這封以「敬啟者」(To whom it may concern)開始的遺書,是打字而成,只有一頁紙,由徐諾曼親筆署名。遺書在徐諾曼5日沒有按規定到加州紅木城法庭出席保釋聆訊後一天,由速遞公司送到多名收件人及「無辜計劃」在紐約的辦事處。「無辜計劃」是一個使用DNA證據為囚犯洗脫罪名的法律權益組織。該組織承認,徐諾曼是他們的一個主要捐款人。他們表示,收到信後擔心徐諾曼的安全,曾設法聯絡徐的律師,並將信件傳真給當地檢察官辦公室。
Evangelos Soukas testifies on Capitol Hill in Washington, Thursday, April 12,2007, before a Senate Finance Committee. Soukas is serving a federal prison sentence for identity fraud and filing false income tax returns. (AP Photo/Dennis Cook)
Fraudulent forensic expert jailed Thursday, 22 February 2007, 13:33 GMT
A bogus forensic psychologist who supplied evidence in hundreds of court cases has been jailed for five years.
Gene Morrison, 48, of Hyde, was described in court as a charlatan who had tricked judges, lawyers and police.
About 700 cases he worked on over 26 years, across the UK, will now have to be re-assessed, Manchester's Minshull Street Crown Court was told.
Judge Jeffrey Lewis said Morrison, who was convicted of 20 charges, was an "inveterate and compulsive liar".
The charges included obtaining a money transfer by deception, obtaining property by deception, perverting the course of justice and perjury.
He was cleared of one count of obtaining a money transfer by deception.
The court heard Morrison was paid at least £250,000 in taxpayers' money for giving apparently expert advice, but had actually bought his qualifications from a sham university.
Morrison's firm, Hyde-based Criminal and Forensic Investigations Bureau (CFIB), had been hired to give evidence in court. Many of his reports were cut and pasted from the internet.
Judge Lewis said: "You yourself had no expertise worth speaking of. Your business was built on a whole series of lies.
"My impression of you as an inveterate and compulsive liar is borne out by the verdict of the jury.
"Your activities in various ways struck at the heart of the judicial process.
"You did not care about the truth, you were wholly dishonest, you did not care of the consequences of your actions to the administration of justice."
Morrison admitted to police he began working as a forensic investigator in 1977 after buying certificates by post for a BSc in Forensic Science, a Masters with excellence in Forensic Investigation and a Doctorate in Criminology.
It "looked easier" than going to a real university, he told the court. At one client meeting, Morrison wore a fluorescent jacket with the words Forensic Investigator emblazoned across the back.
During his four-week trial he insisted on being called Dr Morrison.
Det Supt Martin Bottomley, of Greater Manchester Police (GMP), dubbed Morrison a "Walter Mitty-type character".
He added: "His entire working life has been based on a web of lies and deceit.
"He brazenly stood in front of judges and juries up and down the country and lied under oath repeatedly.
"Morrison has shamelessly fleeced innocent victims, including a grieving family, out of many thousands of pounds and, in the process, has hoodwinked courts across the country."
GMP will be sending a report to the Attorney General on Morrison's work to see if action is needed.
<pre>ID THEFT 101: BEAUTY CONS HER WAY ONTO IVYS' ROLLS AS AN ED. RINGER By LUKAS I. ALPERT The New York Post
January 8, 2007 -- A cunning co-ed con artist was able to dupe some of the nation's top universities - including Harvard and Columbia - into granting her admission by stealing other people's identities, including that of a woman who has been missing for more than seven years, investigators have discovered.
Esther Elizabeth Reed, 28, managed to attend Columbia University as a graduate student for two years under the name Brooke Henson before investigators caught wind of the scam last summer.
The real Henson had disappeared from her home in Travelers Rest, S.C., in 1999, and has not been seen since.
In a strange twist, Reed has been listed as a missing person herself since 1999, when she was last seen leaving a Seattle courthouse, where she was facing charges for forging checks she had stolen from her sister.
Since then, the brazen brunette beauty's path has been tortuous, but she appears to have used sophisticated and elaborate scams to steal several identities that she then used to gain entrance to California State University at Fullerton, Harvard and Columbia, where she studied criminology and psychology, investigators said.
"Reed's an incredibly smart and sophisticated con woman," said Travelers Rest police Investigator Jon Campbell, who has run the probe of Henson's disappearance since 1999.
"She's is an excellent impostor to the point of being pathological."
While investigators said they have no reason to believe Reed had anything to do with Henson's disappearance, she went to great lengths to assume the missing woman's identity. And unlike typical identity thieves, the motive did not appear to be financial.
"She didn't run up a whole lot of debts and bail, as is usual. She was living as Brooke Henson, which is very unusual," Campbell said.
But he said he was most shocked someone could approach an Ivy League college claiming to be someone they are not and talk their way in. He said the schools have been extremely uncooperative in helping him piece together what happened.
