Disney Dining Serving up the latest Disney Eats, Treats, News, and More!
A red-headed man in his late 30s with a dog that never stayed on its leash has given Johnny Depp’s Edward Scissorhands a run for his money, and in a very short time, he has become the stuff of legends for what some residents have described as “avant-garde landscaping” in the Tavolo Park neighborhood in Fort Worth, Texas.
Related: Texas Residents File Police Reports Against a Real-Life Edward Scissorhands In The Neighborhood
Credit: DisneyDining
A Strange Kind of Criminal in Their Midst
No one likes a prowler, and homeowners aren’t too pleased with trespassers who engage in what police call “criminal mischief,” especially when that mischief includes the use of shears, unauthorized activities, and the destruction of property.
But for homeowners in the Tavolo Park neighborhood in Fort Worth, Texas, the situation was far more than just a trespasser who wouldn’t leave. This “criminal” did his very best work in the middle of the night—in the dark—with a pair of lopping shears.
Credit: Disney/20th Century Studios
He’s been referred to as the real-life Edward Scissorhands, a nod to the 1990 Tim Burton fantasy film Edward Scissorhands, starring Johnny Depp and Winona Ryder. The film tells the story of Edward, an animated human being created by a scientist who dies before he can complete Edward:
The scientist dies before he can finish assembling Edward, though, leaving the young man with a freakish appearance accentuated by the scissor blades he has instead of hands. Loving suburban saleswoman Peg (Dianne Wiest) discovers Edward and takes him home, where he falls for Peg’s teen daughter (Winona Ryder). However, despite his kindness and artistic talent, Edward’s hands make him an outcast.
Credit: Disney/20th Century Studios
A Real-Life Edward Scissorhands Roams the Neighborhood
In 2022, multiple news outlets in the North Texas area reported that residents in the newly developed Tavolo Park neighborhood in Fort Worth had noticed branches and limbs from their trees were missing. But as the limbs were left in a disheveled mess underneath the trees from which they had been cut, this was clearly not the work of landscapers hired by the homeowners’ association.
Soon, people in the area began to notice video footage from their security cameras and Ring video doorbells depicting a red-headed man in his late 30s with a dog. He had been the “vigilante landscaper,” but no one knew who he was or why he was on a mission to trim back trees in the Tavolo Park neighborhood—especially since the development was brand-new and most of the trees were only saplings.
Tavolo Park neighborhood/Credit: Highland Homes
“I was talking to my wife, Emily, and I was like, ‘Hey, we had a storm last night,’ and she was like, ‘Oh no, that’s Edward Scissorhands,’ and so I was like, ‘Uh, what?’” Fort Worth resident Jerry Balkenbush said.
Initially, Jerry’s wife, Emily, had talked with friends in the area, and it appeared that the landscaper was only targeting trees on certain streets in the neighborhood. But over time, the landscaper eventually made the rounds, attempting to prune and trim trees on most of the streets in the area, despite the fact that the “work” was unauthorized and unnecessary.
Though he was likened to Edward Scissorhands from the early 1990s film, his work was more like hack jobs that threatened to destroy the young trees rather than the work of a gifted topiarist.
Credit: Disney/20th Century Studio
One Journalist Looks Deeper
One journalist named Jocelyn Tatum became intrigued by the story of Fort Worth’s real-life Edward Scissorhands and set out to learn more about the man and the motive behind the odd behavior.
Credit: Disney/20th Century Studios
“Knowing it [might] be difficult or impossible, this assignment was to find the man dubbed Edward Scissorhands who made national news for trimming trees in a Fort Worth neighborhood in the middle of the night,” Tatum wrote of her mission. “The broadcast news outlets did not report a name or specific location, so I wasn’t sure what I would find.”
Tatum only had a few details to go on, including a rough description of the man based on images captured by residents’ Ring video doorbell cameras, knowledge of the man’s odd behaviors—using shears to remove limbs and branches from neighbors’ trees without their consent—and the fact that the man usually arrived to “prune” the saplings between 3:00 a.m. and 5:00 a.m.
Credit: CBS/Ring Video Doorbell footage
She also knew that the man arrived each night in the same garb–a black pair of shorts and a black tank top with reflective striping.
As Tatum watched footage from residents’ video cameras, she noted that even though the residents described the man’s work as poor and a “hack job,” he often cut off branches and limbs of the residents’ trees and then stepped back to admire his work.
It was odd behavior, to say the least.
Police Do Very Little When They Confront the Man
Tatum detailed the meeting police finally had one evening with the man after she read a police report she obtained by request.
Per her account:
[Police] told the visiting trimmer to stop but didn’t write a citation that first time. After all, the crime was unprecedented and seemingly innocuous. Plus, nobody knew then the extent of the damage this man was imposing by improperly trimming such young trees. When the police left, [one of the neighbors] followed him as he took his time walking up and down four more streets.
He got in his truck, turned his lights on, driving through the neighborhood at a reasonable pace, with [the neighbor] behind him the whole time. Then the visiting trimmer turned his lights off and peeled out of the neighborhood fast.
Credit: Highland Homes
When Tatum and a security officer attempted to approach the “vigilante” tree trimmer at his residence (after obtaining his address from a police report), they were unsuccessful in speaking with anyone except an older woman who answered the knock on the door, and they were surprised to discover that the man’s lawn was adorned with only a singular tree, the limbs of which were “unruly and untrimmed.”
We were nervous. The drive there was about 20 minutes to far south Fort Worth. We spent the time plotting and planning. What do we say? Surely, he’s not home.
We pulled up about 2:35 on a broiling hot Thursday afternoon in August, a year to the month after he was at the height of his tree-trimming heyday.
Walking up to the house, the grass was overgrown. I imagine in this heat and drought it would have taken months of no mowing for it to be that overgrown. One middle-aged lone tree stood in his yard. The limbs were unruly and untrimmed. It, too, had been neglected.
An artist created his impression of the Tavolo Park red-headed Edward Scissorhands hard at work/Credit: Ardit Dragjoshi
Ultimately, despite her best efforts, Tatum was unable to score a face-to-face interview or conversation with the real-life Edward Scissorhands, who had vandalized the trees in the Tavolo Park neighborhood.
The midnight trimmer never returned my texts and phone calls, and he never came to the door that day.
I told him in a text that I would not reveal his identity to protect his privacy, but that I just wanted people to understand him better. That is always my intention as a narrative writer of people. And as journalists, we are asked to consider the privacy of lesser-known citizens.
What did this man have against the trees of Tavolo Park? What assistance did he think he was offering to trees that didn’t need trimming? Did he understand the damage he was doing? What happened to this man? What is he going through?
Credit: DisneyDining
Though Tatum and the Tavolo Park residents never got the answers to any of these questions, the vigilante tree-trimming sessions under the cover of dark seem to have stopped. So, at least for the foreseeable future, it appears those questions will remain unanswered.
