Wow, I guess sodomy laws really are worthwhile

[Drake Tungsten]

I don't think anyone is even charged with forcible sodomy in this case. Fiancé is charged with sodomy and sexual assault, IIRC.

[Jaguar]

Originally posted by The Emperor Fabulous
The worst person in this whole thing is the fiance. He was like "Free blowjob from hot 18 year old? Now THAT'S an extra-value meal!"

Hope he gets the 35 years

QFT

[germanos]

It's odd the girl preferred the ever increasing sexual 'assault' over the running around naked in the restaurant. Jumping up and down in an apron, okay, but at some point a threshhold must be crossed, no? And then being beaten for ten minutes.

[Theben]

Thanks, Mobius, but I don't feel as though I qualify for amoeba-like intellect- although during my stint at BK I could almost feel my brains oozing out my ears.

The sad thing is this happens often enough that most businesses dealing in low-skill workers have either training videos on this or have at least put out a memo alert.

[Sikander]

Originally posted by MOBIUS

You're competing for the stupidity awards, aren't you?

Don't worry, your crown is safe.

[Sikander]

I'm torn between horror and extreme amusement. I bet the perpetrator watched those psychology films where they were pretending to electrecute people for research purposes.

[Pekka]

..mm... you must.. do .. jumping jacks, ok? Now I have to... spank you really hard..

Right.



I mean .. the one who came up wiht this scam should get a medal for exposing stupidity. This is too good.

[germanos]

Originally posted by Sikander
I'm torn between horror and extreme amusement. I bet the perpetrator watched those psychology films where they were pretending to electrecute people for research purposes.

I was reminded of that too.

[Sikander]

The true stupid white trash moment is not the fact that these idiots went along with the caller, it is that even after they became aware of their own stupidity they agreed to relive the whole thing for ABC news and have it broadcast far and wide. No such thing as bad publicity? I think not.

[Chemical Ollie]

A hot teen doing nude jumping jacks for hours in a small office
Idiots believing moronic phone calls
Idiots doing the above in front of surveilance cameras
Blurred images

This story should belong in "The most stupid criminals" show or something.

[Mr. Harley]

Sikander already made the point referencing the Milgram experiments. ALOT of people will do stupid things like this.

In an early 1960s experiment, Harvard researcher Stanley Milgram recruited college students to help "teach" slow "learners." A white-coated "experimenter" instructed the students to deliver increasingly powerful electric shocks to a learner each time the learner made a mistake. In spite of believing the shocks were real, two-thirds delivered the highest level of shock labeled "danger - severe shock," as they watched the learner writhe in (pretended) pain. In a similar study conducted in Germany, over 85% of the subjects administered what they were told would be a lethal electric shock to the learner! The imprimatur of approval from higher authority dissolved the cultural taboo against torture, and released the hidden satisfaction of inflicting pain.

Actually, that happened one county south of where I am. The local paper did an excellent review, plus the case has been followed up. You will note that the bastard manipulator who did this had to call mutiple places before he found the morons he could dupe.

Remember another thing. Many "girls" are raised to be obedient, and a "good" girl is one who obeys and is largely compliant. Also the man in question was over twice her weight, and she became quite scared - read the attached article from the local paper. I would hope that my daughter, in that situation, would knee the idiot fiancee in the crotch. I am encouraging her to be independent, even if "I do it" is giving me some extra grey hairs.

Here is the text from the local article. I am posting it complete since it is in a fee based archive, and I lucked out and found a free link.

Sunday, October 9, 2005

A hoax most cruel

By Andrew Wolfson
awolfson@courier-journal.com
The Courier-Journal


She was a high school senior who had just turned 18 -- a churchgoing former Girl Scout who hadn't received a single admonition in her four months working at the McDonald's in Mount Washington.

But when a man who called himself "Officer Scott" called the store on April 9, 2004, and said an employee had been accused of stealing a purse, Louise Ogborn became the suspect.

"He gave me a description of the girl, and Louise was the one who fit it to the T," assistant manager Donna Jean Summers said.

Identifying himself as a police officer, the caller issued an ultimatum: Ogborn could be searched at the store or be arrested, taken to jail and searched there.

"I was bawling my eyes out and literally begging them to take me to the police station because I didn't do anything wrong," Ogborn said later in a deposition. She had taken the $6.35-an-hour position after her mother lost her job. "I couldn't steal -- I'm too honest. I stole a pencil one time from a teacher and I gave it back."

Summers, 51, conceded later that she had never known Ogborn to do a thing dishonest. But she nonetheless led Ogborn to the restaurant's small office, locked the door, and -- following the caller's instructions -- ordered her to remove one item of clothing at a time, until she was naked.

"She was crying," recalled Kim Dockery, 40, another assistant manager, who stood by watching. "A little young girl standing there naked wasn't a pretty sight."

Summers said later that "Officer Scott," who stayed on the telephone, giving his orders, sounded authentic. He said he had "McDonald's corporate" on the line, as well as the store manager, whom he mentioned by name. And she thought she could hear police radios in the background.

Summers shook each garment, placed it in a bag and took the bag away. "I did exactly what he said to do," Summers said of her caller.

It was just after 5 p.m., and for Ogborn, hours of degradation and abuse were just beginning.


