According to police, a woman from North Carolina was detained on Monday after allegedly staging her own murder.
According to a Facebook post by the Franklin Police Department, Margaret Frances Elizabeth Sweeney, commonly known as Maggie, 37, reportedly “made anonymous third-party false reports” about being murdered to a friend and the Department of Social Services last Friday.
Sweeney allegedly used an app to hide her identify and texted the friend and DSS agent alleging she had been killed with a tire iron, according to the arrest warrant obtained by NBC News.
According to a Facebook post that criticized Sweeney’s claimed behavior for allegedly diverting police attention from other crimes, officers discovered Sweeney on Saturday in a nearby town and detained her two days later.
According to the police department, Sweeney’s actions cost our agency and other departments numerous hours of work that could have been employed elsewhere.
According to the arrest warrant, officers searched for Sweeney and looked into the matter for a total of 75 hours.
Sweeney was detained on suspicion of making a fake complaint to a police station, making a false report of a death or serious injury by telephone, and impeding law enforcement officials, according to the police.
Chief Devin Holland of the Franklin Police Department said that Sweeney was released from custody on a written commitment to appear in court on September 7 and that she was not represented by an attorney at the time of her arrest.
Holland claimed that a local park is where Sweeney was discovered.
On Wednesday morning, she could not be reached right away.
It was not immediately known how long she might spend in jail if found guilty, if she had ever been convicted before, or whether a lawyer was now advocating for her.
180 miles to the west of Charlotte is the town of Franklin.
The incident occurs a month after Carlee Russell, 25, an Alabama nursing student, was charged with two crimes after she admitted to lying about being kidnapped: false reporting to law enforcement officials and fraudulently reporting an occurrence.
The charges carried a $1,000 each bond, according to the Hoover Police Chief, and if Russell were found guilty, he could spend up to a year in jail and pay a $6,000 fine.
