committing major felonies and that they never got caught.
I was a very, very bad teenager. I had my 5th felony by the time I turned 15. All in all, that's a very small percentage of the felonies (and misdemeanors) I was never caught for. Nothing violent, but lots of vandalism, theft, etc.