I Can't Come To Work Today ...

Courtesy of

Everybody’s had days when they felt bad enough to call in sick to work.

Then there’s the crowd — and you know who you are — who are prone to call in with so much as a hangnail.

But a particularly devious Iowa couple took it one step further. Since they couldn’t necessarily call themselves in dead, they killed their “son” instead.

The fictional fiasco started in December, when James Snyder and Mary Jo Jensen began telling their employer that their son was very ill and they couldn’t come to work, the Associated Press reports. But they technically didn’t even have a son.

Snyder, Jensen’s boyfriend, claimed that Jensen’s kid from a previous relationship was actually his own, so when the sort-of-son fell ill, the pair had to skip out on work to tend to him together.

But like any good soap-opera plot, this screwball scheme snowballed.

Police say the pair told their employer that the boy, after struggling on life support, died at the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minn., so they submitted an obituary to the Waterloo-Cedar Falls Courier to back their story up.

Only problem was, the kid was spotted chowing down at an area restaurant after his obituary ran — looking pretty good for a dead guy.

Police caught on, and Snyder was charged with tampering with records. Jensen was charged with being an accessory after the fact.

Records show the son told police about the pair’s plan.