Girl threatened in lewd call, police say

Published 11:18 pm Friday, September 28, 2007

MUKILTEO — A woman was tricked to talk dirty with a man who threatened to molest her kidnapped daughter if the mother didn’t go along with his demands for phone sex.

The woman panicked once the man said he had kidnapped her daughter, Mukilteo Police Chief Mike Murphy said. The 13-year-old girl was safe in school the whole time.

“Once someone says they’ve got your child, everything else goes out the window,” Murphy said. “That’s what makes it so terrible.”

Detectives are investigating and attempting to track down who made the call. No suspect has been identified and no one has been arrested.

The woman told police the man called her at work on Thursday and said he had her daughter.

She complied with his demand for phone sex. Afterward, she insisted that he let her speak with her daughter. The man refused and hung up.

The woman learned that her daughter was safe only after the man ended the call and she was able to reach someone at the school. Staff verified that the teen was in class. Snohomish County sheriff’s deputies went to the school and also checked on the girl. She was taken home by her father.

The call doesn’t seem to be a prank, police said.

“It appears to be a sexually motivated phone call,” Mukilteo police detective Lance Smith said. “We want to find out where it came from.”

Mukilteo police have not received any reports of similar calls, Murphy said.

It appears the woman likely was selected at random, he said. She told police she didn’t recognize the caller’s voice. It’s unknown how the man knew the woman had a daughter.

The man kept the woman on the phone for about 15 minutes.

Obscene phone calls aren’t anything new. Men and women regularly tell police about receiving calls from strangers who breathe heavily into the receiver or talk about a sexual fantasy. People often hang up and many never report the incident, Murphy said.

Police and victim advocates said Thursday’s call goes beyond a typical obscene phone call.

The caller used fear to victimize the woman, said Jenny Wieland Ward, executive director of Families and Friends of Violent Crime Victims.

“The ruse of having someone’s child goes beyond terror,” she said. “You’d only be thinking about what you can do to get your child back.”

People have been bombarded with the highly publicized stories of children being kidnapped, sexually assaulted and murdered in this community and across the country, Wieland Ward said. The possibility of someone harming a child is an unfortunate fear that faces parents, she said.

That trauma could be similar to what a sexual assault victim would encounter, said Dusty Olson, a spokeswoman for Providence Intervention Center for Assault and Abuse.

“The reality is in a sexual assault the trauma comes from fear and loss of control,” she said. “There doesn’t have to be a physical assault to have that.”

The woman would have feared for her daughter and may have felt like she couldn’t do anything else to help her.

“That’s going to have the traumatization impact that any sexual assault would,” Olson said. “I would consider that person a danger.”

Reporter Diana Hefley: 425-339-3463 or hefley@heraldnet.com.