KARMA KETCHES UP

Heinz thief atones to NJ eatery after string of bad luck

She wouldn’t cut the mustard as a hardened criminal.

A customer who swiped a bottle of ketchup from a New Jersey restaurant was so wracked with guilt — and bad karma — that she secretly returned to the eatery and dropped off two containers of Heinz.

“I hope returning two new bottles will restore some [luck] for me, and I can stop carrying around this guilt,” the contrite condiment klepto wrote in a note left in a bag with the ketchup outside a door at Perkins Restaurant & Bakery on Route 9 in Forked River, part of Lacey Township.

The thief — whom workers at the eatery believe is a young woman judging from the penmanship — admitted in the note to having no good reason to steal the bottles.

“A few weeks ago, I had taken one of your ketchup bottles off the table because for some odd reason I thought it’d be ‘risky,’ ” said the confession, a photo of which was posted on Facebook (left). “Well, a few hours [after] I did it someone crashed into my car, and since then, my karma, luck, and life have been s- -t.” The note is signed “an awful person.” Restaurant manager Charlene Reebe told The Post on Monday that she found the pilfering diner’s penance Wednesday night while cleaning up outside.

“There was just a normal, little gray Walmart bag on the side of a [trash] can, on the ground,” Reebe said. “And I open it up, and there’s a letter, receipt and two bottles of ketchup in there. “I was very surprised.” She said no one in the restaurant had noticed the bottles were even taken.

The receipt showed the thief paid $2.78 apiece for the 32-ounce ketchup bottles — which are 12 ounces more each than the 20-ounce ones the diner puts on its tables.

The eatery’s owner, Maria DiLeo, had something to offer the thief — a job.

“I would hire her in a second,” DiLeo said. “Because if you do something like that, you’re not an awful person. You’re an honest person.”