Episode 2: The Star Man

When she didn't show up to give DNA, she was in the wind, John Campbell had a million questions, like who was this mysterious student at Columbia University was increasingly convinced that she was not really Brooke Henson, that he was dealing with an impostor, especially after she ducked that DNA test, which made him wonder who was she? Did she have anything to do with the disappearance of the real Brooke Henson? And then there was the most important

question of all, where was this mystery woman? Now? The obvious first move was to ask Columbia for help, So John says he reached out to the university's director of Investigations in technology, then sent him a subpoena explaining the entire situation. John requested Brooks records, including any photos, letters of reference essays, student loan forms, that kind of stuff. And he started facts them down and I got about thirty pages or so, and then it just it was

like half a sheet. And then he called me. He said, lawyers walked into this office and ripped him off of the whole file, off of the facts. So there's John standing by the fax machine with some files in his hands. He says he got a few documents, including Brooks College admissions essay, and then the transmission was interrupted. What he had so far was tantalizing. The essay said she'd grown up in a tiny town in South Carolina, and that

much was true. The real Brooke Henson was from Traveler's Rest, But the essay also described a super religious childhood and that definitely didn't match up. So what was going on here? John felt if he could just get the rest of these files, he'd find the clues that would tell him who this woman really was and where she might be now. So John, he was on a mission. He just needed to out fox Columbia University. I'm Jake Halbern and this is deep Cover Season three, Never Seen Again, episode two,

The Starman. According to John Campbell, officials at Columbia told him that they would no longer cooperate with him unless he got a federal subpoena. Now this is a technical distinction, but it's an important one. John had sent a state subpoena from Greenville County, South Carolina, and Columbia was basically saying, no, no, no, we don't recognize that you're out of your jurisdiction. We

need a federal subpoena. And of course I said that because they thought, well, some small town detective in South Carolina's not gonna be able to get a federal subpoena. John may have been a small town detective, but he did have some powerful connections. In fact, he knew exactly whom to call. And this becomes really important. So bear with me for a sec while I give you a little backstory. A few years before this, when John first started working on the Brook Henson case, he wanted to

get an office computer. He didn't have one at the time, and he felt if he was going to pursue this case seriously, he needed one. You know, how to take advantage of things like spreadsheets and the Internet. So he asked the chief for some money to buy one. His chief apparently said, sorry, don't have the funds. John, ever determined, started making inquiries, asking other law enforcement guys, Hey, what's the best way to get a free computer, And turns

out they had an answer for him. Call the Secret Service. Yeah, those agents with the earpieces who run alongside the presidential motorcades. But the advice was, don't just ask them for a laptop, ask to do a case with them, because apparently everyone knew do a case with the Secret Service. They seize everything and give it right back to local law enforcement. You're telling me that, like, you work with the Secret Service deliberately so that you could if you bust some

guys with the computers, you can keep it. Yes, that's how you do it on the municipal level when you have no money. Now, in case you didn't realize this, the Secret Service does a whole lot more than protect the president. It also investigates financial crimes and chases down counterfeiters, you know, people who print fake money. And John's like, I can find some guys like that, because, as it turns out, at the time, there was someone in trial

theer's rest passing out phony twenty dollar bills. It looked like they were being made with an inkjet printer. Anyway, John puts the word out among the local businesses. He says, call me if you see anything suspicious. So one of the businesses was Burger King and this girlfriend Burger can call. He goes, hey, those guys are back and they gave me a fake twenty again. What do I do? He said,

tell will be a few minutes to their fries. He's laughing now, right, but at the time he's like, here's my big chance to bust some counterfeiters and befriend the

Secret Service and you know, get a free computer. They're waiting for their fries, and we were right down the streets, so we come zooming in behind them, and we come running up to the car and the guys has this big water twenties and he crams it down into his drink and we grab the drink and everything, pull the thing of twenties up and the ink is just ripping off these guys. He's busted. They're local college students looking

for some free whoppers. John calls the Secret Service tells them he's busted some counterfeit and the Secret Service is pleased, so pleased that they continue to work cases with John. Eventually they even give him an award for his work on another counterfeiting case. So the Secret Service guy said, he is such a good job on that they sent a thing up to Washington and got me thing, a citation thing. So I had that on my wall and it was signed by the director of the Secret Service.

