Brooke Henson knew she was in trouble
when she logged in to her e-mail account at Columbia University and
found a message from the campus-security office. She stared at the
computer screen, feeling that familiar anxiety rising. You'll
be fine, she reassured herself. Think positive thoughts, just
like her therapist had taught her. Surely she would get out of this
scrape the same way she'd gotten out of all the other ones: with
smooth talk and little lies. OK, big lies.
She dialed campus security. "Hi," she said, her voice
controlled. "This is Brooke Henson."
The officer told her that he had gotten a curious call from
police detectives in South Carolina who were trying to crack a
missing-person case. "There's something I need to ask you," the
officer continued. "Are you Brooke Henson?" The young
woman who had disappeared from the rural South Carolina town of
Travelers Rest seven years earlier? The girl whose grieving family
had been searching for her ever since? The Brooke Henson who was
presumed murdered?
"Yes," Brooke said into the phone. "That's me."
Her mind raced through her options. On the one hand, she had a
purse full of proof that she was Brooke: her student ID, a Vermont
driver's license, a U.S. passport, an Ohio identification card, a
South Carolina birth certificate. She had a part-time job, a rented
apartment not far from campus on New York's Upper West Side and a
full course load at Columbia, all registered under the name Brooke
Henson.
On the other hand, she wasn't Brooke Henson.
She packed a suitcase hastily, grabbed her two Shih Tzus, hailed
a cab and headed straight off the grid. By the time New York police
came knocking with a DNA test, "Brooke Henson" was long gone.
Thus began an 18-month federal manhunt unusual in its scope and
intensity. Investigators had never encountered anyone like this
mysterious young woman, whom they discovered was not Brooke Henson
at all but an imposter named Esther Reed: a criminal with an MO
radically different from that of a typical identity thief. Rather
than max out people's credit cards and move on, Esther would
become them, spending years living under a succession of
assumed names. Posing as various young women, she got her GED in
Ohio, aced her SATs in California, gained admission to three
universities — including continuing-ed programs at Harvard
and Columbia — and received $100,000 in student loans. Along
the way, she duped countless people from coast to coast, from DMV
clerks to college professors to the West Point cadets she
dated.
"She's a criminal genius," says Jon Campbell, the South Carolina
police detective who eventually exposed her trail of deceit. "She
was manipulative, controlling, brilliant. We didn't know what to
make of her." With so many unanswered questions, authorities
treated Esther Reed's disappearance as an all-out emergency,
suspecting her not only of fraud but of murder and international
espionage. The tabloids had a field day with this brazen girl who
had conned her way into the Ivy League; front-page headlines
worried over her whereabouts and wondered what dangerous secrets
she might be keeping.
No one guessed the truth, which was simpler, and therefore
stranger, than their wildest theories: that the scared young woman
so hotly pursued by South Carolina police, the Secret Service,
federal marshals and even the U.S. Army was actually on a bizarre
and misguided journey of self-discovery. A 28-year-old high school
dropout from Montana, Esther Reed just wanted to stop being Esther
Reed and to embark on a new, better life of her own design. She was
pursuing the American Dream, with a twist: Rather than forge a new
identity from scratch, she would steal someone else's and remake it
to suit her own needs. Reed never imagined that her ill-conceived
self-help program would land her on America's Most Wanted
and brand her as a threat to national security — or that for
one brokenhearted family in South Carolina, the fulfillment of her
hopes and dreams would mean the end of their own.
Two girls vanished in 1999, one after the
other. On the night of July 3rd, 20-year-old Brooke Henson threw an
Independence Day party at her parents' house in the faded foothills
town of Travelers Rest, South Carolina. Brown-haired, slender and
cheerful, Brooke was a free spirit who had quit school in the 10th
grade and hadn't done much since, other than hang out at
Southern-rock festivals and fall in with a bad crowd. In the
smoke-filled chaos of the party that night — her parents were
at an Allman Brothers concert in Charlotte, North Carolina —
Brooke got into a spat with her boyfriend, Ricky Shaun Shirley,
surly-mouthed and handsome with a fast-growing rap sheet. By the
time her parents staggered home around two in the morning, the
party was breaking up and Brooke was stalking out the door in a
huff. She left a note for Shaun: "Follow me if you care." She never
came home.
