Dog Free and Man Collared : Now Owner Wants $2,500 Ransom Back

First there were the midnight phone calls. Then there were the weird ransom instructions. Finally, after a $2,500 ransom payment was left in a phone booth, Maryetta Selle reunited with Ginger, her poodle.

“I’ve never lost a child,” Selle said Thursday as she held Ginger in her arms. “But this seems almost as good as finding a lost child. I’ve had her and loved her for four years; she’s almost a family member.”

The reunion marked the end of a bizarre dog abduction/extortion plot that began last Friday when Ginger wandered out the front gate of Selle’s ocean-view home. As soon as she realized the dog was gone, Selle said, she frantically searched the neighborhood, but it was already too late. Apparently the dog had been picked up by people whose intentions were less than scrupulous.

Those intentions began to unfold, Selle said, later that night when she got a phone call from a young woman demanding $5,000 for the return of the dog. “I was shocked,” the dog owner recalls. “I never expected anything like that. I told them I didn’t have that kind of money.”

What followed was like something out of a bad James Bond movie. In a series of midnight phone calls from the kidnapers, Selle succeeded in lowering their ransom demand to $2,500. At one point, she says, they instructed her to park her car outside a nearby Bakers’ Square Restaurant, leave the money on the floor and drink coffee inside until they called her with the news that the dog was in her car. Selle, a retired psychologist and college administrator, was suspicious: “That was the old pigeon drop,” she said. “I’d come out and my car would be gone.”

Finally, acting on Selle’s behalf, a friend spent most of Tuesday night in Huntington Beach, finally dropping the cash in a phone booth where the abductors had left Ginger’s collar as proof that they had her. When she heard about the collar, Selle admitted later, “I thought the dog was dead. I gave up on her.”

The next day a man delivered Ginger to a Huntington Beach animal shelter where workers, alerted to the situation, made two immediate phone calls. One was to Selle to tell her that her dog was OK. The other was to police, who showed up within minutes and arrested David R. Baker of Midway City.

Charged with attempted extortion, Baker, 25, is being held at the Newport Beach jail with bail set at $10,000.

“He’s the one who dropped the dog off,” said Bill Hartford, the Newport Beach detective assigned to the case. “I personally don’t know of any other dog extortions that have occurred within memory.”

Still under police investigation, he said, are the questions of who else might be involved and what happened to the $2,500.

Selle and Ginger, meanwhile, spent Thursday afternoon basking in the glow of each other’s company.

“She was tickled to death when she saw me,” said Selle, stroking the pink-bowed poodle relaxing on her lap. “She was shaking like a leaf; she’d been in so many hands that she was scared to death. She was so dirty and scrungy.”

Yet all’s well that ends well.

“Ginger’s my best friend,” Selle said. From now on “I’m going to make sure she (stays) in the house.”