Esther Reed

Written on November 21, 2009 – 11:42 am | by admin | | Tags: 48 hours mystery episodes, brook henson, brooke henson, camp cupcake, Esther Reed, esther reed captured

Who is Esther Reed?

esther elizabeth reed

Esther Reed in earlier this year was sentenced to four years in prison by a Federal court. She is a former extension student whose used mental illness as an excuse to steal up to six identities.

Esther Elizabeth Reed was born on March 8, 1978, in the tiny town of Townsend, Montana, the youngest of eight children. Her father, Ernest “Ernie” Reed, was a woodworker and farm laborer. He married a woman named Florence when he was 32 and she was 40 and a single mother with seven children and two marriages behind her.

According to the New York Post, in between 2002 and 2005, Esther Reed attended Harvard sporadically. To forge her way into California State University and Extension School at Columbia, she used the identities. According to the Associated Press, Reed was at the time labeled as a scheming manipulative criminal by the federal judge.

By using one of her persona’s Brook Henson, her crime was unravelled when she applied for a job in Manhattan in 2006, a woman who had been missing since 1999 in South Carolina. She was indicted in Greenville S.C. in 2007, for charges of fraud, wire fraud, and identity theft, the Crimson was told in an interview with Ed Donovan a secret Service spokesman.

In 2007, Reed was put on the Secret Service’s Most Wanted List, Donovan said as they investigate major cases of fraud, while also defending key government figures. Natalie M. Bowman ‘99 who later graduated from Columbia Medical School was also a target of Reed who attempted to adopt her identity.

Her defence of mental illness which was said to be caused by the 1998 death of her mother, was backed by her attorney’s Ann Fitz. Fitz said, “She felt like there was no other choice but to try and hide herself and live her life through somebody else’s identity,” Fitz was also disappointed at the final verdict claiming it dismissed mental illness as a “creative argument.”

Walt Wilkins, a prosecutor and U.S. attorney for the district of South Carolina, said that her scams were seen as an effort to support herself after she left home in 1999. Wilkins said that Reed also put herself in social situations despite her defence of “social anxiety disorders.”

Nowadays, identity theft is one of the fastest growing crimes in the nation and also internationally through the fast growing of the Internet.

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