Despite being released over a decade ago, Craig Zobel’s 2012 film Compliance has garnered a newfound interest online because of the harrowing true story it is based on.
Starring Ann Dowd, Dreama Walker and Pat Healy, Compliance follows a group of employees working at a fictional fast-food restaurant who receive a phone call from a man pretending to be a police officer. After the impersonator claims that one of its employees has been accused of stealing money, the restaurant’s manager, Sandra (Dowd), confronts her employee, Becky (Walker). At the behest of the caller, Sandra escalates the situation to a strip search, which quickly descends into a whirlwind of abuse.
Streaming on both Peacock and Netflix, Compliance is a gripping watch based on the even more horrifying true story of a 2004 hoax call targeting a McDonald’s in Mount Washington, Ky, during which an 18-year-old employee was forced into a series of heinous acts that eventually led to multiple trials.
The true story even inspired a 2022 Netflix docuseries, Don’t Pick Up the Phone, which follows the investigation into a series of hoax calls that targeted fast food chains across the United States in the late ‘90s and early 2000s.
So, what is the true story behind Compliance? Here’s everything to know about the real-life case that inspired the 2012 flick.
What is Compliance based on?
Compliance is based on a real phone call scam that occurred in a Mount Washington McDonald’s. However, the names of the characters and some minor details were changed for the big screen.
While Compliance follows Sandra and Becky, the actual employees were named Donna Jean Summers and Louise Ogborn, respectively.
Summers, who was 51 at the time, was the assistant manager at the Mount Washington McDonald’s and held a similar role to Sandra’s in the film. She was engaged to Walter Wes Nix Jr., an exterminator and coach for youth baseball teams in the area.
Meanwhile, Ogborn was the principal victim of the phone call scam and was a high school senior who had just turned 18. A former girl scout, Ogborn had been working at the McDonald’s for four months and sought the position after her mother lost her job.
Other employees involved in the incident were assistant manager Kim Dockery, who was 40 at the time; Thomas Simms, a 58-year-old maintenance worker who helped out at the store; Jason Bradley, a 27-year-old cook; and manager Lisa Siddons, whom the caller insisted was on the other line while the phone call was taking place.
What happened in the Mount Washington McDonald’s case?
On April 9, 2004, a man identifying himself as “Officer Scott” phoned the Mount Washington McDonald’s and said an employee had been accused of stealing a purse.
“He gave me a description of the girl, and Louise was the one who fit it to the T,” Summers said in court documents, per The Courier Journal. The caller demanded she be searched at the store lest she be taken to jail. Ogborn was taken to a small office in the restaurant, and following the fake police officer’s instructions, she was ordered to remove one item of clothing at a time until fully nude.
“She was crying,” Dockery said, per The Courier Journal. “A little young girl standing there naked wasn’t a pretty sight.” At the caller’s insistence, Summers did not tell Dockery what was happening and later disclosed that “Officer Scott” said he had “McDonald’s corporate” on the line along with the store’s manager, Siddons.
Bradley was later summoned by Summers to watch over Ogborn. However, he refused to go along with the caller’s instructions when asked to remove an apron she had been given to cover herself up and describe what she looked like.
“I was scared because they were a higher authority to me,” Ogborn said in court documents. “I was scared for my own safety because I thought I was in trouble with the law.”
Summers said, “I did exactly what he said to do,” taking Ogborn’s clothes and putting them in a bag the caller stated would be picked up by police shortly. The police never showed despite their building being less than a mile away from the restaurant, but Summers later said in a deposition that whenever she “asked him questions,” the caller “always had an answer.”
The abuse only progressed after that point, with Summers’ fiancé Nix being called into the office. Nix later told police that the caller “told me what to do” for the next two hours, including describing Ogborn’s nude body to him, ordering her to do jumping jacks and forcing her to sit on his lap and kiss him (to supposedly smell her breath).
Ogborn later testified that whenever she refused to follow the caller’s twisted instructions, Nix was ordered to slap her. Eventually, the caller ordered Ogborn to perform oral sex on Nix. She recounted in her deposition that she began crying and said, “No! I didn’t do anything wrong. This is ridiculous.”
But she claimed that Nix told her he would have to hit her if she didn’t do it. The abuse continued until Summers finally returned to the office, and the caller ordered Nix to leave. After arriving back at his house, Nix’s best friend Terry Grigsby recalled receiving a phone call from him during which he said, “I have done something terribly bad,” per The Courier Journal.
The manipulative scam finally ended when Simms, the maintenance worker, refused to follow the caller’s instructions. “He said, ‘Something is not right about this,’ ” Summers recalled in her deposition, prompting her to realize the same.
Summers proceeded to call her manager Siddons, whom the caller said was on the other line, but discovered that she had been home sleeping during the abuse. The caller then finally hung up. “I knew then I had been had,” Summers said. “I lost it. I begged Louise for forgiveness. I was almost hysterical.”
The abuse was captured in its entirety on a surveillance camera. “I was bawling my eyes out and literally begging them to take me to the police station because I didn’t do anything wrong,” Ogborn said in a deposition later. “I couldn’t steal, I’m too honest. I stole a pencil one time from a teacher, and I gave it back.”
