Episode 3: The Imposter

woman in question is not our victim Brookley Henson. Her behavior fits the profile of a spy far better than that of the average identity. Back in two thousand and six, there was a woman enrolled at Columbia University who claimed to be Brooke Henson, but in reality she was an impostor. She was using the identity of another woman who'd gone missing from South Carolina seven years earlier. This impostor she'd deceived Columbia University, her boyfriends, and many others. It was

a hot mess. And I know this because she herself told me, told me all about it, starting with the moment that it all began to fall apart for her. I think I got a message from Columbia Security saying they wanted to talk to me, and I was like, oh shit. A short while later, she received a call from a detective in the NYPD. He basically asked me if I'm Brooke Henson and I say yes, and he says, well, why are you listed as missing? And then I tell

him like, I am running from my family. I don't want anything to do with them, and he's like, okay, that's fine, I'll tell the detectives down there. And it seemed like that might be the end of it. But then the detective called back because he said the authorities down in South Carolina wanted more information. South Carolina people just want to double check that you're actually Brooke Henson. So I have a couple of questions. Are you okay with that? And I was like sure, Were you like

panicky at all with yeah? Oh my yeah, of course. But she was prepared. She knew a lot about the real Brooke Henson. There was a lot of stuff on the Internet about her being missing, and I had read every shred of it. The detective started asking questions about the names of friends and family members from back home and Traveler's Rest, South Carolina. She could only hope that she answered enough of these questions correctly that the detective would be satisfied, and it seemed like he got what

he needed. But that didn't last very long. This detective kept calling me back and he goes, are you sure you're telling me the truth? Because he goes, I can help you, and I was like, no, no, no no, I'm telling the truth. And then he would call by he goes, you know, I know a judge, like, I'm pretty sure, like we can figure this out. Are you sure you're telling me the truth? Like, no, no no, no, I'm telling

the truth. Is your like anxiety kicking in? Oh yeah, yeah, Like sometimes I'll get hives when I get really anxious, and I'll just my blood pressure goes up really high and so I'll get red and all of that was happening. That sounds pretty terrible. It was, Yeah, it was one hundred percent terrible. All of this is terrible, Jake, It's all horrible. Eventually, the NYPD detective calls back and tells her that the authorities down in South Carolina are insisting

on more proof. They want her to provide DNA to confirm that she really is Brokenson. She stalls. She says that she has two final papers to finish over the weekend and asks if she can possibly meet the detective at her apartment on the following Monday and then take the DNA test. The detective agrees, like, what's your plan as your Oh, I didn't have a plan at that point. I mean, I was just hoping it would all go away. I'm like just stupid, right, Like, you know, there's no

there's no plan, Like I can't fix this. I'm just thinking like what if I miss them? Like what if I'm not home? Is it a big deal that they come back? Or is this like we don't have the resources for this and this isn't a big deal, Like I didn't know at that point. She finishes her two papers and then she kind of comes to her senses, has this moment when she realizes that this is not all magically just going to go away, that the police they're onto her. So she decides she's got to do something.

I went to get a U wall truck because I had decided I'm freaking getting out of here, and I was going to pack up my apartment. I still thought like I could come like this is gonna down, I can come back, It'll be urry. Her plan was to pack up her place, move everything into storage, and then grab her two dogs, Pooching and Odie, and disappear for a while. And so I rented the truck and I took all the money I had it out of my account and I think they probably had my accounts flagged.

And so by the time I got back to my apartment, I pulled around the corner of my unhaul truck and there were New York City cops knocking on the door. And I was like, oh shit, because she's too late. The cops are there. So now she has a choice to make either a run for it or B just turn herself in, tell the cops everything about who she really is. No choice is tempting. It's second nature, actually, because she's been more or less on the run for years.

But the problem is Pooching and Odie. They're inside the apartment, and no matter what, she cannot leave her dogs. So it's gotta be b turn herself in. So I pulled over in front of a fire hydrant and I walked around the block, and by the time I got around, they were gone, and so I was like, oh, So I went upstairs, packed the quickest bag I could pack, grab my dogs, called a cab, and left. Would you do it to? You? Haul? Left it here? It's not I don't want people to think that Mead chuckling is.

