[AZ] Officer Allen used fake identity to harass his ex girlfriends

Officer Bradley Allen was arrested and resigned the next day - before there could be an internal investigation.

Report: Cop's alter ego harassed 2 women
East Valley Tribune, AZ - Sep 5, 2008
Katie McDevit
September 5, 2008
[Excerpts] - [MJ] and [NL] were haunted by a man they thought they never knew. David Fowler harassed them, made lewd comments and caused problems in both of their relationships. Neither woman had ever met Fowler. But they had dated a Chandler cop named Bradley Allen. Allen was a hard-working officer and someone they cared for deeply - but as they'd later find out - he was also the dreaded David Fowler. In a bizarre case of a man with two identities, a Chandler cop's secret alter ego led to his arrest and ultimately his resignation. The unmasking of Fowler began, police reports say, on June 30 when Allen told police a tale about his car being stolen. But the investigation into the missing car soon morphed into a hunt for Fowler and the ultimate realization that Allen himself was the main suspect. And it also revealed a disturbing fact - before the case was over, Allen would exchange more than 13,000 text messages with himself, texting between two phones he controlled, one as Allen, the other as Fowler... No one knows why Allen wanted to set up his former girlfriend as a suspect in a fake stolen car case. But he walked into a detective's office on July 9 and claimed that [MJ] was involved in the crime, and that Fowler had tipped him off. Detectives met with [MJ] and she told police she didn't take Allen's car or know who would have. She did, however, know another detail that shocked investigators. "I asked her if she knew a male subject by the name of David Fowler," Detective David Bugallo wrote in a police report, "she told me David Fowler didn't exist." He's a fictional person, she said. Allen made him up. [MJ], who couldn't be reached for this story, told detectives she had hired a private investigation firm to figure out who Fowler was and that two different investigators confirmed not only that he didn't exist, but that Fowler was Allen. Not long after that, investigators found there was another woman. [NL] was dating Allen and had received two mysterious text messages from a man who said he was Fowler. She was confused about why Fowler had messaged her. Fowler is the "key to unlocking the truth in what was going on," Bugallo said to [NL]. He told her that the only person Fowler seemed to know was Allen. "She told me that [MJ] was having her ([NL]) and Brad followed," Bugallo, who wouldn't agree to an interview, said in the report. "I asked how she knew they were being followed (and) she said that David Fowler knew everywhere they had been and even described the clothes she had been wearing on some of the occasions." Investigators sifted through phone records from Fowler and Allen and looked at surveillance photos from a store where Fowler's pay-as-you-go phone was topped-up. They saw [NL] had been buying Allen the "Top-up" cards to add more minutes to the phone, so police asked her how often she bought the cards for Allen and why. She told detectives she had bought them more than 10 times and that Allen used a regular cell phone and a secret cell phone. "[NJ] then went silent and she said to me, 'Brad is David Fowler isn't he,'" Bugallo wrote. "I told her that I was sorry to be giving her such bad news, but we now felt that Brad was in fact David Fowler"... On July 30, police got a search warrant to access GPS data on Fowler's phone. They discovered that the phone had either been destroyed or the battery had been removed. From April to July, Fowler had sent 3,627 text messages to Allen, and Allen had sent 3,682 messages to Fowler... Now, his case is sitting at the Chandler City Prosecutor's Office. Chandler police are recommending Allen be charged with false reporting to law enforcement, the report says, but no charges have been filed yet. The Chandler City Prosecutor's Office says the case is "under review." On paper, Allen appears to have been an exemplary officer. His personnel file includes satisfactory and above average ratings as a law enforcement officer. He was once investigated on suspicion of disorderly conduct related to domestic violence during his relationship with [MJ], but was never charged and never punished. But despite Allen's alter ego and tumultuous relationships, Chandler police say there's no reason to think his personal behavior spilled over into his police work... Chandler police spokesman Sgt. Rick Griner said "there was nothing out of the ordinary with his cases," and that the department won't be reviewing Allen's cases unless someone comes forward with concerns. "Unless we had some kind of complaint, I don't know what we would look for," Griner said. [Full article here]