Butter chicken break-in

A thief who broke into a Rutland home Thursday morning appears to have had a particular hankering for Indian cuisine.

For the five years Tom Bischoff has lived on Cornwall Road, near Springvalley Elementary, he's never had any issues with break-ins, a fact he attributes to the several visible surveillance cameras he has set up around his property.

That all changed Thursday morning, when a man hopped his back alley fence and walked through the home's unlocked back door, paying little mind to the surveillance cameras that captured several shots of his face.

“No one was home at the time, my stepdaughter had just left the house 15 minutes before to go to school so luckily she wasn't here,” Bischoff said. “It's a horrible, horrible feeling.”

The thief, who casually strolled around the backyard before entering the house, was on the property for 12 minutes.

Despite initially checking out a bicycle in the backyard, he made his way inside where he found a watch, a cellphone, a computer, a bluetooth speaker, some jewellery and a bag full of Bischoff's clothes. But before he left, he checked in the fridge.

“Of all things, he took some three-day-old, leftover butter chicken out of the fridge,” Bischoff said.

While waiting for police to attend the scene, Bischoff says a friend who lives a few blocks over found a bag on the street full of Bischoff's clothes and the stolen computer, covered in butter chicken.

“I didn't even know the butter chicken was missing until I got this bag and at first I thought it was something else that's brown and sticky all over my clothes, so I was a little upset, but then I realized what it was,” Bischoff said.