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An e-mailed alert about a rapist's supposedly prowling the parking lot of a Target store and using an elderly woman in distress as a lure to snare his victims began appearing in inboxes in May 2005 as a description of an incident that allegedly occurred at one of the retail chain's outlets in Wheaton, Illinois, and has since been circulated in forms that simply reference a Target store but omit any mention of a specific locale: In common with so many Internet-circulated warnings of the past few years (e.g., foiled abduction in Saginaw, gang initiation in Memphis, foiled abduction in Cedar Falls, robbery in Garland), it adds to the perception that women are being hunted en masse in the parking lots of shopping centers and mega-retailers. The incident described in this seemingly helpful warning never happened, said Terry Mee, division commander of the Wheaton Police Department: there was no foiled abduction, no little old lady luring an unwary woman into a trap, no gun-wielding large man in a stocking cap, no police officer who fortuitously saw the whole thing and was able to race over and arrest the perpetrators. According to Commander Mee, the alarming e-mail was fabricated by a person who was reportedly suffering from some emotional and/or psychological problems and passed [it] on to another who took it upon herself to shotgun (i.e., to widely disseminate by e-mail) the initial message — believing it to be true. Barbara far flung fiction Mikkelson
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