The Infamous Phone Scammer Who Tricked People Into Lewd Acts

From 1992 to 2004, employees at restaurants across 32 states were conned into performing illegal strip-searches, among other sexual acts, by a phone caller who claimed to be “the police.”

By Jessie Schiewe

Louise Ogborn was someone you’d describe as a “good girl.” 

An 18-year-old high school senior with less than a month of classes before graduation, she was a regular churchgoer and a former Girl Scout. She was also one of the newest employees at the McDonald’s in her hometown of Mount Washington, Kentucky. She’d taken the $6.35-an-hour position after her mom had lost her own job. 

Yet on the night of April 9, 2004, four months into her stint at the McDonald’s, Ogborn found herself in a room she did not often go in. Instead of working the front counter as normal, she was in the fast-food chain’s small back office. She was completely naked. 

Later, during a court deposition, Ogborn would describe herself as being “too honest,” the Louisville Courier Journal reported. She said she once stole a pencil from a teacher and then gave it back. 

But on that night in 2004, the teenager’s integrity was called into question when a man identifying himself as a police officer claimed she was a thief. 

“Officer Scott” rang the McDonald’s sometime around 4 p.m. and was connected with the store’s assistant manager, to Donna Jean Summers.

He told her that Ogborn had stolen a woman’s purse. He also claimed she was a drug dealer and said that at that very moment, police were searching the 18-year-old’s home. 

The reason for Officer Scott’s phone call was to get help investigating Ogborn’s crimes. He told the 51-year-old assistant manager she had the choice of strip-searching the employee then and there at the restaurant, or calling police to arrest her and take her to jail where she would then be strip-searched. 

Believing him, Summers opted for the first option, which, at the time, was seemingly the easiest. Officer Scott thanked her for her cooperation. 

He then instructed Summers to follow his orders and do exactly as he said. 

He started with telling her to remove Ogborn’s clothing — one item at a time. Summers obeyed. When the caller told her to place the clothing in a bag and then remove them from the room for police to pick up, she did that, too. Summers also confiscated the girl’s car keys per Officer Scott’s orders.

“I did exactly what he said to do,” Summers later said. “When I asked him questions about why, he always had an answer.”  

After detaining Ogborn for more than an hour, Summers told the officer that she had to return to the counter and couldn’t continue watching the young girl. Officer Scott responded by telling her to call her fiancee and have him watch the so-called criminal so that she could resume her work. Again, Summers did as she was told.

At around 6 p.m., Walter Wes Nix Jr. arrived at the McDonald’s to help his betrothed out with “a situation” she said she was having. Summers led him to the back office and handed him the phone, before leaving the room to work the front counter. 

The man on the line told Nix he was a detective and repeated his story about Ogborn’s crimes. Convinced he was speaking with a real officer of the law, the father of two trusted the voice on the phone. He spent the next two hours following the caller’s instructions. 

Between 1992 and 2004, a scam phone caller successfully convinced more than 70 employees at restaurants and grocery stores across the country into conducting lewd and demeaning acts on fellow employees and even customers. 

The methods were always the same. The caller would identify himself as a police officer investigating a crime, and would describe the suspect, who was often someone on the staff, in precise detail. He’d then instruct the store’s manager or assistant manager to follow his commands by performing a range of bizarre acts on behalf of “the police.” 

Rural areas and workplaces that tend to hire young and inexperienced employees were most often the targets. More often than not that meant fast-food restaurants, with the scammer pulling his cons on more than a dozen restaurant different chains across 32 states in the 12 years he was active. 

By the end of 2000, the Louisville Courier Journal counted around a dozen reported phone scam cases. By the end of 2003, that number had grown to 60. 

With each passing year, the cons became more frequent. The things the caller instructed people to do also became increasingly more sadistic. 

For example: 

• On January 20, 1999, a manager at a Burger King in Fargo, North Dakota, listened when a police officer on the phone told him to strip-search a 17-year-old employee and slap her on the butt. When the victim began crying, the caller chided her. “Pretend like it doesn’t bother you,” he reportedly said, adding that it was her responsibility to make the manager not “feel so bad” for what he was being instructed to do. 

• On November 30, 2000, a female manager at a McDonald’s in Leitchfield, Kentucky, obeyed when a police officer called the restaurant and told her to undress in front of a customer. The officer claimed the customer was a “suspected sex offender” and that her role was to serve as bait so that undercover police officers could arrest him. 

