The burglars knew what they were looking for when they targeted the Midtown home.
Sure, they wanted jewels and electronics, but they also had their eyes on something bigger: a king-sized, four-poster canopy bed.
They spent hours in the victim's home, near East Broadway and South Craycroft Road, disassembling their plunder, ignoring other more valuable items that would have been easier to steal.
Though the neighbors never saw the perpetrators, evidence of the crime lingered into the following morning — a soft, fluffy pillow was left on the driveway.
Jordan Taylor, 50, found out about the burglary from her landlord. Her neighbors called police, she said, because she'd been staying with her boyfriend.
When she got home, she realized her $8,000 bed was gone.
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"It was very creepy after the burglary — I would see fingerprints or smudges on the wall — that feeling that somebody was in my house invading my life and my privacy in that way," she said.
It happened at the end of last May, almost a year ago, but Taylor still clings to the hope that she might get the bed back. Police weren't able to catch the thieves, she said, so she hired a private investigator to track them down.
"Part of my motivation is to recover my bed," she said. "I don't know if that's going to happen at this point, but I also want to catch whoever did this."
Taylor said she estimates the total value of the stolen property to be at least $15,000.
Bob Wilson, the private investigator she's hired, said his fee is about $75 an hour plus expenses and estimates he's spent 50-60 hours on the case.
Taylor and Wilson said they may know who committed the bed theft. Wilson is the president of Arizona Undercover Private Investigators. Usually, he said, companies enlist his services to investigate employee theft. Taylor was the first client he's had to track down an individual item, he said.
Wilson said it was most likely somebody who knew the bed was in the house and who knew how to take it apart. Wilson and Taylor believe it was a person who helped Taylor move into her home and assembled the bed for her. But police said the investigation hasn't yielded enough solid evidence for an arrest.
The problem is that Taylor believes the suspected thief had a legitimate reason for being in her home, so evidence like fingerprints becomes unusable, said Capt. Carla Johnson, with the Tucson Police Department's property crimes division.
But whoever committed the crime will likely perpetrate another burglary, Johnson said.
"Chances are whoever took the bed, it wasn't his or her first burglary and it probably won't be his or her last, unless they're in the Department of Corrections," Johnson said.
But Johnson said it was a fairly unusual crime.
"We don't have a pattern of beds being stolen," Johnson said. "But we do have some bizarre cases."
Taylor asked that anybody with information about her bed's whereabouts e-mail burglarytucson@gmail.com.
"It was very creepy after the burglary — I would see fingerprints or smudges on the wall — that feeling that somebody was in my house invading my life and my privacy in that way."
Jordan Taylor, 50,
whose canopy bed was stolen
