Law Humor

Rat Planter Pleads No Contest to Extortion Charges

By Kevin Underhill

Debbie Miller pleaded no contest on Tuesday to charges stemming from a failed attempt to extort money from a Wisconsin restaurant by planting a dead rat in her lunch.  The report did not say what kind of lunch Miller had, so it is not clear exactly how this genius-level scheme was designed to play out, but apparently she just plopped an entire rat into her lunch and then demanded $500,000 in compensation, saying that otherwise she would alert the media.  How could such a plan have failed, you ask?

The restaurant's owners kept the rat and turned it over to insurance investigators for testing.  They discovered that not only was this not a wild rat of the kind that might creep into a kitchen and then into a meal, it was a domestic white rat, of the kind people (some people) keep as pets.  More importantly, they found it had spent some time in a microwave oven.  The restaurant quickly pointed out that it does not use microwave ovens, thus clearing itself.

An alternative theory, that the rat microwaved itself elsewhere and then staggered into the restaurant and flung itself into Miller's lunch because of a grudge against the owners, whereupon Miller simply tried to take advantage of the unusual situation, has not been advanced by anyone at all.

Link: Appleton (Wisconsin) Post-Crescent

Full post as published by Lowering the Bar on February 05, 2010 (boomark / email).