I don't think any of this is funny. It's just uncomfortable and whatever. But yeah, I just left it there. That's kind of crazy. I know all of it's crazy. I was scared, and this decision to run for it, more than anything else, it's what makes this story go bat shit. It's the decision that confounds everyone, the authorities down in South Carolina, the Secret Service, the assistant US Attorney. Because now it's got them all thinking, who leaves a

U haul idling at the curb? Why is this woman running? What is she hiding? Because it's got to be something big, right. I'm Jake Halbern and this is deep Cover, Never Seen Again, Episode three. The Impostor. This woman the one I'm speaking to. The impostor. She's gone by many names, including Natalie Fisher, Natalie Bowman, and Brooke Henson. Her real name, well, I should say her birth name is Esther Reid. And I'm going to call her Esther. That's the first name that

she goes by. Currently. Esther lives in a small city in the Pacific Northwest. We started talking months ago. I eventually went out there to visit her, and she told me that only four people in her city knew her

full back story, well five if you counted me. And in this episode, we're going to take a deep dive into her side of the story because at this point you've heard from John Campbell, You've heard his theories, his suspicions that this mystery woman was not just an identity thief but a spy who seemed to be on the run. And Esther was on the run, but what she was running from, well that's complicated. Back in the early nineteen nineties, Esther Reid was a young girl in a small town

in Montana. She lived in a tiny two bedroom house with unfinished walls. Outside, there were chickens, geese, rabbits, goats, and a big garden. She says her dad was a serious man. My dad is very, very very religious, and so like there was no TV in the house. We weren't really allowed to listen to any music that had a beat, anything with a drum beat was considered satanic or evil, so we weren't allowed at school. Her father didn't allow her to wear pants. Instead, she wore homelesspun dresses.

Her mom was the fun one, always making up games and telling them stories. When I think about my mom, I just remember hers right in her effervescence, and she was just so amazingly loving and kind and giving. Esther told me stories where her mom seemed like a magician. She conjured joy even in tough situations when no one could sleep in the sweltering heat. She rallied the kids

in the middle of the night to make fudge. Another time, the kids were having a water fight, and instead of breaking it up, she dragged a hose into the house and soaked them. My mom was definitely a lemons into lemonade girl, and really definitely the happiness is what you make of it. Esther says her parents' relationship was very business like like. She only remembers seeing her dad hug her mom a few times, and it was like that right up until the day that their marriage effectively ended.

Like the way my dad told her he wanted to divorce, as he wrote her a letter, And I think at that point they had been married eight years, and he wrote a letter, I think on a Friday, and he put it in her purse and she found it when she got to work, and he basically said, this isn't working. I would like you to take Esther and move out, and he wanted her gone by Sunday. Esther was twelve when this happened. She and her mother moved out and life didn't get any easier for her. A year or

two later, ESS's mom was diagnosed with colon cancer. Meanwhile, Esther started high school and hated it. Not the schoolwork. She was very bright and she actually had a photographic memory. It was the social aspect of going to school that was just really tough for her. She dreaded it, in fact, so she played hooky as much as she could. Her mom typically left the house early each morning for work, and instead of going to school, Esther often just stayed

in the house. One week, when her mom stayed home from work, Esther had to improvise. I would pretend to go to school. And then we had a part of our basement that was unfinished, and I had a little TV, a little black and white TV that I had bought at a garage sale, and I put that back there and I spent that whole week down there. At the time, Esther felt something was off, but she just didn't know what it was. She knew that she needed a loane time to recharge. She described it to me kind of

like hibernation. It was only years later that Esther would learn she had a social anxiety disorder. Eventually, Esther and her mom decided to move to Seattle. Esther continued to struggle there, and she no longer had the support of the small town community that she and her family had known. She dropped out of high school in her junior year. Her mom insisted that she get a job, so she started working at a nursing home. Esther did have a bunch of older siblings, but at this point, the only

real constant in her life was her mom. My mom was really the only person I was really close to. I mean, I had friends, but it's very difficult when you have undiagnosed, untreated social anxiety to be friendly with someone, right. You just felt uncomfortable around everyone. And my mom was really the only person who knew I had these issues, and so she kind of managed life for me. But then when she was seventeen years old, her mom's cancer