Was the Mount Washington hoax call an isolated incident?
The McDonald’s hoax call was not the first time an incident like it took place. The first report of a similar call came in 1994 from Ohio. A year later, another call came in from North Dakota, followed by one in Nevada, according to The Courier Journal.
By the end of 2000, there were more than a dozen reports of similar scam calls, and by the end of 2003, there were around 60. The caller typically pretended to be a police officer and mainly targeted stores and fast-food restaurants in small towns.
When the infamous call came in at the McDonald’s in Mount Washington in 2004, employees in at least 68 stores in 32 states had already been tricked, and McDonald’s was defending itself in at least four lawsuits connected to the hoaxes, per the publication.
Detectives working on the case eventually concluded that all the scam calls were probably coming from one person as the events and methods of operation were almost identical each time.
Despite the frequency of the scam calls, both Summers and Dockery said they had never heard of the hoaxes.
Who was behind the abusive call that inspired Compliance?
Detectives investigating the call identified their suspect as David R. Stewart, a then 38-year-old prison guard and Florida resident, according to The Courier Journal.
After learning that the scam call originated from Panama City, detective Buddy Stump on the Mount Washington Police Department was put in contact with fellow detective Detective Sgt. Vic Flaherty from West Bridgewater, Mass., who was also looking for the same guy.
Flaherty was investigating the hoax calls after a scam caller hit four Wendy’s in his local area, per the outlet. The two worked together to trace the calls and found that a calling card was purchased at a Walmart in Panama City on April 9, 2004, hours before it was used to phone Mount Washington McDonald’s.
The detectives also had two pieces of surveillance footage from different Walmarts in Panama City showing their purchaser. Flaherty flew to Florida in June 2004, and local officers immediately identified the jacket worn by the suspect in the surveillance footage as that of the uniform worn by officers working at Corrections Corp. of America, a private prison company, according to The Courier Journal. When Flaherty visited the facility, its warden immediately identified the man in the videos as Stewart.
The prison guard, a married father of five, had previously worked as a mall security guard, volunteered as an auxiliary sheriff’s deputy and drove a propane truck before taking the job at Corrections Corp. After 11 months of working in the facility, Stewart was fired in the week following his arrest.
Although Stewart denied making the calls when questioned by Flaherty, the detective wrote in a report that he started to “sweat profusely and shake uncontrollably,” per The Courier Journal. The police officer also wrote that Stewart asked, “Was anybody hurt?” and said, “Amen, it’s over.”
While Stewart stated that he hadn’t bought calling cards before, detectives found one during a search of his home, which had been used to phone nine establishments the previous year. They also found several job applications for police departments, police-inspired uniforms, guns and holsters.
Was David R. Stewart found guilty?
Stump arrested Stewart in Panama City on June 30, 2004. He was eventually extradited to Kentucky, where he faced charges of impersonating a police officer, solicitation of sodomy and solicitation of sex abuse in the Mount Washington McDonald’s incident, according to The Courier Journal. He pleaded not guilty to the charges.
Stewart’s trial lasted for about a week in October 2006, during which prosecutors alleged that he made the phone call to the Mount Washington McDonald’s and induced a strip search of Ogborn, NBC News reported.
Stewart was acquitted of all charges. However, his defense attorney and the prosecution believed that a lack of direct evidence affected the jury’s decision. Namely, there were no witnesses and no voice recording of the hoax call to compare to Stewart’s speech.
“There are a lot of questions unanswered in this case,” Stewart’s attorney, Steve Romines, said per NBC News. “The only thing I knew for sure was my client didn’t do it.”
Police would later claim that after Stewart’s arrest, the scam calls stopped.
Where are the real people who inspired Compliance now?
In the aftermath of the hoax call, Summers ended her engagement with Nix and was fired from McDonald’s for violating several company policies, including allowing nonemployees to enter the restaurant’s office, according to The Courier Journal. She entered an Alford guilty plea in February 2006 to a misdemeanor charge of unlawful imprisonment and was placed on probation, per NBC News.
Meanwhile, Nix pleaded guilty to sexual abuse, sexual misconduct and unlawful imprisonment that same month and was sentenced to five years in prison in March 2006.
Ogborn sought mental healthcare after the horrific ordeal. Her therapist, Jean Campbell, said in a court deposition that Ogborn began experiencing panic attacks, insomnia and nightmares about a “guy attacking” her after the assault, per The Courier Journal.
Three years after the call, Ogborn sued McDonald’s for $200 million, claiming they knew the dangers of hoax calls as they had received similar calls since 1994 but failed to implement appropriate measures to protect their employees. The civil trial ended in October 2007, with Ogborn awarded $5 million in punitive damages and $1.1 million in compensatory damages and expenses.
Summers also sued McDonald’s after the incident and was initially awarded $1 million in punitive damages and $100,000 in compensatory damages. However, after a 2009 appeals court, her punitive award was reduced to $400,000.
If you or someone you know has been a victim of sexual abuse, text “STRENGTH” to the Crisis Text Line at 741-741 to be connected to a certified crisis counselor.
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