Woman admits she lied about abduction, rape

By Meg Olson

The woman who had sheriff’s deputies scouring the county for a man she said raped and abducted her admitted Friday she made the whole thing up so she wouldn’t have to explain where she spent a longer than expected weekend.

The Whatcom County Sheriff’s Office (WCSO) is not releasing the name of the 34-year-old Deming woman until prosecutors decide if she will be charged. She could face up to 365 days in jail and a fine for making a false report, one that ate up days worth of detectives’ and deputies’ time as they followed up on the woman’s story and over 100 tips that came in after details of the purported attack were publicized.

On August 6, WCSO released a composite sketch of a man and a description of the vehicle the woman said he forced her into at gunpoint two days earlier. She claimed the man had held her captive and repeatedly sexually assaulted her until she had escaped from him on Pipeline Road near Blaine and ran to a residence for help.

WCSO detective Beth Larson said the woman had a credible story, but her behavior made them suspicious. “We didn’t have a chance to really speak with her until Thursday. She was avoiding and not showing up for interviews, calling and saying she had other things to do,” she said. “When she came in on Thursday she didn’t want to talk and left the interview. Her story was falling apart.” After a Friday phone conversation with detectives in which the woman admitted some parts of the story weren’t as she had described them, Larson said detectives drove to her home. “She came clean on the whole thing,” Larson said.

Larson said the woman admitted making up the story of the attack to explain a weekend hiatus away from home. “She had been away without telling anyone and didn’t want to lose her job,” she said..

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