Hard to believe

At first, scam seemed too bizarre but then the reports kept coming in
The first report of such a call came in 1995, in Devil's Lake, N.D.; another came later that year in Fallon, Nev. The caller, usually pretending to be a police officer investigating a crime, targeted stores in small towns and rural communities -- areas where managers were more likely to be trusting.

Most were fast-food restaurants, where the male and female victims were young and inexperienced, and assistant managers were likely to be working without supervision.

At first, nobody believed store managers when they insisted after the fact that they had just done what they were told to by someone they believed to be police.

"Did the manager tell a whopper?" a newspaper headline in Fargo, N.D., asked after the manager of a Burger King there insisted that he thought it was a police officer who had told him over the phone on Jan. 20, 1999, to slap a 17-year-old employee on her naked buttocks.

"It's just not conceivable to me that there's any reasonable justification for what happened," a North Dakota state judge said as she sentenced the manager to 30 days in jail for disorderly conduct.

Restaurant owners and police often said they assumed the caller and victims were in cahoots in a bizarre scam to extract settlements from individual franchises.

But the hoaxes continued -- by the end of 2000, there were more than a dozen. By the end of 2003, there were nearly 60.

Detectives eventually would conclude the calls were the work of one man because the methods of operation were practically identical, with only slight deviations:

On Nov. 30, 2000, the caller persuaded the manager at a McDonald's in Leitchfield, Ky., to remove her own clothes in front of a customer whom the caller said was suspected of sex offenses. The caller promised that undercover officers would burst in and arrest the customer the moment he attempted to molest her, said Detective Lt. Gary Troutman of the Leitchfield Police Department.

"We asked her why she hadn't called local police, and she said she thought it was local police who had called her," Troutman said.

On May 29, 2002, a girl celebrating her 18th birthday -- in her first hour of her first day on the job at the McDonald's in Roosevelt, Iowa -- was forced to strip, jog naked and assume a series of embarrassing poses, all at the direction of a caller on the phone, according to court and news accounts.

On Jan. 26, 2003, according a police report in Davenport, Iowa, an assistant manager at an Applebee's Neighborhood Grill & Bar conducted a degrading 90-minute search of a waitress at the behest of a caller who said he was a regional manager -- even though the man had called collect, and despite the fact the assistant manager had read a company memo warning about hoax calls just a month earlier. He later told police he'd forgotten about the memo.

On June 3, 2003, according to a city police spokesman in Juneau, Alaska, a caller to a Taco Bell there said he was working with the company to investigate drug abuse at the store, and had a manager pick out a 14-year-old customer -- and then strip her and force her to perform lewd acts.

Mount Washington
Kentucky employees say they never were warned

By the time the caller telephoned the company-owned McDonald's in Mount Washington in April 2004, supervisors had been duped in at least 68 stores in 32 states, including Kentucky and Indiana. The targets included a dozen different restaurant chains.

Managers of at least 17 McDonald's stores around the nation had been conned by that time, and the company already was defending itself in at least four lawsuits stemming from such hoaxes.

But Summers, who had worked for the McDonald's 25 miles southeast of Louisville for about eight months, said she had never heard a thing about the hoaxes. Neither had Dockery, or the store's manager, or McDonald's area manager, according to court depositions they gave later.

Company executives had sent out memos to owners and operators about the hoaxes, but as global security director Michael Peaster acknowledged in one of them in 2003, "It appears the information is not reaching our restaurant staff."

So unwarned, Summers said she did the bidding of the man she thought was a cop.

As Ogborn tried to cover herself with an apron, Summers took her clothes to her car; "Officer Scott" said police would arrive shortly to pick them up.

At one point, Summers said later in a court deposition, she asked herself why it was taking so long for police to show up -- the Mount Washington department was less than a mile away.

But "when I asked him questions about why," she said, "he always had an answer."

At the caller's instructions, she refused to tell Dockery, the other assistant manager, what was going on.

Dockery hugged Ogborn and tried to console her, and Jason Bradley, 27, a cook who Summers at one point called in to watch Ogborn, refused to go along with the caller's instructions to remove her apron and describe her. But neither of them called the police, nor demanded the search be aborted.

By now, Ogborn had been detained for an hour. Her car keys had been taken away, and she was naked, except for the apron. She would later testify that she thought she couldn't leave.

"I was scared because they were a higher authority to me," she said. "I was scared for my own safety because I thought I was in trouble with the law."

Summers then told the caller that she had to get back to the counter, and the caller asked if she had a husband who could watch Ogborn.

"She said no, I'm not married yet, but I intend to be," Bradley recalled in his deposition, adding that Summers "started laughing like she was talking to a friend." The caller told Summers to bring in her fiance, and at about 6 p.m., she called Walter Wes Nix Jr., at home.

"I asked if he would help," Summers said. "I said I had a situation."


Knuckling under

Perceived authority carries much power, studies show
Psychological experts say it is human nature to obey orders, no matter how evil they might seem -- as was illustrated in one of the most famous and frightening human experiments of the 20th century.

Seeking to understand why so many Germans followed orders during the Holocaust, Dr. Stanley Milgram, a Yale University psychologist, took out a classified ad in 1960 and 1961, inviting residents of New Haven, Conn., to take part in what they were told was a study of the relationship between punishment and learning.

A man in a white lab coat introduced the participants to a student, and told them to shock the student each time he made a mistake, increasing the voltage with each error.

