This episode contains references to suicide. You can find links in our show notes to support services. Let me start in December twenty ten. It's a Monday morning in Auckland, New Zealand's largest city, and a cluster of young people are waking to a nightmare. A young woman, Laura Jane West, has been killed overnight in a car crash. She was twenty, survived by a five year old daughter, Caylee. This was devastating news for Laura's family, but the shock the grief
of losing Laura went much further. Laura was bright, bubbly, vivacious, and like her sister's very pretty and popular, particularly online. When it came to Facebook, Laura and her three sisters and their friends at times were a swirling whirlwind of excitement to the first generation to truly raise social media.
Distance disappeared and they connected with people across the country. Laura, dead at twenty, was barely sixteen when she joined Facebook, and the years that followed she built friendships and even discovered love online. So when his sister Abby announced Laura's death on Facebook, the impact the grief went far beyond her immediate family.
Last night, at three am, Laura and May opt into a car with a guy they trusted and know really well who told them he was sober to stand out to be alive. He was five times over the limit. My particle sister just wanted to forget and have a good night out. On the way home, the driver of the car checked the corner at great speed and lost control of the car, heading into the lamppost rap.
Babeger, there have been tragedy enough in Laura Wes's family. Just weeks earlier, the sisters Rachel, Abby and Becker shared through Facebook that they'd lost their dad. He was one of the twenty nine men killed when the Pike River mine on the West Coast exploded. And now Laura dead too. A young life cut short just when it was getting going.
The daughter Kaylee left without a mother. It's a tragedy in every sense of the word, and the Facebook post was filled quickly with tributes from those who counted her as a friend, even if they had never met in real life.
Rap baby girl, you were there for me always when Amy passed, and fuck, I'm going to miss you like I do Amy every fricking day. I love you the rest, easy, little one. Always missed, never far from her heart. Hey, my sys fucking miss you like crazy. Love you so much, Never going to forget you in my heart forever. Love you bud.
R P.
Baby girl, I'm going to miss your big times.
See you my God.
I can't believe this is true, mate, I miss you.
Remember the time when I saw you jis and my heart goes out to you and wee Kaylee.
Then there were those who learned more directly. In the South Island, in a small town not far from christ Church, a grandmother called Bernie received a phone call when her teenage daughter Emma had started making friends online. Bernie had got on the phone to check them out, and that's how she came to know Laura and Abby, discovering through them a distant family connection. They called her Auntie when they called or connected on a messenger. Emma was the
new founder cousin. So that day, December sixth, twenty ten, remains fixed in their memory for the impact it had. When a broken, distraught Abby rang to break the news to Bernie.
Abby wrung, Mum and I are a mess. So Laura is dead and my mom was like she was like no. She had a car crash and she did. They took the ICU, but she didn't make it. Yeah, we got the message, and then I got a message or a phone call at the home saying she dead. Your cousins did, and you know that sent both of us spiraling.
It was a.
Crushing blow for the mother and daughter, but especially for Emma. She had lost a friend, a close friend, to suicide just months earlier, and a friend who died before that at a car crash that was very similar to that which killed Laura.
That's what I went on a big bender because I yeah, no, I want a big bender. Then you know, I broke my sobriety. We just sat there numb and grieving, and we were trying to, you know, help planning the funeral. We were we were like trying to make the trip up north apparently too, that's where it was happening.
Thank you.
Yeah everything, oh nine yards just to get up there, because I was made to carry of the casket.
All these years down the track. They can't shake the horror of losing so suddenly, such a bright spark of life and a thoughtless drink drive death.
Early that Monday morning.
For Sam Baker, who was dating Abbie, he remembers the distress and wanting to console Laura's boyfriend.
I heard from my friend and he was very very upset. He just read about it on Facebook. I think one of the sisters had gotten in contact with him, or it might have even been I don't know. I'm really scratching my fourteen year old memory here, but there may have been a mother Facebook page that was involved as well, that reached out to my friend and said that, yeah, very very sorry to tell you, but Laura's tragically passed away. You know, she loved you dearly. She wanted to build
this big life with you and everything. It's really really sad, but feel free to keep in contact with us, because you know, you're like family to us. Like my mate, he liked he was going to buy a ring for her and stuff like. They were really really locked in. So whendn't he found the news? When I found the news out from him, you know, I went up to console him, but he was beside himself.
