The Cleaning Burglar

In a small town in North Rhine-Westphalia in 2012, a married couple in their fifties locked up their two-storey house and left for a two-week walking holiday in northern Italy. They drew the curtains. They set the lights on a timer. They double-locked the front door. They coiled the garden hose. They asked the retired neighbour across the road, who had a key, to water the plants in the front room.

On the second day of the holiday, a man forced a kitchen window. Climbed in. He had a shower. He changed into the husband's clothes from a wardrobe upstairs. He made himself a sandwich from the contents of the fridge. He sat down on the sofa and watched what was, by police reconstruction, probably a German game show. He decided not to leave.

Four days

He moved in. Not in any formal sense. He brought no possessions. He did not change the locks. He simply began to live in the house as if it were his. He slept in the spare bedroom. He ate breakfast, lunch, and dinner from the kitchen. He drank the husband's beer. He read books from the family's bookshelves. He used the family's bathroom — including, the police later confirmed, the family's toothbrush. The German press would, in subsequent days, focus on the toothbrush.

By the third day of his occupation, he had begun to do something that the police, the press, and several psychologists would subsequently spend considerable time trying to understand. He had begun to clean.

The cleaning

He cleaned the kitchen counters. He cleaned the hob. He opened the oven and scoured it. He cleaned the sink. He removed every item from the fridge, wiped down the interior, and reorganised it. He cleaned the bathroom. The toilet. The bath. The mirror. He cleaned the bedroom carpet, using the family's vacuum cleaner. He cleaned the carpet on the stairs. He polished the wooden floors of the living room. He cleaned the windows from the inside, using the family's Windex bottle. By the third day he had moved on to areas the owners themselves had not cleaned in months — the skirting boards, the corners of the ceiling, the space behind the fridge.

His subsequent explanation, offered in court, was that he had felt guilty. He was living in someone else's house. He was using their things. He felt, he said, that he should leave the house in a better state than he had found it. As a courtesy.

The neighbour

On the fourth day, the retired neighbour from across the street let herself in to water the plants. She walked into the kitchen. The kitchen was significantly cleaner than she had ever seen it. She walked into the living room. Also significantly cleaner. She heard, from upstairs, the sound of a vacuum cleaner.

She did not, immediately, panic. She believed — for approximately twenty seconds — that the couple had hired a cleaning service to maintain the house during the holiday. She walked upstairs. She entered the spare bedroom. She found a man she had never seen before, in her neighbour's husband's pyjamas, vacuuming the carpet.

He turned the vacuum off. He looked at her. She looked at him. He, in fluent German, said: I am the cleaner.

She believed him for approximately twenty seconds. Then she noticed that he was wearing her neighbour's pyjamas. Then she noticed that the vacuum cleaner was her neighbour's vacuum cleaner. Then she noticed that he was approximately thirty years old, which was younger than any cleaning service the couple would have hired, and that there was no van outside. She walked back down the stairs. She walked out of the house. She walked across the street to her own house. She locked the door behind her. She called the police.

The arrest and the trial

He continued vacuuming for about fifteen minutes. Then, presumably realising she had not returned and that police would be coming, he packed a small bag — several pieces of jewellery, the husband's watch, approximately three hundred euros in cash from a drawer — and left through the front door. He was arrested at the train station, approximately one kilometre away, sitting on a bench eating a sandwich.

The case was prosecuted at the Amtsgericht in Essen. He was convicted of burglary and theft under the German criminal code. The sentence was within the standard range. The judge noted, in passing, that the defendant had been an unusually conscientious occupier of the property, and that the cleaning was entered into evidence as one of the more unusual aggravating circumstances he had seen — aggravating, technically, because it constituted prolonged unauthorised use of the property.

Identification was straightforward. He had handled the cleaning supplies extensively over four days. His prints were on the Windex bottle. His DNA was on the toothbrush. There was no plausible defence.

The owners came home from Italy. They found their house cleaner than they had left it. They found a stranger's bag in the spare bedroom. They found a thank-you note on the kitchen table. The note was brief. It apologised for the use of the toothbrush. It explained that the windows had needed cleaning. It recommended a brand of Windex. The wife threw out the toothbrush. The husband, the German press reported, kept the note.

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Listen to the full story on Dumb Crimes Europe, Episode 13. Stream the episode here.