In reality, the machine was a prop, and the student was an actor who wasn't shocked. Yet nearly two-thirds of Milgram's subjects gave what they believed were paralyzing jolts to a pitifully protesting victim simply because an authority figure -- the man in the white coat -- had commanded them to do so.

"With numbing regularity, good people were seen to knuckle under the demands of authority and perform actions that were callous and severe," Milgram wrote of his results, which were later replicated in nine other countries.

Milgram died in 1984, but his biographer and protege, Dr. Thomas Blass, said in an interview that the behavior of the people duped in the strip-search hoaxes would not have surprised him.

"Once you accept another person's authority, you become a different person," Blass said. "You are concerned with how well you follow out your orders, rather than whether it is right or wrong."


'Scared for my life'

Youthful victim endured physical, emotional abuse
As his fiancee had requested, Nix showed up at the Mount Washington store.

"She told me there is a girl in the office who was caught stealing," Nix said in a court deposition. Summers also advised him that "Officer Scott" had accused the girl of dealing drugs -- that police at that very moment were searching her home in Taylorsville.

Nix, 42, a father of two and an exterminator by trade, attended church regularly and had coached youth baseball teams in Mount Washington. He is a "great, super guy, a great community guy," his best friend, Terry Grigsby, said later in a deposition. "He was a great role model for kids. … I don't think he'd ever had a ticket."

Summers handed Nix the phone and left the office. The caller told Nix he was a detective. For the next two hours, Nix later told police, "He told me what to do."

And Nix did as instructed.

He pulled the apron away from Ogborn, leaving her nude again, and described her to the caller. He ordered her to dance with her arms above her head, to see, the caller said, if anything "would shake out." He made her do jumping jacks, deep knee bends, stand on a swivel chair, then a desk.

He made her sit on his lap and kiss him; the caller said that would allow Nix to smell anything that might be on her breath.

When Ogborn refused to obey the caller's instructions, Nix slapped her on the buttocks, until they were red -- just as the caller told him to do, Ogborn testified later.

Each time Summers unlocked the door and ducked back into the office, Nix handed Ogborn the apron back so she could cover herself -- as instructed by the caller. When Summers left, the abuse began anew.

Ogborn said the caller sometimes would talk directly to her, demanding that she do as she was told if she wanted to keep her job and avoid further punishment. She said she believed she was trapped. Nix outweighed her by 145 pounds and stood nearly a foot taller. "I was scared for my life," she said.


Master of deception

Caller described as 'a freak who plays God'
The caller was unusually persuasive, according to workers across the country who talked with him.

He had mastered the police officer's calm but authoritative demeanor. He sprinkled law-enforcement jargon into every conversation. And he did his homework.

He researched the names of regional managers and local police officers in advance, and mentioned them by name to bolster his credibility. He called some restaurants in advance, somehow getting names and descriptions of victims so he could accurately describe them later.

Summers said "Officer Scott" in Mount Washington knew the color of Ogborn's hair, as well as her height and weight -- about 90 pounds. He even described the tie she was wearing.

Around the country, many detectives initially assumed the caller had to be watching the stores from across the street with binoculars. But later officials would say he simply was a master of deception and manipulation.

For example, when the 17-year-old victim at the Fargo Burger King started crying, the caller told her to "be a good actress" and "pretend like it doesn't bother you" so the manager wouldn't "feel so bad" about what he was having to do.

Allan Mathis, the manager of a Hardee's in Rapid City, S.D, who strip-searched an employee in June 2003, said in an interview: "I didn't want to be doing it. But it was like he was watching me." Mathis spent 40 days in jail before he was acquitted on rape and kidnapping charges.

The caller wasn't always successful; phone records show he sometimes called as many as 10 stores before finding one where managers would take his bait.

Stanford University psychologist Philip Zimbardo, who conducted a renowned prison experiment in which college students assigned to play guards became so sadistic that the experiment had to be aborted, said the caller was "was very skilled in human psychology -- he may have even read about Milgram."

Zimbardo, who is a consultant to one of the restaurant chains targeted by the caller, described him in an interview as a "skilled confidence man."

The lawyer for Mathis, the Hardee's manager, told the Rapid City Journal that his client was a victim of "a freak who plays God."



Prizing obedience

Employees are trained to think, `Can I help you?'

In her book, "Making Fast Food: From the Frying Pan into the Fryer," Canadian sociologist Ester Reiter concludes that the most prized trait in fast-food workers is obedience.

"The assembly-line process very deliberately tries to take away any thought or discretion from workers," said Reiter, who teaches at Toronto's York University and who spent 10 months working at a Burger King as part of her research. "They are appendages to the machine."

Retired FBI Special Agent Dan Jablonski, a Wichita, Kan., private detective who investigated hoaxes for Wendy's franchises in the Midwest, said: "You and I can sit here and judge these people and say they were blooming idiots. But they aren't trained to use common sense. They are trained to say and think,`Can I help you?'"

Even supervisors at fast-food restaurants made ready targets, said Milton Prewitt, national editor of Nation's Restaurant News, a trade publication. "You dot your `i's, cross your `t's' and push the buttons, and after a year of that," he said, "you might be an assistant manager."

Quick-serve restaurants — as they are known in the industry — also may have been vulnerable because managers are trained to cooperate with law enforcement, said Gene James, president of the National Food Service Security Council, an industry group.