It was really quite horrible.
But there's a catch to this story, and that catch is that Laura never existed. Her daughter Kayley didn't exist. There was no car, no car crash, there was no death at all. Abby didn't exist. None of the sisters existed. They were all characters created by one woman, a woman who joined in the Facebook grief posting with a heartfelt message that she knew wasn't true.
At twenty, you have not even lived yet, my sweet girl. Why is all I am asking?
You know?
Getting into a car with a drunk hass driver is wrong? Babe, Rip Laura Jane West, you are going to be missed and loved.
That post was written by Natalia Burgess. My name's David Fisher. I'm an investigative journalist with the New Zealand Herald. I first heard about Natalia a few months after this post bent up back in twenty eleven. I've written thousands of stories over thirty five years in journalism, thousands of lives that have touched mine and carried on into the future. In my life, people come and go with the stories they have to tell, and then there are those stories
and people that come back. This is one of those stories. This is a story about Natalia Burgess, also known as Laura West or Amy West or Kaylie Rose Becker, Julienne Abby William, Rachel Drent, and so many other names. There were so many false identities Natalia Burgess created online and infused with life.
And histories and friendships.
The problem with Natalia's fancy world was how imaging it became. For those whose identities she used and for those who believe she was real. Hearts were broken, trust was betrayed, someone died, and Natalia went to prison. I never thought I'd be thinking of this case again, But here I am in twenty twenty four, thirty years after all this happened,
and Natalia is back in my life. Back then, she called herself the puppeteer, and after all these years, she's still pulling all the strings, and I'm looking for a way to cut her loose. My journey with Natalia started in early twenty eleven. Back then, I was working as the chief reporter for the Herald on Sunday, a twenty two year veteran reporter and quite a bit more veteran. Now it's easy to forget how much has changed and just thirteen years, and how different technology was then.
Let me take you back to that time.
This was a time when MySpace and Bebo had just passed the use by days as the big players and online social media Twitter hadn't really taken off in the mainstream, and Facebook was still young enough and still quirky enough that a biopic about its creation was a big player in Hollywood's Ward season that year. There was no zoom and Skype. Conversations were often about how I can see you, but I can't hear you all the other way around. We were only up to the iPhone four and the
first generation iPad. The idea of smartphones as an everyday part of life had yet to be embedded in the mainstream. The Internet and social media may have started to infiltrate our lives, but not in the all consuming way they do now. The reason all this matters is the herold on Sunday where I worked was people had said it was crazy to launch a newspaper when the whole news industry was going to shift online. But it worked, and one reason for that was we worked harder and smarter,
finding every advantage that we could. One of those things we got really good at very early in the piece was mining these new social media sites like Facebook for information about the people using it and the connections they had. That meant when the Press newspaper in christ Church reported that a woman was using false Facebook identities to scam teenage boys. I was perfectly placed to dig below the surface. It took a week to identify in Natalian Burgess as
that woman. It was a week of building evidence and developing sources to the point where we could name her and run her photograph on the front page of the next edition. Over a year, Burgess used her multiple online personalities to form Internet relationships with dozens of teenage boys and men across the country. Almost forty boys at Saint Thomas, at Canterbury School and Cristchurch were caught up, along with dozens of others. Many believed they were in relationships with
attractive girls their own age. She would arrange to pay for some to have their mobile phones topped up with credit and they would spend hours through the night talking to her. I'd later learn that Natalie was not just focused on one school. There were dozens of young people and adults around the country that fell into her orbit. One of those people was Sam Baker, he heard earlier talking of his shock over Laura's death. He was just
thirteen when drawn into Natalia's world. All the way from tiny Murchison near the top of New Zealand South Island.
It was once a gold mining town.
Now it's sought after for whitewater adventure sports, and it is a tiny town. The last census put the population at fewer than five hundred people. Small as it was, the internent made Sam's world feel so much bigger, and that's how he got mixed up in this.
