Can't make it into work today, I was car jacked!!!

Winner of the best excuse not to go to work award for 2006, goes to a young woman in Ashland, Oregon. Apparently she'd been running out of excuses, and so she called in and told her boss she'd been Car Jacked. Hey, sounds reasonable to me. Only problem was she made it up. Oops!

Ashland car-jacking fabricated
By Robert Plain
Ashland Daily Tidings
A car jacking in Ashland turned out to be "an extremely bad lie" on the part of Jessica Hutson, who reported the crime, Ashland police said.

"The car jacking did not happen," Deputy Chief Rich Walsh said.

Hutson told her boss and Ashland Police that on Aug. 8 at 5 p.m. a man "walked in front of her car, came to the driver's side door, pulled out a gun and told her to get out of the car," police said at the time.

But it turns out she made up the crime as an excuse to get out of going to work that day, according to police.

"It was an extremely bad lie and a poor choice on her part so we cited and released her," Walsh said. She was charged with filing a false report, a class C misdemeanor.

Hutson first reported the car jacking to her boss, not expecting her employer to report the incident to the police.

"Basically she was running out of excuses to not show up for work," said Walsh. "There was some suspicion [by her employer] that this may not be true."

The next day Hutson, a 20-year-old Southern Oregon University student, left her job at the Wet Seal in the Rogue Valley Mall.

Police suspected something was amiss with the report from the first day.

"We actually saw a lot of holes in her story from the beginning," Wash said. "About an hour after it occurred we started to put the pieces together. It didn't make a lot of sense."

Walsh said Detectives Bon Stewart and Randy Snow "did an outstanding job" uncovering Hutson's lie.

Surveillance tapes from the Albertson's parking lot proved to be Hutson's undoing. By reviewing the tapes, the detectives learned the woman's car was not parked where she said it was. The tape also showed her acting "calmly" after the crime.

"She wasn't agitated, she wasn't excited," Walsh said, noting that her purse wasn't stolen either.

The car was found, locked and parked legally, only a few blocks away.

"If it was a real car jacking, why would a criminal bother to lock the car," Walsh said. "You would think a car jacker would head towards the highway to get out of Dodge — or Ashland in this case."

Police were trying to contact Hutson to question her when she filed a harassment complaint against one of the officers on Thursday.

"She was trying to get the investigators off her back," Walsh said. "A good offense is sometimes a good defense."

But not this time. When Stewart interviewed Hutson for her harassment change, she confessed. "She made the story up," Wash said.

http://www.dailytidings.com/2006/0825/stories/0825_carjack.php

Hmm... Now if you ask me, wouldn't you think it would be a great idea to just fess up once you get a phone call from the cops asking about the story? Honestly, a simple "listen, I just really didn't want to go to work today, I didn't think this thing through, and I really didn't think my boss was going to call the police about this... "

I certainly suppose you could give her credit on the follow through! She definitely rode that lie to the bitter end!