The Case of Deborah Olson

This file was compiled by Alva Keel through witness interviews and observations conducted by SQ.

      On a quiet afternoon in Three Springs, California, a man entered the Apple Tree Cafe and pulled a knife, demanding money from the cash register. A young waitress named Deborah Olson approached the robber and was immediately seized, held prone before him, and cut across the throat with the large knife. The robber fled. Thirty witnesses saw this happen; all were horrified and shocked by what they had seen. A woman knelt beside Ms. Olson to place a rag to her throat to try to stop the bleeding until emergency personnel could be summoned, but this woman found that Deborah Olson's throat was not cut. It was miraculously uninjured.
      Shortly thereafter, Mr. Callan's associate at the Catholic church, Father Calero, contacted us about this case. A Pastor James from Three Springs had called him, as he knew Father Calero, to find someone to look into its authenticity. We took on the case of whether or not Deborah Olson was a saint. The process of declaring someone a saint takes place when two miracles have happened involving that person, and truthfully, the person should be dead before this declaration can transpire. A miracle can be defined as a wondrous, supernatural occurrence surpassing all known human and natural laws that expresses the divine will of God. Upon arriving in Three Springs, we met with Mayor Frank Letherton and Pastor James, who described to us the atmosphere in the town. People had been coming in from all over to see "Saint Debbie;" tourism had been quite heavy since the woman's attempted murder. She seemed to have suffered no ill effects of this attack, as she had no wounds on her neck as a result. The mayor was overjoyed with this rise in tourism.
      At the cafe where Ms. Olson worked, people asked her to touch their babies, took pictures of her, and wrote songs about her, which an amateur musician sung outside the restaurant. We met with Ms. Olson for the first time as she was heading home from work; within only minutes of this meeting, a man emerged from the crowd with a live rattle snake in his hands. He shoved the snake at Deborah Olson, where it promptly bit her, then dropped the snake and fled on foot. I subdued the snake by stepping on its neck, grabbing it, and throwing it in the nearby guitar case; there it could be trapped, and not hurt anyone else. Ms. Olson was taken to the closest hospital. The doctor there said that she could find no sign of snakebite poisoning; Ms. Olson was in fine health - she would not even require a bandage. This sounded quite miraculous.
      Back at Ms. Olson's house, I conducted an interview with her about her medical history. She claimed she had never suffered a broken bone, had surgery, nor any serious illnesses. When she graduated high school, her parents had been killed in an automobile accident; she had been solely responsible for the care of her mentally challenged brother, Daniel, ever since. Danny thought his sister was a true saint, that there could be no other explanation for her amazing indestructibility.
      Unfortunately for him, it was all a lie. Mr. Callan and Ms. Santos conferred with the police to find out that a partial license plate was taken down on the car that fled the scene of the original robbery that started this case. The only match within 100 miles led back to an elderly woman. While interviewing this woman, Mr. Callan and Ms. Santos encountered her grandson, Greg Barger. Mr. Barger excitedly confessed to having performed the entire "saint" scenario; it was a plot concocted by Mayor Letherton, Mr. Barger, and Ms. Olson in order to drum up tourism. Mr. Barger acted as the robber, attacking Deborah with a prop knife that sprayed fake blood. Then he procured a rattlesnake that had had its venom sacs removed for the second stunt. The entire setup was a hoax.
      For my own part, I was quite convinced that Ms. Olson was indeed a saint, so my associates put on a show with the prop knife to prove to me how easily one could be fooled into believing it was real. For several seconds, I actually believed that Mr. Callan had cut Ms. Santos' throat; I can fully understand how the witnesses in the Apple Tree Cafe that day could have been taken in, as well. Immediately I confronted Ms. Olson, who also confessed to her involvement in the hoax. She stated that Mayor Letherton had offered her $30,000 to act as the "saint." With this money, she had hoped to leave Three Springs and place Danny in a better school where he could learn to live on his own, while she herself could then return to college. Ms. Olson thought no one would ever get hurt.
      Her thoughts proved to be ill-fated, for Danny had overheard our conversation; he left the house, climbed to the top of the town's water tower, and threatened to jump. He said Deborah would save him when he jumped, because she was a saint, and he would perform this leap of faith to prove it to her. Apparently, in his eyes, I had been the one who persuaded Deborah not to believe in herself. Ms. Olson tearfully confessed before the crowd assembled at the bottom of the water tower that the whole thing had been a hoax in an effort to persuade Danny to come down. She yelled to him that if he jumped, she could do nothing to save him.
      A woman named Mrs. Charlotte Martin, who had been a witness to the staged robbery, believed very vehemently in Deborah's sainthood - she stepped from the crowd to try to convince Ms. Olson that everything she had just said could not be true. Before we knew it, Mrs. Martin had pulled a gun from her purse and aimed it directly at me. She blamed me for clouding Ms. Olson's mind. According to her, I needed to be stopped; she had every intention of shooting me. As Mrs. Martin began to pull the trigger, Deborah Olson leapt between us, and was shot in my place. Luckily, though, this did get Danny safely down off the water tower.
      It was thought from the onset after we arrived at hospital that Ms. Olson would not survive. In the meantime, people began bringing money to the Apple Tree Cafe for Deborah's recovery; she had given them hope, and they wanted to repay her, to do everything they could for her in her time of need. The doctor came out of surgery to inform us that the trajectory of the bullet had been miraculous - that it had missed four vital organs. Deborah Olson would be able to go home, alive, in only two days.
      Mr. Callan and I persuaded Mayor Letherton to give Deborah the $30,000 despite how things had turned out, or we would expose his involvement in the hoax. The only stipulation was that Ms. Olson had to leave town as soon as she was better.
      Was Deborah Olson a saint? Technically, no. In my eyes, though, she had saved my life - she always will be a true saint to me.
      This case is closed.

Return to The Archives

?