Back when I was about 10 years old, I hung out with several other neighborhood boys, at least one of whom could be referred to as a “troublemaker”, but pretty innocent compared with today’s average. There was a family at the end of the block of mom, dad, and two boys one of which was in the age range of our group. That kid was a real jerk, maybe even a budding sociopath. He seemed to like hanging out with us, but would break things belonging to one of us and then blame one of the others; a pathological liar. One might surmise that he came by his unpleasant personality by way of his family since his parents were a couple that had a lot of the same attributes and none of the neighborhood adults liked them: arrogant, elitist, domineering, and irresponsible. They called the police numerous times for supposed infractions of the law, like someone stepping off the sidewalk in front of their house and walking on the edge of their lawn. Needless to say, the police didn’t like them either. They were especially prickly to their next door neighbors, a really nice family whose son was in our little boy group.

The tipping point came one December before Christmas when the boy-jerk went on a destructo binge while his parents were out shopping and tore all the lights off the pine tree in the front yard and smashed the bulbs on the sidewalk. The boy-jerk blamed the neighbor boy, one of our friends, insisting that he had seen the whole thing. This escalated into the police being called (again), taking down the whole story, rolling their eyes when they thought nobody was watching, and finally telling the boy-jerk’s father and mother that there was nothing they could do, since the boy-jerk was not exactly a credible witness with holes in his story that would make a brick of Swiss cheese blush. Both parents were absolutely apoplectic livid and vowed to take the neighbors to court…. etc. etc. etc.

The one in our group who was the defacto ring-leader, I’ll call him Joe, came up with a clever idea to get even. The Jerk family had boasted about how they were going away over New Year for two weeks to a beach location and sneered at all of us rubes who were going to have to tough it out in the northern US Midwest winter. Joe outlined the caper and the three of the rest of us agreed to go along after much nervous discussion, because Joe’s plan actually involved house-breaking.

A key part of this plan was that this was almost 60 years ago when people in “nice” neighborhoods typically didn’t bother locking their windows, sometimes not even their doors, unless they were going away. Joe planned on them not being diligent enough to lock the window of the downstairs bathroom.

Two nights before they were due to come home, we snuck up to their house with a case of mixed flavor Jello boxes. Raised the bathroom window and climbed in. We locked the bathroom door from the inside and filled the bathtub with hot water. Opened all of the boxes and dumped the contents into the bathtub and stirred it a bit. Then we cleaned the bathroom to a pristine level and crawled back out the window, leaving it open about an inch. The weather was perfect for this - it was getting down to about 25F during the night and into the 30s during the day, so the Jello set very nicely.

The family came home. They apparently got very concerned when they had to break into their bathroom because someone had locked the door. They were really stunned, then spooked, then furious when they found their bathtub full of gray Jello (didn’t know until the night of the “crime” that a mix of all the Jello flavors will result in gray). The police were called and they had their suspicions as to how this had happened, but since there was really no damage and nothing was stolen, there was no point in trying to pursue it further.

I made a point of walking my dog past their house the afternoon they came home and to this day get a smile when I remember them standing out in the cold on their front lawn yelling at the police to “do something about this!” The inability of the police to take this case seriously led them to move away the next Spring, citing the need to relocate to a “safer” community.