“By evening, the soldier had allegedly confessed to tossing the receiver into a dumpster”
“Suuuure he did”
Agreed.......that makes absolutely no damned sense what so ever.
—”“Suuuure he did””
It is possible someone had a MAJOR beef and wanted to cause some BIG trouble for the unit.
This would more than do the trick.
I have personal experience with a similar case involving a stolen M60 7.62mm machine gun while serving as an officer in a USMC infantry battalion in the late 1970s and early 1980s. I am not going to write out the details as it will take too long and it is only the pattern of circumstances and subsequent events that may be applicable to this case.
The essential element is the thief has been caught without the goods and has provided a story that doesn’t check out. The thief is only “confessing“ because other people have identified him as the person who took the .50 caliber machine gun receiver. He has provided information claiming that the receiver was discarded in a dumpster which, rather conveniently, subsequently has been emptied. So the receiver went to the landfill. It is possible to search a landfill once you know which one to search and have the necessary manpower committed to do it.
So, if the thief was truthful (sure), the receiver will eventually be found OR the story will function as a distraction to probably what is the real location of the missing receiver.
Thieves do pre-mission planning too. Unless they can be fenced, stolen goods , especially a weapon, involves risk and returns no value for stealing the item. So the actual stealing of the M2 receiver was the midpoint of a more complex plan. Considered as a component of the weapon, the receiver is the more valuable part as it contains nearly all of the parts that make a machine gun a machine gun. But an entire receiver may be difficult to dispose of due to its serialization and inevitable questions about provenance. However, if broken down as individual repair parts, the receiver has value when sold into the secondary market.
But to accomplish this, you need secure possession of the stolen item and time to negotiate the fencing transaction. Arresting the thief has probably interrupted the plan. Now, both sides are going to seek to create advantage out of the situation. The thief, once he is convinced the dumpster disposal story is a no sale, may make an offer through defense counsel to return the receiver in exchange for a lighter punishment. The Army probably will be okay with that as long as the receiver is returned. The question is how long the process will take since military courts can, when necessary, be nearly as slow as civilian courts. In the case of the stolen M-60, pre-trial confinement lasted 18+ months before the return plea bargain was laid on the table.
So where is the receiver? In my opinion, the receiver was either immediately taken off base by a friend to be hidden and probably buried or it is buried somewhere on base. The branch in the action tree as to which location it is at is how much time elapsed between when the receiver was taken and the thief was apprehended. Since this theft was probably preplanned and some hours passed before the thief was identified and detained AND on-base searching has not turned up anything yet, my money is on it being buried off base.
To give you an idea of how quickly such a move can be put together, the M-60 machine gun theft was a true crime of opportunity. The thief (a courts-martialed DD scum bag waiting for his discharge paperwork to process after serving his brig sentence) just stumbled on it unguarded in the barracks. Using regular dial telephones, he called a friend to come with his car to pick the weapon up and take it off base - where it was subsequently buried for additional security. In reconstructing the crime, CID estimated the whole process of getting it out the front gate took about one hour from the time the thief’s friend was called.
With pre-planning and cell phones, how long do you think it would take to get a wrapped up M2 receiver into the trunk of a car/back of a van and off base?