Episode 4: A Very Sophisticated Gal

Would you do it to U haul? Left it here? That's kind of crazy. I know, all of it's crazy. I was scared. When Esther fled New York City. She didn't get very far. Basically, she just crossed the Hudson River and stopped a few miles away in Secaucus, New Jersey, got a hotel room. She was with her two little shitsus Pouchin and Odie, and they were just looking at her the way dogs do, as if to say, what's the plan? Boss? Like, what is going to your brain

when you're in that hotel room in Jersey? I have no idea? I mean, that was absolute panic. I knew I needed to get a flight and so I remember I needed vet certificates for my dogs to fly. So she finds a vet who basically certifies that these dogs don't have rabies or whatever, and then she comes up with a plan. She decides to fly to Ohio and then a few weeks later catches a ride to Chicago

using a ride share that she found on craigslist. Your life is like one series of ridiculous like yes, logistical challenges like your you are on the run at this point, that is, that's yes. I didn't necessarily view myself. I was still hoping that it wouldn't be a big deal and they would might be over it. So I didn't realize I was on the run. I just kept thinking, like, well, come on, I mean you you you left the U haul in front of your apartment and I left your

apartment like you. I mean, at that moment, I was, but I was I should did. I knew I was on the run, but I still was thinking I can avoid truffle, Like if I could just like lay low, this could work out. I'm an undying optimist, and so I really did think, like maybe they won't be able to find me, just that it would become a cold case, and like they would stop devoting resources to it and

it might have become a cold case after all. At this point, Esther was just a missing person of interest in a possible case of identity theft and finding her it was all about resources, like how badly do you want to find her? And unless her case became some kind of top priority, which it currently wasn't, well, then there wouldn't be much of a man hunt or woman hunt as it were. As far as Esther was concerned, she was relatively safe. Meanwhile, down in Traveler's Rest, South Carolina,

John Campbell was kind of at a loss. He was supposed to be solving the case of Brooke Henson, who'd vanished seven years before. It was now two thousand and six, and this whole other thing with Esther read up at Columbia. It was just a lead that John was chasing down, a tip, a kind of side trail that he'd been jogging down in the hopes of finding Brooke or at least a clue as to what had happened to Brooke.

But Esther's trail was getting cold. She fled New York City in the summer, and by a Christmas time, six months later, John still had no idea where Esther was, and he was no closer to solving the Brook Henson case either. John's boss wanted an update. We had a new chief of police, and he came in and he said, where are we on this Henson tip thing? I said, We're dead in the water. I mean, she didn't show up to give a DNA sample like she said she would.

She hasn't been back to her apartment. Nobody knows, she hadn't been to class, Nobody knows where she went. She's in the wind, she's gone. John's boss, the chief, had shared some information about the case with the local press, but apparently they wanted more details. So the chief tells John opened the file and let the press have whatever they want. And I said, all right, are you sure? Are you kidding because we'd never done that, and he's like, yeah,

we're an open book. And I said, okay, heyman, he's the chief. The Travelers Rest Police Department shared what they knew with the local press, told them that there was this impostor who'd stolen Brooks identity and gotten into an eye Vy league school, and for the first time revealed her name publicly. Esther Reid. We opened the boat and we told him everything we had, and man, they took that and ran. This decision to open the file turns

out to be a huge deal. John shares the evidence in the case history, but also his espionage theories, even if some of those theories were half baked, and I should note not everyone in law enforcement was buying into John's ideas. Over at the Secret Service, Don Long was skeptical, but the Secret Service wasn't talking to the media John was. The point is, once John started talking, he said something

in motion, a media juggernaut. Pretty Soon everyone would know about Esther Reid, and finding her would become more than just a priority for law enforcement. It would become a reality TV show of sorts, a content test to see who could find her first. I'm Jake Albert and this is Deep Cover Season three, Never Seen Again, Episode four, a very sophisticated gale. So the local TV station down in Greenville, South Carolina runs its story and right away

John Campbell's phone rings. On the other end was a guy named Tom Colbert from California. Tom was a former news guy, used to work for CBS and Paramount, but now he had his own business. He worked closely with local journalists. They would feed him tips and then Tom would pass the best ones along to the big media outlets. Tom charged a finder's fee, of course, and he gave a cut to the local news guys. He was basically a middleman and Tom he was good at his job.

