True Crime Thursday – Easter Bunny Didn’t Bring THESE Eggs

Photo credit: Pawel Czerwinski – Unsplash

By Debbie Burke

@burke_writer

 

On Palm Sunday 2020, residents of Flagler County in Florida found small plastic eggs in their mailboxes. Had the Easter Bunny arrived early?

Not exactly.

When recipients cracked open the eggs, they found each one contained a sheet of toilet paper, a goldfish cracker, fizzy drink powder, and…a crumpled page of pornography.

Even by 2020 weirdness standards, this incident rated high on the Bizarro-meter.

Sheriff Rick Staley asked the community to check their home surveillance cams and call leads into Crimestoppers to try to determine the identity of the perverse egg dispenser.

The following Thursday, based on a tip, deputies arrested Abril Cestoni, 42, a supermarket employee who reportedly had delivered about 400 plastic eggs to area mailboxes. She had created the pornographic pages using a computer program.

The reason is not exactly clear.

Here’s bodycam video from the arresting officer.

If there was an explanation in the footage, I missed it.

Ms. Cestoni was charged with multiple counts of distributing obscene materials, failure to appear on a traffic summons, and violating the governor’s stay-at-home order.

According to the Inmate Detail form, charges were later dismissed or she was sentenced to time served.

To the relief of Flagler County residents, on Easter Sunday, the legitimate Easter Bunny delivered regular Easter eggs.

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TKZers: Have you run across any particularly bizarre and/or inexplicable crimes in the past year or so? Please share in the comments.

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$.99 on sale from July 29 through August 1, 2021! Debbie Burke’s thriller Eyes in the Sky is available for Canadian friends on Kobo plus other online stores. 

Please check out the international links here and for Kindle. 

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About Debbie Burke

Debbie writes the Tawny Lindholm series, Montana thrillers infused with psychological suspense. Her books have won the Kindle Scout contest, the Zebulon Award, and were finalists for the Eric Hoffer Book Award and BestThrillers.com. Her articles received journalism awards in international publications. She is a founding member of Authors of the Flathead and helps to plan the annual Flathead River Writers Conference in Kalispell, Montana. Her greatest joy is mentoring young writers. http://www.debbieburkewriter.com

36 thoughts on “True Crime Thursday – Easter Bunny Didn’t Bring THESE Eggs

  1. Debbie, you have outdone yourself. That is truly bizarre. It would be difficult to make up a character who is that off the wall. And working at Publix no less. I wonder how many cats she owns…

    Thanks for a great start to the morning, Debbie!

    • You’re welcome, Joe. 2020 outdid itself on the Bizarro-meter.

      But you’re in real trouble with that crack about cat lovers–they will be bombarding your house with used litterbox contents.

    • Hey! I own cats and I have never placed pornographic pamphlets or easter eggs in anyone’s mailbox. Ever. Although this does present me with some ideas for the annoying neighbors…

  2. Good morning, Debbie. Thanks for an interesting post. It’s sad, really. The lady had obvious mental health problems. I can’t think of any such examples that I’ve run across. My life is filled with enough problems, that I try to not dwell on such things. I try to think about positive things, such as the posts at TKZ.

    Have a great day!

    • Steve, it really is sad. Mental health problems spiked in 2020 (and is following a similar trend in 2021). Treatment was unavailable which exacerbated the crisis.

  3. Okay. I can see the toilet paper – to keep things from rattling around in the egg. (I’ve improvised with stuffings while trying to make Christmas presents less rattle-able), but why the cracker and drink powder? And how did they know it was drink powder? Unless the crime lab assessed it… or someone tasted it…

    • BJ, I admire your deductive reasoning but I thought toilet paper was too scarce then to waste as stuffing. As for taste-testing the powder–you couldn’t pay me enough.

  4. Wow. Just…wow. So, let’s see if I’ve got this straight. A lady is delivering porn masquerading as Easter eggs and a man is pretending to be Iron Man. Okie doke. I think I’ll duck back into my writer’s cave. 😉

    Hope you have a great day, Debbie!

  5. I don’t understand that poor lady at all. Well, I hope she’s okay.

    I do have an odd “crime” though no one was hurt. My friend went to open up her business one hot morning, and there was a nude man sitting on the shaded bench out front. The thing is, he didn’t seem to notice his lack of clothing. He was making a cellphone call to a tow truck company to come get his car. He hung up, explained his phone call to my friend, and then simply walked back to his car.

