Homebrew webcam security followup

Since installing the homebrew webcam security system I described before, it's paid off and I think the story is maybe worth telling here so I don't have to retell it over and over and over.

What motivated me to put this camera system together has been months coming. Since Deborah and I moved to New Hampshire, we've had several of our things go missing. While we can be a bit messy around the house usually, the chaos of moving across the country (more than FOUR times this year for me!) had left us a bit worse than usual, but in my office and lab I managed to keep everything in order. You don't finish a PhD without learning a thing or two about keeping organized. As the months went on, we continued having a sequence of those 'where in the hell did I put that stupid thing' moments though.

One night we were going out and Deborah couldn't find the dress she wanted. I waited downstairs patiently (OK maybe not that patiently), but she kept looking for maybe half an hour, and finally in frustration she picked out another dress. I chalked it up to her just being indecisive about what to wear at the time.

We like to keep a healthy supply of chocolate in the house. It's pretty typical that I can't find any a lot of the time and I always joked that Deborah always eats all of our chocolate. She would admit to really liking chocolate, which is a fine truth, but it seemed like the chocolate was disappearing faster than even she would eat it in the past. Sure, moving and starting post-docs was stressful, but this was like serious chocoholic style chowing, though I never really saw her eating it all.

We returned from shopping for clothes one day and dropped the bags in our room upstairs before going out to meet some friends. When we came back and started putting away our newly procured finery, Deborah noticed a missing article and thought that maybe she'd left it on the counter at the store or somehow lost it on the way to the car.

This went on and on: sweaters, shoes, food, jackets, etc., for months. Again, I thought it was probably just us being a bit less organized than usual due to stressing about work and moving around, but I was starting to feel pretty under control at work, and we had essentially settled all of our stuff after a couple of months. One day, Deborah noticed a huge jar of pocket change emptied and second guessed herself about whether she or I had taken it in for exchange, or done something else with it. A month or so later, we were going out for dinner and she was looking for a gold necklace her grandpa made her, which she couldn't find.

After all of this, we were highly suspicious that something funny was going on, but didn't have any hard evidence one way or another so we never called the police or said anything to our neighbors or our landlord who lived next door. We suspected that maybe some misguided highschool kids or maybe the electrical repairman or oil refill guy at various points, but these didn't really fit the pattern of things going missing so consistently for so long. I alternately envisioned either homeless people or members of an ancient thieves guild picking through my house while I was away at work every day, and was pretty distracted trying to figure out what was going on.

Sitting over some bourbon one night I realized that I had all the pieces to assemble a homebrew webcam security system, and that doing so could shed some light on the situation, so I took an hour or so to put it together. I tuned it up for a week or two, working out the sensitivity settings that would only trigger on some actual event, not noise. It wasn't perfect, when the sun shined in the window at certain times of day and the wind was up, it would trigger, but otherwise it worked pretty well. Sometimes I left it on, but usually not. I got tired of the angry dog sound barking at me when I came home, so I turned it off. I didn't have very high hopes of actually figuring out what was going on, but I was happy that I put it together.

Since Deborah was going to be in California for all of December, I was planning to stay down in Cambridge as well for the month so that I could work longer hours and hang out with some friends down there. We had recently purchased a climate monitor to keep an eye on some humidity problems in the house, and since I was also planning to turn the heat way down while we were out of town, but wanted it high enough that the pipes wouldn't freeze, I set up the webcam system to upload snapshots of the climate monitor panel to my personal website at work. After looking at a couple of the test images, I realized that I could leave it monitoring motion for the month as well, and thought that it would be a good idea since the holidays are a typical burgling time. I hung the camera in the corner of a room from which it could see pretty much any entry into the house on the ground floor, and even put a lamp on a timer at night so it wouldn't miss anything in the dark. Sort of like in 'Home Alone' except no music or fake dancing people on turntables. I left it running and got the train down to Cambridge on Saturday night. About a week later I got what I was after.

On Monday morning at work, I looked through the snapshots and everything seemed as expected except that the climate monitor showed 70F at night! It turns out the lamp I hung it on generates some heat. OK no big deal, in the morning after the lamp turned off it showed 50F as expected. I sifted through all my emails for the morning and was about to get down to business when I noticed another email around 9am: a message from my motion detector. It was way too early for the sun to shine through the windows, so I looked right at the images. And then I started to understand what had been going on.

The back door opened and in came a woman, who seemed to be checking if anyone was home (there was no audio so I can only guess). After she determined that the coast was clear she immediately went upstairs, empty handed as she had entered. She returned about 5 minutes later with an armload of clothes and proceeded rummaging through my pantry, eventually selecting a bottle of cheap wine before wandering through the living room and finally leaving with as much as she could carry.

My heart was racing over some combination of surprise, fury, and satisfaction that I actually put the camera in, and that I put it out of the way enough that she apparently didn't see it. >:-(

I immediately had the following brief conversation with one of the guys across the desk:

'Hey man, what do you do when you've been burgled?'
'What do you mean, like last week or something?'
'No like maybe five minutes ago.'