came back. Esther watched her mom struggle for the next few years, and by the time she was twenty, her mom had died. I was incredibly depressed. I've just lost my mom. I have no contact with really anybody who's able willing to help, you know, thinking about killing myself all the time. I did not care about anything at that point. I didn't care about myself. I didn't care about anybody else. I just wanted to die so I could see my mom. So really, there was no There

was definitely no future thought. It's just survival. She couldn't hold down a steady job, her car was repossessed. She didn't have a reliable place to live, so she slept on the floor at a friend's place for a bit. It was during this time that she did something pretty desperate. I was working for like maybe a week two I don't think it was two weeks, so I didn't I was not able to work for two weeks, so maybe like i'd been there for four or five days, and

then I stole my coworker's purse. She had it sitting on like the nurses station. The purse had a bunch of credit cards and a driver's license. Then Esther showed up at a department store claiming to be that coworker. She had added her own photo to the ID. The credit card had been reported as stolen, so when Esther tried to use it, she got arrested. Esther pled to the charges. She had to pay a fine, and she got off with a year of probation and three days

in jail. This actually wasn't the first time she'd stolen from somebody. In the wake of her mom's death, she swiped a check book from her sister Edna and wrote some hot checks in her name. Edna also lived in Seattle, and Esther saw her from time to time, but they had a rocky relationship, and it only got rockier after

the whole stolen checks incident. As far as I could tell, Esther's mom was the lynchpin to absolutely everything, and without her, Esther's life just derailed, popped right off the tracks, and rattled onward toward the abyss. Esther felt like there was nothing left for her in Seattle. I think at that point it probably felt like I could run away from my problems, right like if I don't if I don't think about my mom, and if I'm not living in Seattle, then it won't be so painful, and like maybe I

can get over it. So she just left town, didn't really tell anyone where she was going, just kind of vanished, bought the cheapest plane ticket she could find, which was to Salt Lake City. She found an inexpensive place to stay a weekly rental, and she hold up there for a while, but she kept getting these messages from her family, especially from her sister Edna, who wanted to know where are you. Esther says, in her highly anxious state, she

felt as if she were being stalked. She says. One of her other sisters threatened to call the cops on her, apparently just to intimidate her. What. Esther wanted space to hibernate a bit away from her family, and suddenly this didn't really feel like the escape that she had envisioned, because she wanted a clean break with her own past, a clean break with being Esther Reid. And eventually she came up with a solution. She decided to start using the name of someone she knew, a girl back in

Seattle named Natalie Fisher. She knew a decent amount about Natalie. Esther says at some point she had access to Natalie's wallet and saw her social Security number, and don't forget Esther, she had a photographic memory, so she knew some of Natalie's vital information, and what she didn't know she figured out online. She then obtained a birth certificate in Natalie's name and eventually got an ID and then on paper at least she was Natalie Fisher. Pretty bold right not

to mention illegal. What's the logic that's going through your brain when you're doing this. I always just viewed it as me using a different name. I never thought I was her or anything. I mean, I changed my name before I left all the time. I hated the name Ester, so I was you know, when I was a little girl, I wanted to go by Herford, and you know, changed my name to Elizabeth or Liz or so it just didn't My name didn't make me who I was. I

never viewed it like that. I just always saw it as I get to be me and like she can't find me. She's talking about her sister, Edna, who'd been trying to get in touch with her. But as I see it, it was far more than just Edna. It was the co worker who's purse she'd stolen, and the high school in Seattle that she'd avoided, like the plague, and the hole that she found herself in after she lost her mom. With a new name. She put all

of that in the past. There was no connection to it now, no point of reference, not even a set of nine digits on a Social Security card. Or at least that's what she told herself the past. It had been erased, and as Esther put it, I get to be me whoever that was. Esther left Seattle in the fall of nineteen ninety nine, and she drifted around for almost two years. I don't know exactly how she was making ends meet. This period in Esther's life is kind

of a black hole. I only have her version of events. She says she worked odd jobs, short term gigs that she found on Craigslist, and that she eked out a modest existence as Natalie Fisher. The way she described it seems like she was adrift, no purpose, no plan other than being who she once was. But when she looked back on her past, it wasn't all bad. There was something she felt shed done well. Things she felt good about. And one of them was, if you can believe it,

being on a high school debate team. Now it might be thinking, could someone who has paralyzing social anxiety really thrive on a debate team, And the answer it turns out as yes, those were my people. I just felt very comfortable among those individuals. Plus they were all like little brainiac nerds like me, So it wasn't a big deal.

