By Rodney Thrash, Times Staff Writer
Thursday, August 19, 2010
CLEARWATER — Monica Marie Kirchner led Largo police to believe that two men — one of them a one-legged amputee on crutches — held her captive for 14 hours in May.
She told authorities the men threatened her, kidnapped her and kept her inside a Clearwater home. She said she fled in one of the tormentors' cars after the men fell asleep.
Wednesday evening, authorities made an arrest. But the men aren't the ones in custody. Kirchner, 21, of Largo, is.
After a nearly three-month investigation, Largo police said Thursday that they have unearthed surveillance video that shows Kirchner and the so-called kidnappers shopping for groceries at an area Walmart at the time of the alleged abduction.
One shot shows Kirchner talking on a cell phone. Another shows her picking out her favorite cereal and drink, police said. In a third, Kirchner hands the amputee his crutches.
"The defendant's behavior and actions depict an individual who has free will of choice and movement," police said in an arrest report.
Largo police spokesman Lt. Mike Loux said this bizarre tale began on May 23 when Kirchner's boyfriend reported a kidnapping. Loux would not identify the boyfriend, who has not been arrested. An investigation remains open, he said.
The boyfriend told police that he, Kirchner and another unidentified man went to an unspecified location to meet the alleged kidnappers for a drug transaction.
The second man left Kirchner and her boyfriend "in a vehicle while he supposedly" completed the transaction, Loux said. He never returned to the car and an unknown amount of money disappeared.
The kidnappers told the boyfriend that they were going to hold Kirchner as collateral until they got their money or narcotics back, Loux said.
"We made contact with her on the 24th," he said, "and that's when she jumped in on the story and kind of agreed that she was kidnapped also."
Loux said the story sounded fishy from the start.
So why did it take until Wednesday to make an arrest?
"The investigation's been ongoing since then and every time (investigators) talked to one subject, it led them to speak with other people," Loux said.
He would not say what led them to the Walmart surveillance video. "That's part of the active investigation," he said.
Kirchner was being held in the Pinellas County Jail on Thursday in lieu of $5,150 bail on charges related to grand theft and false report of a crime.
Rodney Thrash can be reached at rthrash@sptimes.com or (727) 445-4167.