Dial M For Mother

from Reuters news report, July 2, 1994, as reported in the RISKS digest.

WIRES CROSS AS LOVERS DIAL M FOR MOTHER

LONDON, July 2 (Reuter)--A terrified British mother put police on red alert after mistaking the sound of lovemaking for a cry for help from her daughter. The Independent newspaper said on [July 2] that two accidental phone calls woke the woman in Devizes, southern England, in the small hours of the morning. Hearing moaning, groaning and shouting, she dismissed the first as an obscene call, but in the second she recognised her daughter crying: ``Oh my God,'' and heard a man's voice.

Convinced her daughter was being attacked in her bedroom 100 miles (160 km) away, she dialed the emergency number 999 and a police squad sped to the daughter's home to investigate. ``Officers rushed round and found she wasn't being attacked--in fact she was quite willing,'' a police spokesman said. ``They explained that during the moments of passion one of the couple [pushed an auto-dial button on their phone] with a toe. Unfortunately on both occasions it was the girl's mother's phone number,'' he said. ``This is a warning for other people--if you're going to indulge in this sort of thing, move the phone.''

Edited and converted to HTML by Dan Bornstein.