A diamond ring made a circuitous journey to the popular Wendover pawn shop, the Better Deal, through a woman’s digestive track.
Angela Winters Hardman is now in the Sandy city jail on one charge of felony retail theft after allegedly stealing, swallowing and then pawning a $4,800 diamond ring from a Salt Lake area Macy’s.
According to police reports Hardman, 38, stopped at a Macy’s outside Salt Lake City in May and asked to try on the jewelry.
An employee says Hardman then made a switch and handed back a similar, though obviously bogus, ring — but denied stealing the real thing.
Detectives who watched surveillance video confronted Hardman later and say she admitted swallowing the ring and pawning it last week for $600.
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Sandy Police Sgt. Jon Arnold says the ring first went through the “natural digestive process.”
“I was very cooperative with police,” said Better Deal owner Judy Doudna. “She came out here in her own car pawned the ring and partied over the weekend. Then she went back to Salt Lake. The detectives didn’t tell me the whole story about the ring, I mean how she got it out of the store. What is really unbelievable is the retail price of the ring, the mark up on diamonds is almost unbelievable.”
Diamonds unlike any other commodity are controlled though one world wide monopoly the diamond exchange run by the DeBeers corporation based in South Africa. Owning or controlling well over 90 percent of diamond production in the world DeBeers can literally set the price of the stones without fear of being underbid by a competitor.
Helped by the fact that the vast majority of diamonds are sold just once and taken off the market forever the diamond trade has literally been a sellers market for over a century. Ironically diamonds weren’t always a girl’s best friend. As late as the 19th century diamonds were considered only a semiprecious stone and it was the opal that was the engagement ring of choice. Then thanks to a happy coincidence for diamond miners Sir Walter Scott’s 1829 novel Anne of Geierstein , the heroine’s opal discolors when touched by holy water and she dies that night as a result. Opal sales fell nearly fifty percent in the year after the book was published and diamonds became the stone of choice.
Ironically if the price of the ring was its $600 pawn value, Hardman would have escaped felony charges.