Ultimately, of the 70 confirmed locations where the calls triggered strip-searches, 53 were fast-food stores and nine were sit-down restaurants.
Escalating demands

Sexual abuse steps up as some are eager to obey

Some managers cried as they carried out the caller's orders. But court documents show that others performed with great zeal.

At a Burger King in Pendleton, Ind., a supervisor was so intent on finishing a search of a 15-year-old girl in December 2001 that when the girl's father arrived to pick her up from work, he had to jump over the counter to end her humiliation.

And in Dover, Del., a Burger King manager who was strip-searching an 18-year-old employee in March 2003 fought off the worker's mother and boyfriend so strenuously that state police had to be called.

Court records also show that over time, the demands in the hoax calls grew more perverse.

At a McDonald's in Hinesville, Ga., in February 2003, a 55-year-old janitor was told to put his finger in the vagina of a 19-year-old cashier, supposedly to look for contraband, according to court records. In Joplin, Mo., according to a police report, a caller in May 2004 persuaded a 16-year-old girl who was managing a Sonic restaurant to strip-search and perform oral sex on a 21-year-old male cook — and then got the cook to strip-search the manager.

Continued in next post

[Mr. Harley]

Wave of remorse

`I have done something terribly bad,' man says

Louise Ogborn had been in the back office for nearly 2½ hours when the caller said she should kneel on the brick floor in front of Nix and unbuckle his pants.Ogborn cried and begged Nix to stop, she recounted in her deposition. "I said, `No! I didn't do anything wrong. This is ridiculous."

But she said Nix told her he would hit her if she didn't sodomize him, so she did.

Like the rest of her ordeal, it was captured on a surveillance camera, recorded on to a DVD. And it continued until Summers returned to the office to get some gift certificates, and Nix had Ogborn cover herself again.

The caller told Nix then that he could leave but that Summers needed to find another man to replace him. She called in Thomas Simms, a 58-year-old maintenance man who did odd jobs at the store.

Simms would say in a deposition later that he was shocked by what he saw — a young woman trying to cover herself with a small piece of cloth. Summers insisted it was OK for him to watch her, that "corporate" had approved it.

Nix left, drove a few blocks to his home and immediately called his best friend, Grigsby, who recalls Nix saying, "I have done something terribly bad."



Refusing to play

`Something is not right,' 9th-grade dropout decides

It was Simms, the Mount Washington store's maintenance man and a ninth-grade dropout, who refused to play the caller's game.

He had stopped by the restaurant for dessert and coffee when Summers pulled him into the office and handed him the phone. The caller told Simms to have Ogborn drop the apron and to describe her. Simms refused.

"He said, `Something is not right about this,'" Summers recalled in her deposition.

And finally, she realized the same. She called her manager — Lisa Siddons — whom the caller had said was on the other line. Summers discovered Siddons had been home, sleeping.

"I knew then I had been had," Summers said. "I lost it.


"I begged Louise for forgiveness. I was almost hysterical."


The caller hung up.


Ogborn was so cold she was shaking and so stunned that, as Dockery wrapped her in a blanket, she asked if she had show up for work the next morning.


Dockery told her no. "Take as much time off as you want," she said.



Illusions destroyed

Repercussions hit all of those involved

Summers watched the store video later the same night, saw what Nix had done, and called off their engagement. She hasn't spoken with him since, according to her attorney.

She initially was suspended, then later fired, for violating a McDonald's rule barring nonemployees from entering the office. A couple of weeks later, she was indicted on a charge of unlawful imprisonment, a misdemeanor. Nix was indicted on charges of sodomy and assault.


Dockery was transferred to another restaurant.


Ogborn never went back to work at the store.


She began suffering from panic attacks, severe insomnia and nightmares about "a guy attacking" her, according to a court deposition from her therapist, Jean Campbell. Riddled with anxiety and depression, Ogborn was forced to switch from one antidepressant to a second, then a third and a fourth, before she finally found some relief.


"I can't trust anyone," she testified in a lawsuit she filed in August 2004 against McDonald's, alleging it failed to warn employees about the hoaxes. "I push people out of my life because I don't want them to know what happened."


She graduated from Spencer County High School, but was too shaken to enroll at the University of Louisville, where she had planned to study pre-med, Campbell said.


"She was dealing with a lot of issues of shame, feeling contaminated, feeling dirty, questioning herself," Campbell said in her deposition. "When anything like this happens, it destroys our illusions."


`Slow on the draw'

Restaurant chains failed to act quickly, ex-agent says

Despite the mounting number of cases across the country, restaurant industry officials failed to act more quickly or decisively, Prewitt said, in part because "nobody could believe it, it was so weird."

Some of the strip-searches weren't even reported to police, because embarrassed restaurant officials were reluctant to publicize them, said Jablonski, the ex-FBI agent. The fiercely competitive chains also initially were reluctant to talk to each other. "For a variety of reasons, they were slow on the draw," he said.

James, the head of the industry's security group, said the quick-serve chains acted "appropriately and expeditiously," although the group's previous executive director, Terrie Dort, acknowledged last year to The Associated Press that it took until 2003 "for the pieces of the puzzle to come together and for everyone to start comparing notes and realizing the scope of the problem."

Many police departments filed their case away under "miscellaneous" because they couldn't figure out how to pursue the caller, Prewitt said, or had trouble figuring out what crime, if any, he had committed.

Several departments were able to trace the calls to phone booths in Panama City, Fla. But that was as far as any had gotten until the Mount Washington hoax.