Some people called him the gem hunter because Tom he found the gems. Anyway, Tom gets this tip from a TV reporter in Greenville about the Esther read story, and right away he calls John Campbell to get his take on Esther. He talked about the potential for being a Russian spy going to various universities under cover. It had so many interest elements, the fact that it could be involved with espionage. That wasn't clear to me until John really laid it out and said, no, I really think

this gal has a different name for other reasons. I thought it was maybe just for money, trying to get into bank accounts now, and he said, no, this is a very sophisticated gal. This was John's pet theory that Esther was a spy. He stressed the fact that Esther had dated several military men, including two West Point cadets and a Naval Academy midshipman and that she seemed to be a master at creating aliases and then vanishing. Tom

was intrigued. 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. Tom jumped on the story. Within a day or so, he sent out a press release. It told the story of how John Campbell was tracking down a mysterious con artist. It quotes John as saying she's incredibly bright, articulate, and a conniving,

manipulative person, almost to the point of being pathological. The press release also says that Esther seduced several military men. It adds quote Reid allegedly has been funded through mysterious money orders for years from sources in Germany and Italy. She has told lovers she is a professional chess player. The press release had a long list of contacts, including John Campbell, Esther's sister, and also the Fleischmann's, her ex boyfriend's parents. Three days later, Esther was on the front

page of the New York Post. The banner headline was klepto, brainiac id thief scams colleges. The article heralded her as a brazen brunette beauty. It included comments from both John Campbell and Ian's Fred Fleischman suggesting that Esther was a spy. The article ended with a quote from John saying, the one million dollar question is where she turns up next?

And is who? It was kind of like the old children's game Where in the world is Carmen San Diego, only a version that was spy themed and a bit sexed up. The article had some facts and a lot of conjecture. It made for great reading. That's what really set off a firestorm of the phone ringing. John suddenly had to balance being a detective, a spokesman, and a

dad because he had a toddler at the time. I have a little office in the police department, and I'd be there for hours and hours an hour, So my son's like on the floor playing under my desk, playing with his hot wheels in the hallway and stuff like that while I'm on the phone with the press. For a while, it basically became a full time job for so anybody they call, I talked to anybody they could get me on the phone, and I talked for days straight.

The phone rang for days NonStop from reporters, and when people couldn't get ahold of me, they just published whatever somebody else, whatever I told somebody else. There's all kinds of things that say, John Campbell said, my idn't even talked to that guy in my whole life, not even who that is. You know. As the newspaper clippings piled up, things got serious. A grand jury formally indicted Esther. This happened in September of two thousand and seven, roughly a

year after Esther fled. New York City prosecutors charged her with fraud and identity theft. They said Esther fraudulently obtained a copy of Brooks birth certificate, applied for US passport, and took out more than one hundred thousand dollars in student loans. And with this indictment, Esther officially became a federal fugitive. Meanwhile, forty eight hours the CBS News Show picked up the story. They decided to do a full

hour segment on Esther Reid. In fact, they ultimately did two segments, and I want to share some excerpts from both of them. Capture the Queen to Night's forty eight Hours mystery, the producers hired a professional sleuth to track Esther down. My name is Stephen Rombaum. I'm a private investigator and I am currently hunting for us to read. Over the course of his career, Stephen had chased after some pretty serious bad guys, including Nazi war criminals. Now

Stephen told viewers about his latest target. This is a woman that completely reinvented herself from being a chubby Montana high school dropout to an attractive IVY League co ed able to conn her way into Harvard, into Columbia, going to military balls at West Point. She is certainly not above using her feminine wiles to get whatever she wants. So Stephen the private eye, he hits the road looking

for Esther. It's pretty wild, actually, because at this point there's the official law enforcement search for Esther Reid being led by the Secret Service and John Campbell, and then there's the made for TV version of this search being led by Stephen and along with him one of the show's hosts, Peter van Zand how do you begin, Well, we begin by finding out everything we can about her background,

her alias's, places, where she's lived. Rombaum heads first to Esther's last known address, the Manhattan apartment where she was living as Brooke Henson, and then we see Steve Rombaum going through Esther's abandoned possessions. Thank goodness, Sir, Landlord saved all of this. This is just extraordinary. It's everything a private eye could hope for, a treasure trove of documents

