Sacramento prison psychologist’s friend also charged in rape hoax

From The Sacramento Bee:

    The woman accused of helping her friend fake a home-invasion robbery and a sexual assault has been arrested.

    Nicole Snyder, 33, was booked into the Sacramento County Main Jail on Dec. 12 and released later that day on $5,000 bail. She was arraigned Monday on two counts of felony criminal conspiracy.

    Snyder is accused of assisting Laurie Martinez, a supervising psychologist with the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation, stage a crime in Martinez’s Norgard Court home in April so Martinez could persuade her husband to move to another neighborhood, authorities allege.

    According to court documents, authorities say Snyder bought boxing gloves and then hit Martinez in the face, and helped Martinez hide some of her belongings in Snyder’s home so it would appear as though Martinez had been robbed.

    Martinez split her own lip, ripped open her shirt, scuffed her knuckles with sandpaper and then urinated on herself to make officers believe she had lost consciousness, according to allegations laid out in the court documents.

   

Sacramento prison psychologist charged with false report of rape

From the Associated Press:

    Authorities allege a woman was so determined to convince her husband of a need to move to a safer neighborhood that she faked being raped. She split her own lip with a pin, scraped her knuckles with sandpaper, had her friend punch her in the face, and even wet her pants to give the appearance she had been knocked unconscious, authorities said Friday.

    Charges filed by the Sacramento County district attorney allege Laurie Ann Martinez, a prison psychologist, conspired with the friend to create the appearance that she was beaten, robbed and raped by a stranger in April in her Sacramento home.

    Police detectives and crime scene investigators spent hundreds of hours on the case, until one of Martinez’s prison co-workers came forward to say Martinez had been talking at work about faking a crime at her home to persuade her husband to move, Sacramento police Sgt. Andrew Pettit said Friday.

    Martinez, her friend and two co-workers eventually told police the whole thing was a setup to convince Martinez’s husband that they needed to move from a blighted, high-crime area three miles north of the state Capitol…..