On the opposite side of the country, in an outlying suburb of
Seattle, 21-year-old Esther Reed was already two months gone. Her
family's last sighting of her, in May, had been outside the King
County Courthouse, where Esther had just pleaded guilty to stealing
a co-worker's purse.
"You can't live like this!" Esther's older half sister Edna had
screamed at her in the garage afterward. Edna had good reason to be
upset: Her own purse was missing too, and she had recently
discovered that Esther was forging checks in her name.
Esther stood there listening to her sister yell, her amber eyes
set in an impassive stare. She was an athletic, oval-faced girl
with a sharp chin, a broad forehead and a curtain of heavy dark
hair. She was also a terrified young woman who had learned to mask
her despair with a nonchalant expression. She felt like the
loneliest person in the world. "I just needed to get away," she
would later recall.
Esther had an uncommonly sheltered childhood. She grew up off an
unpaved forest road 15 miles outside tiny Townsend, Montana, the
youngest of nine children from her mother's three marriages. The
nearest neighbor was a mile away; as a child, Esther wore homemade,
poufy dresses and attended a rural schoolhouse with four other
kids. Compounding her isolation, Esther and her older brother, EJ,
were brought up in a Southern Baptist church straight out of
Footloose: Dancing, movies and music with a backbeat were
all considered forms of devil worship. For fun, Esther and EJ
played chess — until EJ got tired of being beaten by his baby
sister and refused to play anymore. "To say we were socially
stunted is an understatement," says EJ.
Their father, Ernie, worked at the sawmill and was a shy,
reclusive man. Their mother, Flo, a real estate agent, was the
opposite: outgoing and spontaneous, a woman who would finish off a
family water fight by dragging the garden hose into the house. And
then there was the mass of far-older half-siblings, like a crowd of
stand-in parents, all intent on keeping the youngest two in line.
Esther, her mother's favorite, was a special target for their
abuse. "It was tough on her to always be told, 'You can't do that'
or 'You're not doing this well enough,'" says EJ. "It kind of
caused a stubborn streak: 'I want to, so I will, and I'll find a
way to do it.'"
When Esther finally entered public school in the fifth grade,
she was a bright and curious child glaringly out of step with the
world — academically beyond her peers, but dressed for
basketball practice in a frilly blouse and homemade shorts. Her
outsider's sensitivities sharpened in high school when her parents
separated, with little warning. Esther went to live with Flo, while
EJ stayed with Ernie. Without her big brother to protect her,
Esther suddenly felt like a pincushion for her older siblings'
resentment — especially her sharp-tongued sister Edna. "I
just listened to all of her criticisms and started to draw inside
myself," Esther wrote to me in an extensive correspondence from
prison. "I began to believe that everyone was as critical and
judgmental as she was."
Esther, always shy, was seized by a fright she couldn't shake, a
paralyzing sense of self-consciousness and paranoia. She was sure
the rest of the world had already written her off as a despicable
loser, just as her family had: "Every interaction with people felt
like an audition I was going to fail." She became aloof and
hostile, forever steeled against some forthcoming attack, and
finished the ninth grade overweight, with a C-minus average and
fellow outcasts for friends. "Esther was really struggling,"
recalls Jim Therriault, her speech and English teacher. "I knew she
was an intelligent person who was hiding her light under a bushel.
But she was having a lot of psychological trauma."
Life only got worse after Esther and her mother moved to
Lynnwood, a rainy commuter town outside Seattle. Esther dropped out
of high school, and three years later her mom died of colon cancer.
"I shut down," Esther says. She tried staying with Edna for a
couple of months, then moved in with a boyfriend. She stopped
showing up at her job as a nursing assistant, spending most of her
time playing chess online, escaping into a world that felt orderly,
sensible, within her control. Sometimes she stood in the kitchen
and stared at the knives, fantasizing about ending it all. Then one
day, Esther began flirting with the beginnings of an idea.
"I had massive amounts of anger and feelings of betrayal," she
says. "I couldn't function, I couldn't pay my rent, and no one
would help me — so, fine, I'll find a way to help
myself."
She started by helping herself to her co-worker's purse. At her
sentencing, Esther felt so disconnected that she didn't even
recognize Edna sitting in the courtroom.