He came over pretty surprised and we reviewed the images, then he suggested I call the police. I wasn't convinced that there was sufficient evidence for a conviction and I didn't want them to spook her into throwing all my stuff into the garbage, so instead I invoked my pre-paid legal benefits (those are useful sometimes it turns out) and spoke with a local attorney first. After I filled him in, he asked a couple of details about if the camera was monitoring a public area (potentially illegal?), if there was audio (illegal without notifying all recorded parties beforehand), and a few other potential complications, then said I should call the police and bring them a copy of the evidence. 

I was pretty sure I knew who the woman was, but I sent the photos to Deborah to independently confirm before calling the police. I called her out of bed (it was a bit after 6am in CA), and she confirmed the ID: it was my landlord's wife!

Then I got another email from my motion detector! She had returned to the house wearing some of the clothes and apparently returned most of them, but she then left with another armload and rummaged some chocolate on the way out. I'm pretty sure that in some of the first frames she's even popping some pills, which she presumably brought with her. It just kept getting weirder and weirder. 

At this point most of the other folks in the lab had caught wind of what had happened and one of them offered to loan me his truck for the day so I didn't have to take the train for the 1.5hr trip up north. Realizing that I hadn't had anything but coffee all day at a bit after noon, I stopped to grab some bread, milk, and bananas from the grocery store for lunch on the road. 

After the drive up, I met a guy who looked pretty beaten up in the police station lobby while I was waiting for an investigator. He told me he had been jumped by three guys on a trail in town the night before and asked if I knew where the local soup kitchen was. I felt bad for the guy so I gave him half my loaf of bread since I had already eaten my fill. A moment later the investigator came out for me and as we walked back to his office he asked what story the guy gave me. After I told him, he told me that the guy had actually started a fight in a bar with one other guy the prior night and had done so several times before. Hopefully he remembers my bread if I ever meet him in a bar down the road…

I then told the officer the above story, reviewed the photos with him, and gave him the name and address of the perpetrator. He pretty much high-fived me for some of the better surveillance imaging that he's seen. Apparently most systems are crappy out of focus low resolution black and white poor exposure images, and my webcam was a step above most of the other stuff he'd seen. 

I emphasized that we were most highly concerned about the gold necklace which was made by Deborah's grandpa when he was a jeweler before he got arthritis. The officer told me that it probably would have been melted by now, but not necessarily.

He then asked if I had any other evidence I wanted to give him before he went over for an interview. I told him that was all I had when I left work, but I'd check my email to see if there was anything else, then after it loaded I said,

'Yeah actually. It looks like she's back in the house right now.'

I didn't have everything I needed on my phone to review the images, but I had another email notification from just moments before. You can't just plug any computer into the police network, so he sent me over to the library to write up a testimonial and review my new surveillance while he did his field interview. 

The images I saw at the library were the strangest yet. She had returned again, but this time spent pretty much all her time raiding my pantry for chocolate and also raiding my fridge just stuffing her face and leaving with an armload of leftovers including some pumpkin we had baked and my famous (to me at least) turkey pot pie. I heard from the officer a couple hours later,  we regrouped at the station, and he told me the interview went as follows:

'Hi miss, sorry to bother you but I'm investigating some reports in the area of some suspicious activity. Have you seen anything recently?'
'No, everything's been pretty much normal around here.'
'OK. Well, would you be surprised to learn that some of your neighbors have cameras in their houses?'
'No, that seems pretty strange…'
'Alright, how about this: can you identify the woman in this photo?'

At which point he pulled out a printout from my camera from earlier in the day. He said she was wearing the same clothes as in the photo and pretty much broke down at that point. She immediately confessed to the business of the day, and several prior offenses, i.e. kleptomania. Apparently she was binging on our food and going next door for a purge: bulimia. I'm still not really sure about the pills. She returned all of the property which occurred to her immediately, and over the next few days more and more came out.

After all of this, it's nice to finally know what was going on and that I wasn't just losing my organization and recall since I had moved to NH. Deborah and I were pretty moved at first but we had been suspicious for months and were glad to finally have some answers. 

For my landlord on the other hand, this entire story came out of the blue. How you can be married and have multiple kids with someone and not know or be suspicious about this sort of stuff in someone's life is beyond me, but apparently that's what happened. She never told him that evening when he came home from work, he found out the next day after the neighbor pulled him aside as he got home to ask why the police had been around the house so much for the past two days. He had no idea, and found it all out at once when he asked her. :-\

Since then we told him we're breaking the lease early and expect full return of the last months rent, deposit, and oil, all of which he was cooperative with which has definitely made things a bit easier.

Days later we found out that the necklace was sold to a local jeweler shortly after the theft and had since been melted down. This was a pretty major bummer. :-(

The initial investigation is over, the criminal case is being prepared, and they tell us we'll get some restitution for any unreturned property. We're definitely looking forward to putting this whole thing behind us.

Certain facts have been omitted and dialogs approximated in this article to preserve anonymity of the suspect and others involved until after completion of the trial.