A former veteran of the Bowling Green, Kentucky, police had to call a bizarre story in to his old buddies at the department on Wednesday morning. He was reporting a stray human “hiding” in his basement. The mayor swears up and down he didn’t lock her in.
Who’s hiding in the basement?
In his spare time, Mayor Bruce Wilkerson is remodeling a home on Henry Drive. He was totally unaware his property was occupied, by a girl hiding in his basement. He swears he wasn’t holding her captive.
With the carpentry work almost finished, he’s been able to stay in the house overnight. He was still trying to get his eyes focused over his coffee cup, early Wednesday morning, when he he heard what he described to police as a “ruckus” happening outside. Instead of settling down, it annoyingly “keeps on and keeps on,” he relates.
The former officer of the Bowling Green Police Department decided to investigate and was alarmed to find “a spot of blood on the door to the home’s cellar,” BG Daily News reports. All he found was a “small bag” with some women’s clothes and other items. That’s when he called in the professionals. After asking about “any reports of missing women,” he was told there weren’t any and went back to his remodeling work. Not long after that, he lost power indicating a tripped breaker.
When he went outside, he immediately saw “the door to the cellar was ajar” and discovered “a young woman about 20 years old.” That seemed to solve the mystery of the bag. “I’m hiding from someone,” she told him. Wilkerson didn’t try to stop her as she “ran out of the cellar and down Henry Drive.” Apparently she managed to slip into the basement through a tiny crawlspace under the porch.
Mayor Wilkerson told the local press that he couldn’t tell how long the woman “had been living in the cellar.” She couldn’t have been hiding there very long though, because she made so much noise. He’s just afraid that because he’s in the political spotlight, the incident could be bad for his career, even though he did nothing wrong. He’s “coming forward to set the record straight,” he grinned. He’s not a predator. He knows that the way today’s media works, “the story would come out that I had a lady locked up in my cellar.”
A similar incident two days before
Police haven’t pointed out any connections between two seemingly unrelated incidents but they have so much in common that they could be tied together. On Monday evening, about five miles from the mayor’s house, a woman was arrested for allegedly breaking into a house. Not only that, she “howled like a wolf” and “meowed like a cat” when questioned by police.
Around 8:13 p.m. Monday evening, deputies with the Warren County Sheriff responded to the “Maria Drive area.” There, they encountered a man similar to the mayor. The owner of a rental home on Detour Road and one of his neighbors reported “a woman in gray sweatpants walking in the area talking to herself and howling like a wolf.”
The homeowner called police because he noticed lights on in what should have been his vacant house. Deputies checked and didn’t find anyone inside but they did notice several open doors. After they kept searching, they located 36-year-old Janet Compton “on top of a trailer at the residence.”
Catlike, Compton jumped off the roof and vanished. They chased her down shortly. According to the arrest report, she admitted entering the home but she was there to “look for Jimmy.” Suddenly, “in mid-conversation,” she started to “howl like a wolf and meow like a cat.” According to police that was probably because “Compton stated she used methamphetamine on the morning of this date.”
She was charged with second-degree burglary, second-degree fleeing or evading police, second-degree disorderly conduct and public intoxication. No reports are available on what happened to her next. If she was turned loose on her own sometime Tuesday, it might explain who crept cat-like through the crawl-space into the mayor’s cellar to be discovered Wednesday morning.
