The good folks at Tuttle Crossing Mall in Columbus, Ohio breathed a sigh of relief towards the end of April 1998 when phone calls about the horror story then circulating on the Internet began to decrease. It began to look as though they had finally put the damaging old rumors behind them.
As the stories went, a female shopper had left the mall to return to her car and found she had a flat tire. As she set about changing it, a man in a business suit approached and offered to help. She accepted, and together they installed the spare tire without incident.
When they were finished, the helpful businessman asked the woman for a ride to his car, which he said was parked on the other side of the mall. For some reason his request made the woman uncomfortable, so she politely declined. He became insistent. Fearful of his intentions, the woman told the man she had more shopping to do and fled back into the mall, where she reported the incident to security officers.
Later, when she went back to her car accompanied by the officers, the "good samaritan" was nowhere to be found. Since the deflated tire still needed repair, she drove to a nearby garage, where a mechanic noticed that that the tire had been slashed with a knife. It was also discovered that the man had left his briefcase in her trunk.
"She opened it," the story concludes, "and the only things in it were some rope and a butcher knife!"
'A false, ridiculous, sick rumor'
Horrifying, if true. But it's not. It's an urban legend, and hardly a new one at that (see "The Hairy-Armed Hitchhiker" for an older variant). But for several weeks after the story began circulating on the Internet, Tuttle Mall personnel fielded inquiry after inquiry from frightened patrons and scoop-hungry media types, nearly all of whom assumed the story was based on a real-life event. It was not.
"It's not true!" was the constant refrain at the mall switchboard during those weeks. The security office issued a statement saying no such incident had ever been reported at Tuttle Crossing Mall. Columbus police investigated and found no evidence to substantiate the story.
"It was nothing but a false, stupid, ridiculous, sick rumor," a security guard told me when I called the mall to verify the tale in July 1998. He said he was relieved when the rumor seemed to begin dying down in April — and seemed audibly perturbed when I informed him it was back with a vengeance in July.
Next page > Part 2: 'Trust no one' > Page 1, 2
