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.”