The Man Who Loved Cat Burgling.(Mitch Shaw robbed rich for nearly ten years)

By day, MITCH SHAW was a colorless computer nerd. By night, he teamed up with his sweetheart, JENNIFER DOLAN, to rob Dallas' rich and famous of their jewelry. The police say they pulled off impossibly daring heists for nearly a decade--until she made one little mistake.

THE COPS who patrolled Dallas' richest and most exclusive neighborhoods throughout the 1990's, Mitch Shaw and his cute girlfriend, Jennifer Dolan, must have looked like a couple of rubes. For one thing, they cruised through the neighborhoods in a turquoise Toyota Tercel. Turquoise! Jennifer always drove, usually with her window down, her magnificently teased hair and dangling costume earrings fluttering in the wind. Although no one would have called Jennifer a knockout, she had a big, inviting smile, and she clearly knew how to handle herself around men. When a Dallas police officer stopped Jennifer and Mitch a couple of years ago to ask why she kept tooling up and down one particular mansion-lined lane, Jennifer gave the officer a little wink and said in a voice as sweet as syrup, "Officer, we live in a little apartment, and sometimes we like to look at big, pretty homes. Is there anything wrong with that?" Then she pursed her lipstick-red lips around a straw and took a drink from a big cup of Diet Coke that she had wedged between her thighs.

If the officer was able to take his eyes off Jennifer--and, in all honesty, it was an effort to not look at her, especially when she wore one of those bras that pushed her breasts together--then he would have glanced over and seen a slightly pudgy, unmuscular young man with soft brown eyes, long eyelashes, thinning dark hair, and a gentle, almost perplexed expression on his face. Mitch Shaw was not exactly a threatening figure. His friends said he was a computer geek who spent most of his time creating Web sites on the computer that sat on the kitchen table of the one-bedroom apartment in far north Dallas that he shared with Jennifer. For relaxation, he watched Jeopardy, dabbled in abstract painting, played with his tabby cat, Sweet Pea, and took Jennifer to the Galleria, where they wandered through the stores and ate fast food down by the skating rink. They looked like so many other young couples you see at the mall, couples still trying to find their footing in life, the type who often drive through rich neighborhoods at the end of the day so that they can dream about what their lives might be like someday. As the wide-eyed Jennifer exclaimed to the police officer that day, "Just look at these homes with all these big columns. They're bigger than Ramada Inns."

Actually, Mitch and Jennifer were not that interested in the way those homes looked--not from the outside, anyway. According to statements that Jennifer would later give to Dallas police detectives and subsequently confirmed to me, she would often park the Tercel on a side street with little traffic and watch as Mitch, who usually wore a rumpled T-shirt, baggy shorts, and tennis shoes for their evening drives, put a black baseball cap backward on his head, pulled on a pair of gloves, and then snapped a fanny pack around his waist that was filled with just three items: a flashlight, a screwdriver, and a pack of cigarettes.

"Be careful, honey," Jennifer would always say, leaning across the seat and giving him a kiss.