Mouse steals captor's dentures

WATERVILLE, Maine, March 25 (UPI) -- A Maine man has his teeth back after ripping open a wall in his home to pull them out from where a mouse with Houdini-like escape skills had hidden them.

Bill Exner, 68, of Waterville, Maine, said he caught the little rodent on three separate occasions with a live trap and had placed it in a gallon pickle jar but it kept getting away even after he put a lid on it, the Waterville Morning Sentinel reported.

After his last escape, the mouse apparently decided to grab Exner's lower dentures from his bedroom. Exner found an opening in the wall and guessed the "little stinker" was using it. So he called his daughter's fiance, who came over with a crowbar, saw and hammer and went to work.

"The dentures were inside the wall, lying right there," Exner told the newspaper. "The mouse didn't bite them or anything. It's like he was saying 'I'm going to get even with you for putting me in that jar.'"

Exner cleaned them up and, "I've got 'em right in my mouth and that's where they're staying."

The mouse remained at large.