Carlee Russell, the 25-year-old nursing student who went missing from the side of an Alabama highway before returning home on foot two days later, told the Hoover Police Department that she’d been kidnapped and had fought for her life before managing to escape. However, authorities revealed in a press conference on Wednesday that her story simply didn’t add up. Chief Nicholas Derzis told reporters that not only was there no indication that anyone had abducted her, but in fact, Carlee Russell had made a rookie mistake by Googling things like the age limit for Amber Alerts and the movie “Taken.”
If you’re not familiar with “Taken,” the classic Liam Neeson action flick is all about a young woman who gets abducted and her father’s fight to save her from her kidnappers. A social media post from Russell shared online revealed that “Taken 2” was her favorite movie. Given that the Google searches were made within literally hours of her going missing, it’s a bit more than a coincidence, don’t you think?
“We want to talk in facts and I do think it’s highly, highly unusual to the day that someone gets kidnapped that several — seven hours or eight hours before that — that they’re searching the internet, Googling the movie ‘Taken’ about an abduction. I find that very, very strange,” Derzis said.
But if that wasn’t enough to suggest that Russell made the whole thing up, there’s the fact that she was caught on surveillance cameras stealing a robe and some toilet paper from her workplace. She then headed to Target to pick up snacks including Cheez-Its — oddly enough, she later claimed that an unknown female who was with her male abductor fed her Cheez-Its while playing with her hair in a home the following day. She also took the snacks with her when she left her vehicle to go and see the “toddler” she swore was walking along the edge of the highway.
“She stated when she got out of her vehicle to check on the child a man came out of the trees and mumbled that he was checking on the baby. She claimed that the man then picked her up and she screamed,” Derzis revealed of the alleged kidnapping. She then claims she was forced to climb over a fence before being loaded into an 18-wheeler, where she was with the aforementioned woman and a child. She said that she was blindfolded but not bound as the suspect didn’t want to leave marks on her. At one point, she claims to have escaped before being re-captured and taken to a house where the woman fed her Cheez-Its, played with her hair, and painted her toenails. Sounds like a fun girls’ night!
The details of this case are still continuing to be revealed, and Carlee Russell has yet to make a public statement about her love of “Taken” or the fact that it appears she really wasn’t. If it’s confirmed that this was all one big hoax, as seems to be the case, she could face serious charges for wasting authorities’ time and resources.
