Suspended license IDs suspect

Deepa Bharath

It doesn’t take a genius’s IQ to be a crook.

In fact, history books show quite the opposite.

Burglars digging into refrigerators or falling asleep on the

living room couch. Robbers leaving behind identification in

convenience stores. Then, there’s the occasional clumsy one who drops

his house key or wallet.

Randall Gregory Bigelow went one step further. He handed over his

suspended driver’s license to the man he had reportedly robbed and

told him the piece of paper had all the information about him, if

anyone wanted to know.

The 41-year-old man handed the clerk at the Best Western hotel on

Balboa Peninsula a license suspension notice from the Vandalia, Ill.,

Department of Motor Vehicles, Newport Beach Police Sgt. Steve Shulman

said.

Bigelow first gave the clerk that piece of paper as a “robbery

note,” he said.

“He had all sorts of things scribbled out on the notice,” Shulman

said. “He pointed a semi-automatic handgun at the clerk and asked him

to empty out the register, which he did.”

And just when Bigelow was about to leave with the $286, the clerk

asked Bigelow his name.

Shulman said Bigelow simply told him: “Just give them that paper.

That’s all they need to know about me.”

“That paper” had Bigelow’s full name and photo. Detectives had a

composite made based on the clerk’s description and compared it to

the note, Shulman said.

With all the information they had, detectives tracked him down to

the Vista jail in San Diego, where he was being held on suspicion of

attempted carjacking, Shulman said. Detectives arrested him and

brought him back to Newport Beach on Feb. 10.

Bigelow’s serial crime spree reportedly began in Newport Beach on

Jan. 29 with that robbery, he said.

“On Jan. 30, he is said to have robbed a hotel in El Segundo,”

Shulman said. “Also, on Jan. 29, he allegedly made employees at a gas

station in Fontana fill gas in his vehicle at gunpoint.”

Bigelow was stopped in Carlsbad on Jan. 31 for an expired registration, and his car was towed, Shulman said. He was arrested

the very next day on suspicion of attempted carjacking in Encinitas.

It’s actually common for robbers to write notes on “items which

identify them,” Shulman said.

“There was one time when a bank robber wrote the note on his own

deposit slip,” he said.

There’s also a theory that some crooks want to get caught, Shulman

said.

“It’s the exception to the rule,” he said. “You see it once in a

while, but most of the time, they end up doing it accidentally or

because they’re just not thinking.”

More than likely, robbers end up in jail because “they’re not the

brightest lights shining at you,” said Gilbert Geis, a Newport Beach

criminologist and a retired UC Irvine professor.

“If they were clever, they wouldn’t have become robbers in the

first place,” he said.

Many make not-so-smart moves all the time, Geis said.

“They put fingerprints all over the place,” he said. “They use the

same gun more than once and get traced by the ballistics. Let’s not

even get into DNA testing.”

But, Geis dismissed the idea that Bigelow probably wanted to get

caught.

“A lot of people believe today that that kind of Freudian

interpretation is outdated,” he said. “He probably thought they

wouldn’t catch him because it was an expired license from Illinois.

Now, that’s not very smart, is it?”

* DEEPA BHARATH covers public safety and courts. She may be

reached at (949) 574-4226 or by e-mail at deepa.bharath@latimes.com.