I was up visiting a friend of mine who was speaking to a girl that he'd been talking to quite a while over online, and from what I was under the impression of they were in an online relationship.
At the time, I just assumed that he had known.
Who previously and they were just communicating on an online platform. But I didn't really that didn't occur to me to press any to do that. I was thirteen at the time and he was a good friend of mine, so I just thought really nothing of it. Bear in mind, when I was living he was sixteen. It was I'm from a small town, so people from varying age groups just tend to hang out with each other, I guess.
But anyway, I was talking to this girl who name happened to be Laura, and I started yearning to all I was up to seeing my mate, and we just I don't know. I just said, hey, hey you Gan, you're good.
Thanks. She asked me what my name was, asked what her name was?
Asked her, you know how long they guys have been friends talking to each other. She said maybe like a year or so. And he's like, yeah, I've met her online. When we get along great, I was like, that's pretty cool.
Sweet as I thought nothing of it. He ended the call.
We played a few games of Xbox, as you do when you're thirteen years old, and then I just Sweet Home and Sweet Home for dinner and then to do homework and stuff. But anyway, I log into my Facebook and I noticed that I have a frame request from a random girl who name. The full name eludes me nowadays, but it was Rachel. I think her name was Rachel. And I accepted it and messaged to her. I was like, hello, who are you. It was a bit more colorful that
I was like hello, who are you? She's like, hello, my name is Rachel. I believe you were talking to my sister earlier and Laura. I was listening to the conversation and I thought you had a cute voice. I was wondering, would you be keen to I don't know develop her friendship, and I was like.
Okay, cool.
Bearing in mind, I was thirteen years old and a town of five hundred people.
In my school.
There are one hundred and twenty kids in my classroom. I would have been probably year seven, year eight at the time.
Out of thirty of.
Us, I think there were three girls, so to be getting this sort of female attention, I didn't really think twice about it. I just thought, oh my god, there's a very attractive girl heading me up.
Natalia knew her target demographic well. Her primary false personality was a young woman called Laura West. Laura entered Facebook age sixteen, and at that time Natarmi was.
Around twenty six.
Laura West was pretty with a bright and engaging smile. She also seemed to be very popular where she went On Facebook, she traveled with an engaging social circle who liked Laura were young and attractive women, and it seemed that they, like any teenager, were trying to work out how they fitted into the world and with others their own age, so many came under their spell. One of those boys was Ethan Williams, whose story is pretty similar
to Sam's. Years older, around fifteen, when he first met Laura, and he too was a small town boy raised in Monteweka and Nelson, the same general area where Sam lives.
So I think initially I met a girl called Laura online, and I think this is this is probably in the early days of Facebook or kind of towards the tail end of the old Bebo social network when that existed, and it was just one of those kind of random ads on Facebook. She haded me, and I thought, yeah, oh, why not? You know, but there were there were about three or four different people that you know, that were family of this this Laura West that her last name
was West, That's right. That added me as well. And I didn't want much of it. And I guess as I probably said to you, well, I wouldn't have set you at the time. But as I said, just a moment ago, being quite a naive Asia, I didn't think much of it. And I think also because catfishing wasn't particularly a well known phenomenon back then, it wasn't something that ever crossed my mind.
Could you tell me how Laura presented herself? I mean, who did you think you were communicating with online?
Yeah? I so it's a very good question. If we think about an answer she presented as kind of an attractive I think she was seventeen eighteen or something around that sort of age, kind of a little bit older than me, but you know, quite an attractive young woman, you know, short blonde here and someone that I thought, you know, she's she's quite attractive. I'll talk to her if she's gonna talk to me. And yeah, it's kind of ret snowballs. I suppose.
Ethan was fifteen when you started talking Tonalia, or as he knew Laura West, and Sam was just thirteen when he started dating her sister Rachel.
This was in twenty ten.