"They got caught with their pants down on this one, and they seem to be very embarrassed by it," he said. "And they should be, because they really aided her in this whole thing. They didn't check anything."
A spokesman for Columbia acknowledged someone named Brooke Henson had been enrolled but would not discuss it any further, citing federal student-privacy laws. A Harvard spokeswoman similarly declined to talk "about students real or fictitious." A message left at California State was not returned.
Reed's scam first came to police attention last June, when she tried to get a summer job as a housekeeper in Manhattan and identified herself as Henson. She used the missing girl's birthday and Social Security number.
When her prospective employer did a search on Henson's name, the first thing she found was a missing-persons Web site created by Henson's family.
"She realized that the woman who had come to her had the same birth date and had a resemblance to the picture of Brooke Henson on the Web site, so she immediately called the South Carolina Law Enforcement Division," Campbell said. They, in turn, notified the NYPD, who sent a detective to Reed's campus apartment.
"Everyone suspected it was probably a case of a stolen identity, and we fully expected her to say, 'You got me. I'm not Brooke Henson,' " Campbell. "Well, to our surprise, she said the exact opposite."
Reed, pretending to be Henson, claimed she was estranged from her family and had run away. The detective then called Campbell.
"He called and said, 'You can clear your case.' But I was like, 'Hey, wait a minute.' Frankly, I believe that Brooke Henson is very likely dead, and I needed more proof - like DNA or fingerprints," Campbell said.
He said that by claiming she was Henson, Reed almost pulled off a stunning con.
"If it hadn't been on this case - which I am very close to - we would have closed the file, and she would have had a completely laundered identity," he said.
When investigators contacted Reed just before July 4, she agreed to provide a DNA swab after the holiday but never showed up.
Investigators have now determined that Reed had been posing as Henson since 2004 but appeared to have gotten her Social Security number and other personal information later, when she managed to gain access through Vermont State Police computers to a missing-persons database accessible only to law-enforcement officials.
After Reed disappeared, Campbell immediately pressed Columbia to release her records, but the school stonewalled him, claiming that a flag had been placed on her file because she had once been the victim of domestic abuse.
"I tried to explain that I was a police officer, but that didn't seem to help. We sent a state subpoena that they just ignored. We are still fighting with them. I had to go to the Secret Service [which investigates identity theft] before [Columbia] would budge," he said.
How Reed paid for her tuition is unclear, as Columbia has refused to turn over financial documents.
Detectives eventually gained access to Reed's apartment and discovered "she'd left almost everything behind," Campbell said.
"All she took was her cat, her toothbrush and her brushes and combs - anything with DNA on it," he said.
Among the possessions Reed left was an ID card naming her as Natalie Bowman, an identity she had stolen earlier and used to attend Cal-State and Harvard.
Reed seems to have followed in the footsteps of the real Natalie Bowman, 29, who is currently a medical student at Columbia and appears to have attended Harvard before Reed.
Bowman did not return a call for comment.
Investigators also found Reed, while at Columbia, had dated several cadets at the West Point Military Academy and at least one midshipman at the United States Naval Academy at Annapolis.
Fred Fleischman of Caledonia, Mich., said his son knew Reed as "Natalie Fisher."
"She comes across as very interested in whatever you're doing, she talks to you about you, but provides very little information on her own," the father said.
Campbell said conversations with the cadets and their families finally helped investigators get a true bead on who Reed really was - and that Reed's family finally confirmed the identity through pictures cops provided.
"She's changed drastically since I last heard from her. Her mother passed away in 1998, and I don't know if that sent her off the deep end, but she's a very different person now," said her father, Ernest Reed Jr., of Townsend, Mont.
But investigators also stumbled upon some alarming information.
At least one soldier's family told Campbell they saw that Reed frequently received large amounts of money wired to her from Germany and Italy. She also placed numerous lengthy calls to people in the Netherlands. And at some point, she traveled to Florida to have plastic surgery done on her face.
Then she allegedly tried to get a cadet to furnish her with a certificate from the Army's assault school.
"At this point, it started sounding like it could be espionage and not just identity theft," Campbell said.
Fleischman believes Reed was using Cold War-type espionage techniques - lining up people and information that she could use to her advantage.
Campbell said his office immediately turned over what they had found to the Army's Criminal Investigation Department. Officials there didn't return a call for comment.
As for Henson's family, the tantalizing possibility that their loved one - who disappeared at age 19 when she went to buy a pack of cigarettes two blocks from her home - might still be alive raised great hope. But watching the possibility crumble in front of their eyes was almost more than they could bear.
"Most of us have come to terms with it, but her mother has really struggled," said Henson's aunt, Lisa.
Campbell said he's curious where Reed will surface again. "The $1 million question is where she turns up next and as who."
