The Phantom Police?

I don't tell this story very often because even I have a hard time believing it, and I was standing there when it happened. It was the early 1980s, and I was living in the Hollywood Hills. Just after midnight, someone started pounding on my front door so violently that I thought they were trying to break it down. When I looked through the window, I saw a woman covered in dirt, crying uncontrollably, and looking over her shoulder every few seconds like someone was chasing her. The only coherent thing she managed to say was, "Someone's been stabbed... please help me." There was something about the panic in her voice that felt completely genuine, so we brought her inside, locked every door, and called 911.

While we waited, we tried to calm her down, but she barely answered any questions. She kept rubbing her hands together, staring out the windows, and mumbling that she shouldn't have run. Every car driving past made her flinch. The dispatcher told us officers were already on their way, and about ten minutes later, two LAPD officers arrived. They looked exactly how you'd expect, uniforms, badges, radios, everything. They spoke quietly with the woman before one of them turned to us and explained she'd been reported missing from a house a few streets away. They thanked us for helping, walked her outside, and we watched all three of them get into what appeared to be a standard police cruiser before driving off. We remember talking about how lucky it was that she'd found our house instead of wandering around the neighborhood all night.

About half an hour later, there was another knock at the door. Assuming one of the officers had forgotten something, we answered without thinking. Instead, there were two completely different LAPD officers asking if we'd reported a distressed woman claiming someone had been stabbed. We laughed at first and told them they'd already been there. Their expressions changed immediately. They insisted no officers had been dispatched before them. Thinking it was just poor communication between units, they radioed dispatch to confirm. A few minutes later, they came back looking genuinely unsettled. Dispatch had no record of another patrol responding to our address. No officers had checked in, no one had transported a woman, and no reports had been filed before the two standing on our porch.

The officers searched the area for over an hour, knocking on nearby doors and checking every street around the neighborhood. They even contacted surrounding divisions to see if another agency had responded by mistake. Nothing. There was no missing woman matching her description, no stabbing reported nearby, and no explanation for who those first two officers could have been. What makes the story impossible for me to dismiss is that there were multiple witnesses. We all watched them walk through the front door, speak with the woman, escort her outside, and drive away. Forty years later, I've accepted that I'll probably never know who those first "officers" really were, or what happened to the terrified woman who disappeared with them that night.