{"id":616078,"date":"2026-04-19T00:31:11","date_gmt":"2026-04-19T00:31:11","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/616078\/"},"modified":"2026-04-19T00:31:11","modified_gmt":"2026-04-19T00:31:11","slug":"today-in-history-april-19-bank-robber-stunned-lemon-juice-didnt-stop-him-being-identified","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/616078\/","title":{"rendered":"Today in History – April 19: Bank robber stunned lemon juice didn’t stop him being identified"},"content":{"rendered":"

Then, less than an hour later, the man responsible was arrested.<\/p>\n

Police were stunned McArthur Wheeler had robbed a bank at gunpoint making no effort to cover his face.<\/p>\n

\"McArthurMcArthur Wheeler was identified minutes after his face was shown on the news. (Supplied)<\/p>\n

Wheeler’s masterplan to avoid being identified had a remarkably stupid logic.<\/p>\n

If you can use lemon juice to make invisible ink, then surely lemon juice would make your own face invisible.<\/p>\n

“But I wore the lemon juice. I wore the lemon juice,” Wheeler exclaimed as he was arrested.<\/p>\n

Before the robbery, Wheeler and his accomplice Clifton Earl Johnson had tested the theory with a Polaroid camera.<\/p>\n

When Wheeler did not show up in the photograph, they were convinced it had worked.<\/p>\n

Police theorised the photo test was flawed because Wheeler may have unintentionally pointed the camera at the ceiling.<\/p>\n

Johnson received a five-year prison sentence. Wheeler was handed a 24 and-a-half-year prison term.<\/p>\n

The sheer stupidity of the robbery attempt inspired psychologists David Dunning and Jim Kruger to define a type of cognitive bias.<\/p>\n

The Dunning-Kruger effect argued that people with a low capacity to do something well would also have bad judgement in their own ability.<\/p>\n

Or in other words, if you are too stupid to rob a bank, you are also too stupid to know you are too stupid to rob a bank.<\/p>\n

Dunning and Kruger’s research was published in 1999. The following year they would be awarded the Ig Nobel Prize.\u00a0<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Then, less than an hour later, the man responsible was arrested. Police were stunned McArthur Wheeler had robbed…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":616079,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[43,44,41,39,42,40],"class_list":{"0":"post-616078","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-headlines","8":"tag-headlines","9":"tag-news","10":"tag-top-news","11":"tag-top-stories","12":"tag-topnews","13":"tag-topstories"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/616078","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=616078"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/616078\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/616079"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=616078"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=616078"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=616078"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}