All of my quirkiness or idiosyncrasies that I hadn't been appropriate, least socialized when I was a kid, those things didn't stand out and make me a weirdo among that crowd. Back in high school, when she wasn't playing hooky, she actually participated in debate tournaments and she loved it. Also, for someone with social anxiety, debate was the opposite of a cocktail party, that's my take. Anyhow, there was a strict format that dictated when things would happen, opening statements, rebuttals,

closing remarks. Everything was so clear. Plus it was also intellectually engaging. She says that it overrode her social anxiety. For Esther, the world of debate tournaments was a world that made sense, and so she decided to go to debate camp, the Arizona Debate Institute. She arrived at the Twin Palms Hotel in Tempe, pink exterior, tiny balconies, obligatory palm trees, and a lobby packed with lots of precocious

college students getting ready to debate. You take one hundred and twenty college students from all across the country that have not generally met before in lock. I'm in a hotel for two weeks and high pressure situations. It's exactly what you think be like. That's John Brushky, the organizer of the debate camp. It would really get up and go to the lectures because they wanted to be at

the lectures. Then they would work from like noon till midnight, and they neither decided they're going to pull an all night or to finish their research or you know, socialize. It sounds like a Nerds version of spring Break. Yes, exactly, a Revenge of the Nerds Tempe, Arizona edition. So this is the scene that Estra walked into posing as Natalie.

John still remembers when he first met her. So her narrative was, I make my money playing competitive chess and I kind of live a nomadic life, right, so we were trying to get what's your home address? That was a question we couldn't get out of her registration. John remembers that this nomadic young woman, she was ambitious. She told him that she wanted to win a national debate championship, you know, when she wasn't playing pro chess. So a bit odd perhaps, but hey, this was Revenge of the

Nerds Tempe edition. Esther's story. It wasn't all made up. She actually did spend many of her days playing chess online. Chess is an escape for me. I would play it for hours and people would be like, why are you doing that? So she came up with an answer to that question, a lie that became part of her fictional biography. She told people she was a professional chess player, which was a good lie, of course, because Esther knew a

lot about chess. She was slowly crafting her own semi fictional narrative, and she was learning when lying stick to the truth right, because as she toyed with the details, adjusting them here and there, she learned the dangers of straying too far from the truth. Like one time some guy chatted her up and she improvised a bit too much, and I was like, oh, I'm going to a tennis tournament because oh, you're a teenis plan? I was like, yeah, yeah,

I'm a tesselayer. This was a problem because Esther didn't actually know that much about tennis, and also once Ali was out, it spread. I mean because then once you tell people, then they're like, oh, you know what she does? She pleased tenant and I'm like, gosh, shit, you know, like it just it would eventually get me in trouvel So she quickly realized better to stick with the chess story, and it worked well. At the debate camp, she spun her tail, she made some friends, and she even won

an award for her performance as a debater. Afterwards, she started talking to John Brushki, the debate coach, about attending college. In addition to running the debate camp, John was a professor at California State University Fullerton. He encouraged her to apply there. For Esther, it was a moment of hope and possibility. For two years, she had felt lost, but suddenly her life seemed to have traction. Esther soon started to make plans to move to California and take classes

at cal State Fullerton. She stayed in touch with her friends that she'd made in Tempe, her people, as she called them. At one point she met up with them at a debate tournament in Washington, d c. At Catholic University. And this is where she met Ian Fleischman. You may remember him. He was the handsome young cadet from West Point who became her boyfriend. Esther was struck almost right

