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The first rumor listed above, about impending murder in the Memphis area, began surfacing in e-mail in mid-July 2005. No such murders or attempted murders were reported, no gang members were arrested, and no one spoke up about having planned to participate in the supposed plot. Since then, many similar versions of this basic rumor, all sharing common elements (e.g., gang initiates will be murdering white women, children, or the eldery at various big box store locations), have periodically appeared with different dates and locales mentioned for the purported soon-to-take-place initiation killings. One of the many versions in circulation was prefaced with information about two grisly murders that took place in Chicago in November 2007. While the murders it described were real, police had not linked the two crimes, and neither of the women was kidnapped from or murdered at a Wal-Mart or a Target. There was also no reason to believe the death of Hazel Lewis or of Theresa Bunn was gang-related. Instead, it appeared that information about two horrific murders of black women have been used to dress up the false scare. The rumor seems to have begun with statements about gang initiation violence planned to take place at a mall or shopping center that an unidentified woman says she overheard in a bathroom and which she subsequently reported to police in that city. The rumor was unsubstantiated — there was no guarantee the woman who reported it actually did hear such a conversation or, even if she did, that the people she heard speaking weren't playing a practical joke on her. Major Pat Lovett of the Metro Gang Unit in Memphis, Tennessee, says in her 25 years on the force in Memphis she had never known gang initiation to include murder. Initiations, she said, are more likely to include assault and battery or robbery. To me, it wouldn't be smart to involve somebody in such a serious crime and then have them arrested and not in the gang anyway, says Lovett. In a news release, a police spokesman said of the rumor: While the Memphis police department takes such threats seriously, our investigation has not yet identified any specific gang or any specific victims. In response to the rumors, police in Memphis stepped up their patrols of shopping center parking lots. While the mother and small child murdered at a Wal-Mart version is the one circulating in e-mail, another form that the rumor took asserted in a more generalized fashion that a woman and a child were to be hurt or killed at a mall or shopping center as part of a gang initiation. Still further forms of the scuttlebutt altered the nature of the threat and left off mention of a child being included or of any specific store or venue. For example, one unnamed woman who had encountered the chatter said of it in an interview with WPTY-TV in Memphis, They say either they're [women] going to get raped or murdered; those are exactly his words. In August 2005 we began seeing this version of the rumor appear in our e-mail: The subsequent version expanded the scope of the original rumor from the Memphis area to Nation Wide and the potential killing fields from one named retail outlet to any department store's, yet it also served to limit the alert to the African American community by specifying the initiations-by-murder would target black women and girls. Such expansion made the rumor harder to wrestle to the ground — whispers of a threat to female shoppers at Wal-Marts in Memphis could be combated by statements from that area's police, but grapevining about danger to female shoppers frequenting any department store anywhere in the U.S. can't be similarly countered. In January 2008 the caution appeared in another form, this one warning about gang initiation activities allegedly taking place at Wal-Mart stores in Greensboro, North Carolina: One factor that possibly influenced the spread of rumors about gang-related random violence poised to strike in the Memphis area was the shooting deaths of two teens in the days just prior to the rumor's emergence in July 2005. David McVay, 21, and his stepsister, Jessica Sisson, 17, were killed on 14 July while standing on a sidewalk in their neighborhood in Raleigh visiting with friends. A gun fight erupted up the street between gang members, and the pair were caught in the deadly crossfire. They both died at the Regional Medical Center at Memphis. These two young people were felled by gang members because they were in the wrong place at the wrong time, a fear that finds its voice in the rumor about an impending gang initiation that has as its object the casual slaughter of innocents. Similar rumors surfaced in mid-March 2009 claiming that a gang initiation involving the killing of a white woman (or white women and men and children, or three men and three women) would be taking place at a Wal-Mart in Alabama, Alaska, Arizona, Arkansas, California, Colorado, Connecticut, Delaware, the District of Columbia, Florida, Georgia, Hawaii, Idaho, Illinois, Indiana, Iowa, Kansas, Kentucky, Louisiana, Maryland, Michigan, Mississippi, Missouri, Montana, Nebraska, Nevada, New Jersey, New Mexico, New York, North Carolina, Ohio, Oklahoma, Oregon, Pennsylvania, South Carolina, South Dakota, Tennessee, Texas, Utah, Virginia, Washington, West Virginia, Wisconsin, Wyoming, or the province of Alberta, Canada. Often the rumor was spread by text messages sent to cell phones: Law enforcement officials in many of the listed areas issued statements disclaiming the rumors as not credible, hoaxes, or urban legends, including Mike Smith, Director of Covington-Newton County 911, who sent us the following information about that rumor outbreak:
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