Hunting for suspect

Lone detective presses Bullitt case, gets help

The lone detective on the Mount Washington Police Department, Buddy Stump, had worked only a few weeks as an investigator when he got the call.

He had spent most of his career doing factory work and was home watching an "Andy Griffith" rerun when his deputy commander assigned him the case. "I joked that I was watching my training films," Stump recalled.

He was furious when he saw the store surveillance video. "It burned me up that this had happened to an 18-year-old girl," he said.

He was able to track down the phone number the call had been made from, but it was listed to a nonexistent phone and turned out to have been made on a pre-paid calling card. "I figured we didn't have a chance to catch him," Stump said.

He eventually learned the call had originated in Panama City, and that the largest seller of phone cards there was Wal-Mart. But that didn't help much — the largest seller of everything is Wal-Mart, and it has three stores in Panama City alone.

But a Panama City detective told Stump a bit of interesting news — an officer from West Bridgewater, Mass., was hot on the same trail.

Detective Sgt. Vic Flaherty had been assigned to lead a task force investigating the crimes after the caller hit four Wendy's in the Boston suburbs on one night in February 2004.

Flaherty had traced a calling card used in some of the hoaxes to one of the Panama City Wal-Marts, but that store's surveillance video only captured customers entering and exiting, not at the registers.

After hearing about the Bullitt County call, however, he helped Stump trace that calling card to its source. This time, they were in luck: It was purchased at 3:02 p.m. at another Wal-Mart in Panama City on April 9, 2004 — just hours before it was used to call the Mount Washington McDonald's.

The camera at that store was trained on the registers, and it showed the purchaser was a white man, about 35 to 40, with slicked-back black hair and glasses. The same man could be seen on Flaherty's video entering the other Wal-Mart, where he was wearing a black jacket with small white lettering.

Flaherty and a colleague flew to Panama City on June 28, 2004, and local officers immediately identified the jacket as the uniform worn by officers of Corrections Corp.of America, a private prison company.

When they showed it to the warden at the company's Bay Correctional Facility, he identified the man as David R. Stewart, 38, a guard on the swing shift.

Stewart denied making the calls, but when confronted, he started to "sweat profusely and shake uncontrollably," Flaherty wrote in a report. Stewart also asked, "Was anybody hurt?" and said, "Amen, it's over," according to the report.

Stewart insisted he'd never bought a calling card, but when detectives searched his house, they found one that had been used to call nine restaurants in the past year, including the Idaho Falls Burger King on the day its manager was duped.

Police also found dozens of applications for police department jobs, hundreds of police magazines, police-type uniforms, guns and holsters. "It was very apparent Dave Stewart wanted ... to become a police officer," Flaherty said.

Mount Washington became the first department to charge Stewart.Stump drove to Panama City to arrest him on June 30, 2004.

Stewart eventually was brought to Bullitt Circuit Court, where he pleaded not guilty to solicitation to commit sodomy and impersonating a police officer, both felonies, as well as soliciting sex abuse and unlawful imprisonment, both misdemeanors. He was released on $100,000 bond pending his trial Dec. 13. His bond was posted by his brother, C.W. Stewart — a retired police officer from Cheektowaga, N.Y.



Not smart enough?

Suspect considers himself `a victim as well,' letter says

Married 11 years and the father of five, Stewart had worked as a mall security guard, volunteered as an auxiliary sheriff's deputy, and driven a propane truck before taking the prison guard job.

He had worked 11 months there before his arrest; he was fired a week later.

His family has stood behind him — his mother said he is "a good boy" and another relative said he's well liked in Cheektowaga, the Buffalo suburb where he grew up.

Stewart declined to be interviewed, but in a letter responding to Ogborn's suit in Bullitt Circuit Court, he said: "I received your notice but I'm in no way responsible. I feel bad for your loss because I am a victim as well. I lost my job, my home and my car all over something I did not do."

In fact, he deeded his residence, a $37,900 mobile home on a dirt road 20 miles north of Panama City, to his wife for $100, according to Florida property records.

His Louisville lawyer, Steve Romines, said his client is not bright enough to have pulled off the hoaxes. "Based on numerous conversations with my client, I don't believe he is persuasive or eloquent enough to convince somebody to do these preposterous things," Romines said in an interview.

Stewart has been charged only in Bullitt County. Flaherty said prosecutors in Massachusetts are awaiting the outcome of the Kentucky case before deciding whether to proceed against him.

Detectives in other jurisdictions say they didn't press charges because the caller's crime would be a misdemeanor for which he could not be extradited.

There has not been a reported hoax call since Stewart's arrest, according to police and lawyers for the restaurant industry. Romines said there have been two, but he declined to say where, and none have been reported by news organizations.



Duped or stupid?

Some see how hoax worked, others shocked

Across the United States, at least 13 people who executed strip-searches ordered by the caller were charged with crimes, and seven were convicted.

But most of the duped managers were treated as victims — just like the people they searched and humiliated.

They all "fell under the spell of a voice on the telephone," wrote a judge in Zanesville, Ohio, in an order acquitting Scott Winsor, 35, who'd been charged with unlawfully restraining and imposing himself on two women who worked for him at a McDonald's.

Chicago lawyer Craig Annunziata, who has defended 30 franchises sued after hoaxes, said every manager he interviewed genuinely believed they were helping police.

"They weren't trying to get their own jollies," he said.

