The shape-shifting swindler who conned her way into Ivy League schools using stolen identities was once an obese teenage dropout so abused by her loved ones that she wanted to scrap her entire life, friends told The Post.
Since Esther Elizabeth Reed, 28, was last seen by her family in Seattle in 1999, authorities say she has shrunk to half her weight, undergone plastic surgery and has lived all over the country under numerous assumed identities.
The sophisticated con artist who moved to the nation’s biggest cities and duped schools like Columbia and Harvard into admitting her stands in stark contrast to the dejected, awkward teen from Townsend, a tiny Montana lumber town surrounded by mountains.
“She was never happy with who she was. She was a left shoe on a right foot. She had a weight problem and hated herself,” said Jim Therriault, Reed’s speech and drama-club teacher at Townsend HS.
Reed also hated school and dropped out at the beginning of her junior year in 1994 with a miserable record of D’s and F’s.
“She had a very dysfunctional family and had a serious absentee problem. She hated school,” Therriault said. “She was determined to drop out. Everybody tried to talk her out of it. I tried to talk her out of it. She connected herself with real losers after she dropped out.”
“She never talked about what she wanted to do, she just wanted to leave school and the town,” he said.
Options are limited in Townsend, where most of the 1,950 people who live there work at a nearby lumber mill, so Reed did what many there do and eventually gravitated west to Seattle, where she worked occasionally as a nurse’s aide. Then, in 1999, she called her father and told him she planned to do something drastic.
“I got a phone call from her when she was living on other people’s credit cards, and she said, ‘Dad, I’m going to be doing things that you don’t approve of – things that are not in your value system.’ And that is the last I ever heard from her,” Ernest Reed said while at the door of the white-shingled, single-story house where Reed was raised.
He said problems began to arise with his daughter after he and her mother, Florence, divorced in 1991. Florence had been married twice before and had four other children – three daughters and a son – with her previous husbands. She had another son with Ernest Reed.
“Esther wanted to do what she wanted to do. When she was living here, I didn’t allow any sex or violent videos. But when she went to her mom’s, that was acceptable,” he said. “I don’t know what turned her – maybe living with her mom?”
Her English teacher, Mary Duede, said Reed’s mother encouraged her daughter to be “resistant” and “combative.”
“She had a real snippy attitude. She was passive-aggressive and very complicated. She never came to class. Her mom supported her in leaving. She kept showing up at the school saying it didn’t serve her daughter’s needs. She was one of those moms who always thought the kid was right,” Duede said.
Therriault – who stayed close with Reed after she left school – said she talked of an abusive boyfriend and how her roughhousing half-sister, Lori Sampson, 45, would beat her.
“[Lori] was very dominant. She punched Esther around. [Lori] was out in the streets fighting in the town. Esther was gentle and submissive,” he said. “She was a pretty troubled youth. She was constantly unhappy and came to school crying. She was constantly fighting with her parents.”
Lori Sampson could not be reached for comment.
Reed’s mother moved to Washington state in 1996, and Reed began spending more time there. But she rarely stayed in one place for long. Both her father and Therriault said letters they sent to her were often returned. While in Seattle, she began shedding the pounds that had made her the target of abuse as a child.
Then in 1998, Florence died, and Reed began exhibiting flashes of the criminality that would later define her. She stole credit-card information, her father said. Court records in Seattle show she was busted in 1999 for possession of stolen property. Then she was arrested for stealing her sister’s checks. The last time her family ever saw her was as she left the police station.
The trail goes cold until 2002, when authorities believe Reed started taking courses at California State University, Fullerton. Except now she was Natalie Bowman, officials at the school said.
Reed convinced a professor there to write her a recommendation to Harvard, where she got in as Natalie Bowman in either 2003 or 2004. Officials there have repeatedly declined comment.
In 2005, she appeared in New York – this time as Brooke Henson, an identity she had stolen from a woman who has been missing from South Carolina since 1999. She studied at Columbia University’s School of General Studies for two years before her use of the identity caught the authorities’ attention.
In 2004, Reed’s father called the Social Security Administration to see if they were withholding money in her name, which would indicate she was alive.
“They couldn’t tell me anything, but they did tell me she was alive, so I reported her missing to the police in Washington,” he said.
Police there said since Reed’s disappearance in 1999, she has gone through a near-constant stream of men.
“Some of the witnesses in New York said she had scars – from burns – on her arms and back, which she didn’t have when she left Seattle. I believe that may have come from some episode of domestic violence,” said Janet Rhodes, the investigator with the King County Sheriff’s office in Washington who is handling Reed’s missing-persons case.
While in New York, Reed began dating several cadets from West Point and at least one student at the U.S. Naval Academy. Some knew her as Natalie Fisher.
Reed’s cross-country scam finally began unraveling in late June 2006, when she applied for a job as a housekeeper as Brooke Henson. After doing an Internet search and discovering a missing-persons Web site created by Henson’s family, the employer contacted police in South Carolina.
When police got in touch with her, Reed claimed she was Brooke Henson. But officials in South Carolina asked her to turn over a DNA sample. She agreed, but disappeared before she could give them a sample.
Investigators have since discovered Reed frequently received wire transfers from Europe and had traveled there under other identities. And she had a nose job and breast-enlargement surgery in Florida.
This, coupled with her penchant for getting close to military men, led police to suspect she might be involved in espionage, so they turned what they had discovered over to the Army Criminal Investigation Division.
Officials there acknowledged they were aware of the situation but declined to comment further.
Reed’s father said he doubts she will ever contact him.
“There is no point in dwelling on her too much. You get so paranoid to the point you are in a loony bin, but I miss her. Of course I am hoping she will contact me, but I haven’t heard from her in nearly 10 years,” he said.