An observant homeowner who spotted his stolen camera being sold on Craiglist led Baltimore police to an undercover sting, a take-down at a coffee shop in Canton and an investigation that closed a series of burglaries in the neighborhood.

Sunday's Crime Scenes column walks you through the investigation and profiles the suspect, who police said had decorated his apartment with looted items that he hadn't yet sold:

Inside, Layton wrote in court documents, he saw Driver's stolen X-Box hooked up to the television set. On a shelf, the officer said, he saw the victim's stolen bottles of gin and vodka, lined up in an "orderly fashion," as if they had been there for months.

The detective also saw a pile of jewelry, cell phones and computer equipment, and over the next few weeks, he painstakingly matched the items to four other burglaries in Canton between June and January in which thousands of dollars of items were reported stolen.

A license plate number etched on the back of a cell phone led him to the victim of one burglary. A number in another phone's directory labeled "Dad" led him to the father of another victim. A home phone number found on a portable computer drive led to a third.

Court documents reveal a series of burglaries that in some cases required several pages of police reports to list the missing items — laptop computers, video game consoles, expensive watches, guitars, iPods, smart phones, cameras and handbags.

And that's just the stuff you'd expect to be stolen in a burglary.

The list of missing loot includes steaks taken from a freezer along with a George Foreman grill. There's a stack of missing children's videos — unopened Blu-ray discs of "Wall-E," "A Bug's Life," "Cars" and "Monsters, Inc." — and videos for older folks, such as a boxed set of "Seinfeld" and the second season of "Big Love."

From one house, an engraved $1,300 Swiss Tag Heuer watch was stolen. From another house, a $2 box of Rice-A-Roni was taken from a cupboard.