Many of the supervisors were fired and some divorced by their spouses, Annunziata said. Others required counseling.

But the duped managers have been condemnedby others.

"You don't have to be a Phi Beta Kappa to know not to strip-search a girl who is accused of stealing change," said Roger Hall, the lawyer for a woman who won $250,000 after being strip-searched at a McDonald's in Louisa, Ky.

A Fox-TV commentator asked how the managers who went along could be so "colossally stupid."

While the incidents were triggered by a "perverted miscreant" wrote a federal judge in Georgia, the managers "still had a responsibility to use common sense and avoid falling prey to such a scam."

Though the Milgram experiment may help explain why supervisors went along with the caller, even Milgram's disciples say it doesn't absolve them of responsibility.

Just as one-third of the participants in Milgram's study refused to shock the subject, some supervisors refused to go along, including a supervisor at McDonald's Hillview store, who hung up on the caller the very night of the Mount Washington hoax.

"Nobody held a gun to their heads," said Blass, whose book about Milgram is titled, "The Man Who Shocked the World."

"They had the critical ability to decide whether to carry out their orders."



3 lives `destroyed'

Suits target McDonald's in Mount Washington case

In her suit against the $19billion McDonald's company, Ogborn contends it failed to warn Mount Washington employees about the hoaxes even though the company and its franchises were already defending lawsuits in Georgia, Ohio,Utahand elsewhere in Kentucky.

"This suit is about failure to warn, failure to train, failure to supervise," said Louisville lawyer StevenYater, who with William C. Boone Jr., is representing Ogborn.

Although a McDonald's security executive had sent a 10- to 15-second voice message to every store in the region about hoax calls about a week before the Mount Washington incident, Siddons, the manager there, said in her deposition that it didn't mention strip-searches.

The company also failed to execute a plan it had developed to send warning stickers to be placed on the headset and cradle of the phone in every store, Peaster, McDonald's global security director, said in a deposition.

Ogborn's suit, which is set for mediation Oct. 31 and trial March 30, also names Summers and Dockery as defendants, saying they "forced Louise to remain imprisoned, in the nude, for over four hours."

Dockery declined to be interviewed, although in court papers, she denied wrongdoing and said Summers had kept her in the dark about what was going on.

Summers has filed her own claim against McDonald's, alleging that the incident would not have occurred if she had been warned.

She declined to be interviewed, but in her deposition, she angrily asked how McDonald's "could have failed to spread the word."

"You've destroyed three lives," she said. "Hope you're happy."



Restaurant responds

McDonald's points fingers at others, including victim

McDonald's blamed what happened on Stewart and Nix, over whom it says it had no control. The company has sued both of them.

Its Louisville lawyer, W.R. "Pat" Patterson Jr., said McDonald's employee manual clearly noted its policy against strip-searches. "The employees didn't read it," Patterson said in an interview. "That is all I can say."

The company admits it knew of the earlier hoaxes, but Patterson said it reacted appropriately by sending memos to owners and franchisees. "McDonald's did what every quick-serve restaurant did — maybe more."

In a prepared statement, a spokesman for McDonald's USA, Bill Whitman, said, "We are keenly aware of these unfortunate incidents and will continue to take appropriate actions to safeguard customers and employees."

Asked what additional steps the company has taken since the Mount Washington incident, he said it would be "inappropriate to discuss in detail specific security and safety measures."

In court papers, McDonald's also has blamed Ogborn for what happened to her — saying that her injuries, "if any," were caused by her failure to realize the caller wasn't a real police officer.

Questioning Ogborn during a deposition, Patterson suggested that although she had no clothes, she could have walked out of the office, but stayed voluntarily to clear her name.

"Did it ever occur to you to scream?" he asked.

Ogborn declined to be interviewed for this story on the advice of her lawyers, although she agreed to be identified by name.

Her therapist said she followed orders because her experience with adults "has been to do what she is told, because good girls do what they are told."



20-20 hindsight?

Lawyer wonders how each of us would react

Bullitt District Court Judge Rebecca Ward initially dismissed the charge against Summers, saying she "definitely exercised poor judgment ... but was as much a victim as Miss Ogborn."

Ward later reversed herself and reinstated the charge; she set Summers' trial for Dec. 7.

Summers' lawyer, Wendi Wagner, said in an interview that "everybody agrees, in hindsight, `How the hell could you let this happen?' ... But how many times did it happen over the past 10 years?"

In a brief interview, Nix insisted that he — like Summers — thought he was following a policeman's orders.

Nix is scheduled for trial Tuesday. If convicted of sodomy, he faces a maximum sentence of 20 years in prison — twice the penalty that could be meted to Stewart, although his lawyer, Kathleen Schmidt, noted that plea negotiations are under way.

"I can understand how people can question what he did," Schmidt said. "But they weren't in the same position. Maybe you and I wouldn't have done this, but how do we know?"

Editor's note: This story is based in part on depositions and other court documents filed in a pending Bullitt Circuit Court lawsuit, as well as interviews and police reports, court records and news accounts from more than five dozen jurisdictions. The victim in the Bullitt County case agreed to be identified.

[Mr. Harley]

follow-up articles

Man pleads guilty in hoax case
Victim approves deal for probation

By Andrew Wolfson
awolfson@courier-journal.com
The Courier-Journal



A Bullitt County man who claimed he was duped into sexually humiliating a teenage McDonald's worker last year by a man impersonating a police officer pleaded guilty yesterday to a felony charge of unlawful imprisonment.

