The Fake Police Call That Led to an Assault at McDonald’s

On April 9, 2004, a man phoned a McDonald’s in Mount Washington, Kentucky, claiming to be a police officer. A caller the staff could not see persuaded people inside the restaurant to follow his instructions. An employee, Louise Ogborn, was detained, subjected to a strip search and sexually assaulted.

The caller had a voice on the telephone and the authority of the title he claimed. He used both to direct what happened in a room he never entered.

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How the call took hold

The caller claimed that a young employee had stolen from a customer. Assistant manager Donna Summers called 18-year-old Ogborn into the office and followed the caller’s instructions. The Kentucky Court of Appeals later described how the caller continued giving orders as other people became involved.

The call was presented as urgent police business. The caller supplied a story and an apparent reason for every next step. Each step made it harder for the people in the office to pause and reconsider the premise they had accepted at the start.

Why a title can change the way we listen

People learn to give certain roles the benefit of the doubt. A police officer’s request can carry weight even when the person issuing it has supplied no way to verify who they are.

In Stanley Milgram’s 1963 obedience study, volunteers were prompted to continue administering what they believed were increasingly severe shocks. The shocks were simulated. In the reported experiment, 26 of 40 participants continued to the highest setting, while the rest stopped earlier. It is one example of the pressure an apparent authority can exert.

In Mount Washington, Summers’s fiancé, Walter Nix, came to the restaurant and sexually assaulted Ogborn. The caller’s influence helps explain how the situation was maintained. Each person who acted still made choices that mattered.

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What the caller could do at a distance

The caller had no badge to show and never entered the restaurant. The violence happened inside the office, while the person giving the orders maintained the fiction that he could direct what others did there.

The court record documents earlier hoax calls to McDonald’s restaurants. It also describes the company’s awareness of that pattern and the question of what employees had been told about it.

Compliance on screen

Craig Zobel’s 2012 film Compliance dramatizes a case like this one. Much of its tension comes from watching how long a person can keep issuing instructions on a telephone while the people within reach of the victim continue to obey.

The film gives us time to hear an instruction that should have ended the call. Then it shows how readily one instruction can become the reason to follow the next.

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The moment to check

The case stays disturbing because the instructions came through such a familiar channel. A telephone in a workplace is an ordinary thing. So is wanting to be helpful to someone who sounds like they are carrying out a duty.

Phone scams still use a role that people recognize to make a demand sound routine or urgent. The recognition can come long before there is proof that the person holds the role.

That leaves a question for anybody listening to an unexpected instruction.

What would you need to verify before acting on what this person just told you?

A real title can be checked independently. The time it takes to stop and make that check can change what happens next.