Word: seiler
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CHARGED. AUDREY SEILER, 20, with two misdemeanor counts of lying to police, after her apparent abduction turned out to be a hoax; in Madison, Wis. The University of Wisconsin sophomore, who was missing for five days, says she faked her own kidnapping to get more attention from her boyfriend...
...apparent abduction shook the city: citizens became bloodhounds, dorms became prayer centers, and Madison itself was on edge. On March 31, Seiler was found in a marsh a couple of miles from campus after a woman spotted her and called police. Seiler was bruised and suffering mildly from exposure but otherwise unharmed. Police at first accelerated the hunt for a perpetrator. At a nearby cancer clinic, about 50 employees and five cancer patients were herded into a room as officers swarmed through the building looking for a suspect. "People had radiation treatments aborted because you can't run the machines...
...within hours the tale began to crumble. The more questions police asked, the less they believed Seiler's account. Investigators now say she may have planned her "abduction." Seiler initially claimed to have been kidnapped near her apartment, police say, then in Abduction Story 2.0 changed the location to another part of town. Police also reviewed a store videotape that showed her a few weeks earlier buying rope, duct tape, cough medicine and a knife--the very items she said her abductor had used to kidnap her. An analysis of Internet searches on her computer found information about woodsy areas...
...Seiler did fake her abduction, she wouldn't be the first. But false criminal reports that aren't motivated by money or revenge are rare, according to forensic psychiatrist Park Dietz, who knows of roughly 50 U.S. cases in the past 20 years. When they do happen, they tend to make headlines. In 1988, Dietz testified in the grand jury investigation of Tawana Brawley, a black woman who claimed to have been abducted and raped by a gang of white men in upstate New York. The grand jury found her claims to be untrue. Dietz coined the term factitious victimization...
...clear what motivated Seiler. Police chief Wray said Seiler "stated that she just wanted to--quote, unquote--be alone." If so, she found a highly public way of expressing her desire for solitude. (Whether she will be charged with a crime or asked to repay the cost of the manhunt isn't yet known.) Her dean offered sympathy. "While we do not condone the behavior attributed to Audrey ... we fully understand that people communicate their need for help in many different ways," Luoluo Hong said in a statement. Whatever her reasons, one question Seiler has raised is whether folks will...