Always a good one ...
This classic urban legend, known to folklorists as "The Dead Cat in the Package," refuses to die a quiet death even though it's at least a century old, as San Francisco's venerated newspaper columnist Herb Caen observed in 1963:
The Story of the Dead Cat: a woman, for reasons unexplained, places her dead cat in a shoebox and, on the way to bury it, stops in a downtown department store. (Why?) As she is shopping, she places the box on a counter, and it disappears. A few minutes later, the store detective finds a lady shoplifter passed out in the powder room, the open shoebox on her lap. I first printed that in 1938 — it was hoary then — and it reappears in somebody's column at least once a year, as gospel.
The email version above, noteworthy for its down-home details like topping off a day of shopping at Dillard's with lunch at Luby's Cafeteria, has been circulating on the Internet since 1998.
A brand-new variant, in which it is claimed that muggers in Austria stole a woman's handbag containing the corpse of her beloved pet rabbit, appeared in European newspapers in November 2007.