You know, he did a great job. What really made John happy, though, was back in their dorm room, those counterfeiters had a sweet computer which soon became John's computer. Score right, But the real windfall came later. Fast forward a few years. There's John standing by his facts machine with half a set of records from the woman who claimed to be Brooke Henson, and he's got a big fat snub from Columbia University, which was demanding a federal subpoena,

a potential dead end for John. But turns out all John had to do was look up on his wall at that fancy citation thing from the Secret Service. And remember he had some friends, some pretty powerful friends, who could, if they were so inclined, tell Columbia University to shut up and play ball. The person that John Campbell connected with at the Secret Service is a guy named Don Long. I am an assistant Special Agent in charge with the

Secret Service. I've been employed with the agency for about thirty years now, and I'm currently located in our office in Columbia, South Carolina. If Don sounds like a clean cut, no nonsense law man, well that's because he is. Don is not an obsessive Files fan or a guy who buys into a lot of conspiracy theories. In this way, you might say that he and John are kind of like opposites. Even so, Don is quick to give John props.

John is a very thorough investigator. If you had a case that you wanted somebody to really turn over every single stone to look for a possible suspect, you would certainly want someone like John on the case. Don says that back in two thousand and six he wanted to help John if he could, and he was intrigued by the Brook Henson case, but he couldn't just fire off a federal subpoena as a favor to John. This was a serious matter, and if the Secret Service got involved,

it would become an active partner in this investigation. So Don's first question was, what is this case exactly? Don says he conferred with the assistant US attorney in Greenville, who would be prosecuting this case if it went forward, and the two of them they debated what to do. In the end, it was decided that they should open up a fraud and identity theft investigation and see what was in those files at Columbia. And just like that, John now had a partner, Don Long, the Secret Service agent.

And even though this was now technically a federal investigation, John was still, as he told me, a backseat driver. I might add, a very active backseat driver. So off goes that federal subpoena kind of amazingly, Columbia University rejects it. Basically, Columbia just tells the assistant US attorney, a guy named Walt Wilkins, sorry, no dice, and what lost his mind? Are you kidding me? Your Columbia University, This is a

federal grand jury subpoena. If you can't give us these records, you come down to talk to the judge and explain why. It wasn't clear why Columbia was refusing to cooperate. Maybe it was just trying to protect the privacy of a student, or perhaps, as Don Long speculated, the university was embarrassed that it had possibly been duped by an impostor. I reached out to Columbia University, by the Way, and they

declined to comment. In the end, Don flew up to New York to speak with officials at the university in person, and at long last, Columbia relented. A little while later, investigators had the complete records for one Brooke Henson. The records from Columbia included a bunch of documents. There were two admissions essays. Together, they presented an intimate portrait of a young woman who claimed to be Brooke Henson. I asked my producer, Amy Gaines, as she would read from

these essays. My young life consisted almost entirely of events that would take place inside four church walls. My parents didn't feel that a public education was the right place to teach their children about the world and the skills it would take to survive in that world. Along with three other children, my brother and I were educated under the tutelage of my mother and another woman from church. In spite of what is considered by others to be

a horrific environment to educate children. Somehow, my brother and I excelled in our academic surroundings. Weird right, because the real Brookhanson she grew up in a house without a lot of rules, with laid back parents. The essay goes on to say the moment that truly defined her life was when her mom was dying of cancer. She says she took care of her mother and that in her

spare time, she found solace by playing chess online. I loved to dive into a world filled with sixty four squares, thirty two pieces, and a never ending supply of new combinations to learn and master. This black and white world made sense to me. I was in control of strategy, of risk, and ultimately of death. When her mother passed away, she said something within her shifted. After I came to terms with losing her and living my life without her, I felt very free in a strange way. I saw

the world as something I could explore and conquer. I never really looked outside my little town and my little life until that life had disappeared. I was no longer an option for me. John Campbell read all of this with great interest. But what was it exactly? Seemed like a work of fiction, confirmation that they were dealing with a con artist. After all, the real Brooke Henson was a free spirit who liked to hang out and party

with her friends, not some Christian who played chess. Even so, John found himself wondering could this possibly be true at least some of it, Like did the real Brooke Henson have some secret life that he didn't know about? Was she, for example, a chess player. John forced himself to be methodical about the whole thing, and just to vet this properly, I called Travel's Dress High school and I said do

