Netizens are spreading the story of a very enterprising old woman who, at 83 years old, got 65 cats and taught them to steal from their neighbors. We checked whether such a daring crime was actually committed.

The description of the crime of the century, as the story has been nicknamed on social networks, looks something like this. 83-year-old Ruth Gregson from Columbus, Ohio, allegedly became the first person in US history to be accused of training cats to steal. During a search of an elderly woman, police found jewelry worth $650,000 - it is believed that the cats have robbed more than 5,000 houses and apartments. The investigation into the case began in the fall of 2021, when neighbors said that small shiny and valuable objects began to disappear from them, and Gregson cats were seen nearby before the disappearance of the items. According to the culprit herself, she taught the animals to steal so that they could “earn their own food” (the old woman fed the pets only if they brought home valuable things). All 65 cats and 17 more kittens have already been transferred to the Humane Society.

In March 2022, this story was widely circulated on VKontakte: official communities included "Cube Media", "Metro Newspaper", "Guardians of the Motherland" And “I cried!”, and also E s t h é t i q u e (1.2 million subscribers), "Gulag" (473,000), Custodi et serva (249,000), "ZSH" (2.7 million) and "Men's magazine" (1.4 million).

On March 21, 2022, publications wrote about thieving cats and their trainer "Knife" And "Disgusting men", the site is indicated as the source New Jersey Brief, where the news came out on March 20. However, the story itself is not new: for example, on VKontakte there are several posts about Gregson and for 2018 year, and for 2019, and for 2020, and for 2021st, but then the recording didn’t go viral.

However, the original appeared even earlier. According to fact-checking resource Snopes, news source is the site World News Daily Report (WNDR), known for its fictional stories. The material was published there back in November 2017. You can understand that only fakes are published on the site by slogan “Where facts don’t matter” (“Here the facts don’t matter”), and according to the disclaimer, where it says the following: “WNDR takes full responsibility for the satirical nature of its articles and for the fictitious nature of their content. All characters appearing in the texts on this site are entirely fictitious, even if based on real people, and any resemblance between them and any person, living, dead or undead, is a mere miracle.”

By the way, we have previously repeatedly refuted other fabrications of the World News Daily Report, including stories about old lady, who gave birth to a child at 101 years old, about girl, arrested for making tens of thousands of calls to her ex-lover, and about married couple, in which the husband pretended to be deaf for many years.

Note that the article about the cat organized crime group uses real photos and the name of Columbus Police Chief Kim Jacobs, who left to retire in 2019. However, according to Russian-language publications, Kim Jacobs is a man who still works for the police.

And in the photo, the role of the criminal trainer of a gang of cats was played by the heroine of another crime story - a resident of Florida, Helen Staudinger, who was 92 years old at the time of shooting. According to the agency Reuters, in March 2011, a woman was arrested for shooting at her neighbor Dwight Boettner's home.

According to the 53-year-old victim, the old woman became interested in him when he first moved to the area, and even threatened to shoot him after learning that the neighbor already had a girlfriend. The incident report shows that Boettner got into an argument with Staudinger when she came to his home and refused to leave, demanding a kiss. The man refused and drove her away, for which he soon paid: the old woman shot several times at his home and car with a pistol. “If my head had been a little further, I probably would have gotten hit in the back of the head,” Boettner said.

Image: Reuters/Marion County Sheriffs Office