By Jackson Posey | Sports Editor & Hannah Webb | Focus Editor

The masked marauder grins, pearly whites flashing under a ski mask.

Baylor’s most notorious criminal spent an entire paycheck at H-E-B, stacking piles of coconut cream pies inside a dingy minifridge. These were not desserts of whimsy. They were sweet ammunition for the unwitting.

“Simple Simon met a pieman/Going to the fair,” a 1764 nursery rhyme reads. “Says Simple Simon to the pieman/Let me taste your ware.”

Baylor met its own Pie Man over two centuries later.

A royal succession of confectionery criminals reigned over campus from 1976 to 1988. Just before Valentine’s Day 1976, a small advertisement graced The Baylor Lariat. “FED UP OR JUST FOR FUN,” it reads. “I throw pies in faces upon request.”

What began with a harmless advertisement soon became mired in controversy, police defiance and a successful sting operation. During the Pie Man’s reign of terror, he took hundreds of victims, pie-ing unsuspecting bystanders for small sums of money and the love of the game.

“A vigilante is just a man lost in the scramble for his own gratification,” Ra’s al Ghul once told Batman. “He can be destroyed or locked up. But if you make yourself more than just a man — if you devote yourself to an ideal — and if they can’t stop you — then you become something else entirely … Legend.”

Every hit was meticulous. The Pie Man dressed in white pants, shirts, socks and a ski mask, crafting an untouchable aura while preparing his dashing escape. An escape route, getaway vehicle and “at least one blocker for protection” were aligned. The entire process took 30 minutes. Thousands of calls flooded the Pie Man’s solicitation number, scrawled in chalk on sidewalks across campus.

He pied students and professors alike. He pied the student body president and vice president. He pied an evangelist. He pied a girl on the second floor of North Russell and even pulled off a rare “triple hit” in the SUB, hitting two students and returning to hit the girl who hired him.

“I love it,” the Pie Man told The Lariat in 1980. “It gives me such a high to hit people.”

Dr. Charles Capone met his fate on Sept. 12, 1988.

“What I remember, of course, is just him coming at me in the classroom,” Capone said. “He opened the door, ran in quickly. I remember bracing myself … on my back leg and putting my right arm to block. The pie hit me in the shoulder and splashed on my face.”

Capone still recalls the incident as abrupt and surprising.

“It was jarring; one doesn’t expect that you’ll be physically attacked,” Capone said. “Certainly, the adrenaline starts flowing. You know it’s a shocking experience.”

In the Sept. 20, 1988, edition of The Lariat, Capone spoke about the incident from the prior week.

“Fortunately, it was whipped cream, which is better than other creams,” he said. “But it stained my suit.”

The Pie Man had one more chance to attack this semester before meeting his demise.

With the help of two undercover police officers and The Lariat itself, Pie Man was apprehended after attacking Dr. James Hunt, an assistant professor at the time.

“With my superb athletic ability, I was able to dodge the pie,” Hunt said at the time. “Most of the pie hit the blackboard.”

The arrest was quick and surprising. The perpetrator was instructed to approach Capone with sincere remorse for his actions and disappear into the ether.

Following the arrest, radio silence crackled across the airwaves. Onlookers wondered if the filling had run out. “The institution of the Pie Man was assumed over,” Preston Smith wrote in the Dec. 8, 1988, edition of The Lariat.

Meanwhile, the Pie Man plotted his triumphant return.

At 11:15 a.m., a man walked into the Hankamer School of Business with a gleam in his eye and a pie in his hand. The assailant opened the door of Professor Leslie Rasner’s Business Law 3305 class, shouted an expletive, and struck student Jim Wyatt in the face with a pie before running away.

Chris Colihan observed the attack up close.

“I was in class and this man opened the door,” Colihan recalled. “He walked in, yelled a name, and said, ‘This is from so-and-so!’ and gave another name. He just hit her with the pie and turned around and ran out.”

Wyatt’s glasses were smattered with pie cream, so he never saw the culprit. He trudged to the bathroom to clean up, his classmates’ laughter echoing behind him. But he wasn’t out of the woods yet. Pie Man would strike again.

“When Wyatt went to the restroom, he still could not see because of cream covering his face, so he was not ready for the Pie Men waiting for him in the bathroom,” Smith wrote of the Avengers-style sneak attack. “The assailants struck him with several more pies, but he still never saw the attackers.”

Wyatt returned, “completely covered in pie cream,” and mumbled, “There was more of them in the bathroom.” He packed up his things and went home, but the Pie Man (and his henchmen) still weren’t finished.

Footsteps foretold the third appearance.

“Hey, Gina,” yelled a man poking his head through the door. “You’re next!”

All hell broke loose. Several students leapt from their chairs to chase the man down, but he’d already escaped into his getaway car. He tried to wrest command from the female getaway driver, but by the time she switched seats, the pursuers were upon them. A screaming, wrestling match ensued.

Steve Spoonemore and Larry Vasbinder, two students, assaulted the car from opposite angles. Vasbinder failed to breach the passenger door, while Spoonemore managed to turn the car off twice from the driver’s side — but couldn’t wrench the keys out of the ignition. Spoonemore gave up the fight after the getaway car ran a stop sign at 20 miles per hour, at which point he pushed himself out of the car and rolled several times to a stop in the street.

Once again, the Pie Man had gotten away — this time, for good.

Wyatt, the victim, played the incident off as harmless fun. Gina Gee, the student threatened before the chase scene in episode three, seemed confused and upset at catching a stray. Professor Rasner did not find the incident amusing.

“If I had a deadly weapon, I would use it in my defense,” Rasner told The Lariat in 1988. “It is embarrassing. It is degrading. This just should not go on in a university. It is past a joke.”

Sixteen years after the last reported pie–ing at Baylor, Homer Simpson adopted a new alter ego. Upon seeing his daughter mistreated at the county fair, the star of “The Simpsons” donned a mask and splatted “The Rich Texan” in the face under a familiar guise. A hero was reborn.

“Whatever injustice shows its ugly face, I will be there, for I am the Pie Man,” Simpson proclaimed.

Baylor’s Pie Man was not universally beloved. During fall 1976, he hiked prices from $3.50 to $7 and considered making T-shirts “to make this a national thing, like streaking.” In November of that year, he told The Lariat people in his hall had set him up.

“They all had pies ready and hit me when I came in,” he said. “While another group was waiting for me and rubbed cheese in my face and kicked me … [But] they were disgracing themselves, not disgracing me.”

The institution of the Pie Man has lain dormant at Baylor since those final attacks in 1988, with no whispers of a renewal this side of Springfield. There’s no official record of his identity or current whereabouts. But somewhere, somehow, he’s out there. Waiting, baking and plotting his return.

“Most of my pleasure’s from the audience,” Pie Man said in 1976. “That’s what I’m in the business for: entertainment.”