away by his thoughtfulness. He's a very good listener. You know, sometimes you'll tell people something and like they'll kind of listen, but really they're only waiting for their moment to interject. And Ian's not like that at always very genuine and this feeling, this sense that she had about him, it only grew with time. Like Ian's the type of guy that would change your oil and fill up your gas tank and check to make sure your tires, you know,

aren't bald or you know. He's just very caretaking. Caretaking that's something that she hadn't had much of since her mom died, and esther she felt cared for by Ian's family as well. She visited the Fleishman's back in Michigan on a few occasions. They were just so kind and like I made cinnamon rolls one morning for everybody, and super lovely, like I don't know if it's coming across

by absolutely adored their entire family. Esther says Ian's mom, Shirley Fleishman, was an especially lovely person, kind and nurturing, just like Ian. Shirley was also a university professor, and when she heard about Esther's dreams of going to college, she encouraged her. Esther says she was actually staying at the Fleishman's house the night before she took the acts. That night, she was kind of freaking out when Shirley gave her a pep talk. She said, you know, you've

got to calm down. You're going to do great tomorrow, and I was like, I don't think so. And then she's like, any school is going to be lucky to have you, And I just remember looking at her and like nobody had ever said anything like that to me. Ian's father, Fred Fleischmann, was a different story. Esther says that Fred was suspicious of her from the beginning, that it didn't seem to believe her whole story about being a professional chess player, and that at one point he

searched her car and went through her possessions. It was almost like Ian's parents saw the two different sides of Esther read One of them looked at Esther and saw the best in her, all the promise of what she could be, while the other saw only the worst, the lies and the trouble that she would bring. And in some ways they were both right. Esther was intent on

going to college, but she foresaw problems. She knew eventually she'd need to provide a social Security number and that might tip off the real Natalie Fisher that someone was using her identity. And then I came up with the brilliant idea of I need a social Security number that nobody's using. And at that point I knew you couldn't actually use the social security number of somebody who was declared dead. So I came up with the idea, oh, maybe all I could use the number of somebody who's missing.

I came up with lots of dumb ideas, but this one is the one that I settled on. She searched missing persons websites for a while until she found a post that looked promising. It was for a woman named Natalie Bowman. Esther says she found all kinds of information about Natalie online. Her mom had posted a whole bunch of stuff. You know. She was like, please help me

find my daughter. And I understand that, right if you are a desperate mom trying to find your daughter, you're putting up report cards, you're putting up like pictures with her best friend, and you know, whatever you can find. And I was like, oh, I bet that's a social Security number. To Esther, she seemed like a good candidate. And then there was the name Natalie. It was convenient. It would be an easy switch from Natalie Fisher to Natalie Bowman, and so Esther she just went for it.

She would now tell people that her name was Natalie Bowman. Esther says there were moments when she saw how crazy this all was. There were times when I was like, you know, you can just go back and use your own name and stop doing all of this stuff, right, Like, you could just go to a new school, apply as you and stop this because you're not in any trouble. But at this point she was so deep into this deception. She was a professional chess player, though some had heard

it was tennis. She had to change her name to escape a maniacal stepfather, though she told one boyfriend she was in the witness protection program. Her last name was Fisher or was it Bowman or was it Henson? She was from Montana or was it South Carolina. He was a lot to keep track of all of these lies and half truths. The fact and the fiction were hopelessly intertwined, and there seemed to be no straightening it all out. Using her new alias, Natalie Bowman, she took classes at

cal State Fullerton. She joined the debate team, made some friends, but if she felt any sense of relief, it didn't last long, because pretty soon her alias began to fall apart. Esther learned that someone else was earning money and accruing Social Security benefits under Natalie Bowman's name. Maybe it was the real Natalie Bowman, or maybe it was another identity thief. It didn't matter. Point was this alias? It was no

longer safe to use. So what did Esther do? She went back to the internet looking for yet another missing girl, someone who was still listed as missing, but who in all likelihood was deceased. Like, how much time did you spend looking for her? Oh? My gosh, I mean it took months to find somebody. I mean that's the way it probably was, six or seven months. Why did it take so long? Well, like, I mean, a lot of different pieces have to be in place, right, Like I

