Ashland car-jacking fabricated

A car jacking in Ashland turned out to be "an extremely bad lie" on the part of Jessica Hutson, who reported the crime, Ashland police said.

"The car jacking did not happen," Deputy Chief Rich Walsh said.

Hutson told her boss and Ashland Police that on Aug. 8 at 5 p.m. a man "walked in front of her car, came to the driver's side door, pulled out a gun and told her to get out of the car," police said at the time.

But it turns out she made up the crime as an excuse to get out of going to work that day, according to police.

"It was an extremely bad lie and a poor choice on her part so we cited and released her," Walsh said. She was charged with filing a false report, a class C misdemeanor.

Hutson first reported the car jacking to her boss, not expecting her employer to report the incident to the police.

"Basically she was running out of excuses to not show up for work," said Walsh. "There was some suspicion [by her employer] that this may not be true."

The next day Hutson, a 20-year-old Southern Oregon University student, left her job at the Wet Seal in the Rogue Valley Mall.

Police suspected something was amiss with the report from the first day.

"We actually saw a lot of holes in her story from the beginning," Wash said. "About an hour after it occurred we started to put the pieces together. It didn't make a lot of sense."

Walsh said Detectives Bon Stewart and Randy Snow "did an outstanding job" uncovering Hutson's lie.

Surveillance tapes from the Albertson's parking lot proved to be Hutson's undoing. By reviewing the tapes, the detectives learned the woman's car was not parked where she said it was. The tape also showed her acting "calmly" after the crime.

"She wasn't agitated, she wasn't excited," Walsh said, noting that her purse wasn't stolen either.

The car was found, locked and parked legally, only a few blocks away.

"If it was a real car jacking, why would a criminal bother to lock the car," Walsh said. "You would think a car jacker would head towards the highway to get out of Dodge — or Ashland in this case."

Police were trying to contact Hutson to question her when she filed a harassment complaint against one of the officers on Thursday.

"She was trying to get the investigators off her back," Walsh said. "A good offense is sometimes a good defense."

But not this time. When Stewart interviewed Hutson for her harassment change, she confessed. "She made the story up," Wash said.

Staff writer Robert Plain can be reached at 482-3456 x. 226 or bplain@dailytidings.com