What Some Will Do to Prevent Relatives from Flying on 9/11

Her mother and brother were both booked to fly out of Tucson on the tenth anniversary of the worst day in aviation history, and Mary Purcell reckoned she didn’t like that idea too much. So she got on the phone from where she lives in New York, and, not nearly as anonymously as she believed, claimed she’d heard her boyfriend and some others discussing the bomb-plot they were scheming, for the very flight on which her relatives were scheduled to travel. She did this once, and then she did it again. But there’s technology for tracing things like that. At first, when the authorities came around looking for her, Purcell, who is 37, tried to deny it, saying she’d only called to inquire about the possibility of a bomb threat. But they have technology for things like that, too, and eventually she came clean. Now she can get ten years in prison, which means she should be paroled in time for the twenty-year anniversary–or, failing that, the twenty-fifth.