In a plea bargain approved by his victim, Walter Nix Jr., 43, will get probation after agreeing to a one-year term for the felony and for sexual misconduct, a misdemeanor. He originally was charged with sodomy and assault, for which he could have been sentenced to 20 years in prison.



Bullitt Circuit Judge Tom Waller tentatively accepted the plea pending formal approval of it by victim Louise Ogborn at Nix's sentencing, set for Nov. 2.

It is the first conviction stemming from a strip-search hoax on April 9, 2004, at the McDonald's in Mount Washington where Ogborn worked.

Nix was engaged at the time to the store's assistant manager, Donna Jean Summers, who asked him to come watch Ogborn. A man who phoned the store pretending to be a police officer accused Ogborn of theft and ordered her strip-searched.

According to police and court records, Nix said he thought he was following an officer's orders when he directed Ogborn, who was detained four hours in the restaurant's office, to do exercises in the nude and perform oral sex on him. He also slapped her several times on her buttocks, at the direction of the caller, the records show.

The incident was the focus of a Courier-Journal story Sunday that noted that the strip-search was among at least 70 performed at fast-food restaurants and other businesses from 1995 through 2004 at the direction of a caller who claimed he was investigating crimes. Ogborn agreed to be identified by name in the newspaper.

A private prison guard, David N. Stewart, of Fountain, Fla., was charged in July 2004 with impersonating a police officer and soliciting sodomy in the Mount Washington case. He has pleaded not guilty, and his trial is set for Dec. 13. Summers is charged with unlawful imprisonment, a misdemeanor, and her trial is scheduled for Dec. 7. She also has pleaded not guilty.

Bullitt County Commonwealth's Attorney Mike Mann said in an interview yesterday that he agreed to probation for Nix because he has no prior record and because it would have difficult to persuade all 12 members of a jury to reject Nix's defense -- that he was duped by someone he thought was a law-enforcement officer.

"It would have been hard not to have one juror say, 'I might have gotten that call and done the same thing,' " Mann said.

Still, he said he found it disturbing that anyone would believe that "sodomy is part of a lawful criminal investigation. There had to be a point where he realized that this wasn't right," Mann said of Nix.

Nix didn't explain his plea in the courtroom and left without talking to reporters. His lawyer, Kathleen Schmidt, said he was too nervous for an interview.

Ogborn's co-counsel, William C. Boone Jr., said his client approved the deal because "she wants somebody to say they are sorry and for somebody to say she did nothing wrong," both of which he said Nix has promised to say at sentencing.

"She is tired of McDonald's blaming her for what happened," Boone said.

In a lawsuit, Ogborn has alleged that the company failed to warn employees at the Mount Washington store about prior strip-search hoaxes at other restaurants around the country. McDonald's has said in court papers and through its lawyer that Ogborn was in part responsible because she failed to realize the caller wasn't a real officer.

The company also has said that agents outside its control -- Stewart and Nix -- were at fault.

The company's Louisville lawyer, W.R. "Pat" Patterson Jr., referred questions to spokeswoman Tara McClarin, who in a prepared statement said, "McDonald's regrets these unfortunate incidents and is pleased to know that those who have been criminally charged are being brought to justice."

Nix entered an Alford plea, maintaining his innocence while acknowledging there is enough evidence to convict him.

As part of the plea agreement, Mann agreed to drop an assault charge against Nix and to reduce the sodomy count to sexual misconduct, a misdemeanor punishable by up to 12 months in prison. He also raised the unlawful imprisonment charge to a felony, which carries a sentence of one to five years.

Ogborn, a high school senior who had just turned 18 at the time of the incident, hadn't received a single admonition in her four months at the McDonald's when the man who called himself "Officer Scott" called and said an employee had been accused of stealing a purse.

Summers said later that she picked out Ogborn because the caller's description fit her "to the T." Following the caller's instructions, Summers took Ogborn into the office and had her remove one item of clothing at a time until she was naked.

Although McDonald's said Ogborn could have left at any time, Summers had taken away her clothes, and she was able to only partially cover herself with an apron. The incident continued until a maintenance man who worked at the store questioned it and the caller hung up.

Nix and Summers were among at least 13 people across the United States charged with crimes for executing searches for the caller. Seven have been convicted of various crimes. Stewart so far has only been charged in the Bullitt County incident.

Mount Washington Detective Buddy Stump, who investigated the case, said he had no objection to probation for Nix. "One down, two to go," he said.

Hoax victim opposes plea deal
Teen strip-searched at Bullitt McDonald's

By Andrew Wolfson
awolfson@courier-journal.com
The Courier-Journal



A teenager who was strip-searched in April 2004 at the Mount Washington McDonald's where she worked is objecting to terms of the plea bargain struck for the man who admitted sexually humiliating her.

As part of the agreement, Walter Nix Jr., 43, pleaded guilty last month to unlawful imprisonment and sexual misconduct, and was to be sentenced today in Bullitt Circuit Court to one year's probation under those charges.



But Louise Ogborn, 19, who was forced to sodomize Nix as part of telephone hoax at the store on April 9, 2004, objects to portions of the deal that allowed him to deny wrongdoing and to avoid registering as a sex offender, according to lawyers for both sides.

"The deal will not go through," said William C. Boone Jr., Ogborn's co-counsel.

