Hamptons Police Blotter: McGumbus Spay Camp, Manhunt
Camp Application Furor
Shelter Island’s Old Man McGumbus, the 104-year-old WWII veteran and self-taught wildlife surgeon, was arrested on Thursday for disrupting an official planning meeting. According to officials, McGumbus became agitated during the meeting and ignored repeated warnings to allow others to speak. Among the items on the meeting’s agenda was McGumbus’s own application to run a sleep-away camp on his premises in summer 2015. McGumbus plans to call the camp “Camp Spay-a-Doe.” The board reviewing McGumbus’s application had numerous concerns about the proposed camp, chief among them being McGumbus’s plan to teach his young campers how to spay female deer and to then send them off on solo “wilderness expeditions” to see how many does they can spay. He additionally proposed to bill the town $1,000 for each successful neutering operation his campers perform—$1,000 being the going rate for this service. Officials had special objections to this last proposal, pointing out that it would be difficult for campers to prove how many does they had spayed. McGumbus became enraged, loudly accused the officials of calling him a liar, and became so disruptive that police were called to arrest him.
Witnesses Sought in Reopened Case
Police have announced the reopening of a decades-old case, citing unspecified new information that may link it to the East End. The crime in the case comprised a shooting and a robbery at a private residence in El Paso by two suspects, one male and one female. In a press briefing last Tuesday, the police detective in the new investigation, Billy Mack, who was also the original investigator on the case, recalled the circumstances. “Usually these two suspects, who were in a relationship, just sat around the house using drugs and watching television, but one day they just went nuts.” The two, who at the time were known, rather generically, as “Billy Joe” and “Bobby Sue,” made off with an unspecified amount of cash after the armed robbery, and have remained at large to this day. While at first they headed south, police officials feel that they could be just about anywhere, and probably have adopted different names in order to avoid detection. Officer Mack remarked that the new information police have received has energized the search for the suspects: “I’ve said it before—I’m not going to let these two escape justice. Not only do we have the facts, but the taxpayers demand results.” Police encourage anyone with information to contact them.