A NEW documentary explores the sick allegations against David Richard Stewart after a McDonald’s worker was strip-searched in a strange phone call hoax.
Netflix’s docuseries Don’t Pick Up The Phone retells the haunting story of April 9, 2004, in Mount Washington, Kentucky.
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Louise Ogborn, an 18-year-old McDonald’s employee, was working the evening shift when she was called into the office by assistant manager Donna Summers.
Summers claimed to be on the phone with “Officer Scott” from the local police department, who said that someone matching Ogborn’s description had stolen a purse from a customer.
The employee was reportedly given a choice, submit to a search or be taken to the police station.
Ogborn was told to empty her pockets and surrender her car keys and cell phone first.
The caller then demanded that Summers have the employee remove her clothes, including her underwear, before having Summers call her fiancé, 43-year-old exterminator Walter Nix.
Nix was commanded to keep an eye on Ogborn until police arrived, which he followed, and he even forced her to perform a sexual act under the caller’s orders, according to ABC News.
After Ogborn suffered three hours of abuse captured on surveillance cameras in the restaurant, Summers realized that it was all a hoax.
Nix was arrested when officers arrived at the McDonald’s but the bizarre incident opened a door that went back more than 10 years.
Mount Washington Police Detective Buddy Stump found several similar incidents via a quick internet search and was able to trace the call to a supermarket payphone in Panama City, Florida.
He contacted the Panama City Police Department, which was already aware of similar incidents across the US.
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At another McDonald’s in Hinesville, Georgia, a caller had convinced a janitor to perform a cavity search on a 19-year-old cashier, according to ABC News.
In two other incidents, a Burger King manager strip-searched a 17-year-old female employee in Fargo, North Dakota, and a Taco Bell manager did the same to a customer in Phoenix.
While working with other agencies who were conducting their own investigations, authorities were able to find the exact Panama City Walmart where an AT&T calling card had been purchased to make the April 9, 2004, phone call in Kentucky.
The suspect, found by searching security footage, was seen wearing a Corrections Corporation of America uniform.
The warden for the private prison company identified the man as David Richard Stewart, one of his prison guards and a married father of five.
Officers searched Stewart’s trailer, finding guns, police paraphernalia, and training manuals.
An investigation found that Steward had attended a local police academy and volunteered as a deputy for a small police department in western Florida.
He was extradited to Kentucky in June 2004 on charges of solicitation of sodomy and impersonating a police officer.
Stewart, who was facing 15 years in prison if convicted, pleaded not guilty on all charges.
His trial started in the fall of 2006 with defense attorney Steve Romines arguing that Stewart was an innocent “fall guy.”
Stewart was found not guilty on October 31 due to a lack of concrete evidence that he was the one behind the phone calls.
He was acquitted on all charges.
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“There are a lot of questions unanswered in this case,” Romines said in an interview following the verdict.
“The only thing I knew for sure was my client didn’t do it.”
Despite the jury’s decision, prosecutor Mike Mann firmly believes that Stewart was guilty.
“I don’t think the evidence points to anyone but David Stewart,” he said at the time.
In the years since the trial, Stewart has kept himself out of the public eye.
Police say that the phone calls stopped after his arrest in 2004.
Nix, the ex-fiancé of manager Summers, was sentenced to five years in prison in March 2006.
He pleaded guilty to sexual abuse, sexual misconduct, and unlawful imprisonment and testified that he thought he was following an officer’s orders.
Summers broke things off with Nix and was fired.
She was sentenced to probation after being charged with unlawful imprisonment in connection with the horror ordeal.
McDonald’s said in a statement to ABC News: “We take this matter very seriously and through our training try very hard to warn employees about such schemes.
The company’s training manual reportedly includes a section that warns employees that “no legitimate law enforcement agency would ever ask you to conduct such a search.”
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