Afterward, as Edna berated her outside the courthouse, Esther
simply tuned her out. In some ways, Esther Reed was already
gone.
"When I was 14, I learned how to lock myself up in a little
box," Esther wrote in a letter to her father. "And I couldn't get
out, and nothing could get in." But now, she added, she was ready
to climb out of the box. What she didn't explain was her escape
plan, via a Social Security number filched from her now
ex-boyfriend's sister.
Jon Bruschke, the debate coach at
California State Fullerton, first met "Natalie Fisher" two years
later, at a 2001 summer debate camp at the Twin Palms Hotel in
Tempe, Arizona. Natalie was a beginner with no collegiate debate
training, but the young woman with the cool demeanor blew away the
novice division. Bruschke was impressed, especially after Natalie
confided to him that she wanted to win a national championship
someday. "I saw her as being able to go that far," says Bruschke.
He encouraged her to come to Cal State and to debate for his team.
Sure enough, Natalie Fisher enrolled the following year —
with one difference.
"When she came here, she was Natalie Bowman," Bruschke
remembers. "It seemed a little strange." He didn't ask questions,
and she didn't offer an explanation. Nor did "Natalie" reveal much
about herself to her fellow junior-varsity debate teammates; they
found her outspoken in matters of debating but awkward and private
on a personal level. They really knew only one detail, says her
debate partner, Russ Hargrove: "She told us she made money playing
chess professionally." In reality, Esther Reed did no such thing,
but it helped deflect questions about why she was starting college
at 24.
Her transformation from Natalie Fisher to Natalie Bowman had
taken her across the country and back again. She got her first
phony driver's license under the name of her ex-boyfriend's sister
at a DMV office in Philadelphia. When Esther walked in, she was
panic-stricken at the sight of a security guard. "I thought he was
going to tackle me on the way out," she says. She calmed her nerves
by retreating into "robot mode," a kind of emotional distance she
had been perfecting since childhood. "I have this practiced ability
to not deal with whatever's going on around me and just fake it,"
Esther says. "I think that helped me when I was doing stuff I
shouldn't have been doing."
Obtaining a new identity is one thing — deciding what to
do with it is the hard part. Lacking a plan, Esther acted on a
geeky fantasy by becoming a "debate groupie." She hung out at
college tournaments, eventually mustering the courage to
participate in open competitions. Debating was a curious choice for
a painfully shy person, but it exhilarated Esther to be able to
speak her mind, to apply her brain to something tricky and to excel
at it. Debate was also a controlled environment, one in which all
speech is stripped of judgment or emotional weight, relying instead
on preparation, intellect and skill — a safe, ultrarational
atmosphere that suited Esther just fine.
But her larger goal was to erase all traces of her past, making
it impossible for her family to track her down. To escape from
herself and from her old life, she'd decided a simple name change
wouldn't be enough: She needed a new Social Security number. The
only legitimate way to procure one, she knew, is to be a victim of
domestic violence — a fact Esther found galling. What were
nine arbitrary digits compared to her pursuit of happiness? "I
believe everyone has the right to live free from judgment and
emotional abuse," she says. What she needed was someone who
wouldn't be affected by the misuse of their personal data, someone
who wouldn't — or couldn't — blow the whistle on her.
So Esther went looking for a missing person.
Missing-persons websites, she learned, provide a wealth of
helpful information. Browsing site after site, she eventually found
an identity that seemed a good fit. The real Natalie Bowman, from
Tennessee, had a birth date roughly the same as Esther's —
and her Social Security number had been conveniently posted as
well. Esther copied it down. No one would be hurt by the theft, she
reasoned, as long as she was careful not to rack up debt. "I always
thought, mistakenly, if there was no financial loss, there was no
harm," she says.
Untethered from her old life, Esther began to shed her layers of
self-protection. In becoming someone else, she felt like the person
she was meant to be. "There was no reinvention," she insists. "More
of a re-emergence of a girl who had been hidden away." There was
even a physical component to her transformation. Esther became an
avid runner, losing so much weight that she had a breast job to
excise the sagging skin and tissue. She splurged on a pair of
implants while she was at it, even though she could scarcely afford
it. Investigators would later speculate that Esther was making
money by shoplifting and then "returning" the items for cash.
Still, she was so broke that at one point a boyfriend who was
living in Germany wired her $80 just to help her out.
