Wife of police officer staged own rape to frame ex lover
The wife of a US law-enforcement officer is facing more than 20 years in jail for a plot to stage her own rape and frame her husband’s former girlfriend as the organiser of the crime.
Angela Diaz, 31, called police to her home in Southern California last June where they found her in tears with her shirt torn and redness on her neck and breasts. She told them that a man had just tried to rape her in the garage.
Investigators traced the alleged assault to a recently posted advert on Craigslist, the classified listings website, in which a woman identifying herself as Diaz invited men to her home to participate in ‘‘rape fantasy encounters’’. She supplied photographs of herself and details of her daily routine and told some contacts that she wanted them to have ‘‘forcible sexual intercourse with her even if she screamed or resisted’’, prosecutors said.
She had married Ian Diaz in February 2016. Detectives quickly followed the electronic trail back to his former fiancee, Michelle Hadley, who they learnt had allegedly sent death threats to Diaz and her unborn child.
Ms Hadley was arrested the same day, bailed and then rearrested three weeks later after a 17-year-old boy appeared in Diaz’s courtyard in response to a fresh Craigslist advert.
Ms Hadley was charged with a range of offences including stalking, criminal threats and attempted rape and spent 88 days in custody facing a possible life sentence. She was released in October after the evidence against her began to crumble.
This week prosecutors fully exonerated Ms Hadley, 30, saying that she had been the innocent victim of a diabolical scheme meticulously planned and carried out by Diaz.
‘‘When a person who has committed a crime gets arrested and charged, that’s a bad day,’’ Tony Rackauckas, the Orange County district attorney, said. ‘‘But when someone who’s innocent gets arrested and charged with a crime, it’s not just a bad day, it’s a nightmare.’’
The motive for the crime remained unclear but Mr Rackauckas speculated that it involved a love triangle and Diaz wanting ‘‘to put the dagger into the older relationship’’.
On Monday prosecutors in Fullerton, California, officially dropped all charges against Ms Hadley, whose lawyer described her as a ‘‘wide-eyed, very bubbly’’ young woman with a life’’.
Outside the court she said that although the ordeal had been ‘‘probably the most traumatic experience of my life’’, she still hoped to graduate soon: ‘‘Nothing has ever stopped me before.’’
Diaz was arrested last week in Phoenix, Arizona. She faces up to 12 years and eight months in state prison and an additional 11 years in county jail.
Richard Zimmer, the Orange County assistant district attorney, said that while she gave every appearance of being ‘‘an upper middle-class professional’’, his ‘‘lust for investigation had exposed her as a serial con artist. She used specialised software to send threatening emails to herself, making it appear that they had come from Ms Hadley. It took detectives months of work to discover that the messages had actually come from her home, her mobile phone and her father’s home in Arizona.
Diaz is also accused of faking a pregnancy and cervical cancer, forging a cheque and doctors’ notes and posing as a lawyer and two of her husband’s former girlfriends. There was no evidence linking her husband to the case, Mr Zimmer added.