• In February 2003, at a McDonald’s in Hinesville, Georgia, a female manager took a 19-year-old female employee into the women’s bathroom and strip-searched her at the behest of a police officer on the phone. The restaurant’s 55-year-old janitor was also brought into the bathroom to conduct a body cavity search of the woman. The officer told him to put his fingers into her vagina to locate any “hidden drugs.” 

• In May 2004, a 16-year-old female manager at a Sonic restaurant in Joplin, Missouri, obeyed when a police officer called and told her to conduct a strip-search on the 21-year-old male cook. Then he told her to perform oral sex on the cook. 

It can seem hard to sympathize with the scammer’s victims who, one might argue, were using bad judgement and too little common sense. In fact, in the early years of the crimes, restaurant industry officials didn’t even believe the victims after the incidents happened. The scenarios they were describing were simply too weird and too paper-thin to seem credible. 

But the scam caller was good at what he did. Employees heeded his orders because he was that convincing, that persuasive. He knew law enforcement lingo, would name-drop regional managers and local police officers, and always had exact descriptions of the people he was accusing, down to their weight and hair color. 

“I didn’t want to be doing it. But it was like he was watching me,” said a manager at a Hardee’s in Rapid City, South Dakota, who was instructed to strip-search an employee in June 2003.  

Some of the strip-search scams weren’t even reported to police — that’s how embarrassed the companies were of the crimes committed by their employees. 

As the frequency of pranks inflated, fast-food restaurants began issuing warnings to their employees alerting them of the hoax calls. Not only were the strip-search phone scams bad for publicity, but victims had started suing their places of work for the abuse they’d been subjected to while on the job. By 2004, at least 17 McDonald’s stores across the nation had been conned, resulting in at least four lawsuits against the restaurant company. 

The problem was the warning memos companies were sending out were only reaching the owners and operators, not the restaurant staff themselves. 

And even on the rare occasions when they did trickle down to employees, they didn’t make a big enough splash to be remembered. 

That was the excuse an assistant manager at an Applebee’s in Davenport, Iowa, used after subjecting a waitress to a 90-minute strip-search, per the orders of a caller who claimed to be a “regional manager.” Yes, he’d read the memo a month earlier, but, as he later told the police, it slipped his mind when the call came in. 

As for the McDonald’s in Mount Washington, Kentucky, none of the employees said they’d been warned of the hoaxes before they were conned on that fateful night in 2004. Neither Summers or Ogborn, nor the store’s manager or regional area manager claimed to have heard a thing about the calls. 

When Nix arrived to take over the role of watching Ogborn, things escalated. 

Per Officer Scott’s orders, Ogborn was threatened with losing her job and other potential punishments if she didn’t obey the orders Nix told her to follow. 

Here’s a snippet of what went down, as reported by the Louisville Courier Journal:

“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.”

The crux of the abuse happened about 2 ½ hours into the ordeal. Officer Scott told Ogborn to kneel on the brick floor in front of Nix and unbuckle his pants. The caller wanted her to give him oral sex. 

Ogborn refused, yelling “No!” and calling the instruction “ridiculous.” 

But, as she later recounted in her deposition, Nix said he would hit her if she didn’t follow the instructions. She eventually relented and obeyed the caller’s commands.

Ogborn’s night of terror finally came to an end thanks to the store’s 58-year-old maintenance man. 

Thomas Simms had been off-work, merely stopping into the restaurant for dessert and a coffee, when Summers called him into the office and handed him the phone. Officer Scott told Simms he would be replacing Nix; that it was turn to watch over the still-naked Ogborn. 

Simms was a high school drop-out who never made it past the ninth grade. Yet even though Summers told him that “corporate” had approved the events of that night, he quickly realized that something wasn’t right. Simms ignored the caller’s demands, refusing to play the prankster’s sick game. 

His reaction, in turn, triggered doubts in Summers, leading her to start questioning the caller’s equivocal demands 

Earlier that night, he had told her the store’s manager was listening on the other line. Summers decided to give the woman a call and discovered that she’d been home, sleeping, the whole time. 

“I knew then I had been had,” Summers said. “I lost it.” 

She confronted the caller. He hung up. 

The events at the Mount Washington McDonald’s catapulted law enforcement’s efforts to track down the scammer behind the hoax calls. 