you have a chess team? And lady over a Travelers risso fell out of the chair when she stopped laughing. She said, no, honey, we don't have any kind of a chess chess club. And Travel's rass Travels Dress is for their football. I don't have a chess club. They never had a chess club. You don't even find anybody in this area that plays chess. But even if these essays were all lies, they were lies that might prove useful down the road. He didn't need to be a

detective to see that. I myself have always believed the old adage the best liars always stick close to the truth, and so maybe this imposter, whoever she was, was a chess player who was raised in a strict Christian home and who lost her mother at a tender age. Maybe these were clues that needed to be taken seriously, a glimpse into who this mystery woman really was. There were

other clues in the Columbia records. The young woman claiming to be Brooke Henson had gotten her ged she had aced the SATs, but once she arrived at Columbia, she often failed to attend class. In an email, she confided in her academic advisor, I haven't decided whether I will attempt school next year at Columbia, but clearly I will need to take a closer look at the financial aspects of it. She ends by saying, sometimes being without my mom is tough when I have a big decision to make.

The picture that emerged was of an ambitious young woman who was struggling. At some point in the investigation, John got his hands on a rather curious photo. It looked like it was taken at a military school, and it showed a slender young woman dressed in a formal gown, the sort you'd wear to a gala. The woman didn't really look like Brooke Henson. She was standing next to

several sharply dressed cadets. John studied the photo closely, so I had a loop like a photographer's loop, and I had this picture, and I'm down on this picture like this. Have you ever seen the movie The Good Shepherd. John, by the way, loves making pop culture references, especially to spy stories. In The Good Shepherd, there's this CIA agent played by Matt Damon, who spends much of the movie

analyzing magnified images from this one mysterious photograph. Anyway, John was determined to figure out, among other things, where was this photo taken. Kept narrowing down based on what was on their uniforms. I sent the picture to VMI, the Citadel, several other places that were military colleges. In one picture, you could see they had a sash. He said, we don't wear sashes. And wear sashes. The architecture in the

back was an arch Nobody had that. And eventually we got back to West Point, so there was a West Point connection. But John didn't know exactly what to make of that. There was one other document in the Columbia Records that caught the attention of both John Campbell and also of Don Long at the Secret Service. It was a letter of recommendation for Brooke from a professor named doctor Shirley Fleishman. The letter mentioned that Brooke had visited her home, that she was a friend of her son.

This seemed promising. Maybe the Fleischman family could tell them more about who this young woman really was. When I called mister Fleshman, I said, I'm John Campbell, I'm with Travels Verst Police Department. I'm calling about a girl you might know named Brooke Henson. And he said, I wondered when you were going to call And I said, what do you What do you mean when I was going to call him the world? How would you know that I was going to call him? He said, when my

son brought her home, I knew she was troubled. According to John, mister Fleishman told him that this young woman, this Brooke Henson, had dated his son for about a year, and at that time his son was a cadet at West Point. After the break, what John Campbell and Don Long uncovered when they spoke with the Fleshman's So far, everything I've told you about the mysterious woman fleeing Columbia University and then John Campbell fighting to get her college records,

all of that happened in two thousand and six. Now we're going to turn back the clock a few years earlier, to two thousand and one. Picture this scene the quad at Catholic University in Washington, DC, A big green expanse with leafy trees and gray stone buildings. There were lots of excited college kids strutting about. They were here for a debate tournament. One of these students was a nineteen

year old named Ian Fleischmann. Ian was a cadet at West Point, where he was on the policy debate team, and it was here on this quad at Catholic University that Ian first spotted her. She was a very attractive woman, relatively short, brown hair. She had a great smile and a fun laugh. I remember that. So they get to talking. She introduced to herself Natalie. I knew her as Natalie. Natalie was not competing. She had debated another tournaments in the past, but that day she was just there hanging

out with some friends. She told Ian that she wasn't currently enrolled in college, and that she had a pretty unusual job. She introduced herself as a professional chess player, which was interesting because I had never met a professional chess player. Natalie said she had a manager in Germany and that she traveled around the country playing in tournaments. Ian was intrigued. Soon after this, they started dating, which wasn't so easy because they didn't live near one another.

