Earlier this week, a jealous woman in California was sentenced to prison. She was caught by law enforcement officials actively engaging in an elaborate scheme to frame her husband’s ex-fiance for stalking and attempted rape. Although the ex-fiance was initially taken into custody despite being innocent, her name was cleared soon after investigators quickly learned the truth.

Specifically, Angela Maria Diaz, a 32-year-old woman from Orange County, California was recently sentenced to five years behind bars after pleading guilty to 10 felony and 22 misdemeanor charges, including “kidnapping, false imprisonment, forgery, and falsely reporting a crime to a peace officer,” for trying to make it appear as if her husband’s ex-fiance, Michelle Suzanne Hadley, was harassing her.

According to reports, Diaz’s scheme started last June when she called Anaheim police and told them that a man had tried to rape her in her garage. The next month, she called them again and said that a 17-year-old boy appeared in her courtyard in response to a “rape fantasy” Craigslist ad inviting men to show up to her condo and “have forcible sexual intercourse with her, even if she screamed or resisted,” which she claimed her husband’s ex-fiance had created out of jealousy.

As proof, Diaz showed investigators menacing emails that contained threats of rape and links to photographs of aborted fetuses, dead bodies, and decapitated bodies and accused Hadley of sending them. At first, the officers believed Diaz and promptly arrested Hadley.

However, investigators soon learned that the Craigslist ad and the harassing emails were actually sent from Diaz’s condo and her father’s home. Upon discovering this, they then immediately released Hadley, who had spent eighty-eight days behind bars for a crime she didn’t commit.

Once Hadley was released from custody, officers then focused their investigation on Diaz. Several months later, they arrested her in Phoenix, Arizona and extradited her back to Orange County, where she was subsequently sentenced to five years in prison.

Unsurprisingly, Orange County’s District Attorney, Tony Rackauckas, who called Diaz’s plan a “diabolical scheme,” was outraged over the fact that an innocent person was thrown behind bars. “When a person who has committed a crime gets arrested and charged, that is a bad day. When someone who is innocent gets arrested and charged with a crime, it’s not only a bad day, it’s a nightmare,” reasoned Rackauckas while being interviewed about the case.

“We want to make sure that Ms. Hadley is cleared in every possible way, in the courtroom and court of public opinion,” he continued, noting, “if not for the hard work of law enforcement continuing to investigate and seek the truth in this case, Ms. Hadley could have continued to face life in prison.”

After releasing Hadley, Sergeant Daron Wyatt of the Anaheim Police Department spoke with reporters and explained why they arrested an innocent person. “We had a serious public safety concern here which caused us to make the arrest,” stated Sgt. Wyatt.

To clarify, he added, “there was plenty of probable cause here to make the arrest. In fact, this was not a probable cause arrest. It was a warranted arrest after a criminal case was filed by the District Attorney’s Office and a warrant issued by a judge. When public safety is concerned, we are almost mandated to make an arrest.”

After defending their decision to arrest Hadley, Wyatt then praised the investigators involved in the case for eventually figuring out the truth. Specifically, he said, “once we believed that Ms. Hadley had been set up, we released her from custody and the investigation continued all the way through to the point we are at today. It was the tenacity of the detectives involved that got us to this point, where we could exonerate Michele Hadley and prosecute Angela Diaz.”

Clearly, Diaz is an incredibly disturbed individual. Hopefully, while in prison, she gets the help that she obviously needs.