Nix's lawyer, Kathleen Schmidt, said she will ask Judge Tom Waller to enforce the plea agreement today. If he doesn't, Nix will have the option of withdrawing his plea and going to trial, or accepting an agreement with harsher terms. Nix had been charged with sodomy and assault, which carry penalties of up to 20 years in prison.

Commonwealth's Attorney Mike Mann declined to comment on whether a new deal has been worked out, but he confirmed that Ogborn and her family expressed misgivings about the plea agreement when he met with them Saturday.

Steven Yater, Ogborn's other lawyer, acknowledged in an interview that he and Boone failed to tell their client about some terms of the agreement, including one that allowed Nix to enter an Alford plea, in which he maintained his innocence but admitted there was enough evidence to convict him.

Nix has claimed he was duped into humiliating Ogborn by a man who called the McDonald's pretending to be a police officer investigating a theft. Nix was engaged at the time to the store's assistant manager, Donna Jean Summers, who, at the behest of the caller, had taken away Ogborn's clothes before calling Nix in to help watch the teen.

Nix has said the man on the phone ordered him to direct Ogborn to do exercises in the nude and perform oral sex on him. He said he also slapped her several times on the buttocks at the direction of the caller.

Ogborn was detained for nearly four hours in the hoax, which was one of 70 perpetrated in 32 states from 1995 through last year. A private prison guard, David N. Stewart, of Fountain, Fla., was charged in July 2004 with impersonating a police officer and soliciting sodomy in the Mount Washington case. He has pleaded not guilty and is set for trial Dec. 13.

Summers, who was fired, is charged with unlawful imprisonment, a misdemeanor, and her trial is scheduled for Dec. 7. She also has pleaded not guilty.

Although Ogborn has agreed to probation for Nix, Yater said she objects to his contention that he was just following orders.

"That is the defense made by Germans at Nuremburg," Yater said. "You could be fooled into some of the things he did, but not sodomy."

In other developments:

ABC Primetime is scheduled to broadcast a segment Nov. 10 about the Mount Washington case, according to Yater, who said Ogborn was interviewed for it last week by a producer and reporter John Quinones.

Yater said efforts failed Monday to mediate a settlement of Ogborn's civil lawsuit, in which she alleges that McDonald's failed to warn her and other employees at the company-owned Mount Washington store about previous hoaxes.

An attorney for McDonald's, W. R. "Pat" Patterson Jr., confirmed that the mediation was unsuccessful. A corporate spokesman for McDonald's, Bill Whitman, would say only that "we are open to further discussions with the plaintiff and her legal counsel."

Managers of at least 17 McDonald's stores already had been conned by the time Ogborn was strip-searched, and the company was defending itself in at least four lawsuits stemming from such hoaxes, The Courier-Journal has reported.

McDonald's has denied liability and said Ogborn should have realized that the caller was not a police officer. The company also has filed civil claims against Stewart and Nix.

Man tells hoax victim he's sorry
Judge rejects deal; trial is next month

By Andrew Wolfson
awolfson@courier-journal.com
The Courier-Journal



The Bullitt County man who claimed a hoax caller duped him into sexually humiliating a teenage McDonald's employee at the restaurant last year apologized to his victim yesterday and said he was ashamed of what he did.

"I had no intention of hurting anyone," Walter W. Nix Jr., 43, said in Bullitt Circuit Court to Louise Ogborn, whom he forced to sodomize him in April 2004. Nix has said he was following the orders of the caller, who he thought was a police officer.



But Judge Tom Waller refused to accept a deal in which Nix had offered to plead guilty to a reduced charge of sexual misconduct and unlawful imprisonment in exchange for a sentence of one year's probation.

Waller said he had "great reservations" about the plea agreement after viewing a surveillance video of the incident that shows Nix spanking Ogborn and forcing her to perform oral sex. Waller also cited Ogborn's concern that the deal wouldn't have required Nix to register as a sex offender.

Waller let Nix withdraw his plea and set his trial on charges of sodomy and assault for Dec. 13. That's the same day that David N. Stewart, a former private prison guard from Fountain, Fla., is scheduled to stand trial on charges of impersonating a police officer and soliciting sodomy for allegedly perpetrating the hoax during a call to the Mount Washington restaurant.

Law enforcement officials have said they suspect Stewart was behind at least 69 other hoaxes pulled off at other businesses in 32 states from 1995 through last year. He has been charged only in Bullitt County and pleaded not guilty there.

Nix's lawyer, Kathleen Schmidt, yesterday implored Waller to allow the plea bargain, saying that her client had no criminal record -- "not even a traffic citation" -- before he was called to the restaurant and asked to watch Ogborn.

Nix was called by his then-fiancee, Donna Jean Summers, who was assistant manager at the McDonald's and had strip-searched Ogborn after the caller said an employee who resembled Ogborn was suspected of theft. The teen later quit.

[MrFun]

Thanks for the waste of space Harley!



Because of that, Jesus doesn't love you anymore.

[Dis]

Originally posted by Drake Tungsten

No shots of the woman actually being abused? Promise?

It's security cam footage mixed in with interviews and general news reporting. They show the girl after she stripped down, but blur out the naughty bits. Also show her apparently preparing for the sex act, but don't show any of the actual act.

Slightly voyeuristic, but no more than is normal for a primetime news magazine.

err, what sex act are we talking about. I hate it when they say sex act and don't say which act.