Post by lepke on Oct 7, 2015 11:11:13 GMT
One of the many unusual aspects of the case, is that while neglecting to take more valuable banknotes on many occasions, EAR/ONS liked to take coins that could be considered collectable, even though they were often not of any great value. He just seemed to like them.
When I was a boy growing up in London, between around 1989 and 1991, I was actively interested in collecting coins, and while part of the collection that I built came from foreign or old British coins given to me by family or friends of the family, I also got some coins from shops which supply coins to collectors.
Even in a city the size of London, and in the days before you could get hold of coins on the internet, I do not remember there being an abundance of such shops, and while there may have been a few in Central London that I never went to, I only recall going to one shop in North London, that was closer to home.
Most of their stock was of quite valuable coins, catering for adult collectors with much deeper pockets than I had as a boy, but for a few pounds, I was still able to go there and buy quantities of low value coins, probably leftovers from people's foreign holidays, or old British coins that were no longer legal tender.
While I stopped actively looking for ways to add to my collection when I was still a boy, because I developed other interests, I still have a collection of coins from perhaps over a hundred countries, and occasionally I add to it, with coins that end up in my possession by chance.
The reason that I have written about my own relationship with coin collecting, is to make some points about EAR/ONS. Firstly, even if he stopped what I would describe as active coin collecting, I expect he still retained a lesser interest, and may well still have a coin collection, or someone may have inherited it.
Secondly, and given how there did not seem to be a huge number of coin shops in London when I was a boy, I find it hard to imagine that ten to fifteen years earlier, in the places that may be relevant, such as Sacramento, Visalia, and maybe even Stockton, that there were so many coin shops.
I think that there is a decent chance that EAR/ONS visited such shops, perhaps to buy coins, and maybe even to get rid of some coins that he had stolen, either by selling them, or swapping them for coins that he considered to be of greater desirability.
I wouldn't even rule out that he had a connection to a coin shop beyond just being a customer, and if meetings existed for local collectors to swap coins, something that I never participated in myself as a boy, then maybe he was known at them too.
Perhaps someone in a better position to look into such things, could research the shops and swap meetings, that coin collectors in the relevant places and time period, could have been drawn to. I'd be surprised if there were very many of them to be found, which is why I think it may be a good line of enquiry.