Police in the town of Mauron have caught the mastermind behind 170 separate gnome thefts. Mauron (pronounced 'moron' as far as I'm concerned) is in Brittany in the north west of France. The culprit is said to be a man in his fifties [1] and not part of the Garden Gnome Liberation Front [2], as was previously expected. This is what happens when you only work twenty hours a week and drink wine with every meal. It's not like the French are running out of productive things [3] to do with their time or anything...The 53 year old thief, let's call him Pierre, wasn't just playing pranks on the townsfolk. It's said that he had all one hundred and seventy gnomes crammed into his personal garden. He even went through the trouble of repainting the gnomes to make the identification process more difficult if not impossible.
I'm curious how they ended up finding this guy in the first place. I'm sure after thirty or forty gnomes were reported stolen, the police became suspicious. So what happened next, did they stake out local gardens? How many man-hours were spent tracking this guy? Was there an epic shoot out at an acid factory when the thief was finally caught?