The Snoring Burglar

Cologne, 2014. A burglar forces a kitchen window of an empty apartment, takes a laptop, takes some cash, finishes the job in under an hour. Then he sits down on the homeowner's bed for what he tells himself will be sixty seconds of rest. The owner returns at 2 PM. Opens the door. Hears, from the master bedroom, the sound of a stranger snoring in his bed. The bed had been made that morning. The shoes are now placed neatly at its foot. The German Polizei arrive seven minutes later and walk through an entry that one of them later describes as one of the most relaxed arrests of a burglary in progress they have ever conducted — because the suspect, throughout, is snoring. They can hear him from three rooms away. Kit and Eden on the man who came to Cologne to commit a burglary, brought twenty-six hours of accumulated sleep deprivation with him, and lay down on a memory-foam mattress. The homeowner replaced the bed.