Natalie always seemed to be on the road traveling for her job, and Ian well, he was at West Point where he had a strict curfew and couldn't leave campus without a pass. So they chatted online and talked a lot over the phone. Ian remembers leaning out his dorm window to get a better cell signal and talking late into the night, long after lights out. His roommate, David Labovich, remembers hearing some of these conversations, and he also chatted

with Ian about his new girlfriend. But David, he wasn't entirely buying Natalie's story, you know. He shared with me the little detail of, oh, she's a professional chess player, but she's got this manager that has all the money, and if she needs money, she has to email him and he has to respond and give her the money. It was this really odd and I remember saying that to Ian at the time. It's like, yeah, man, something

about that just doesn't seem right. David is quick to add that Ian is a really smart guy, extremely talented. In fact, Ian was such a good student that he was rewarded a set of gold stars, which he wore on his uniform. There was a term for guys like Ian at West Point Starman. They were the guys who were going places. All that being said, David suspects the Ian was perhaps blinded by love because he missed other

slightly suspicious things about Natalie. One other kind of odd thing that she did was she sent him some cookies and said, hey, these are you know, homemade cookies. And I remember looking at him and I was like, Ian, those are suspiciously round, Like she just got the little two cookies and just cut them up and baked them. Ian says his old roommate, well may have been onto something. I mean, like in retrospect, where would she have made

these cookies? Right? Like she was living out of her car, traveling the country, going I mean, you know, she did always like to stay in like extended state places. But I doubt you can use those kitchenettes to make perfectly round cookies. But at that point, Ian said he had already bought into Natalie's whole story, that she was a chess champion with a German manager who traveled the country

and occasionally hung out at debate tournaments. And so if you start with the acceptance of that as you as your starting point, some of these small minor things over time, I think you know, it's easy to gloss over, right, because you've you've already accepted the most ridiculous thing as true and honestly, when you're dealing with somebody that you genuinely care for, that you have spent a long time building up a relationship with, I think it's easy to

miss a lot of those, you know, smaller things, or to forgive them, because you trust the person enough to accept the excuse or the explanation that they give you. Natalie talked a little bit about her own family. She told him about her mother, who had died and whom she adored, and a bit about her stepfather too. She said that he was abusive, that he was stalking her, and that occasionally he would find her and she would

have to flee. At one point, she told Ian about an incident that he had found her someplace in Tennessee in a hotel room and threatened her with an iron, like to beat her with an iron. All of this was upsetting to in. I mean, it didn't really have the option to essentially run to her to protect her, and so that, I mean that did tug out my heartstrings. At some point, Ian says, she told them that she was changing her name from Natalie Fisher to Natalie Bowman,

same first name, just a different last name. Ian says, as best as he can recall, she said that she was doing this to protect herself, which made sense to Inn under the circumstances, and for him, it didn't change who she was. It was the same Natalie. I mean, she was the same person, regardless of the moniker that she was she was using. She had the same flaws, the same loves, the same laughs. On several occasions, Ian

brought Natalie home to meet his parents. He said that his mother, Shirley Fleishman, welcome Natalie into their home with open arms. I mean, everyone's going to tell you that their mom is the most loving and caring person in the world right. But for me, my mom is I think the most loving and caring person, and she unconditionally accepted and love Natalie because of the relationship that I had with her. And this relationship between Ian and Natalie

was serious and at times tumultuous. It was an emotional relationship. From the moment we met, I think there we were, you know, madly in love or fighting or somewhere in between or both at the same time, for the course of a year or so before we eventually broke up.

The breakup happened in part because of biography. Natalie decided she wanted to go to college in California, and she essentially gave me the ultimatum of quit West Point and moved to California while I go to cal State Fullerton and get my degree or we're going to break up. And I seriously considered leaving West Point. So there was in a star student at west Point, literally a starman, and he was going to walk away from that for her. Ian wrestled with his decision, and then one day it

all came to a head. One of my mentors, you know, from the debate team, eventually found went out into the field at West Point during a field exercise that summer, found me in my tent and dragged me off into the woodline to yell at me and tell me that I was making a terrible mistake if I thought that I was going to leave to the military to run off to California after some girl, so Ian State at West Point, and they broke up, but it didn't end aadle.

