The
strip search prank call scam was a series of
incidents occurring for roughly a decade before an arrest was made
in 2004. These incidents involved a man calling a
restaurant or
grocery
store, claiming to be a
police detective, and convincing
managers to conduct
strip
searches of female employees or perform other unusual acts on
behalf of the police. The calls were usually placed to
fast-food restaurants in small rural
towns.
Over 70
such occurrences were reported in 30 U.S.
states, until an incident in 2004 in Mt.
Washington, Kentucky finally led to the
arrest and charging of David Stewart, a
37-year-old employee of Corrections Corporation of
America, a private-commercial firm contracted by the State of
Florida
to provide corrections officers at private detention facilities. On
October 31, 2006, he was acquitted of all charges. These incidents
were the inspiration behind an episode of
Law and Order:
SVU featuring Robin Williams as the scammer.
Incidents prior to the Mt. Washington call
There were incidents in multiple states that followed the same
pattern: a caller identifying himself as a police officer would
contact a manager or floor supervisor on the pretense of soliciting
the supervisor to assist the police in detaining a suspected
criminal employee and conducting a search
of the person. The caller would provide a physical description of
the suspect which the supervisor would recognize. A vast majority
of the calls were to
fast-food restaurants
but a few were made to chain
grocery
stores. Some notable cases include:
- Two
calls reported in 1992: one in Devils Lake, North Dakota
and another in Fallon, Nevada
.
- A
McDonald's manager in Leitchfield,
Kentucky
was convinced on November 30, 2000 to undress
before a customer when the caller persuaded her that the customer
was a suspected sex offender and that her serving as bait would
permit undercover officers to arrest him when he showed an interest
in her.
- A call
to a McDonald's restaurant in Hinesville, Georgia
in February, 2003, in which a manager, who thought
she was speaking with a police officer and monitored by the
McDonald's regional vice president, was instructed to take a
19-year-old female employee into the women's bathroom and perform a
strip search of the employee to uncover
hidden drugs.
- On January 26, 2003, an Applebee's
Neighborhood Grill & Bar assistant manager victimized a
waitress after receiving a collect call
from someone who purported to be a regional manager.
- In
March, 2004, a 17-year-old female customer at a Taco Bell in Fountain Hills, Arizona
near Phoenix was strip-searched by a manager
receiving a call from a man claiming to be a police
officer.
Mount Washington, Kentucky incident
The final
call was made to a McDonald's restaurant
in Mount
Washington, Kentucky
on April 9, 2004. According to assistant manager Donna
Summers, the caller identified himself as a policeman, 'Officer
Scott', who described Louise Ogborn, a female employee he suspected
of stealing a purse. After the caller demanded that the employee be
searched at the store, or taken to jail, the employee was brought
into an office and ordered to remove her clothes, which Summers
took to her car. Another assistant manager, Kim Dockery, was
present during this time. After an hour Summers told the caller
that she was required at the counter, and the caller then told her
to bring in her fiance, Walter Nix.
Nix arrived and took over from Summers, following the caller's
directions for the next 2 hours. He removed the apron the employee
had covered herself with and ordered her to dance and perform
jumping jacks. He also ordered her to sit on his lap and kiss him,
and when she refused he slapped her buttocks. The caller also spoke
to the employee, demanding that she do as she was told. During this
time the employee said that "I was scared for my life". After the
employee had been in the office for 2½ hours, she was ordered to
perform
oral sex on Nix. Summers had
returned to the office periodically, and during these visits the
employee was instructed to cover herself up by the caller.
Nix was then told he could leave, and that Summers had to find
someone to replace him. After Nix left, he called a friend and told
him "I have done something terribly bad". The entire incident was
captured on a surveillance camera in the office. Summers watched
the tape later that night, and according to her attorney, called
off the engagement.
Summers called in Thomas Simms, a store maintenance man who had
stopped at the restaurant for dessert. Simms refused to go along
with the callers demands. It was at this point that Summers, who
was not aware of Nix's earlier actions, became suspicious and
decided to call the store manager, whom the caller had claimed to
have on another phone line. Speaking with her boss, Summers then
discovered that the store manager had been napping and had not
spoken to any police officers, and that the call had been a
hoax. The caller quickly hung up. A
quick-thinking employee dialed
*69 before
another call could ring in, to get the telephone number of the
caller's phone. Summers, now hysterical, began apologizing and
released the employee (by then shivering and wrapped in an
emergency blanket) after 3½ hours of
false
arrest and then called the real police, who arrested Nix for
sexual assault and began an investigation to find the caller.
The Mount Washington Police Department was only a quarter mile
away.
Although
their initial suspicion was that the call had originated from a pay
phone near the location of the restaurant, where the perpetrator
could visually monitor police activity at the police station and
the restaurant, the police later determined that the call had come
from a supermarket pay phone in Panama City, Florida
.
Investigation and aftermath
Mt. Washington police, doing a simple word search on the Internet,
quickly realized that this was only the latest in a long line of
similar incidents that stretched over a period of nearly ten years;
none of which had gone as far, for as long, with as many people
involved, as the incident at the Mt. Washington McDonald's.
Learning
that the call had been made with an AT&T calling card,
and that the largest retailer of such cards
was Wal-Mart
, they contacted police in Panama City
, who informed them that Detective Flaherty in
Massachusetts
was already conducting an investigation of his own
and had already pulled surveillance
camera footage from a local Wal-Mart. Following
Flaherty's lead, they used the
serial
number of the
calling card used to
make the call, and learned that the card had come from a different
Wal-Mart store than the card used for the Massachusetts calls.
