The Piffle Of Terra Riffle

January 27, 1994: A young woman from Madison, Ohio calls the police from a fast food restaurant late at night and tells them she was abducted at gunpoint earlier that evening, driven to an unknown location, and raped. Then her violator very kindly drove her back to Great Lakes Mall in Mentor where the abduction took place. These kind of rapes are always suspicious, at best a genuine sexual predator would have left her in a distressed state at a different location. Sure enough, she soon admits she had gone to meet a man she’d met through a newspaper ad. A member of the Victim Resource Center spent six hours with her after being called to the hospital. Program director Peggy Taylor said: “We support police filing charges against a victim who files a false report”, forgetting that if the report is false, the victim is not really a victim. She said too that she gets about two such reports a year – her alone? Charges were indeed filed against the non-victim.

[The above is based on a report by Maggi Martin in The Plain Dealer, FINAL/LAKE Edition, February 1, 1994, page 2B, (accessed here through NewsBank).]

Shortly, the same newspaper identifies her as Terra Riffle, age 20. On February 2 it is reported she had pleaded not guilty to a first degree misdemeanor of filing a false report; she was released on a $500 personal bond to stand trial on February 28. On March 1, it was reported she was found guilty by Mentor Municipal Judge Swain after pleading no contest. She was fined $150.

Terra Michelle Ward Riffle died in a North Carolina hospital on November 6, 2013. She was just 39 years old.

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