At this time, Natalia, being twenty six years old, is literally twice the age of Sam. I remember being told once that the guide for age suitability is to take your age, split it into add seven and the results at the youngest end of the sliding scale that you should be on. You've probably heard something similar. It's one of those unwritten rules of humanity. We will just seem to know. By that measure, Natalia shouldn't be talking to anyone younger than twenty, or at least not in the
way she spoke with Sam and others his age. But There's really only one equation that matters here, and that is back in twenty ten, Sam is a child and Natalia as an adult. And another thing to think on is that Sam had no idea the girl who contacted him online was twice his age. The voice he heard, the photographs he saw were of a teenage girl, while Laura West herself didn't exist. The photos belonged to a real person. The photographs Natalia used.
Where of a real woman? Could Natalie?
This was someone Natalia did not know, but, as Ethan says, she knew the effect she could have with the photographs.
She had chosen.
Those boys at Saint Thomas and Canterbury, Sam Ethan, their friends, none.
Of them stood a chance.
At the age of thirteen, fourteen, fifteen, and some a few years older. They were confronted with bright, vivacious Laura and a coterie of friends who were intent on forming bonds and exploring relationships. By the time I came along, Natalia's on line personas were well advanced, brought to life with other stolen photographs taken from other people's social media pages. Those characters were so well advanced that they had time
to form relationships. Speak of love, contemplate marriage, and all those other things teenagers do when they first fall head over heels. Each of her characters was fully realized. Along with photographs harvested online. Natalia had given them family connections and personalities, breathing life and credibility into every false persona. With some of them, she created family. Laura's sisters, as we've heard, were Rachel Becker and Abby. It wasn't all
playing out online either. As Natalia's characters formed online friendships with schoolboys, she worked to take it to the real world.
I think I had the first voice called with her, maybe like a week into the relationship. It was weird, it was I don't know how she pulled it off. Thinking back, I spoke to her Laura, and there was another sister. I can't remember her name, but she was a blonde girl and she worked at Packing Save And I had a threewey.
Chat with all three of these girls, and they told me how much of the nice boy I think I am and how.
I'm going to be so perfect for the sister, And they asked me like, will you be my sister's boyfriend? Like these two girls sort of asked on her behalf like I've taken into the back room sort of thing and given the fifth degree, and I was just like, yeah, all right, sweet, let's do it.
There were phone calls and long conversations. Evidence emerged of Natalia paying to top up phones so she could speak for longer as Laura or Abby or Becka or any of the other identities she manufactured, and even occasionally as herself as the real Natalia Burgess in the shadow cast
by her younger, glamorous friends. As I said earlier, Natalia wasn't a teenager when she was talking with all these kids, and it kind of reminds me of Hollywood's tendency to cast old when casting teenagers like Greece or nine O two zero will Glee. Every generation has some example of a grown adult playing young, and Natalia was bringing that fantasy to life in her own way. This was real life, though,
and not a Hollywood set. As I dug deeper, there was seriously disturbing aspects to her interaction with those she met online. As she built her fictional world and populated it, she started to develop it with whatever came to hand. Natalia even attached real life people to false personas. After the Pike of a mind disaster. Laura West posted a memorial message with a photograph of one of the miners who was killed.
I miss you and I will never stop loving you, Rip Daddy.
It's one part of the story that Sam Baker remembers all too well.
I grew up in Murchison.
The tragedy happened, I believe in Greymouth, So Murchison and Graymouth for about two hours away from each other.
And what happened was is I remember there was a whole lot.
Of like this was way before crowdfunding and go fund me were a thing. People used to sort of reach out for donations and help via Facebook pages and groups.
And there was a Facebook page called the Pipe.
River Mind twenty nine and it was people that could come together that were affected by the tragedy, that could share photos and memories and maybe like people that had a bit of money they wanted to donate to a family that had been displaced because their father a peerish they could you know, put down their bank account details and receive donations. Laura started fabricating making these big, giant
like Facebook murals. I guess, like with this Paul Blokes photo and then like the name up in lights, and then the born day, the death day, and then like your kids mess you dearly, we love you, daddy, like from Laura, from Rachel, from the other daughter and stuff.
It just all looked very very legit, very polished.