didn't they needed to be about my age. I didn't want it to be a recent disappearance because I kind of wanted like it to be calm so I could live in peace. Then one day she was browsing a missing person's website and she found a post for Brooke Henson from Traveler's Rest, South Carolina. When you found her, were you pretty certain right away? Or did you kind of like wrestle with it for a bit? Oh? No, I wrestled with it forever. I mean, you're trying to

figure out how to do something that's impossible. Esther and I talked about this a lot, how she could justify stealing these identities, and how she rationalized lying to so many people, especially to people like Ian and his family, people she cared about and who cared about her. She explained that all of this really came from feeling like her family was stalking her to the point that it felt like emotional abuse. But she didn't think that anyone

would really take that seriously. So she made up stuff that she did think people would take seriously, like the violent stepfather's story. Basically, Esther felt that these lies were the only way she would ever be understood. When I think about all of this, I feel for her. I mean, what a lonely place to be. But I also can help but think about the consequences, about all the damage that these lies would inevitably cause. Esther eventually left cal

State Fullerton and moved east. First, she went to Boston, where she even took a class at Harvard Extension School. It was kind of like the IVY Leagues on training wheels. Eventually, she set her sights on Columbia University and New York City. This move also presented her with one more chance to come clean, to dispense with all the aliases and lies, and just apply as herself. So why didn't she? I

asked myself that all the time. I just like, there's absolutely no reason I could not have applied to Columbia as ester Reid. Because her true objective, she says, was simply to reinvent herself. Like I have been just trying to start over and like go to school and like get life back on track, and so why Natalie Fisher, why Natalie Bowman, Why why? But really all those questions or why not Esther read? But at this point she hadn't been Esther read in name or otherwise in years.

In that time, she had criss crossed the country, had a few different boyfriends, gone to college or started to anyhow, And by the spring of two thousand and six, Esther was really settling into her identity as Brooke Henson. She was in her second year at Columbia. She had taken out some student loans in Brooke's name to help pay for school. She had obtained a copy of Brooke's birth certificate and with that she had applied to get a US passport in Brooks name. And by the way, yeah,

that's a federal crime. She had her challenges at Columbia. Sometimes her social anxiety was so bad she just hole up inside her room. But then she started seeing a mental health professional for the first time and it really helped. Things didn't work out with Ian, she was in a new relationship. She says, she had support of friends who genuinely cared about her. She had an apartment to dogs, and at that moment happily ever after seemed well possible.

You may be thinking, really she thought this was going to work, And the short answer is yeah. 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. And that's when the phone rang, with the New York City Police Department on the other end, asking if she really was Brooke Henson, and all those other probing questions, and

if she'd take the DNA test. And then finally that moment on the street with the cops in her doorstep and the U haul idling by the curb, then that narrow window of opportunity when the at least seemed to walk away for a moment, leaving her just enough time to grab her bags and her two dogs and run for it. Initially, she did what all fugitives do when they're fleeing New York. She went south to Jersey, and from there, once again she vanished. The funny thing about

wanting to vanish is it only really works. Sometimes occasionally someone just disappears and is forgotten. But other times the strategy backfires big time because the act of vanishing is so mysterious and creepy that it actually calls attention to itself. Truth is, we love vanishing stories of a certain type, especially if they're about celebrities or people who vanish in

a dramatic fashion. Just think Amelia Earhart, dB Cooper, Jimmy Hoffa, even Aaron Burr's daughter, Theodosha Burr, who disappeared in eighteen thirteen Google her people are still talking about where she went. Point is you vanish or you run for it? Well, that's catnip for law enforcement like the Secret Service or the US Marshals or even the Travelers RESTPD. It's also catnip for the media because it asks the question, screams it really, why are you running? And what don't we

know about you? If I hadn't run, I don't think any of this would have happened next time on deep Cover. I mean, there are a lot of people stealing names, but something dealing with espionage spies that was a fascinating, fascinating development and opened my eyes. Deep Cover is produced by Amy Gaines and Jacob Smith. It's edited by Karen Shakurge 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 Nil Lobell, Greta Khne and Jacob Weissberg. I'm Jake Calper