A Greenwich, Connecticut-bred teenager currently residing with her family in an affluent suburb of Sydney, Australia was the victim of a terrifying extortion attempt yesterday afternoon when a masked intruder stormed into her home and strapped what he said was a bomb to her neck. After pinning a hand-written note to her chest with a list of explicit instructions and threats, he fled, leaving 18-year-old Madeleine Pulver to face a grueling 10-hour ordeal.
Pulver immediately called her father, William Pulver, the former CEO of Nielsen NetRatings in Manhattan (he's now CEO of an Australia-based software company). Police quickly descended upon the house, and Assistant Police Commissioner March Murdoch tells reporters, "What they saw was a very distressed young lady with what we believed to be at the time an improvised explosive device attached to her body." It seems the device was very realistic, because bomb technicians spent 10 hours dismantling it before determining that it was fake.
"It was designed obviously to mimic something that was potentially an explosive device," a crime squad commander said after the incident. The Post reports that one female cop stayed with Pulver throughout the ordeal, and Murdoch says the officer "was not wearing any protective clothing or equipment, she wasn't trained as a negotiator, but she made the decision herself... to stay with Madeleine and make sure she tried to remain calm and she wasn't left alone."
Pulver was physically unharmed, but has not yet been formally interviewed by investigators, who have cordoned off the property to search for evidence. The tense, drawn-out incident transfixed Australia yesterday, and Prime Minister Julia Gillard commented, "When I looked at it this morning, the first thing I said was, ’It’s like a Hollywood script — the kind of thing you would see at the cinema or on TV.’ " Or, you know, Erie, Pennsylvania.