Cal State Fullerton presented itself as a natural next step.
Esther was pleased to find she could enroll as a non-degree-seeking
student — sparing her the inconvenience of an admissions
process — and be virtually anonymous among 40,000 other
students. There had been a brief moment of tension when, while
filling out her application, she blanked on her new Social Security
number and got a couple of digits wrong. But "Natalie Bowman" was
accepted without a hitch. The school hadn't bothered to verify the
number; it was evidently nothing more than a filing tool and raised
no red flags.
But before the semester was through, Esther was ready to move
on; the debate program wasn't enough to satisfy her ferocious
intelligence. "Esther was more like, 'I want to be smarter than
everybody else,'" says Bruschke. And even more pressing, Esther had
just discovered that someone was collecting earnings on "her"
Social Security number: The real Natalie Bowman was still out there
somewhere, living her life. Maybe she had run off to start anew,
like Esther herself. Badly spooked, Esther realized she needed
another identity — one that no one was using.
In the Travelers Rest police barracks,
Investigator Jon Campbell reviewed the Brooke Henson file yet
again, hoping some new angle would reveal itself. It seemed
impossible that in this washed-out town of 4,000 souls, no one had
any information about Brooke's disappearance. And yet four years
after Brooke vanished, Campbell wasn't any closer to finding
her.
The Henson investigation had been a disaster from the start.
When Brooke's parents tried to report their daughter missing,
police didn't take it very seriously. Martin and Cathy Henson were
known around town for their good-time ways, and their small,
two-story house was a magnet for folks of all stripes who would
gather for the family's boozy fish frys and never really leave. The
Hensons rented to a basement boarder who hid his marijuana plants
behind a rebel flag.
Brooke's own bad-news boyfriend, Shaun Shirley, slept over
whenever he pleased. In and out of jail for drug violations and
assaults, he refused to talk to detectives during the
investigation. His friends clammed up too. After Brooke stomped out
of her own party in the wee hours, she was last seen at a lakeside
party in nearby River Falls, a thickly wooded region in the
foothills of the Blue Ridge Mountains. Rumor had it there had been
a foul-smelling barbecue in that area not long afterward.
Campbell, a baby-faced 40-year-old with blue eyes and a widow's
peak, had chased down every lead, searching ponds, wells and
forests with cadaver dogs. But he knew he was out of his depth:
Aside from a long stint in the Coast Guard, his whole
law-enforcement career had consisted of writing traffic tickets and
responding to trailer-park brawls. By 2003, he had given up on
finding Brooke alive. When he asked her parents for DNA samples in
case a body turned up, Cathy had collapsed in his arms. The
Hensons, desperate to keep the case open, held an annual vigil,
every July 4th. A psychic was consulted. A family friend started a
website listing every detail about Brooke and her disappearance, in
the hopes that someone — anyone — would see it.
Esther Reed made her public debut as
Brooke Henson at a West Point formal banquet in January 2004. Amid
the swarm of uniformed cadets and their civilian dates, Esther
looked utterly unlike the scared, overweight teen she had once
been. She was dressed in an elegant black sheath, dangly earrings,
a lipsticked smile and sparkly, elbow-length gloves — a
detail that struck some attendees as over-the-top, like she was
trying too hard. Her new boyfriend, West Point junior Kyle Brengel,
already knew that beneath her assertive personality "Brooke" was
acutely self-conscious. "I don't know if she overcompensated for
her anxiety problems by being a little more aggressive," Brengel
says. "But she was definitely very confident at times, and other
times very unsure of herself." It was one reason he never offered
to play chess against her, even though she claimed to have played
professionally; she had already told him it would destroy her
confidence if she were beaten by an amateur. "I never thought to
question it," he says.
As Brooke Henson, Esther was coming into her own. She was taking
classes at Harvard's Extension School. She lived in Boston with
five housemates and had an actual social life, spending her
weekends clubbing, skiing in New York or hiking in New Hampshire.
She honed her mushy Montana accent into a crisp East Coast one and
she set her sights on the very epicenter of ambition and fresh
starts: Manhattan. Esther saw New York City as the best place to
fulfill her twin aspirations: to achieve and, at the same time, to
be invisible. "When you have anxiety, you want to be able to walk
down the street and have nobody look at you," she says. "New York
is as close as you're gonna get to that."
