Versailles woman resuscitated, recovering after likely AI kidnapping scam

“What’s your name? What’s your name?”

Her name is Ann Kautzmann, she’s 64 and she’s lying on the floor in front of the Kroger service counter and this is sound from a body-cam as Versailles police perform CPR. It’s May 1, and just minutes before, her husband was gassing up their vehicle at the fuel station.

“I got a call while he was outside the car, and I said, I answered the phone, and it was Julie's voice, and she said, ‘Mom, mom,’ she goes, ‘I've been in an accident.’ And I said, ‘Where are you?’ And I knew she was coming back from Cincinnati.”

Then Julie’s voice is replaced by a man’s.

“And his voice was muffled, and he said, ‘Ma'am your daughter -- I have your daughter. She's in my truck.’ And I'm like, ‘Who is this? And he goes, ‘Ma'am, I have your daughter. She was just in the wrong place at the wrong time.’”

Kautzmann thinks Julie is being robbed or kidnapped. She races to the service counter and asks an employee to call police while she tries to keep the stranger on the line. Then she hands the employee her phone and collapses.

Versailles police officers Ben Hartley, Rob Young and Jeff Haney take turns providing CPR, with assistant chief Young activating an app on his phone for the exact beats per minute. EMS Director Freeman Bailey, who trains Woodford County first responders and others on CPR -- and advises them to install the app -- takes over.

“We were doing our compressions, and we seen that she was in a rhythm that was shockable, which is ventricular fibrillation. So we charged the monitor, and I shocked her while we're in the floor of Kroger’s there. Then we immediately got her on to the stretcher. We shocked her a second time, continuing CPR through the whole process.”

Ann is shocked a third time on the way to the ambulance, then, on the way to the hospital, she shocks Bailey.

“She was dead at the moment when we got there. And so when she called me by name, she said, ‘Freeman, don't leave me.’ It kind of startled me a minute, and I had to re-look. And then I recognized who she was.”

Bailey had coached Ann and Ed Kautzmann’s son, Adam, from T-ball to middle school baseball. Adam Kautzmann is an airline pilot and can’t be reached this day. A Georgetown police officer shows up on the doorstep of Julie – who’s alive and well. He tells her Ann apparently had a heart attack in Kroger. On her way to the hospital, Julie thinks she’s going to identify the body of her mother. She calls the ER.

“And I said, ‘What is her condition?’ They said she's stable. And I said, ‘Okay, so she's intubated.’ They said, ‘No, she's talking to us.’’’

Ann spends 11 days in the hospital and five more at a rehabilitation center.

Versailles police Detective Dawn Monks says she believes artificial intelligence played a role in what appears to be a kidnapping scam.

“And they're pulling those, you know, the original voice, off of social media, Tiktok, Snapchat, Facebook, anywhere where you may have posted a video. And then they can, they can use AI to create, like, a deep fake of that voice.”

Monks says she’s not optimistic the case will ever be solved and offers this advice:

“The simplest thing is to create a family password. Don't click on any unknown links that you receive, like a cold call, you know, where you just receive it out of the blue. If something sounds too good to be true, it is.”

Ann Kautzmann now has a defibrillator/pacemaker device in her chest, but says her brush with death didn’t have any long-term effects – not physically, anyway. She says she’s blessed, but angry, and says something needs to be done about AI.

“It sounded so much like her. I mean, it was her dead on.”

“And she was upset.”

“Yeah, she was crying.”

I’m John McGary in Versailles.

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