D’ough! Female suspected serial burglar busted hiding in closet with pizza cutter

A female serial burglar was busted when a California woman returned home from Thanksgiving vacation to find the barefoot suspect hiding in the closet of her luxury apartment armed with a pizza cutter, cops say.

“She was in the corner of my closet,” Brittney Heinzman, 35, told CBS News of discovering her neighbor Wendy Wilkinson, 43, crouched inside her bedroom closet at the Skyloft Apartment complex in Irvine with a pizza cutter, cutting board and kitchen towel in hand Dec. 1.

“It’s just like your worst nightmare, you know?” said the victim, who had just moved into the apartment complex — where a one-bedroom 733-square-foot unit costs nearly $2,900 a month — and has now decided to relocate.

“Where was security?” she told KTLA. “I feel like I’ve just been stripped down to nothing.

“To have somebody go through your every drawer, your every cabinet, take your passport, take everything personal, you’re just left with so many questions,” Heinzman said.

Heinzman said she first noticed that the front door to her unit was unlocked and her apartment had been ransacked when she returned home from vacation Dec. 1.

Then when she opened her bedroom closet, she allegedly found Wilkinson hiding inside.

“She just looked at me like a deer in headlights, and I just screamed, ‘Get out! Get out!’ ” Heinzman said.

Wilkinson responded, “Please don’t hurt me” before running off out of the apartment, Heinzman said.

“But that just threw me off more,” the victim said. “I’m like, ‘Are you going to hurt me?’ because she has a pizza cutter in hand. I don’t know.”

After the suspect fled the apartment, Heinzman said she called the cops as she and a friend followed Wilkinson through the apartment complex.

They took cell-phone video and images of her, and a neighbor’s Ring doorbell camera captured the suspect, barefoot with blue leggings and a white crop top and with her hair up in a bun, running through the hallways.

When Irvine police finally arrived on the scene, Heinzman told police she noticed a number of items were missing from her apartment.

“She took sunglasses, she took Dior handbags, she took socks, she took my work ID, my work badge, my passport, my credit card that she decided to use the next day” at a car wash down the road, Heinzman told CBS News.

In total, officers allegedly located more than $30,000 worth of Heinzman’s belongings in her apartment, car and storage unit.

With all of those stolen goods, police believe the suspect must have entered Heinzman’s apartment multiple times in the past.

It remains unclear how she was able to get inside.

“Based on the time that the victim was away and the amount of property that the suspect was able to steal, we believe it is likely the suspect went into the residence multiple times to collect items,” Officer Kyle Oldoerp said in a statement.

Court records also revealed that Wilkinson was free on bail for a separate burglary.

She has since pleaded not guilty to first degree residential burglary and identity theft in Heinzman’s case.