‘Home Alone-Inspired’ Drug Dealer Who Rigged House With Booby Traps Gets 7 Years in Prison

Today in “News That Is Somehow Not From Florida”: the story of one Ian Claughton, a drug dealer from the village of Grimethorpe in northern England. Claughton was sentenced to seven years in prison on Tuesday. But drug dealers are a dime a dozen. The reason Claughton has gained a level of infamy is his decision to protect his growhouses and private stash with a gauntlet of outlandish and potentially lethal homemade booby traps.

As per multiple news reports, Claughton first appeared on the UK police’s radar when he ordered several imitation firearms via his wife’s eBay account. When police arrived at Claughton’s home to investigate, they found themselves confronted with “fishing wire running across the length of one of the rooms at knee height, attached to an electrical connector and a battery pack.” After tiptoeing their way past, they discovered “two primed mantraps [and] two potential firearms,” along with four large plastic bags stuffed full of weed. Next door, they found the growhouse from which those four large bags had been filled, along with more traps, while Claughton’s wife’s house contained additional booby traps. All in all, it apparently required a “three-day multi-agency operation … [including] Army bomb squad experts” to disarm all the surprises left for unwanted visitors.

If it seems lazy to compare this case to Home Alone, we don’t disagree, but the thing is that everyone involved in this case has made the same comparison. This includes Claughton himself, who told police he was inspired by the “booby traps from the Macaulay Culkin film Home Alone“; the police, who said, “[Claughton] appears to have … [gone] to unusual and elaborate lengths to defend his home and its illicit contents from would-be intruders, drawing inspiration from Macaulay Culkin’s character in the popular Christmas film Home Alone”; and the prosecutor, who told jurors, “If you are sitting there thinking that this sounds a little like the film Home Alone, then you would be correct.”

It’s been a while since we’ve seen Home Alone, but we’re pretty sure that young Kevin McCallister’s arsenal of comedy traps did not include mantraps, fishing wire rigged to homemade pipe bombs, or a jerry-rigged flamethrower fashioned from a fire extinguisher—all of which police discovered on Claughton’s various properties, along with the imitation guns, a crossbow and a bunch of cash sewn into a sofa. (Nor, for that matter, do we recall Kevin brandishing a three-pound bag of speed, although it’d probably explain a lot about his character.)

Claughton’s suggestion that rigging his house to inflict all manner of harm on intruders was all just a bit of harmless kooky fun tallies with his explanations for everything else, which can basically be summarized as “Wait, no, it’s not what it looks like!” The speed? For weight loss and chronic fatigue. The tripwire-triggered explosive devices? They were there to scare crows. The multiple imitation firearms found on the property? For a themed birthday party!

What about the homemade flamethrower? That, Claughton insisted, was to “’wow’ people on Bonfire Night.” Judging by the video that police found on Claughton’s phone, it would certainly have done so—but perhaps the most impressive moment in that video comes when Claughton uses the fire extinguisher that he’s jury-rigged as a flamethrower to extinguish the flame it has just thrown. A gadget that can set someone on fire, but can also put them back out again, just in case? Or, come to think of it, that can also restart a fire that you’ve accidentally extinguished? That’s genius! If only our protagonist had used his powers for good.