from Esther's life as Brooke. She left behind her credit card bills, her bank statements, her phone bills, countless countless leads. So Steve is gathering some pretty important clues about where Esther might be. Good old fashioned detective work. But there are other moments when the story feels pure tabloid and it's less about financial crimes and more about Esther's personal life. Here's the show's host, Peter van Zant again, and some

of her targets were the men she was dating. How many men do you think esther Rita has gone through. I'm aware of about a dozen. They talked about her like she was some sort of femme fatal, and that's kind of the vibe throughout these two episodes. The producers pick up on the whole spy theory and run with it. They get a hold of some instant messages between Esther and one of her West Point boyfriends. In the exchange, the boyfriend says that he's been studying maps and timelines

in his military science class. Esther wrote back, I want to see it when you're finished. Steve the Private Eye gives his analysis on this too. This is a classic method of espionage, using sex and using intimacy to get this sort of information. I mean, this is Mata Hari. One oh one, Mata Hari. I want to dive into this reference for a sec Mata Hari was an exotic dancer who was accused of being a spy during World War One. In old photos, she's dressed as a belly

dancer wearing a jewel encrusted bra. Doesn't look a thing like Esther Reid, and yet there's some really interesting parallels. Mata Hari was actually a Dutch woman named Margarita Zella. She too was running from a troubled past. Parents divorced, mom died. She was left with relatives she didn't care for, so she invented herself. Told some she was a Javanese princess and others that she was an Indian temple dancer. During the war, a French intelligence officer became convinced that

she was a spy. There wasn't a ton of proof, but in the end she was executed by a firing squad. Since then, she's become a legend, a stock character, like the mean stepmother or the evil CEO. And the thing about stock characters is we believe in them, We look for them, and we call them out even when the facts don't add up. Hello, yeah, oh great, Okay, I think we're destinesses. We're going oh if if not, I'm not reducing. I reached out to Steve Rambaum, the Private Eye.

I was still wondering about the whole spy thing. Like back then, how serious were people in the media and in law enforcement about this espionage theory. They were concerned that, you know, maybe she's a spy for Iran, Maybe she's a spy for this, you know, Russian. Both of those things actually came up. I'll confess I left, but not everybody laughed. Steve says he never really brought into the idea that Esther was a spy or a master criminal of any kind. I mean, you know, this was not

a young female Bernie Madoff who stole millions. You're talking about defrauding the scholarship system and getting a fake birth certificate and building a false identity. I can introduce you to probably ten thousand people who've done who've done the

same or worse. So I asked him, what was it then about the ester Reid case that the media was so keen on number one, she was a young female, that they were able to make it look like she was one step ahead of the combined investigative forces of America, which I have to tell you wasn't true because federal agents were working on bigger cases and didn't think that this was, you know, a major national security event until

everybody made it look like that. And then there was the spy story and the whole perception that she was a fem fatal, not to mention the fact that she had conned the ivy leagues. Basically, as far as I could tell, it all just made for good TV. Steve told me that he didn't want to bad mouth the media because of all the good he's seen it do. I'll be very honest. I'm not going to be hypocritical

and deny this. I've worked with the media dozens of times to get important and urgent matters, you know, into the public eye and kind of nudge law enforcement. These were cases where kids had gone missing, or where Steve is tracking down alleged war criminals, important matters that had been overlooked, stories that Steve felt should be at the top of the media food chain. I think moving Esther Reid to the top of the food chain was, you know, a weed bit cynical. Wow. Do you feel like you

were a part of that at all? Sure? Sure, I mean I was working a case. I did not say anything during that case to anyone that was in the slightest bit exaggeration. We'll be right back. When Steve Rombaumb was filming for forty eight hours and criss cross the country tracking down Esther Reid, he remained confident in his mission. I would be very surprised the Freedom Finder. If I didn't genuinely believe that, I wouldn't be daring enough to

say it on television. But by the time the first forty eight hours special aired in December of two thousand and seven, Steve hadn't founder and the story, which is getting bigger and bigger. Around the same time, the legendary TV show America's Most Wanted also ran a story on Esther and some other female fugitives too. They called the episode Bad Girls. America's Most Wanted was a big deal

