Posted on 09/29/2003 5:10:15 AM PDT by Pharmboy
The woman sounded frantic, and her 911 call to the police in Meriden, Conn., on Saturday night was nightmarish: she had been raped by four or five men, she said, then locked in the trunk of their car. She was being driven around — she did not know where — and was calling from a cellphone.
In the next few hours, the woman made six calls to the police dispatcher as detectives tried desperately to find her, their resources already stretched thin by two homicides in three days in a city that usually reports no more than three killings a year. They traced her calls to three cell towers in Meriden but kept losing the signal and could not pinpoint her moving location.
The state police, the F.B.I. and surrounding communities were alerted. As the search went on, the woman stopped calling, ominously, after midnight. She later called from New Haven to say she had been released, but detectives had uncovered something strange: the woman had used two cellphones.
And by yesterday afternoon, the grim portrait of rape and abduction had evaporated. The police had finally identified the woman and were still searching for her — not as a victim but as a fugitive hoaxer who faced a charge of filing a false report. Her name was withheld pending an arrest, the police said.
"She led us on a wild goose chase, where we were chasing our tails at a time when we had much more pressing matters," said Lt. Timothy Topulos, the police watch commander on a memorable night of murder and masquerade in Meriden, a community of 60,000 people 15 miles north of New Haven.
The inspiration for the bogus tale was apparently a real case of abduction and sexual assault that had been all over the news in Connecticut on Saturday, a day after a New Haven graduate student had been kidnapped in West Haven, thrown into the trunk of a car and driven to Woodbridge, where she had been attacked.
While the odds against two such cases in two days within a few miles of one another seemed astronomical, the desperation in the voice of the woman who called the Meriden police at 8:45 p.m. on Saturday sounded too real, and her account too vivid, to be discounted.
Cut off repeatedly, calling again and again, the woman blurted her story out in fragments: she had been assaulted in an apartment at 1051 Old Colony Road, then dragged out into woods behind the complex and imprisoned in the trunk of what she thought was a Pontiac Grand Am, possibly a red two-door model.
But as investigators fanned out to search for the abductors and examine the crime scenes, there were discordant hints in the unfolding drama. The woman refused at first to identify herself, then reluctantly said her name was Santiago. She would not give her age or her birth date. And her phrasing was suspiciously slurred.
"We knew something was strange because she wouldn't cooperate and sounded intoxicated," Sgt. Leonard Caponigro recalled. "The first thing you do if you are really in trouble is tell who you are and how old you are."
Still, the report had to be taken seriously, he noted.
At a three-story tan-brick complex on Old Colony Road, the police searched the apartment where the woman had said she was raped but could find no evidence of any crime. No woman named Santiago was listed among the residents of the two dozen apartments. There were woods behind the complex, but the investigators found no signs that a vehicle had been driven there.
The search continued. Police cars scoured Meriden, looking for a red Grand Am, and the authorities in nearby communities, the state police and the F.B.I. were asked for assistance. Bulletins were issued for the fugitive car. Detectives also enlisted the help of AT&T officials in tracing the cellphone signals and the identity of the phone's owner.
While the police were busy tracking the woman, Lieutenant Topulos said, a rare murder in Meriden was being reported. The fatal shooting of a 34-year-old man on a street occurred just after midnight; that, and the killing of a 36-year-old store clerk in a robbery on Friday, had put a heavy burden on the resources of the Meriden police, he said.
The dispatcher who took the woman's calls said she sounded increasingly frantic. During one of her calls, the dispatcher tried to tell her how to deactivate the car's brake and tail lights from inside the trunk — a trick that might make the vehicle stand out in the nighttime traffic — but said the woman could not confirm that she had been able to do it.
By midnight, the woman's calls appeared to have stopped, an unpromising silence that seemed to raise the stakes. But some time later, the dispatcher received a final call from the woman. She said she had been released by her abductors, then hung up, perhaps hoping to kill the investigation. The call was traced to a cellular tower in New Haven, however, and the search shifted there briefly.
But by then, the investigators had made another discovery, a crucial one. Some of the woman's calls had been dialed from a second cellphone, they said. That seemed to conjure up the unlikely situation of a desperate victim, trapped in a trunk, but using two handy cellphones to call for help.
While efforts had failed to identify the registered owner of the first cellphone used by the woman, the police and AT&T officials did identify the owner of the second as a resident of the apartment complex on Old Colony Road. Through him, and other residents, the police said they had learned the identity of the caller, also a resident there. She was still missing last night.
Sergeant Caponigro, summing up the case, was unable to hide his annoyance. "It involved hours and hours of work, combing cellphone records," he said. "There's a tremendous difficulty tracing cellphone calls, and we were in the midst of investigating two homicides, so we were stretched beyond belief."
Also, see here http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/990911/posts
Far-fetched? In this country? No way.
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