Getting there required finesse, but nothing Esther couldn't
handle by now. She already had much of the necessary paperwork.
Months earlier, after acquiring Brooke Henson's Social Security
number online, she had gotten an Ohio state ID in Brooke's name,
then sat for the GED exam. She had also gotten college
recommendations from her Cal State philosophy professor, Mitch
Avila, as well as from Shirley Fleischmann, an engineering
professor at Grand Valley State University in Michigan and mother
to Ian Fleischmann — the first of two West Point cadets
Esther dated. Although both instructors had known Esther as
"Natalie," they agreed to write their recommendations in the name
of Brooke Henson. Esther had explained to them that her father was
stalking her — threatening to kill her, actually — and
so, as a victim of domestic violence, she was being assigned a new
identity.
Now 26-year-old "Brooke Henson" took her SATs and scored a 1400,
more than enough to get her into Columbia University's School of
General Studies. In her application essay, she wrote about how
chess had helped her to cope with the loss of her mother, carefully
replacing any mention of her childhood in Montana and Washington
with "South Carolina." That skillful fusion of two lives —
the kernel of truth adorned with lies — is precisely what
made Esther so convincing in her day-to-day role as Brooke. Esther
herself, however, needed no convincing.
"I know it's hard for people to understand, but in my mind, I
never changed my identity," she says. "My identity change was in
name only. I didn't create a back story; I have a back story." All
that was needed were "minor changes to explain small things." As
she saw it, the person Esther Reed presented to the world, and to
Columbia University, was a reflection of her true self. Accepted
immediately, she got right to work applying for more than $100,000
in student loans and hunting for an apartment in New York. Esther
was so busy making arrangements, in fact, that when Kyle broke up
with her after six months of dating, she barely seemed to notice.
That summer, Esther arrived at her new apartment on 108th and
Columbus ready to enjoy the grandest chapter of her new life.
But maintaining her fictions proved to be stressful; one slip-up
and her carefully crafted universe could come crashing down. It
made Esther fearful of getting too close to anyone. "There was
always a holding back, a knowing that everything could fall apart,"
she says. Like all those times she'd realized a beat too late that
someone had been calling "her" name while she stared off into
space, not responding to "Brooke." Or the time that Ian
Fleischmann's father quizzed her about why, if she was a chess
champ, her name wasn't listed with the U.S. Chess Federation.
Esther had managed to concoct an explanation on the spot, but the
incident had served as a reminder that she always had to be on her
guard.
That vigilance came with a price. Esther's old anxieties had
never really gone away, but she had managed to keep them in check.
Now her fears overwhelmed her. At Columbia, she was sure that
everyone who laid eyes on her was judging her harshly. A professor
calling on her in class became cause for panic. A visit to the
computer room was a terrifying exercise — what if there were
no free terminals, and everyone looked up at her? To survive these
daily onslaughts, Esther put on her familiar mask of haughty
confidence and switched on her emotional autopilot, mimicking
social interactions while feeling nothing.
It didn't help that at the same time her own sense of self was
crumbling, Esther was working to shore up her stolen identity, so
she could continue being Brooke forever. She had already memorized
Brooke's vital info from the missing-person website: date and place
of birth, Social Security number, mother's maiden name, even the
names of Brooke's family and friends. Now Esther used that info to
gain her last coveted bits of ID. First, a birth certificate,
procured with a call to South Carolina's health department, then
picked up at a mailbox she rented at a UPS store in Northampton,
Massachusetts. Next, a driver's license, which she got in Vermont.
And for her final trick, Esther used all those IDs to achieve the
holy grail: a U.S. passport, issued in the name of Brooke
Henson.
Despite those accomplishments, Esther felt no better. She had
lapsed back into that terrified, alienated little girl, as though
she had never escaped that emotional box in the first place. It
never occurred to her that the farther she tried to run from
herself, the more she was sealing herself into that box. She was
suffocating in there.
By her second year at Columbia, Esther spent most of her days
holed up in her apartment with her two Shih Tzu puppies, Poochin
and Odie, soaking up their unconditional love. She stopped going to
class and to her work-study job at the Columbia alumni office, or
even outside to take out the trash. Her transcript was littered
with withdrawn classes. Her adviser suggested Esther see a
shrink.
