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Trunk call probably was hoax A while back we read in the paper and heard on the news of a woman supposedly abducted and locked in the trunk of a car in the Albany area. It was reported she had been knifed and was making calls from her cell phone to 911. I have heard nothing more about this episode and as intense and bizarre as it sounded, we wonder what ever finally happened. -- Terry R., Medford The woman's strange tale had all the makings of a great story, Terry, except one. It very likely wasn't true. When her calls to emergency dispatchers began coming in the night of Aug. 4, they got the attention not only of Albany police but of officers throughout the area, said Marilyn Smith, a police spokeswoman. "They had every police agency in the valley" looking for the car the woman said she was trapped in, a blue 1994 Dodge Colt with yellow license plates. Smith said it was the license-plate description that first made her wonder about the calls. Oregon phased out yellow plates years before. But worry grew as the calls kept coming over the next dozen or so hours. First, the woman said she was in a car in an Albany neighborhood near a school and that she'd been stabbed in the abdomen. Police went there and found nothing. Several more calls came in. The woman said she had been kidnapped by two men who forced her into the blue car, and that she was calling from the back seat. Then she said they'd put her in the trunk and were driving around. Then she said she thought the car was on a gravel road. Then, for hours, nothing. Then she was on the phone again, saying she was out of the trunk -- in a remote area a dozen miles from Albany. It was the last police heard. But after the calls stopped, several interesting facts came to light: Investigators learned that the calls all had been handled through one cellular receiving tower. In other words, the woman had been within a mile of the tower when each of the calls was made. She called from a stolen cell phone. The number was out of service, but the phone worked because 911 calls can be made from out-of-service phones. Finally, police realized that the phone itself was fairly old, a model whose battery would need frequent recharging. "That's hard to do from the trunk of a car," Smith said. Police still are investigating the calls, Smith said, but have taken a dim view of the woman's claims. Was it all a hoax? "Police didn't want to use that word," Smith said, "but essentially, yes." (Send your questions to "Since You Asked," Mail Tribune Newsroom, P.O. Box 1108, Medford, OR 97501; or by fax to (541) 776-4376; or by e-mail to: [email protected] Please include your name, address and phone number for verification.) Today's News Index Mail Tribune Copyright � The Mail Tribune 1999, Medford, Oregon USA