In fact, after the breakup, Natalie even reached out to Ian's mom, Shirley Fleishman, to ask for a letter of recommendation to Columbia. Shirley was a university professor, so this letter would carry some weight. Now you may be thinking that's weird who asks their ex boyfriend's mother for a letter of rec But here was the really weird part. Natalie explained that to protect herself, she had changed her

name once again. She was now going by Brooke Henson, Yes, the very woman who went missing from Traveler's Rest, South Carolina back in nineteen ninety nine. So Shirley Fleischman agrees to help. She writes a letter of recommendation, and this is the letter that both John Campbell and Don Long find in the Columbia records. The letter that leads them to the Fleishman's. When they finally connect, they learned much

of what I've just told you. Ian's dad, Fred had been suspicious of Natalie for a long time, so suspicious that he'd been looking for clues about who she really was. He shared his suspicions with investigators when we spoke to him, Fred turned over a very important piece of evidence. That's Don the Secret Service agent. He says that Fred claimed on one occasion he had to move Natalie's car. It

was blocking his driveway. As I recall, it was like a one lane driveway, and we went in the car to move the car of the way to get his car out. He was a little bit suspicious of her anyways, and he looked in the club box and he found an ID for Esther Reid. Esther Reid? Now who is that? Once again the plot had thickened, The authorities scrambled to

figure out who Esther Reid was. Turns out she was yet another missing woman, roughly the same age as Brooke Henson, who had vanished from Washington State back in nineteen ninety nine, the same year that Brooke had gone missing. So what the hell was going on here? John Campbell had an initial hunch, Mike, this is a serial killer, because I got people who I can't I have somebody using somebody's names. I got Brookinson, I know, I'm pretty sure it's dead.

I got Natalie Bowman, I can't find her. I got Natalie Fisher, I can't find her. She's disappeared. And I got Esther Reid and she's a missing person. But that theory didn't hold up because eventually, with a little more digging, John concluded that two of the women, Natalie Fisher and Natalie Bowman, were in fact alive. As how as the investigators could tell, this mystery woman was still out there.

Maybe her real name was Esther Reid or maybe not, but she appeared to be a serial identity thief who just kept on taking over new personas the question was why, because there was no obvious motive. It just didn't make sense. She was enrolled in Columbia University as brook Hanson. So it's an IVY League school. It costs tons of money to us there. Why would you enroll under an assumed name. It doesn't make any sense. As soon as the gigs up your degree is worth. You don't have a degree anymore.

It's about you, So why would you spend all kinds of money doing that? John felt that all of these deceptions, so elaborate, so involved, had to serve some grander purpose, like they had to be covering for something. He briefly considered the possibility that this woman was a drug mule, but then he turned to another theory, the one that he ultimately came to believe was true. And here's how

he came to it. He learned that this mystery woman had dated another West Point cadet and a Naval Academy midshipman. Hypothesis began to form in his mind. As he saw it, she was targeting military personnel, not just that. Look at who Ian Fleischmann was a starman. What's more, apparently this mystery woman had a manager or a handler overseas who sent her money, and she seemed to be a master

at creating and maintaining aliases. So John typed up an email to the US Army CID, the Criminal Investigation Division. He laid out all the facts and began to explain his most promising theory about the mystery woman. At Columbia, he read that email back to me. Here's part of it. The motives of this woman are not clear. It does not appear that she uses her stolen identities for monetary gain, but actually adopts the identities in order to live near

US military personnel and attend universities. While I am not prepared to say this woman is a spy acting on behalf of a foreign country, her behavior fits the profile of a spy far better than that of the average identity thief espionage. That's what John was intimating, Perhaps more than intimating. John read over what he'd written to Army investigators and then hit send. At this point, John had followed his leads a very, very long way from Traveler's Rest,

South Carolina. This had started off as a search for Brooke Henson, a kind hearted young woman who'd gone miss and perhaps was murdered. Now it looked as if Brooke were just one of several people whose identities had been stolen, and if John's hunches were correct, the perpetrator of all

this was a spy. John held on to the hope that if he could just talk to Esther Reid, he would find the answers to so many of his questions, and that she might have some intel about what had happened to the real Brooke Henson, but that was a stretch. This was quickly turning into a wild goose chase following a tip that was taking him far away from his original case. I remember the Chief asking me, like, how

far are you going to take this? It said Chief, until I can interview Esther Reid, I can't clear this tip next time. On Deep Cover, it never occurred to me, quite frankly, that I would get caught, or could get caught, or that anyone would get hurt. I mean, I figured if I lived as Brooke for the rest of my life, nothing would ever happen. Deep Cover is produced by Amy Gaines and Jacob Smith. It's edited by Karen shakerge mastering by Jake Gorski. Our show art was designed by Sean Karney.

Original scoring at our theme was composed by Luis Gara, fact checking by Arthur Gomfort's Special thanks to Milobelle, Greta Cone and Jacob Weisberg. I'm Jake Albert