Woman Says Rape Story Was a Hoax : Crimes: Police spent 100 hours investigating the supposed kidnaping and rape of a former Oxnard resident. She now says the tale was concocted as a work alibi.

A woman who claimed in April that she was abducted from a Port Hueneme shopping complex and repeatedly raped over the next 27 hours made up the story as an excuse for missing work, police said Monday.

The lurid account of the alleged rape given by Jacqueline Morgan, 24, a former Oxnard resident who now lives in Oceanside, was a complete hoax, said Sgt. Dennis Fitzgerald of the Port Hueneme Police Department.

The phony story was uncovered only after weeks of police work that gradually convinced detectives that the woman was lying and led to a showdown this weekend in which she confessed that she invented the story, Fitzgerald said.

“We felt fairly early on that there were problems with her story,” he said. “We decided to give her the benefit of the doubt and make sure.”

Morgan told police that she had been raped six times and sodomized by a man who kidnaped her in broad daylight on April 3, from the alley behind the French Connection Haircutters salon at 475 W. Channel Islands Blvd.

She said the man had forced her to remain blindfolded in the bedroom of a house, where she was not allowed to eat, drink or use the bathroom for 27 hours, Fitzgerald said.

In describing the attack to police, Morgan said the man had driven her back to her car the next day and warned “I’ll be watching you,” before he left.

Her story was full of details, and medical evidence revealed that she had had sexual intercourse, Fitzgerald said.

But Fitzgerald said that he and the two detectives assigned to the case quickly discovered holes in Morgan’s story.

Morgan said she was forced to park in the alley behind the salon’s building because no spaces were available in front of the hair shop. When police questioned area merchants, they learned there had been plenty of parking spots in front of the salon that day.

Morgan said that the attacker had bitten her on the back of the neck. But two doctors who examined her after the alleged rape did not believe the injury was recent or that it was a bite mark.

A forensic dentist in San Diego County confirmed that the wound was not a bite mark after examining a photo that police sent him of it, Fitzgerald said.

Morgan later revealed it was a hickey her boyfriend had given her, Fitzgerald said.

Police had a description of the white Ford Escort station wagon the rapist supposedly drove and a composite of the alleged attacker. They distributed it to local businesses in hopes of finding a suspect and 12 people called to tip police off to possible attackers. All were dead ends, Fitzgerald said.

After eight weeks of investigating the alleged attack, Fitzgerald confronted Morgan on Friday with his suspicions.

She became upset, denying that she had lied, Fitzgerald said.

But when Fitzgerald questioned Morgan again on Saturday, she admitted that she had concocted the story of the rape to cover two missed evening shifts from work at Los Robles Regional Medical Center in Thousand Oaks.

Instead of reporting to her job as a technician monitoring vital signs in the hospital’s critical care unit, Fitzgerald said Morgan had spent the time with her boyfriend in San Diego.

At the time, Morgan was on probation at the hospital, where she had worked since December, for too many absences, Fitzgerald said.

She resigned from the job on May 16, a hospital spokeswoman said. Morgan, a divorced mother of a 2-year-old girl, is now unemployed and living with her boyfriend in Oceanside, Fitzgerald said.

The Port Hueneme Police Department is considering referring the case to the Ventura County district attorney’s office, which would decide whether to file charges against Morgan for filing a false police report. The maximum penalty for the misdemeanor is six months, said Deputy Dist. Atty. Gregory D. Totten.

Totten said false reports of crimes are relatively rare in Ventura County.

People sometimes report false burglaries in order to collect insurance money or get someone in trouble. Falsely reporting a rape is extremely unusual, Totten said.

The department may also seek restitution from Morgan for the 100 hours detectives spent investigating the case, Fitzgerald said. But Fitzgerald said the department is leaning away from seeking restitution or criminal charges.

“The thing that upsets us more than anything is that it takes away from the legitimate complaints when we have to spend time following up false ones,” Fitzgerald said.

In addition, publicity about the rape story generated fear among women in Port Hueneme, who called the department concerned about safety in the area, Fitzgerald said .

For the last two months, women have been afraid to park behind the stores in the 400 block of West Channel Islands Boulevard. Many of them have mentioned the rape, shop employees said.

And almost no one will come to the French Connection Haircutters salon in the morning--when Morgan said the rape occurred--or after 6 p.m., when fewer people are around, owner Sylvia Martinez said.