Police Farce: can you rob a bank with lemon juice?
The sheer gall and gumption of this particular crime must have been genuinely unsettling in the moment. Two bank robberies took place on the same day, in broad daylight, by the same culprits, one right after the other. The two men waltzing up to the tellers, smelling like a lemon grove, before brandishing guns and demanding the cash. They didn’t even wear masks.
In fact, one of them seemed to revel in this. Smirking up at all the CCTV cameras in the Swissvale branch of Mellon Bank and the Brighton Heights branch of Fidelity Savings Bank on January 6th, 1995, without a care in the world. The sheer brass neck of the gambit is almost admirable. To rob a bank while knowing that your face is going to be one of the most sought after in the area and that your arrest is imminent at any possible second. You’d assume they’d have to know that for sure, right? Well, they didn’t.
One of them, Clifton Earl Johnson, was nabbed within a few days of the job. The other, McArthur Wheeler, managed to hold out until April. After an investigation brought no leads, some bright sparks at the Pittsburgh Police Department thought, ‘Hey, y’know what, we have their faces right here, why not put them on TV?!’ That’s exactly what they did. Security camera footage of Wheeler’s face was broadcast as part of a Pittsburgh Crime Stoppers TV report, and he was caught within the hour.
The strangest part was that both Johnson and Wheeler seemed absolutely baffled that they’d been caught. Wheeler, in particular, was mortified and wouldn’t stop wailing about how he “wore the lemon juice,” as if that was meant to mean anything to anyone. When he was in custody, Wheeler finally came clean about one of the most patently absurd criminal plots in the history of the city. One that would even have been laughed out of the writers’ room of the 1960s Batman TV show.
It really did involve both of them, as Wheeler said, wearing lemon juice.
Why did this crime involve lemon juice?
It turns out that the slight sheen on the faces of both Johnson and Wheeler in all the pictures of them robbing those banks weren’t sweat. After all, in their mind they had nothing to sweat about. Their faces wouldn’t show up on the cameras because they’d smeared their faces with lemon juice before entering. Seriously, that was their master plan, and one can only imagine the howls of derision that this story must have gotten in the police station.
When planning the bank jobs, Johnson came to Wheeler with a truly batshit idea. He said that lemon juice works as invisible ink, so if you smeared your face with it, that would become invisible to a camera. What truly tips this into farce is the fact that Wheeler tested this theory. He rubbed his face with lemon juice, took a Polaroid picture of himself and, lo and behold, he wasn’t in the picture. This is because the juice got in his eyes, and he pointed the camera away from his face when he took the picture, but Wheeler didn’t realise that at the time.
Fitting for the kind of criminal stupidity that’s normally found in a Coen Brothers film, both Wheeler and Johnson didn’t just end up in prison for their crime. Both of them were literally used as the inspiration for the paper that gave the world the Dunning-Kruger effect, a study on the way that stupid people have no idea they’re stupid, and thus think they can do anything.
Not only did Wheeler and Johnson give the world one of the most surreal true crime stories ever, but they also set the blueprint for how every world leader seems to act in 2025.