A detective in Massachusetts — who began investigating the crimes after four Wendy’s in Boston were scammed on one night in February 2004 — traced one of the calling cards to a Wal-Mart in Panama City, Florida. 

The store’s surveillance cameras, which were luckily aimed at the registers, had captured footage of the man who had bought it. He was white, about 35 to 40 years old, with slicked-back black hair, wearing glasses and a jacket with small white lettering. Further investigation revealed that the jacket was actually a uniform; one worn by corrections officers from a private prison company based in Panama City. 

A photo of the store’s footage was shown to one of the wardens who recognized the man. He was a guard on the swing shift who had joined the company 11 months earlier. His name was David Richard Stewart. 

A father of five, married for 11 years, Stewart was 38-years-old, with a background working as a mall security guard and a driver of propane trucks. 

When police raided his house — a $37,900 mobile home situated on a dirt road 20 miles outside of Panama City — they found a calling card that had been used to call nine restaurants, all of which claimed to have been duped by a scam caller in the past year. 

Police also found copious law enforcement-related items, including hundreds of police magazines, uniforms that resembled those worn by police, guns, holsters, and dozens of applications for police department jobs. Clearly Stewart either wanted to be a cop, or seem like one. 

Still, after he was arrested and questioned on June 30, 2004, Stewart denied any involvement with the phone scams. He even denied buying calling cards, despite police finding evidence to the contrary. 

He was eventually brought to Kentucky and tried in the Bullitt Circuit Court on charges of impersonating a police officer and solicitation of sodomy, along with soliciting sex abuse and committing unlawful imprisonment.

Stewart’s lawyer argued that he was not clever enough to have pulled off the cons.

"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," his lawyer said in an interview.

If convicted, Stewart faced up to 15 years in prison. He pleaded not guilty.

The case came to a close on Halloween in 2006.

The jury found Stewart not guilty. He was acquitted of all charges. 

The scammer’s victims weren’t as lucky.

Back at the Mount Washington McDonald’s, assistant manager Summers was first suspended, then fired. The reason? She broke company rules prohibiting strip-searches and allowed non-employees into the back office. 

Then, a couple of weeks later, Summers was charged with unlawful imprisonment. She received one year of probation. She also broke off her engagement with Nix after watching the video surveillance of what he made Ogborn do. Her lawyer said she never spoke to him again after that night. 

Before the events of April 9, 2004, Nix had been a youth basketball coach who was active at his church. His friends described him as a “community guy” and “a great role model for kids,” as well as someone who’d probably never “had a ticket.” 

None of that, however, mattered in court. Nix was indicted by a jury on charges of sodomy and assault. He received a five-year prison sentence. 

As for Ogborn, she never returned to the Mount Washington McDonald’s after that night. She suffered from PTSD and began experiencing panic attacks, insomnia, and nightmares. A therapist prescribed her four different types of antidepressants before she found one that helped. 

With just one month left, Ogborn finished out the school year, graduating from Spencer County High School that May. But she never enrolled in college as was previously planned and she abandoned her previous ambition to study pre-med. 

Ogborn’s social life also took a hit. She claimed to now have trust issues and that it was difficult for her to make and maintain friendships. She also said she “felt dirty,” constantly.

Three years after the event, Ogborn sued McDonald’s for $200 million. She argued the company had failed to protect her during the ordeal despite higher-ups being well aware of the ongoing phone scams. 

In 2010, she settled with them for $1.1 million. 

In the wake of the events of April 9, 2004, McDonald’s has also made changes, namely by revising its manager-training program. Now, new managers are warned of the potential for scam phone callers. They’re also more thoroughly versed in employees’ rights and how best to protect them. 

The aftermath of the strip-search phone scams also inspired a number of creative projects by the media. A 2008 episode of Law & Order: Special Victims Unit depicted the crimes, with the actor-comedian Robin Williams playing the role of the caller. Compliance, a thriller feature film based on the events, made appearances at festivals like Sundance and South By Southwest in 2012. At least one play and one short film have also re-told the infamous tale. 

As for the strip-search phone calls themselves, those haven’t happened again. Ever since Stewart’s arrest in 2004, they’ve stopped. 

JESSIE SCHIEWE IS THE EDITOR OF OK WHATEVER. SHE BELIEVES IN MERMAIDS AND THRIFT SHOPS FOR EXERCISE.

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