And then she had people from the community who they had lost family members in the mind tragedy that were like getting behind her, like, oh my god, we feel so bad for you, as you know, who can help you out. And then I believe she may have been putting down a bank account and receiving donations from these people as a like, I don't know, contributing to helping her get back on her feet because she just lost her dad.
That feels pretty cold.
Yeah, but at the time, what did you make of it? Because this was the girl that you were dating, this her sister Rachel.
Yeah yeah, yeah.
So I was dating Laura's sister Rachel. So at the time I felt horrible for them. I was like, you, poor girl, that's horrible. So yeah, So to get the time frame together, the Pipe River disaster happen, and then Laura died in the car crash. So between Laura between the Pipe River and Laura died in the car crash, quotation marks. I felt absolutely horrible for these poor girls.
It wasn't the only time Natalia created false links to a high profile death. When christ Church woman Emma Agney was murdered, Natalia even went as far as setting up a memorial page in her personas, linking people she had invented to people she had never met. In the relationships she was forming, they were becoming increasingly serious. Sam and Ethan were far from the only ones caught up in this.
There were dozens of teenage boys who believed they were in a romantic relationship with one of Natalia's personas, and each one was smitten. Some thought they'd found the love of their life, and when that was taken away, the consequences were devastating.
My name is Raven Gear and I live out a Birdling slat. Beforehand, I was Raven Ford, and I lived in christ Church all my life until my son tragically took his own.
Life around twenty ten. One man who fell in love with Natalia was Peter Russell. He was from christ Urge, like many of Natalia's other targets, and he was a little older than the others. He was twenty one, But if you look at the photographs of him. He's really still just a boy looking for love and finding it online.
What was the name that Peter knew? Who by.
Laura? Laura West. She was a stunning, beautiful, blonde haired girl. He actually talked to Laura's cousins, which I've since found out with the same person. All along. Peter went out and bought close for this child. No, but there never was a child. This child would talk to Peter on the phone saying, Daddy, mummy's doing drugs. I need help.
She obviously facebooked them off, you know, off another you know, fake Facebook, and I knew something was up, but I never quested him, you know, because he was that a little bit older than me, so I just, you know, I thought it was a friend, and you know how yeah it was. And then we just started drifting away. And then he said to me and I was like, what's up? And he goes, I think I'll fall in love with this girl. And I was like, you need to follow your heart, you need to do what you need to do.
That was Emma, Peter's girlfriend at the time and an online friend of Laura's. You heard her at the beginning of this episode talking about helping arrange Laura's supposed funeral. Not only did Peter leave Emma for Laura, he proposed to her.
Well, I knew at that time when Peter was talking to a young sexy girl on Facebook, and that's all I know. He was talking to her a lot. He was talking to me about her and her child and how he was going to marry her. He actually even proposed to her on the internet. If you look up on YouTube, you can actually see my son asking this lady to marry her.
I love you, and Laura accepted, and then short while later she dumped them.
It was heartbroken, and.
It's it's a difficult thing for parents to see their childlike that.
The game she played with that boy and the mental anguish that she put him through was just unbelievable. One minute she'd should be in contact with him, and then next minute she'd be in hospital when something had happened. And then she went overseas and she remarried somebody else, and then she come back and wanted to be with my son again and just dup a game. Who was the best kid you could ever ask for. It's twenty one years old, still gave his mum kuss and cuddles.
Good night was always family first with him. He'd go out of his way to do anything. Boy you it was just a really, really good kid, but unfortunately got caught up with the wrong person.
I'll talk some more about this in a later episode, but there's something I need to make clear now. In their opinion, ravend and Emma struggle to look past Natalia for Peter's death, but as I've learned over the years, suicide almost always has multiple stresses. We can't delve into the details of the Currenter's inquiry because of court orders
that prohibit details from being made public. I will say though, that in my opinion, there was a lot going on in Peter's life at the time he died, and that no one then really appreciated the extent of Natalia's mind games. Certainly, Peter died believing Laura was real, and raevend Io believed that to be the case until I started reporting what was.
Really going on about six months later.