And so it was that in the spring of 2006, an identity thief
began taking steps toward integrating her new and old selves, with
the help of a cognitive-behavioral therapist. Esther began to leave
her apartment to do small tasks, like going to the basement to do
her laundry — a feat that took her four weeks to complete.
She learned techniques to quell her fears, using logic — that
safe and comforting tool — to examine the reality of each
situation. Soon she was making it back to her classes, including
the one in Hamilton Hall, whose sticky door handle terrified her so
much. She ended the semester with good grades in all four of her
courses — a women's-studies class and three in psych —
and a part-time job at a legal-staffing firm. Esther was wrung out
from the effort, but floating on her sense of achievement.
"For the first time ever, I was functioning!" she recalls. "It
was exciting and awesome. I had done it!" This, at long last, was
the life she deserved, the life she was meant for. Esther was
finally ready to take on the world — to be the best Brooke
Henson she could be. And then she got an e-mail from campus
security, and that lovely life came to an abrupt end.
Jon Campbell tried to break the news
gently to Brooke Henson's aunt. "There's a girl in New York saying
she's Brooke Henson," he said.
On her end of the phone, Lisa Henson felt her breath catch.
"What does she look like?" Lisa demanded.
"She has dark hair and dark eyes. She's kinda thin. And" —
here Campbell paused uncertainly — "she's going to Columbia
University. It could be identity theft."
Campbell explained the situation to Lisa: Up in New York, a
co-worker of "Brooke's" had Googled her name and discovered the
Brooke Henson missing-persons website. When the co-worker called
South Carolina authorities, Campbell brought the NYPD into the
loop. Wondering how a high school dropout like Brooke could have
gotten into Columbia, he asked Lisa to come up with some questions
that only Brooke would know the answers to. She obliged: "What is
your brother's best friend's name? What is your late uncle's name?"
Campbell sent the list to New York detectives and waited.
A day or so later, he got a stunning call: The young woman had
answered nearly all of the questions correctly. The New York cops
believed they had found the real Brooke Henson.
Had Campbell not known the case so well, or come to care so
much, the Brooke Henson missing-person case might have been closed
right then, enabling Esther to go on living the rest of her life as
Brooke Henson. Not only had she answered most of the questions
correctly, but she claimed to be an abuse survivor who had run away
from her family: Thanks to a domestic-violence privacy shield she
had requested for her Columbia file, police were unable to access
her records. Other than student loans and a little credit-card debt
— mostly bills from a psychiatrist's office — her
finances were in order. It made no sense that she wasn't Brooke.
Why would someone go to all the trouble to steal an identity and
not milk it for every dollar possible?
Even so, Campbell couldn't accept it. He was positive that the
real Brooke Henson was dead. "I want DNA!" he snapped at the New
York detective. He wasn't surprised when, days later, he learned
"Brooke" had skipped town. He decided to continue working the case,
to try and find the identity thief who had victimized Brooke.
Campbell could tell from the get-go this was no ordinary case.
The first clue was a call from Kyle Brengel, the West Point cadet
who had Googled his ex's name and been shocked to find a bulletin
about the Columbia identity thief. Brengel steered Campbell to Ian
Fleischmann, the other cadet she had dated. When Campbell called
Fleischmann's family in Michigan, he discovered that Ian's father,
Fred, had always been suspicious of his son's peculiar girlfriend:
her unsubstantiated claim about being a chess champ, her request
for a college recommendation in a different name, the fact that she
always paid for things in cash. For a brief period, she had shared
a cellphone plan with Ian, and when the bills came, Fred noticed
that she had been calling all across the country. Suspicious,
Fleischmann went through her purse, where he found an ID from
Washington State calling her "Esther Reed" as well as a
wire-transfer receipt from Germany. Putting two and two together,
he concluded she was a drug mule.
Using Fleischmann's information — including the cellphone
records — Campbell uncovered her pre-Cal State identity,
"Natalie Fisher." He also ran the name "Esther Reed" through the
National Crime Information Center database and discovered that she
was listed as a missing person. Campbell sent a photo of "Brooke
Henson" to Washington police, who showed it to the Reed family.
They confirmed it was Esther. It was their first indication in
seven years that she was still alive.
