“It’s just, like, you can’t make this up.”
Nantucket, Massachusetts, isn’t usually the setting for a true-crime mystery — but this week, one case had locals laughing and looking to the skies.
Heather Stevens Woodbury, who helps run her family’s Wicked Island Bakery, received a shocking text from an employee: her car’s rear window had been smashed.
“I thought someone threw a rock or something,” Woodbury said. “I’m a nice person, I do a lot for my community … why would someone target me?”
She rushed outside, where two police officers were already inspecting the scene. Shattered glass covered the ground, but something else caught the officer’s eye.
“Is there a reason you’d have a quahog in the back of your car?” one of them asked.
Woodbury blinked. A clam? Inside her car? Sure enough, there it was — cold, fresh from the ocean, sitting on her floorboard. That’s when the officer delivered the verdict:
“It looks like a seagull dropped it.”
Woodbury couldn’t believe it. “No way!” she laughed. What seemed like vandalism was actually the result of a hungry gull using her car as an anvil.
But the accidental break-in sparked another theory. Could this be the same infamous bird that, just a year earlier, made headlines for stealing a wallet straight out of a shopping cart? Photos of the culprit perched on a grocery store roof, wallet clamped in its beak, had already made the rounds in town.
“My car might be the second major crime committed by a seagull on Nantucket,” Woodbury joked.
To add to the comedy, the “evidence” didn’t last long. Woodbury placed the clam outside her shop, only for it to disappear within the hour.
“Either someone wanted a souvenir, or the gull came back to reclaim the evidence,” she said. “It’s like something out of a sitcom — you couldn’t make it up.”
For now, residents are keeping their eyes peeled for the island’s most notorious feathered thief.