The Prank
David Richard Stewart and the McDonald's strip-search hoax calls

“The Prank” is PRETEND’s coverage of the “strip search phone call scam,” a string of hoax calls made to fast-food and retail stores across the United States from the mid-1990s through 2004. Callers impersonating police officers convinced store managers to detain employees and, in the most notorious case, to strip-search them. The best-documented incident happened in April 2004 at a McDonald’s in Mount Washington, Kentucky, where 18-year-old employee Louise Ogborn was strip-searched and sexually assaulted by her manager’s fiancé, Walter Nix, on the caller’s instructions.

Investigators identified David Richard Stewart, a security guard from Florida, as their prime suspect. He was arrested and tried on charges including impersonating a police officer and soliciting sexual abuse. No witness could identify Stewart’s voice as the caller’s, and in 2006 a jury found him not guilty on all counts. He was never convicted in connection with any of the roughly 70 similar calls investigators suspected him of making, though the calls stopped after his 2004 arrest.

Javier Leiva first covered the case on PRETEND in October 2019. In September 2021, production company WAG Entertainment contacted Leiva after seeing his reporting and brought him on to help piece the story together for Netflix’s 2022 docuseries Don’t Pick Up the Phone, for which he was interviewed on camera for roughly five hours (Raleigh Magazine).