Springs woman suspected of hoax call says father abused her

Plenty is known about who Rozita Swinton is not.

She is not a teenage girl who bore her father's child and wanted to kill herself in Castle Rock. She is not an injured child trapped in a Colorado Springs basement. And she was never a sexually abused teen bride trapped in a polygamist compound in Arizona or Texas.

Who she is, though, is not so clear. A 33-year-old woman with a reasonably clean criminal history, Swinton has been active in politics and once sold insurance.

Yet in secret she was someone who could play the part of an anguished child with chilling authenticity. She is a person with either finely honed investigative skills or inside information into the secret details of the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints. And she's someone smart enough to know just how much information to give police to keep them searching - and how multiple cell phones reduced the odds of getting caught.

Swinton made national news last week when she was investigated by Texas Rangers in connection to the Yearning for Zion Ranch in Eldorado, Texas, where 416 children have been removed amid allegations of sexual abuse in the polygamist compound. Texas authorities said her hoax calls may have tipped them off to what was going on at the compound, in part because of items found in her home during a search.

She was arrested Wednesday in Colorado Springs on separate accusations of false reporting.

Phone numbers for Swinton and possible family members have been disconnected.

Swinton is a former insurance agent whose license expired in November 2004, according to the Colorado Department of Regulatory Agencies Division of Insurance. She worked for State Farm.

After the El Paso County Democratic caucuses and convention, she was named one of the 360 delegates to the state convention at the World Arena on May 17, chosen to support Barack Obama.

El Paso County Democratic Chairman John Morris said he and other party organizers did not know Swinton.

While doing her part in public life, her private life was far darker.

Kelly Seaman, a 911 supervisor for the Colorado Springs Police Department, said that more than 10 911 calls from at least three cell phones have been linked to Swinton in recent years. One of those calls also involved Arapahoe County.

Seaman said Swinton would give a little bit of information and then hang up. When dispatchers tried to get back in touch, the cell phone would be turned off. Swinton might then give a piece of information to another agency, or call dispatchers back to give a little more. She would play the part of a scared, crying girl. The calls went well beyond a typical prank, said police spokesman Lt. Skip Arms.

One case in particular, Seaman recalled, was a call supposedly from a teenage girl named Jessica who said she was pregnant by her uncle, who had also abducted her.

Swinton gave a similar story to police and an adoption agency in Castle Rock in June 2005, police said.

Police in Castle Rock spent dozens of hours sorting things out. Arms said some of the calls made in Colorado Springs took every officer who wasn't already involved in a call. Seaman said at times officers were basically going door to door.

Records of the false report that led to her arrest, a Feb. 26 call in which she claimed to be a girl trapped in a basement, have been sealed.

Since March 30, around the same time Swinton called a San Angelo, Texas, crisis center, she spent hours on the phone with Flora Jessop, who fled a polygamist sect and has devoted her life to helping other women and children do the same.

"In all honesty, I'm glad that it turned out that I didn't have a little girl that was being horribly, horribly abused like this little girl said she was," Jessop said Monday. She said she wasn't angry at Swinton, but, "I think she needs to get help."

Jessop, who said she cried over the stories Swinton feigned, said she is amazed at how much Swinton knew about the sect.

"I work these cases all the time. We have been searching for family members . . . and yet we had no idea where some of the people were that she knew about," Jessop said.

She also remains impressed by the acting: "She honest-to-god sounded like a 16-year-old or younger child in need of help."

Swinton has also alleged in court that her father, Clarence Swinton, sexually abused her from the time she was 4 until as recently as April 2005. Court documents show Swinton has obtained at least two restraining orders against her father, who is 69, accusing him of sexual abuse. One of those was filed by the Tennessee Department of Human Services while she was still a minor.

Clarence Swinton is not listed as a registered sex offender, and he has no related criminal background, according to a background check by The Tennessean newspaper in Nashville, where he lives.

Just hours after her release from jail, Swinton called Jessop again. She confessed who she was - just before she went into another story about a troubled teen in need of help. "I said ‘I can't help you, because you've told me nothing but lies,'" Jessop said.

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