【本報訊】紐約郵報(New York Post)8日報導,28歲的女子以斯帖•伊麗莎白•李德(Esther Elizabeth Reed)是一個非常精明的身分竊賊,她盜竊七年前失蹤的女子布魯克•韓森(Brooke Henson)的身分,騙入菁英學府哈佛大學、哥倫比亞大學和富勒頓加州州立大學就讀。她過去兩年在哥倫比亞大學的研究所就讀,專攻犯罪學和心理學。去年夏季在調查人員發現她涉嫌身分盜竊之後,即翩然失去蹤影。
11 November 2005 NURSE IN FAKE LORD RIDDLE From Andy Lines In Zurich
THIS is the Swiss nurse who holds the key to the bizarre mystery of the bogus aristocrat who stole the identity of a dead baby.
Anita Keller is the fiancee of Christopher Buckingham, left, who was jailed earlier this week in Canterbury, Kent. Detectives believe she has access to a bank safe deposit box in Zurich which could unravel the secrets of Buckingham's past. They are also investigating whether he may have been an East German spy.
Anita met and fell in love with Buckingham in hospital
他的眼睛變了一大一小, 沒有神氣. This image made available in London by the Kent Police, shows a man whose real identity is still a mystery, but who masqueraded as an aristocrat for 23 years and who was was jailed for 21 months at court in Canterbury, England, Tuesday Nov. 8, 2005. The man, who calls himself Christopher Edward Buckingham, assumed a false identity - that of an eight-month-old baby who died in 1963. As part of his deception, he also adopted the disused title of Lord Buckingham along with the accompanying heraldic coat of arms.(AP Photo/Kent Police, ho) Email Photo Print Photo
此主題相關圖片如下:
This image made available in London by the Kent Police, shows the the crest of Lord Buckingham, which was used by a man whose real identity is still a mystery, but who masqueraded as an aristocrat for 23 years and who was was jailed for 21 months at court in Canterbury, England, Tuesday Nov. 8, 2005. The man, who calls himself Christopher Edward Buckingham, assumed a false identity - that of an eight-month-old baby who died in 1963. As part of his deception, he also adopted the disused title of Lord Buckingham along with the accompanying heraldic coat of arms.(AP Photo/Kent Police, ho) Email Photo Print Photo
Man Who Took Dead Boy's Identity Sentenced By JESSICA SALLABANK,
Associated Press Writer Tue Nov 8, 7:31 AM ET
A man who assumed the name of a dead baby in order to live the life of a bogus aristocrat for more than 20 years was sentenced to 21 months in jail Tuesday. The man took the name of Christopher Edward Buckingham, a 9-month-old boy who died in 1963, and carried out what a judge described as "wholesale identity theft."
The man, whose real identity is still a mystery, gave himself the title of Lord Buckingham in 1983 and was arrested and charged with obtaining a passport by deception in January this year.
The bogus lord has refused to tell either police or his own ex-wife and children who he really is. Even his nationality remains a mystery. Last month, he pleaded guilty to making an untrue statement for the purpose of obtaining a passport.
His fingerprints and a DNA profile have been sent to Germany, Israel and South Africa in hopes of solving the mystery, Kent police said. His photograph will also be circulated in those countries.
Detective Constable David Sprigg of Kent police welcomed the sentence but said he was frustrated by the defendant's continued silence over his true identity.
"He's obviously got something to hide," Sprigg told reporters outside Canterbury Crown Court. "He's been living a lie for 23 years and is still living it."
"He's very calm, he's very cool, he's very calculating. He knows exactly what he's doing, and he knows that unless we find something on him he's just going to sit there and keep saying 'I am Christopher Buckingham,'" Sprigg said.
In the bizarre case, which mirrors events in Frederick Forsyth's thriller "The Day of the Jackal," police say Buckingham adopted the identity in 1982 and used it to fraudulently obtain a British passport.
After he was arrested in Dover, he told police he had inherited the aristocratic title of lord from his father and even had personalized stationery with the Buckingham coat of arms. Police checks revealed he had assumed the identity of a baby who was born in 1962 and died the following year.
The Royal College of Arms, the heraldic authority for England and Wales, said no one was registered to use the Buckingham Coat of Arms, which it said was last held in the 1700s.
Judge Adele Williams, who sentenced the man, criticized him for his "lack of remorse" and obstruction of the investigation.
This image made available in London by the Kent Police, shows the passport of a man whose real identity is still a mystery, but who masqueraded as an aristocrat for 23 years and who was was jailed for 21 months at court in Canterbury, England, Tuesday Nov. 8, 2005. The man, who calls himself Christopher Edward Buckingham, assumed a false identity - that of an eight-month-old baby who died in 1963. As part of his deception, he also adopted the disused title of Lord Buckingham along with the accompanying heraldic coat of arms.(AP Photo/Kent Police, ho) Email Photo Print Photo