Storekeepers left wondering over Belleville’s missing mannequins

Natasha Baylis pulled up to her boutique in Belleville, Ont., and went in through the back door, as usual. In the backroom, she started getting an order together for a customer while her two-year-old wandered into the front of the store and saw the glass door in tatters.

“Uh oh. Uh oh,” the toddler told her mother that day in early May.

“Just one minute,” Baylis said, not registering that anything was wrong. When she eventually made her way out front, she saw the shards of glass jutting out from the door. Baylis’s iPad and laptop were still on the counter, though. And all the money was in the unlocked cash register. All that was missing was the little, child-like mannequin in the front window — with only its hat and one of its arms left behind.

“It’s extremely weird, isn’t it?” she said. “They kidnapped my little girl mannequin.”

Baylis, who runs Mrs. B’s Bath, Body and Gifts, is one of several shopkeepers to have fallen victim to what appears to be a serial mannequin thief in Belleville, a city of 50,000, about midway between Toronto and Ottawa.

“Somebody is out to steal our mannequins. We don’t know why,” Baylis said. “It’s creepy.”

On Wednesday, police said 11 mannequins — all female — have been stolen in five break-ins since May. In each case, a glass door at the shop was smashed and nothing else was taken, save for whatever clothes were on the mannequins at the time.

“Obviously it raises flags,” StaffSgt. Sheri Meeks said Wednesday.

“What is the motive for taking the mannequins? Is it because mannequins are expensive? Is there a more deviant motive for it?” Shopkeepers who spoke to the

Post said their stolen mannequins weren’t particularly extraordinary or rare — all worth less than $200 each.

At this point, Meeks said, investigators haven’t found images of the thief or thieves on surveillance footage, despite the fact that most of the break-ins occurred on the main street of downtown Belleville.

The latest case saw four female mannequin torsos taken from a shop north of downtown on Sunday. Earlier this month, the same store lost two other mannequins in an overnight break-in.

Dawn ODell, who owns Simple Elegance, a women’s clothing boutique downtown, has also been targeted several times. She said in May, someone tried to pull her door from its hinges but didn’t get inside. They came back the next night, however, and smashed the glass in the door to steal two mannequins. And in June, the glass in the door was broken again with another two mannequins missing.

On top of the four mannequins, she’s lost the bikini and two dresses that went with them, and the $160 prom dress that was torn off the fourth mannequin.

ODell said she thinks the culprit tried to get in again last week, but was thwarted by stronger Plexiglas that was recently installed in the door.

“They scratched the hell out of the Plexiglas,” she said. “They’re putting an effort into it, which is crazy to me, just to steal a mannequin.”