Spies, or Chameleons?

UPDATE, 02/04/08: Esther Elizabeth Reed has been arrested.

Genevieve Lancier

Genevieve Lancier was just one name this beautiful woman used. She also went by Claudia Tielt, Alexia Zerner-Merches, Vera Jarle, Fenella Lorch, and Elisabeth Leenhower.

Her body was found in Isdalen, Norway on November 29, 1970. She'd been dead for a couple of days, and was burned beyond recognition. With her was a bottle of liquor, two plastic bottles that smelled of gasoline, sleeping pills, and a silver spoon. There had been a monogram on the spoon at one time, but it was apparently filed off.

Genevieve Lancier possessed 9 fake passports, many wigs, and several pairs of glasses, none of them prescription. In suitcases she'd stored at a railway station authorities discovered that all the tags had been removed from the mysterious woman's clothing.

Witnesses who'd met the woman later indicated that she spoke German, English, Belgian, and French. No one could identify her accent.

Esther Elizabeth Reed

For a girl who'd once been a chunky high school dropout from a tiny town in Montana, she was doing pretty damned well. Esther Reed had lost weight and had some kind of plastic surgery done, and she was studying at some of the finest Universities in the country.

Reed was in trouble in Seattle, Washington in 1999 when she simply vanished. The last any family saw of Esther was during an angry confrontation with her sister, who accused Reed of stealing her checks. Esther's face was placed in missing persons databases along with entries of other missing young women, like Brooke Henson, from Travelers Rest, South Carolina.

In 2006, Esther Elizabeth Reed was attending Columbia University in New York City, looking more svelte than anyone from Montana or Washington remembered. Looking a little like Brooke Henson might have looked 7 years after she disappeared.

Which was appropriate in that context, because Esther Reed was attending Columbia as Brooke Henson.

Strange Trails

Genevieve Lancier's trail seemed to begin in Geneva, Switzerland. In March of 1970 the woman traveled from there to Oslo, Norway, where she checked into the Hotel Viking, using that name. She was at that hotel for 3 days, then she lit out again, this time for Bergen, first by airplane, then by boat. In Bergen she checked into the Hotel Bristol. This time she was Claudia Tielt.

For unknown reasons she switched hotels, then, going to the Scandia. There she used the name "C. Tielt."

On April 1st, the same woman embarked on a trip that took her through several cities and towns in Norway, a trip that appeared to end in Basel. From Basel she seemed to disappear for almost 6 months.

What was she doing? Were her destinations random? No one seems to know, to this very day. They do know that she was pretty, and seemed to have funds at her disposal. And they do know that her real identity was never certain.

*******

In 2002 a woman using the name Natalie Bowman was attending Cal State Fullerton, but she apparently had higher ambitions. She asked a professor at the California university to write her a recommendation for Harvard, and he was happy to help.

In 2003, Natalie Bowman entered Harvard. Not much is known about her time there at the moment, but two years later she was in New York and intent on going to Columbia.

She was no longer Natalie Bowman, though. Now she was Brooke Henson. On paper, she was the same Brooke Henson who had vanished so mysteriously from Travelers Rest 6 years before.

She enrolled in Columbia's school of General Studies.

Brooke Henson also began dating. She seemed to prefer military types.

*******

In October of 1970 Genevieve Lancier traveled from Stockholm to Oslo, then to Oppdal. There she stayed in a hotel with an Italian photographer named Giovanni Trimboli.

Three weeks later she was in Paris, staying at the Hotel Altona.

Almost two weeks later the mystery woman was in Bergen, again. This time she used the name Alexia Zerner-Merches. While staying at the Hotel Neptun she met an unknown man.

By November 19, 1970, she'd gone through several more aliases and hop-scotched again across Norway, covering several of the same cities and towns she'd traveled through before.

While staying in the Hotel Hordaheimen in Bergen for four days from the 19th on she seemed nervous to those who encountered her. Skittish. As if she was being watched, or followed.

*******

Brooke Henson needed extra money, apparently. She'd been known to receive mysterious money transfers from overseas, even had enough at one time to get breast enhancement and a nose job in Florida, but for some reason she applied for a housekeeping job in June, 2006.

A search engine did her in. Her prospective employer searched "Brooke Henson" and discovered that Henson was a missing person. At first the woman using Henson's name tried to play it off, and she said she was the same person. Then cops in South Carolina asked for DNA.

Brooke Henson vanished. As did Natalie Bowman, and another alias, Natalie Fisher. For all of them were actually Esther Elizabeth Reed.

*******

On the morning of November 23, 1970, Genevieve Lancier left the Hotel Hordhaimen. She went to a railway station and placed two suitcases in a locker there.

Six days later she was dead in Isdalen. When she was found it was also discovered that she had more of the silver spoons, presumably with the evidence of a rubbed-out monogram. She also possessed 500 German marks and 130 Norwegian crowns.

Two women, more than 3 decades apart. One a complete cipher, a mystery. A beautiful wraith flitting back and forth across Europe for most of 1970, her trail seemingly random. She hooked up with a photographer whose later credits would include a book about cartoonist Charles M. Schulz and a man who was as anonymous as she was.

