Years ago, my parents owned a small business. My dad did deliveries as part of the business, so he bought a used delivery van. It was used but in very good shape and it looked new. He used to park it in front of the store when he wasn’t delivering. After a few days, we started noticing scratch marks. We thought it was strange but didn’t think anymore of it until a few weeks later when we saw more and more marks in the back and on the side.

During this time, the lady that ran a store next door wasn’t being very friendly. It turned out that she was annoyed that my dad was parking his van in the parking lot, which in her mind, was taking a space for her customers. We put two and two together and figured out that she was the culprit.

One morning, my dad and I got to the store very early and set up a video camera which was focused on the van. The lady next door parked next to the van, got out, walked towards the van with her key and then made a motion on the van, put her key back in her bag and walked to her store.

We ultimately contacted the police who saw the video. They contacted her and apparently she went ballistic. It was probably all the more embarrassing as her son was on the local police force. She agreed to pay for repairing the scratch marks but wrote a letter stating that she did not do it and was only paying to “keep the peace.”

Unfortunately for her, she was the victim of someone keying her car a few weeks later. Apparently it happened after work one day when she and her husband went bowling. Again, unfortunately for her, this was in the era before cameras were everywhere, so they never found the culprits, but it almost appeared as if someone used a screwdriver alongside her car to scratch and remove all of the paint on one side. It was a vicious job and someone must have really had it out for her :-)