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In Missouri recently, a woman from the city of Joplin got her stolen ring back after the suspect in the theft inadvertently admitted he was the culprit. The thief literally coughed up the ring in front of the police. Police say the ring belonging to Rebecca Moore and was inside her purse in a vehicle parked at a local mall. Someone broke into the vehicle and stole the purse. The victim’s husband, Tom Moore, said the two-carat diamond ring is worth about $20,000 and is a family heirloom passed down to his wife from her mother.
“It meant the world to her,” he told reporter Jeff Lehr with the Joplin Globe newspaper. Moore had just picked the ring back up from a jewelry store where she’d had some repair work done. She drove to the mall lot and parked, leaving her purse in the car while she went inside to shop.
She discovered the theft when she came back out. Less than four hours later, a man and a woman walked into Newton’s Jewelry in downtown Joplin with a ring they wished to have appraised. Luckily for the Moores, store owner L.T. “Bunny” Newton recognized the ring right away from a picture Comeau’s sent to local jewelers in the wake of the theft.
Newton said the diamond was distinctively set between two sapphires and was very easy to spot. “So we stalled, and kept weighing and measuring it,” Newton said while he had an employee call the cops out of the view and earshot of the crooks. About 15 minutes had passed with Mr. Newton still doing his best to buy time so officers could arrive, but the man was getting jumpy.
“He got kind of antsy then,” Newton told the Globe’s Lehr. “You could tell he suspected something was going on.” The man decided to take the ring back just as police officers walked into the store. Newton said he didn’t see it but the man must have swallowed the ring when he spotted the police.
The officers asked the couple about their ring, and the man told them Newton still had it. “I told him: ‘No, you took it back from me,’” Newton said. It turns out the large diamond ring wedged in the male suspect’s throat, cutting off his air supply.
He coughed up the stolen ring as bemused officers looked on. Add this page to your favorite Social Bookmarking websites        
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