For emotionally charged teenagers, connections to Laura West and her circle of attractive friends was like basking in the sun. That became especially the case when there was a sexual element to the relationships. Natalia twenty seven was engaging in phone sex with boys as young as thirteen. It was a heady brew, an intoxicating mess, impossible to resist for teenagers trying to work out who they were and what sex was about. Forgive me if this is too personal, but was there a sexual element to it?
There was we had, you know, not like explicitly, but there was certainly that kind of you know, it's a little bit too intimate.
And Natalia played them like an instrument. Caustic treatment from Laura and her friends was like being shut out in the cold. Natalia built these worlds and she ruled them. I spoke to people who described getting into online spats with Laura. I need to have her entire social network of false characters pile on with emotional abuse.
She had a very very very heavy presence on my social media profiles, and she would interact with a lot of the females on my social media sort of as like a very territorial girlfriend. And she would also interact with a lot of the boys that are on my social media also as a very territorial girlfriend. She would try and start fights with them that would end up spilling into like my school, like lunch breaks and stuff.
I'd be getting hit up from people that were a couple of years older than me, being like, who is this crazy bitch that is claiming to be your girlfriend? She's messaging me or like comment and all my stuff at all hours of the night telling me to stay the eype away from you and this, that and the other, and I just remember thinking like, oh no, because I'm a pretty easy gown chill dude. I remember thinking like, this is gettn to the point where it's sort of getting out of hand.
The supporting cast of characters would turn on whoever had caused the upset, attacking the boy who had fallen out of favor. That was the stick. The carrot was being showered with attention from the group, led by whoever was courting the boy or whoever the boy was courting. Natalia's world creation included devising voices for the characters She spoke on the phone often, and that even included creating Kayleie, a daughter for Laura who was about five years old.
Kaylie would also talk to people like Ethan on the phone. Did you ever wind up talking to Kaylee the the child?
Yes? I did?
How did that?
How did that play itself out because that was the Talia too, right, So how did Kaylee present herself?
I can't remember how old she was, she would have been maybe five six something like that, and you know, she sounded like a five or six year old. You know, that's that's the best I can attribute it to her. She sounded the way I would pick for a five or six year old to sound, you know. And as someone now that has two kids, one of whom has gone through that five and six year old, you know, age age reigned, It's like, yeah, I can see why I thought that that was a child.
And finally came the big twist, Laura's death. But I first spoke to Ethan when all this happened. He said it was like an episode of chiltlund Street, New Zealand's longest running soap opera. As the drama builds, it envelops all those who are part of the show, and then, like an end of season soap opera cliffhanger, the character
is killed off. Talking to me thirteen years later, he still compares it to the soap opera, and you can see why Natalia was showrunner, writer, director, actor all in one. It was a one woman show she created, and all these people couldn't help but tune in day after day, And for many of those caught in Natalia's fantacy world, the first time they learned it wasn't true was when I began telling the story and began with identifying and
naming Natalia as the Facebook predator. Then it turned to tracking down and interviewing those she had manipulated into believing the world she created was real. Many of those people you'll hear from in the episodes to come from the time I worked out and Natari was behind these false profiles, I sought to engage with her, and that men stepping
into the place she was most comfortable, the online world. Ultimately, I wanted to meet Natalia in the real world, and it quickly became clear that was not something Natalia wanted at all. Hi, Natalia, ring me please, I'm writing about you in the Herold on Sunday tomorrow.
Ring the lawyer if you want to know anything.
The lawyer wasn't able to answer any questions for me.
It's you I want to talk to.
Well, the lawyer is dealing with it now and I can't say anything to you.
You've gone quiet I almost thought you wanted to talk to me the other night.
Nice story, even more lies, I see, I was going to talk to you, but then I worked out you just make up your own story without me, as you've already done. I'm loving it like apple Bye. You know, people are starting to pick up on your mistakes and your stories about me and have started to not trust a word you say. I read six different stories about me and things I've done, and only one has been the truth and what has actually come out of my mouth?
Start getting your facts right because my dad has wrung the police on you.