  6. In my county a woman arrived on the bus from Chicago insisting she was the Queen of England. She wrote in a gorgeous Spencerian script and carried herself with grace and dignity as befits a head of state. She got housing at the local Episcopal Church and was kind of a nuisance. A few weeks later the city bought her a bus ticket back to Chicago, telling her that the embassy had called and they need her presence immediately.

  7. My wife, Rita, came in from gardening in the back yard one day and heard the water running. She checked the bathroom and here was this random woman – a total stranger – taking a shower. Rita called the cops and they came and took the woman back to the psych ward where she’d walked away from. Totally harmless but a rather troubled individual. At least she wasn’t doing the Goldilocks thing and sleeping in our bed. Enjoy your day, Debbie and other KZers!

    • Lock your doors! Not only are the crazies about, but gardeners with huge crops of squash and zucchini are dumping them in friends’ and neighbors’ homes, porches, and unlocked cars. Insidiously, they tend to leave the crops at doors where people have gardens themselves. It’s ugly business. The monsters even have a National Zucchini on the Porch Day.

  8. In my other career we have incidents of theft of fuel or other commodities like copper. The strange thing is that most of the sites are in the middle of nowhere with no human residences within a half to a full hour drive.

    I’ve wondered if this could be an inside job? However, the occurrence is common throughout my industry and incidents happen throughout all three of our divisions.

  9. The bizarre appearance of teddy bears in shrubs, windows, cars, lawns, and other places in neighborhoods all over town. Bored young kids, stuck in quarantine, were called in to point them out to parents and local authorities because they appeared to be up to a lot of good.

    Never mind, that was a good thing. The criminals and the nutters have done very little to make themselves stand out around here. Drive-by murders by gangs and young idiots, major drug busts because we are in a hub of interstates going north, south, and west, and an incredible amount of domestic violence because of quarantine. Last week, a local mommy group gathered and got so high they didn’t notice their babies were playing with loaded guns and a 4 year old killed himself. I hope none of them see their kids again.

  10. The plastic eggs in the mailboxes sounds pretty funny. Too bad about the contents. I would have hoped for a smiley face instead.

    The year of covid was pretty boring around here. No criminal activity to report. Since we stayed inside most of the time, we had our groceries delivered. Much of our entertainment during the year came from comparing what we ordered with what was actually delivered. The most amusing replacement came from a deliverer who apparently didn’t have a lot of experience with fresh produce. We ordered asparagus. He delivered brussel sprouts. Close to being a criminal offense, but we ate them anyway.

  11. I can totally see Carl Hiassen coming up with a character like this. This is why his Florida crazies are so real.

    I haven’t seen any real strange crimes, but a bunch of murders. There have been two shootings at a hotel very near my house, near enough that I emailed the mayor. Within 24 hours I was speaking with the Commander in charge of cleaning up that establishment. He had a contact that he thought was the owner of the hotel, and was working with him to clean it up. Turned out he was part of the problem. He got super high on meth, and decided to break the windows and kill someone at the hotel. The cops shot him (shooting number one). He’s not the contact anymore as he is now in the slammer. Turns out he is the son of the owner, so now the Commander is working with the father. Slightly off kilter, but not like the main story.

  12. Dear Deb,
    Your interesting blog today brought some entertaining comments. I don’t recall a great example from the past year, but when reading newspapers, I often scan crime sections, obituaries and police blotters in search of intriguing tidbits. Two strange reports from the past came to mind. A rural Montana woman called the police to report a “package of sperm” had been stolen after it was delivered to her front door. Maybe she has an Angus artificial insemination business, but other creative story lines came to mind. -The other item, gruesome, described a murderous religious pedophile accused of cannibalism who shared casseroles with church members. He was not convicted of murder but was a gourmet cook. His voluminous notes included unusual recipes. The news story led to an interview at the state prison, many letters from him, recipe sharing, and my first true crime.
    Thanks.

    • Betty, your excellent book Eyes of a Pedophile was as fascinating as it was horrifying. I still think if you’d interviewed him another time or two, he would have confessed to you.

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