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Crime doesn’t pay, the old saying goes. That’s especially true for thieves trying to sell the goods back to the person they were stolen from.

Local fiddle legend Alfie Myhre has been reunited with his prized fiddle and banjo after thieves made the mistake of trying to offload the instruments at Myhre’s Music, the family’s music store on 118 Avenue. The instruments were stolen from his Sherwood Park home last week.

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“Late yesterday afternoon, someone came in wanting to ‘sell’ some instruments. They were my dad’s!!” a post on the Myhre’s Music official Facebook page read Tuesday evening. “My dad is ‘happier than a tomcat in a creamery!’ “

According to a later post: “We confronted him and he ran out with the guitar, but we chased him and got his plate# at least.”

Myhre, who has toured professionally for 50 years, was mourning the loss of his favourite fiddle — a Maggini copy with a one-piece birdseye maple back that has an extra turn in the scroll and an LR Baggs pickup attached. Also stolen was a vintage 1930s’ Ludwig “Standard Artist” banjo, which Myhre said was too unique to estimate a selling price.

“I am a fiddle player, and I have played hundreds and hundreds of violins and fiddles over the years,” Myhre told Postmedia last week. “I’ve never felt the same about another fiddle.”

Myhre said the sentimental value of these instruments — his son, Byron Myhre, played the violin in competitions for 20 years — makes them irreplaceable.

sxthomson@postmedia.com

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