The military engineers found that Dethy had numbered and catalogued each device and left coded notes for the whereabouts of each. A pile of booby-trapped dinner plates was revealed by the clue "Cheaper by the Dozen", a reference to the 1950s film by Walter Lang of the same name in which a child throws a plate at someone's head. Whether the notes were aides-memoire for himself, or cryptic clues for his family - or even the police - is not known.