A new film Compliance, starring Dreama Walker and based on the sick 2004 hoax in Mount Washington, Kentucky, US has just opened.
It tells the true story of a hoax caller who posed as a policeman duped managers of more than 70 fast food outlets in 31 US states into strip-searching, humiliating and sexually abusing customers and staff
Following the callers' instructions, assistant manager Summers called 18 year old Louise into the office, took her car keys and phone and locked the door.
The officer stayed on the line and told Summers that in order to preserve evidence she must instruct the girl to strip naked, put the clothes in a bag and take them away. The assistant manager did as she was told.
For three hours Summers – and later her fiancé Walter Nix – did everything “Officer Scott” asked, even as his demands became more bizarre and increasingly perverted.
Another manager and two employees saw the abuse but did nothing – believing that because police ordered it there was nothing wrong.
By the time Summers realised she had been tricked, Louise had been made to dance naked with her hands above her head, do jumping jacks and deep knee bends, sit on Nix’s lap, kiss him, have her buttocks slapped until they were red, then perform oral sex on him.
“I knew then I had been had. I lost it. I begged Louise for forgiveness. I was hysterical,” said Summers when she realised she had been pranked.
When she saw the CCTV of what Nix had done she called off the engagement.
He was jailed for five years for sexual abuse. Summers was sacked and got a year’s probation for false imprisonment.
Louise, who now has a five-year-old daughter, sued McDonald’s for £127million but later accepted £700,000 out of court.
A month before her ordeal, a caller claiming to be a cop persuaded the 16-year-old female manager of a Missouri drive-in restaurant to strip search a 21-year-old cook accused of stealing a purse then perform oral sex on him.
A month before that a manager at a Taco Bell in Arizona also claimed he was following phone instructions after strip search-ing a 17-year-old girl customer and making her exercise naked.
Seven people who executed strip searches at the fake officer’s behest were convicted and jailed.
But David Stewart, the man police believe was behind the calls, was acquitted in 2006 of impersonating a police officer, solicitation to commit sex abuse and unlawful imprisonment because of lack of evidence.
It was only after Louise went to police that the pranksters’s alleged 10-year spree of deception began to unravel.
Mount Washington policeman Buddy Stump discovered the call that began Louise’s ordeal was made from Florida with a pre-paid calling card.
He denied buying the calling cards but at his house police found one which had been used to call nine restaurants.
Since Stewart’s trial reports of hoaxes have all but stopped – but not entirely.
In March 2009 a caller talked the manager of a New Hampshire KFC into activating the sprinklers, raining fire retardant down on her and staff.
The hoaxer then convinced them all to go into the car park, strip and urinate on one another to neutralise the chemicals.
- Mirror
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