back then, especially if you worked in law enforcement. Like if you got your case on that show, it greatly increased the chances that you'd catch your fugitive because so many people watched the show and then called in with tips. When I spoke with Don Long, the Secret Service agent, he told me he was actually surprised that Esther made it onto the show, which makes sense to me. I mean, she was not a domestic terrorist, or a serial killer or a bank robber, but be that as it may,

she was now on everyone's radar. The fact that this was highlighted on America's Most Wanted certainly raised or elevated the level here within the Secret Service. It also enlightened me on some investigative steps I could take to highlight the case even more within my own agency. Don talked to his superiors at headquarters in DC and made the case that Esther should also be on the Secret Services Most Wanted list. They agreed and put her on the list. The way Don saw it, he had a job to do,

and this helped him do it. The more people that are looking for your suspect, the better chance you have of finding them. Esther's face and her story were now everywhere, and the FEDS had made it clear capturing her was officially a priority. So you're probably wondering at this point what was Esther doing while all this was happening, Like, how was she processing this media circus? Well, the short answer is it took a while for the circus to

get underway. Esther had actually been on the run for a year and a half by the time the first forty eight Hours story ran, and during all this time leading up to that, Esther cut off all contact with her old friends. Did you stay in touch with anyone during that time? No? Absolutely, nobody knew where I was at nothing. Did you make new friends? You were just like solo with my babies? Yes, with two dogs. Wow, that's a long time to be solo. Yes, it was

a very very bad period. Esther stayed at cheap rentals and motels, mainly in the Midwest. She says she squeaked by for money. She had this little trick where she bought clothing at J. C. Penny on sale and then found a way to return the merchandise for the full price. She says she was just taking advantage of a loophole in the system. I think it's safe to say it was a scam. During this time, she pretty much became a shut in. She says she was laying low hoping

this would all just blow over. And to be honest, this is a part of her story that I didn't fully get, Like, wasn't she googling herself? Part of it may have been denial, but Astor also told me that she worried that by inputting certain search terms about herself that she might tip off the authorities and give away her location, so she didn't do it. Then one day,

she was up in Michigan staying at a motel. She was in her room with her dogs watching TV when a very brief segment on Fox News came on featuring her. And I remember seeing my picture and it's saying Esther read and I was like, oh shit, like literally, oh shit, this isn't going to go away. Esther says his segment was short, but it told her enough. Told her that the authorities were looking for her, and they had started connecting the dots, uncovering at least some of the aliases

that she'd used. I knew they would probably be able to figure out that I wasn't Brookentson, but I didn't think they would connect Brookentson to Esther read. Up until then, she had believed that her aliases would help keep her safe. She held on to all of her paperwork, all of her fraudulently obtained ideas. Yeah, I hold on to everything you had, your like Jason Bourne wallet with all your IDs. Yes, it was hidden in the bottom of my trunk right,

always kept it. But she realized that none of that would keep her safe any longer. In fact, those ideas were now a liability. Immediately, I went and cut up every piece of idea I had on me, and I cut it all up like the little scissors, into tiny little pieces and flushed them. Wow, you were really pretty well. I thought like they might be coming right this moment,

you know, like I don't handle panic very well. Clearly, there were so many instances where Esther could have come clean, turned herself in quietly without much fanfare, and maybe straightened everything out. But not now. So you cut all these up and flushed them on the toilet. And then what I think? Then? I just thought on the bed and panicked. Esther didn't know the full extent of it or how it had happened. But this thing, this story, it had

grown building momentum like a tsunami. A local TV report ring Greenville, South Carolina, had tipped off Tom Colbert, the gem Hunter, who then brought it to the national media. Before long, it was a newspaper cover story, then fought her for cable news, and finally a full blown hour on one of America's best known TV shows. There were no longer any easy outs, no explaining this away. Yeah, sure,

maybe she was no Bernie made off. And yeah, perhaps the espionage theory was just that a theory, but at this point didn't matter. The public was now hooked, and so were people in positions of power. They were all looking for the mystery girl, the Mata Hari and Esther she was it. The question now was there any place left for her to hide? Next time on deep Cover, I mean, we were chasing her around the country, and

you know, we would look each other out. How are we not finding this young girl who you know, stole some identities. But good grief, guys, we're the federal government here. We ought to be able to do that. 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 Gomperts.

Special thanks to Mia Lobell, Greta Cone, and Jacob Weissberg. I'm Jake Calbern s