Campbell struggled to make sense of the facts. What could Esther
Reed's motivation possibly be? Was she a drug courier, as
Fleischmann suggested? Or, just maybe, could she have murdered
Brooke Henson and the other girls she impersonated? "I thought,
'Man, she might be a serial killer,'" recalls Campbell. Then one
day, while reading the hundreds of pages of instant messages that
Kyle Brengel had turned over, his eyes lit on a passage in which
Esther expressed keen curiosity about a term paper the cadet was
writing about tactical troop movements. In another exchange, she
told Kyle that she'd love to be James Bond — that being a spy
would be her dream job.
Of course, Campbell concluded: Esther Reed was a spy.
If Campbell had learned anything from his time in the Coast
Guard, it was that threats lurk everywhere. Everything started
falling into place: the military boyfriends, the plastic surgery,
the wire transfer from Europe, the false passport. Campbell could
see now that Esther had been infiltrating military intelligence at
its roots, by seducing young cadets at West Point who would become
tomorrow's military leaders.
"It's Cold War spy stuff, the same thing the Soviet Union did to
us for 50 years!" says Campbell, still excited by his theory.
"They'd have some girl go in, have sex with them. Did you ever see
the movie The Good Shepherd? It's exactly like that. Ten
years from now, the guy is going up for his first star as a
general, and he's on the Joint Chiefs of Staff or something. The
guy gets a package, it has a movie in it, and it's 'You work for us
now.' That's classic espionage."
Campbell notified the Secret Service and the Army. The manhunt
was on.
Esther Reed flipped on the light in Room
317 at the Sleep Inn in Tinley Park, Illinois. She blinked at the
tropical-print bedspread: another cheap motel. It was February 2nd,
2008 — nearly two years since she had received the e-mail at
Columbia that destroyed her life as Brooke Henson. Safe in the
hotel room, Esther got herself and her Shih Tzus settled. She was
dressed in a green turtleneck and a huge pair of jeans; since she
had been on the lam, her runner's body had ballooned to 250 pounds.
Her weight gain had been intentional at first, to better disguise
herself, but then it had taken on a life of its own. "Depression
hit hard," she says. Esther didn't know she was wanted as a threat
to national security. She just wanted it all — the lies, the
running — to stop.
She was "Jen Myers" now. The name was fictitious, but her Iowa
driver's license was real, as was the registration for her green
'93 Subaru Legacy parked in the lot outside. Esther had created the
new identity soon after leaving New York with the help of a fake
Kentucky birth certificate, a fake Nevada marriage certificate and
a Social Security number she had made up, having gambled that the
Iowa DMV wouldn't bother to check it. As it happened, the number
she chose was real and belonged to someone else — a crime in
itself. But Esther never used the number for financial purposes.
These days she was living on money from a new scheme: In her
rolling suitcase she carried two laptops, a stack of rewritable
discs, 500 blank plastic ID cards and rolls of blank
register-receipt tape — some with a forged JC Penney logo.
According to prosecutors, they were all tools for a meticulous scam
in which she would "return" shoplifted merchandise for cash.
It was too painful to contemplate just how disastrously her
self-improvement plan had backfired. "I made poor choices, and
those choices hurt other people, and I desperately regret that,"
she says. She had deceived a hope-starved family in South Carolina
that their daughter was alive and well. She had hurt the people she
befriended along the way. And then there was her own family. Esther
was still grateful to have left the lot of them behind —
except for her father and her brother EJ, whom she missed acutely.
She could hardly guess at what she had put them through these past
nine years: the guilt and the grief, the birthdays and Christmases
gone by without her, her family's shock when a body turned up in
Auburn, Washington — possibly a victim of the Green River
serial killer — and her dad underwent a DNA cheek swab in
2004, preparing himself for the worst.
Try as Esther might, she couldn't get herself out of the
elaborate jam she had created for herself. All she could do was
keep moving, staying one step ahead of the forces Campbell had
unleashed. It wasn't so much a plan as it was a way of getting
through each day. In her room at the Sleep Inn, Esther lay down for
a late-day nap. She was exhausted. She didn't know how much longer
she could keep this up.
