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.
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