Hi, Natalia, nice to hear from you. If you'd really like to get to the truth of what has gone on, would you be willing to sign a privacy waiver that would allow me to access first hand, genuine information about you?
How about it? There'd be no question about any facts being wrong.
Then no, you know my number. You want anything, ring me and go check out your own background about me.
And when I look at those messages now it was a game of cat and mouse, with Natalia often confused about who was playing which role. There were insights into her life her upset that Appearent had seen reporting in the newspapers and on television about her online behavior that you felt anxiety attending church on Sunday the same day to hear it. On Sunday came out with my stories about her involvement with teenage boys. How long until you give up? She would ask, And then eventually.
Okay, I'm over this now. I will talk to you, but I want to see the story before you print it, and no recent photo of me is.
To be used.
And that's how we met outside muffin break in the Monaco. More. You created a fake PERSONO to have a romantic relationship with an eighteen year old boy and then killed her.
That's second. That's really awful.
I was that caught up in my own little, fancy world that the rest of the world like this around me didn't exist, right, didn't exist me. I didn't really care.
You'll hear more of this conversation later in the series, though. I should note that we never made any agreements with Natalia before I sat down to talk to her. That's standard journalistic practice. But by the time I had got her on the record, other media would joined the hunt. For a period in twenty eleven, Natalia Burgess was on the front page of newspapers, leading radio bulletins, and on
television news and current affairs shows. On sixty minutes, speaking to journalist Paula Penfold, she promised again that she had stopped.
They were the puffets and I was the puffetier and I was just pulling the strings and sitting back and watching the show.
Are you now getting the help that you need to not do it anymore?
Yeah, lots of people don't believe in you. But as where I go.
To be myself, to learn to be myself, to learn to be Natalia, to learn that I don't need to be Abbie or a bigger amy because I'm good enough as man.
From what Natalia told me, she considered she was doing fine in her community in the real world, which centered around faith. Back then, what troubled Natalia was the loss of the community she created online.
She was grieving.
By now, the bizarre world of Natalia Burgess was too well known. Her online friends had ditched her and were now weary. Over a few months, I spoke to Natalia off and on. I even met up with her again at a truck stop south of Auckland. I actually drove her there. We spent an hour in the car there and back. That's how involved I've become in her life. We went there because I introduced her to the woman whose image she had stolen to use as the face of Laura West.
The idea was to.
Confront Natalia with the impact of what she had done, and it seemed to have worked. Natalia told the woman who was the face of Laura West that she had stopped, and she told me she had stopped. Not so long after that she was in the Monaco District Court, and again she promised that she had stopped, that there would be no more impersonations. This was back in twenty thirteen when she pleaded guilty to and has the technical name a charge of interfering with a computer system and two
charges of obtaining by deception. Those were the gifts she had received through the false personas. It's important to note that neither of these charges relate to creating false identities online or catfishing. The details that emerged in court confirmed just how awful Natalie's deceit had become. The key complainant
was a thirteen year old boy. Natalia had told him she was somewhere around sixteen or seventeen, when really she was easily ten years older, and there was phone sex or what should really be called abuse given their differing ages. The judge tow the court of another victim, aged sixteen, who had friendships destroyed, his family life shattered and emotional and mental health rocked.
As a result of her lives.
If it was not for the strong support of his parents, this young man would have taken his own life as a result of your deceptions against him. It was a court hearing that laid out the manipulation and the cavalier disregard that she had for others. The judge saw clearly how serious it was, and so for Natalia it was jail for two years and two months. To be honest, at that stage, I thought my time at Natalia was over. Should do her time and come out, then go straight.
I'd followed the story for about two years at this point, which is a long time to be involved in one case. When she was sent away, it seemed like a natural endpoint to the story.
I moved on.
Other tip offs came my way, and how other stories were written, and as the years passed, Natalia faded into the background like a ghost from investigations past. I never expected to find myself looking for her again, or trying to understand why she lived a life of fantasy and manipulation. Around the time Natalia Burgess killed off Laura West, nobody really had a name for what it was she was doing.
