You work in this job for awhile, you develop a kind of radar when a story just doesn’t sound right.

So the antenna went up almost immediately after the reports first started coming in Tuesday of a mother and daughter being abducted in the middle of the afternoon on a busy Bucks County street.

And for good reason. It was all a hoax.

Mom’s SUV was not hit from behind. She and her daughter were not abducted and forced into the trunk of a black cadillac. Of course she had to include the tired, damaging description of the suspects as “two black men.”

Bonnie Sweeten’s story started falling apart yesterday afternoon, hours after local police and the FBI issued an amber alert for her 9 year-old daughter and kicked off a massive manhunt.

One of the first pieces was the cell phone call she made to 911. It appeared to be emanating from Center City in Philadelphia, not Bucks County. Then police found her car on a Center City Street. She made her
911 call at 2 p.m. Her car had a parking ticket affixed to it at 2:20.
Pretty quick trip in from State Road in Upper Southampton.

Then last night we learned that video surveillance at the airport showed her and her daughter – seemingly fine and of their own free will – boarding a flight to Tampa.

Don’t look for Sweeten in one of those familiar MVP sports commercials:
“Bonnie Sweeten, you’ve just pulled off an unbelievable ruse, leading cops on a wild goose chase and using your daughter as a pawn in your hoax, what are you going to do now? ‘I’m going to Disney World.’”

That’s right. Sweeten went to Disney World. She was picked up by police at the Grand Floridian luxury hotel last night.

She’s now charged with ID theft and filing a false police report. Police say she used a co-worker’s driver’s license to buy the airplane tickets.

Of course, the big question now is why? What was Sweeten running from?
It turns out she may be looking at some financial problems. There are reports she’s being looked at in connection with money missing from her workplace.

She will now be brought back to Bucks County to face the charges.

I’m wondering if I will get a call this morning from the man who called me yesterday morning to call into question my competence to be editor of this newspaper because we hadn’t put the story – and the pictures of the mom and daughter – all over our front page. I tried to tell him that while it was a compelling story, it did not happen in Delaware County, whereas our lead story, the lawsuit filed by the county and Tinicum against the city of Philadelphia in a battle over airport expansion, affects a lot more people here.

“That child might not be found now because you didn’t put her picture on the front page,” he chided me. “What are you, some kind of idiot?”

Not really. But idiotic certainly would seem to pertain to the actions of Bonnie Sweeten.

I’m not certain what kind of demons drove her to take the actions she did. All I know is she was not the first. And I can say pretty confidently she will not be the last.