How you can tell the gender of a thief

My attempt at being Columbo was only taking me so far. In solving the mystery of who raided the barn, I was going round in circles. All I knew was that the thieves took a weirdly useless assortment of items, including four wrecked horse rugs, a broken lunge line and a wheelbarrow with a completely flat tyre. They left a brand new sack of horse feed and two battery packs, the only items worth stealing.

We always assume thieves are men, but it seemed unlikely that a man or men would wheel away items as light as rugs in wheelbarrows.

Also, they didn’t make enough of a mess. The horse feed was placed carefully on the floor. This just didn’t feel like the actions of two rural crooks.

Stranger still, the flat wheelbarrow was thrown back over the hedge two nights later with the tyre pumped up. I surmised from this that it was either a startlingly incompetent yet strangely considerate thief, or someone was messing with me.