Feds Chase Alleged Ivy League ID Fraudster
An alleged ID thief has authorities searching for her nationwide.
Nov. 12, 2007— -- The U.S. Secret Service has received nearly 50 tips in the past week regarding the whereabouts of a young woman who has evaded authorities for months since stealing the identity of a missing South Carolina woman to apply to two Ivy League universities and obtain $100,000 in student loans.
In a federal indictment unsealed last week, Esther Reed, 29, was charged with allegedly stealing the identity of Brook Henson -- a resident of Traveler's Rest, S.C., who went missing eight years ago -- and using it to apply to for a passport, credit cards and the federal loans.
Soon after the indictment was unsealed, authorities ran Reed's image on the long-running TV program America's Most Wanted, leading to the greatest influx of leads on Reed's location since she was first found to have stolen Henson's identity in 2006.
"They'll take the information from America's Most Wanted and determine if three or four of the tips are all coming from the same city," said Clark Brazier, an investigator in the Traveler's Rest Police Department, who has been looking for Brook Henson since the then 20-year-old went missing July 4, 1999.
Secret Service spokesperson Kim Bruce would not confirm where the majority of those 40 to 50 tips had come from because "the case is still under investigation."
Investigators believe Henson is most likely dead but were given a false hope in May 2006 when a Columbia University graduate student alerted authorities that a woman claiming to be Henson had applied to work for her as a housekeeper. After an Internet search, the grad student learned that Henson was a missing person.
"We don't believe Reed had anything to do with Brook's disappearance," Brazier said, "but we need to find her to clear her."
Brazier said Reed has also used the names Natalie Fisher and Natalie Bowman in 2004, around the time she was enrolled at the Harvard Extension School in Cambridge, Mass.
According to the indictment, in May 2004, under Henson's name, Reed was accepted to Columbia University. The following year, Reed allegedly received a duplicate of Henson's birth certificate in the mail, adding mail fraud to the federal charges against her.
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