These baddies could have gotten away with everything scot-free if it weren't for one tiny slip-up. Here are the stories of 21 criminals who were one step away from committing the perfect crime, and the blunder that caused everything to come crashing down around them.

There are plenty of high-profile crimes that go unpunished. Take the Boston Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum theft for example. Hundreds of millions of dollars of art gone, and nobody to blame for it despite national news attention. Unlike the thieves in this gallery, however, those criminals chose to cover their tracks, even years later. Because while enjoying the spoils of your theft is nice, freedom is nicer. Take one criminal here who decided to spend some of his stashed cash years after its acquisition, only for a real estate broker to realize he never removed its bank vault stickers. Had he just decided to keep his money to himself, he would never have gotten caught. 

But while that man made a dumb mistake, others were caught by dumb luck. One bank robber here committed a string of robberies by night in the rural northeast, only for some kids to stumble upon his stash in the middle of the icy wilderness. The moral is, if you want to stay free, it's probably best to stop robbing banks.