Another woman adopted various identities, but went no further than getting a top-drawer education. Esther Reed during her time as Natalie and then Brooke committed no known financial crimes. She seemed to live a fairly simple student's life.

The most intriguing aspect of her masquerade was the men she dated. She was said to have dated cadets at West Point and maybe even someone at the Naval Academy.

Both women may have been spies. One theory about the true identity of Genevieve Lancier is that she was a Soviet spy. In the 1970 the Cold War was still going strong, and real games of spy vs. spy were being played out all over Europe.

Suspicion that Esther Reed may be involved in some form of espionage was so strong that after her money from overseas and attraction to military men were revealed, investigation into the identity thief was taken up by the Army's Criminal Investigation Division. And Esther Reed is still in the wind, even now.

What if they weren't spies, though? Neither the haunting Genevieve from 37 years ago nor today's Esther Reed? What then could explain their actions?

It was apparent to some who encountered the woman who used the Lancier, Tielt, etc. monikers that she was afraid of something, especially near the end of November. Some seem to have speculated that she could have been fleeing a former husband or lover intent on murder.

There are reports that Esther Reed had scarring of some sort. No one seems to know whether that scarring was from domestic violence or something else. Could it be that she is so afraid of one person that she'd be willing to live the rest of her life snatching new identities whereever she can find them?

Mystery draws men and women together in romance. The mysteries presented by these two women decades apart are also alluring. I wouldn't have presented them together if I didn't see similarities: women of mysterious means; attractive women, constantly changing identities; and women who died or vanished leaving no answers to the questions they raised.

I've known about the story of the strange Ms. Lancier/Tielt/Lorch, etc. for a few years, and find it frustrating that the only book written about her is apparently not available in English.

For a short time about 3 weeks back, Esther Elizabeth Reed's deception was big news. Now that we've got wall-to-wall Anna Nicole coverage, the news machine has clearly moved on.

I have my own questions. Were they spies, or simply chameleons? Many people have a trace of the chameleon in their makeups -- I've been made aware more than once that it seems as though I do. Laura James of CLEWS once noted that about me after seeing me do different TV shows across a span of months. In an e-mail she noted that I never looked the same from appearance to appearance. She was right, too. But through immersing myself in the performing arts as a kid, I found an outlet for that, and by the time I was in my 20s and 30s, I knew who I was. Even if I looked very different from one year to another, my core never changed.

But I am, as a result, completely fascinated with people who never develop that inner anchor, who seem to change wholesale, for whatever reason. Often, they become criminals.

Maybe, if they are in the right place and time, they husband those shape-shifting qualities in a different way, and they use them for a greater cause. Is that how a spy is made?

And if Genevieve Lancier was a spy, it seems pretty obvious who she might have been working for -- best odds would certainly be on the Soviets, based on the time and place.

But who would have recruited Esther Reed, originally just a troubled girl on the run? I don't know as much about terrorism as I do about everyday homegrown criminality, but I do know enough to think that it seems a little skewed to think that someone like Reed would be dating American military men, even sleeping with them, for any kind of Muslim-backed group. Who else, then?

We do still have others who'd like to get some inside line on our military's methods and operations. Even one of this country's fastest friends, Israel, had Jonathan Pollard in our midst at one time. Russia is no longer the looming presence it was in 1970, but there is still a tension there at times, and I'm sure our countries still keep plenty of secrets from one another.

Where Esther Reed was concerned, I found it curious that I could find very little about her aliases on the Web. Since she was going to major universities for at least 5 years, it seemed to me she would have had a Facebook or MySpace just to keep up the facade. If she did have any personal profiles, she was savvy enough to take them offline. Even on the Web, she has remained a ghost.

I only had one candidate online for Esther, but I dismissed the idea pretty quickly. About two or three years ago, a fascinating weblog began to set the press and blogosphere all aflutter. It was titled "She's a Flight Risk," and the blog was purportedly written by Isabella V., a mysterious twenty-something heiress who was on the run from the law and her Godfather-like family.

Isabella V. was very clever with how she handled the whole anonymity deal -- she surfed from masked IP numbers, her registration info was hidden, and she used a high security e-mail account that promotes itself as being unbreakable. "She's a Flight Risk" has also been offline since May, it appears, and Isabella V.'s last entry was written in March of 2006.

Interesting timing of the blog's apparent demise aside, the consensus about "She's a Flight Risk" has been that it was a pre-YouTube form of viral marketing, a female or male writer setting themselves up for a book deal. As well-written as some of the entries were (I had the blog on my blogroll at a now-defunct site I ran), I could believe this, and I could believe that the book deal came, as well.

So Isabella V. could have been anyone.

Then again, Esther Reed and Genevieve Lancier really were "anyone," if you think about it. And that is why mysteries like the ones they left behind lodge in your mind and irritate. They make you visit them, again and again, and wonder.

To top that off, Esther is probably still alive.

She could be in your town or mine right now, doing what she seems to do best... blending in.

Sources:

"Ivy Gal Fled Her Past," New York Post, January 12, 2007.
The Doe Network: Case File 503UFNOR.