Carlee Russell smiles in mug shot as she’s charged with false police report in kidnap hoax

It didn’t take long for her story to begin to unravel: her search history revealed that she had looked up the movie Taken, “how to take money from a register without being caught,” and questions surrounding amber alerts.

Police voiced doubts about her abduction publicly. “To think that a toddler, barefoot, that could be three or four years old is going to travel six football fields without getting on the roadway, without crying ... it’s very hard for me to understand,” Mr Derzis said during a previous press conference.

The police chief said investigators had their doubts from the beginning, but on 24 July, he admitted, “We know that it was a hoax.”

Carlee Russell, the 25-year-old Alabama woman who claimed she went missing and later alleged that she had been kidnapped, has been charged.

The arrest warrant was issued earlier on Friday 28 July, Hoover Police Chief Nicholas Derzis said in a news conference.

Hoover police arrested Ms Russell “for her actions related to faking her kidnapping and subsequently making false statements to detectives.” Chief Derzis continued, “Her decisions that night created panic and alarm for citizens of our city and even across the nation.”

Numerous law enforcement agencies worked “tirelessly” to bring Ms Russell home to her family and to find a kidnapper “that we know now never existed.”

Kelly Rissman filed this report on Friday after charges were announced:

Bevan Hurley reports on how Carlee Russell falsely claimed she vanished after calling 911 to report seeing a young boy in diapers on the side of a busy interstate, and how her lie was untangled by police.