In the parking lot outside, Officer Kevin Horbaczewski was
sitting in his patrol car, his headlights beamed on Esther's
vehicle. He could hardly believe it. Local police had been
searching for this green Subaru for a week, ever since a cop had
randomly run Esther's license plate at a stoplight, a routine check
to see if the car was stolen. It turned out to be legit, so the
officer had watched "Jen Myers" drive off, not realizing she was a
federal fugitive until U.S. marshals called Tinley Park to find out
why the hell the cops had let her get away. Turns out the feds had
uncovered Esther's new alias by tracing one of her e-mail accounts
and had been waiting for her to surface ever since. Now here was
her car, parked innocently in the lot at the Sleep Inn. Officer
Horbaczewski peeked inside the vehicle. It was filthy with
fast-food trash.
Esther opened the door to his knock, her face puffy with sleep.
Horbaczewski pretended to be investigating a noise complaint. She
handed over her Jen Myers driver's license. He led her away in
handcuffs.
"Why am I being brought to the station?" Esther asked from the
back of the patrol car. Horbaczewski was struck by how clear and
confident her voice seemed. He looked at her in the rearview
mirror.
"We'll work it all out when we get to the station," he told
her.
She met his eyes in the mirror. "My name is Esther Reed," she
said. As soon as the words left her lips, her expression dissolved
into one of pure relief.
'I knew instinctively upon being arrested
that this was the start of my life," Esther wrote, her
printing rounded and legible. "I have always been very good at
looking toward the future and somehow remaining optimistic. Now is
no different."
After her arrest, it quickly became apparent to investigators
that Esther Reed had nothing to do with Brooke Henson's
disappearance, let alone with national security. She pleaded guilty
to three counts of fraud and one count of identity theft. At her
February sentencing in Greenville, South Carolina, Esther was led
into the courtroom wearing an orange prison jumpsuit, her wrists
shackled, her long hair pulled into a tight ponytail. She looked
composed and almost casual, except when it was her turn to speak.
"I accept full responsibility," she told the judge, her voice
quaking. Her lawyer tried suggesting that Esther's anxiety had
compelled her to commit her crimes. "I've got to hand it to you,
that's a creative argument," drawled Judge Henry Herlong. He gave
Esther 51 months in prison, followed by three years of probation,
and ordered her to pay $125,916 in restitution. "That's a
significant sentence for someone who's done what she's done," notes
Walt Wilkins, the U.S. attorney for South Carolina, who prosecuted
the case.
Esther sees prison as a way to regroup as she readies herself
for a new beginning — this time, a real one. Now that she's
forced to be Esther Reed again, she finds herself freed up in a
whole new way, even though she's behind bars. "Regardless of where
I am at this moment, I'm not in an emotional box anymore," she
says. "It took this entire journey to open it up, but it's open.
With any luck, I will never need a box again."
Jon Campbell still thinks she's a spy. "It's never really been
fully investigated," he says, in a Greenville cafe after Esther's
sentencing. Seeing Esther in cuffs should leave him exultant; after
all, it was his dedication that broke the case. Instead, Campbell
finds himself frustrated: The Reed case has been solved, but the
Brooke Henson case may never be. It kills him to know that someone
in Travelers Rest must know something about Brooke's disappearance.
"I think it's gonna be a deathbed confession that solves this
thing," Campbell says.
To look around Brooke's hometown today — a once-proud
textile town haunted by unemployment, methamphetamine and teen
pregnancy — is to glimpse what her future might have held,
had she not vanished. Despite the wildly divergent paths that
Brooke and Esther took in life, it's striking how similarly they
started out. Both were aimless small-town daughters, adrift and
anonymous, members of the same lonesome sisterhood — girls
who feel trapped by circumstance, bereft of choices, who long to
discover their greater purpose and meaning; girls in search of
identity. That forlorn sorority is perhaps the reason why, when
Esther met a fellow inmate one day who happened to be a friend of
Brooke's, the woman told Esther not to feel too badly. "If Brooke
had known you were in need," the prisoner said, "she would have
completely understood."
Esther — the girl who once felt so alone and misunderstood
that she chose to cloak herself in another girl's life —
burst into tears. Too late, she had finally found a friend.
Ten years ago, two girls went missing. Esther found her way
back; Brooke didn't. And so the story of two lost girls narrows to
one.
[From Issue 1080 — June 11, 2009]