Using Wal-Mart's records of the second store, the cash register,
and time of the purchase of that card, the police were able to find
surveillance camera video of the
transaction.
Unlike the Massachusetts investigation, which had gone cold when surveillance video failed to show the purchaser
because the cameras were trained on the parking lot and not the
registers, the cameras at the particular store where the card used
in the Mt. Washington call was purchased were trained on the
cashiers. The buyer in the video was wearing a correctional
officer's uniform for the private security firm
Corrections Corporation of
America. Video and stills from both Wal-Marts were compared and
the same man was seen entering and exiting the Wal-Mart at the time
of the earlier purchase. The police used this footage to produce a
front-and-back composite image of the suspect, and subsequent
queries to the private correctional company's
Human Resources department led to the
identification of the buyer as David R. Stewart, a married father
of five children.
After his arrest, Stewart was extradited to Kentucky
to face charges of impersonating a police
officer, and solicitation of
sodomy. He was not convicted, with
both the defense and prosecution attorneys saying that a lack of
direct evidence may have affected the jury's decision.
During
his questioning by police and officers of the Courts, Stewart
insisted he'd never bought a calling
card, but detectives found one in his
house that had been used to call nine restaurants in the past year,
including a Burger King in Idaho Falls
, on the day its manager was reportedly
duped. Police also found dozens of applications for police
department jobs, hundreds of police magazines, police-type
uniforms,
guns and
holsters, indicating that being or becoming a
police officer was possibly a fantasy
of the suspect.
Summers ended her relationship with Nix soon after the incident,
and was fired from McDonald's for violating a corporate policy
prohibiting (a) non-McDonald's personnel from entering the
restaurant's office, and (b) conducting strip searches.
Kim Dockery was transferred to another location.
McDonald's took no further punitive action against any of the
employees involved in the incident.
Nix, remorseful for his part in the crime, pleaded guilty to
sexual abuse and other crimes in
February 2006 in exchange for his testimony against Stewart.
Because he was the principal perpetrator of the beatings and
engaged in the sex act, he received a 5 year sentence, with a
minimum of 2 years in prison.
Summers entered an
Alford plea to a
charge of
unlawful
imprisonment, a
misdemeanor, and
received one year of
probation. Because
she was not aware of, did not initiate, and was not present at the
time of the
sexual assault, she was
not charged with any sex-related crimes.
The victim underwent therapy to address
Post-Traumatic Stress
Disorder depression related to her abuse, including
prescription
anti-depressants.
She
abandoned her plans to attend the University
of Louisville
, where she had anticipated declaring pre-med. In an interview with
ABC News she said that, after her
rape, she "felt dirty" and had difficulty making and
maintaining friendships because she wouldn't "allow anyone to get
too close to me."
Since Stewart's arrest, police reported that the calls have
stopped. Stewart remains a suspect in similar cases throughout the
USA.
The civil trial against McDonald's
Three years after the incident, still undergoing therapy, the
former employee sued McDonald's for $200 million for failing to
protect her during her ordeal. Her grounds were that McDonald's
corporate headquarters was aware of the danger and possibility of
the hoax: it had defended itself against lawsuits for similar
incidents at its restaurants in four other states that had suffered
similar hoaxes at least 2 years prior to the Mt. Washington attack,
and had not taken the appropriate action directed by its own chief
of security as outlined in his memo to McDonald's upper
management.
Summers also sued McDonald's for failing to warn her of the
previous hoaxes, asking for $50 million.
McDonald's based its defense on four points: (1) Summers deviated
from the company's management manual, which prohibits
strip searches, and therefore McDonald's should
not be responsible for any action conducted by Summers outside the
scope of her employment; (2)
workman's compensation statutes
prohibit employees from suing employers; (3) Nix, who actually
performed the acts, was not a McDonald's employee; and (4) the
victim did not remove herself from the situation, contrary to
common sense.
The civil trial began
September 10,
2007 and ended
October
5,
2007 when a jury awarded $5 million in
punitive damages and $1.1 million in compensatory damages and
expenses. Summers was awarded $1.1 million. The jury decided that
McDonald's and the unnamed caller were each 50 percent at fault for
the abuse to which the victim was subjected.
McDonald's and its attorneys were sanctioned for withholding
evidence pertinent to the outcome of the trial.
, nobody has received payment on the award, as McDonald's continues to appeal the ruling. In November 2008, McDonald's was also ordered to pay $2.4 million in legal fees to plaintiffs' lawyers under a provision of the Kentucky Civil Rights Act designed to promote vigorous advocacy for plaintiffs. On November 20, 2009, the Kentucky Court of Appeals upheld the jury's award.http://www.wave3.com/Global/story.asp?S=11545266
After the decision, McDonald's revised its manager's training
program to better emphasize awareness of prank phone calls and
protection of the rights of employees. While the training had
already included such topics, none of the two managers and three
junior employees involved in the hoax could recall much about
it.
See also
References
Sources
- , original ABC News report on Kentucky incident
- Milgram, S. Obedience to authority, Harper & Row,
1974.
- Cialdini, R. Influence: Science and practice, Allyn
& Bacon, 2000.
Notes
- http://www.privateci.org/Oregon.htm
- http://indianalawblog.com/archives/2007/09/07/
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