In twenty ten, when Ethan, Sam, Peter, Emma all these people that were being drawn into Natalie's fantasy, There was a documentary that came out in American cinemas. It was called Catfish and it was the story of Neve Shulman and his online relationship with a young woman called Meghan.
Hey Meghan, Hi, your voice is not at all what I expected. I mean, she must be pretty awsome unless from Facebook.
Except Meghan wasn't really Meghan. Meghan was a fiction created by Angela, who was an aspiring artist approaching middle age. With her days drifting away. Spent caring for two severely disabled step children, Angela sought escape online, creating false Facebook profiles for her alter ego Meghan and Meghan's friends and family all false characters controlled by Angela, and the name of the movie, Catfish, that came from Something's husband said during the movie. He told Neve that in days gone by,
cod was shipped from Alaska to China and vants. By the time it arrived, it tasted awful. The flesh was mush because the cod had just sat in the vans the entire way to China, and then someone put catfish in with the cod, and the cod they swam all the way to China to avoid being eaten by the catfish.
There are those people who are catfish in life, and they keep you on your toils.
They keep your gas, and they keep you think, and they keep you.
Freshnes documentary took the term and turned it into a verb to describe being pulled into Angela's web of lies. She was the catfish that kept them thinking and guessing. That documentary did really well, so well that it spawned a show called Catfish, which her Neve is still fronting more than a decade later. Oddly enough, it's a show
that Natalia has listed in her YouTube favorites. The word catfish went on to enter the public consciousness, used to describe people who adopt false online personas to ensnare others, whether it be for love, money, or something else. We didn't call Natalia a catfisher. She didn't just keep people on their toes. She broke hearts, and she caused so much to stress that it remains raw all these years later.
Now I'm deep in the world she created. Natalia's deceits and manipulation are on a scale far beyond any catfisher I've read about, and it makes me think it didn't really matter back in twenty eleven that we didn't call her a catfisher. We called her the Facebook predator, and Natalia is now as she was then, a predator never stopped.
I am sorry to bother you, but the article you recently published in the above subject was sent to me by a friend. As Natalia Burgess has been using my images since twenty fourteen till current to catfish multiple people, both.
Men and women.
I've had four men and one woman contact.
Me in the last four months.
That email dropped into my inbox in March twenty twenty two, eleven years after I started investigating Natalia Burgess, nine years after she'd gone to prison, was from a woman called Crystal Jenna, a New Zealander living on the Gold Coast in Australia. To be honest, for year, Crystal and I were ships passing in the night. She was busy with work and accustomed to no one caring about the havoc Natalia was causing in her life, and me, well, I
had other stories to work on. Then, over the months we emailed, I came to realize Natalia hadn't just started again, but that she's never actually stopped. After two years in prison, Natalia came straight back out to keep on doing it, and this time she looked overseas where she's not known, where her secret worlds can trap the unwearing. Now, for the last year, I've been going back over my original investigation and realized just how much I missed, how much
we all missed at the time. Over the next four episodes, I'll tell you what I learned, take you inside the fancy worlds Natalia has created, and speak to the people whose lives she infiltrated, the people she has treated as puppets. I'll take you inside by Chase to track Natalia down again, to try and find out why she's been able to get away with this for so long.
And what happened.
When people complain to the police, we'll hear about the efforts to try and stop people like Natalia from creating more victims. Because and here's a spoiler alert. Natalia has been doing this since two thousand and one's The Dawn of Social Media. Natalia has been playing the puppeteer for twenty three years, living a lie for more than half her life, and all that time, no one has found
a way to stop her. You've been listening to Chasing Ghosts the Puppeteer, follow the podcast and the Chasing Ghost Feed on iHeartRadio or wherever you get your podcasts, and you can find more in this case at inzidherld dot co dot mzed ethanselves is by producer with audio engineering by nzme's Sounded Vision.
Thanks to my colleagues for lending their voices to this episode.
If you have a story about this case, contact me at David dot Fisher at zherld.
Dot co dot MZ.
And if you believe you've encountered behavior online that matches what we've discussed in this series, you can find help at netsafe dot org dot mzed. But if you feel at risk, don't hesitate, contact police