BACK AT THE RICHMOND POLICE STATION BEEVER PUT IN a call to the manager of the bank on which the most recent checks had been written. While he held on the line, he spread some of the material they had collected in the flat across his desk. Staring back at him were pictures of the two in various poses with different hairstyles. For Elizabeth alone, there was a whole handful of IDs. There was a University of Virginia student card from 1985 with a photo of a remarkably young-looking Elizabeth Haysom. A similar card dated the next year showed a markedly more mature Elizabeth. There was a Canadian government card that showed Elizabeth with close-cropped hair and a sour expression on her face. And there was a Virginia driver’s license in Elizabeth’s name. There were also Canadian government cards with Elizabeth’s picture, but the names weren’t Elizabeth Haysom. They were Caroline Jane Ferrell, Christina May Clarke, Catherine Lynne Peake, Melissa Anne Taylor, Sarah Elizabeth McKensie, Julia Alexandra Holte, and Tara Lucy Noe. Each identification card was accompanied by a driver’s license with a name to match. One of the licenses had a Quebec City address on it; the others listed her residence on different streets in Montreal. Each also had a different date of birth, ranging from March 1962 to July 1964, which would have made her either twenty-four or twenty-one at the time. In actuality, she had celebrated her twenty-second birthday two weeks previously.
When the banker came on the line, Beever identified himself and asked him if he could tell him about the account whose number he read off the bankbook. The manager went
off to check his records, and when he came back, he sounded excited.
“That account is overdrawn,” he said. “Please don’t let those people go.”
That was enough for Beever to recommend they be held for suspicion of check fraud. In the meantime Wright was plowing through the stack of papers. Included among the documents was a pile of letters held together with a rubber band. Some of the letters were signed “Elizabeth” and some were signed “Jens.” This helped them cut through the identification question and pinpoint the two as Elizabeth Haysom and Jens Soering. But at that stage the names meant nothing to either detective.
Separate from the letters was a student’s exercise book, which was filled, diary-style, with dated entries in chronological order. The first entry, dated Saturday, October 5, brought Wright to attention. In handwriting he would soon come to recognize as Elizabeth’s, it said that Jens had gone to “Bedford” to see “Officers Reid and Gardner.” It further noted that the officers were insisting on some type of tests and an answer was being demanded in four days.
Wright began reading faster. Under an October 12 date, he discovered an entry asserting that Jens had methodically gone through his room and car with a rag obliterating his fingerprints. Apparently this was of great concern to Jens, who was worried that he had already inadvertently left copies of his fingerprints on a coffee mug he had used during an earlier interview with the two officers. Very interesting, Wright thought, moving down the page.
Not all the entries made sense to the detective. At one place, Elizabeth made reference to a telephone call from someone named “Howard,” who told her that the “case” was all but “solved.” What case? Wright wondered. And how was it going to be solved?
Following that, there was reference to another telephone call, that one from someone named “Rover.” Then he read three initials which really caught his eye: “IRA.” He was puzzled. The initials had to stand for “Irish Republican
Army,” the dreaded terrorist group that had been virtually at war with the British for decades in Northern Ireland and, in later years, in Britain itself. But how was this woman involved with the IRA?
The next sentence removed any doubt he had about what the initials meant. The writer noted that the IRA felt its position in London had been threatened by “E.” That confirmed for him that the writer was talking about the terrorist group and that the person identified as “E” (has to be Elizabeth, he told himself) must be connected. But what was the tie-in with the United States, specifically with a place called “Bedford” and with “Howard” and with a “case” that was nearing resolution?
Confounded, he read on.
The next entry was datelined Paris. There, Elizabeth and Jens explored the possibility of emigrating to Zimbabwe, which was the country of Elizabeth’s birth. But officials at the Zimbabwean Embassy turned them away, saying there was no work for them there.
Undaunted, they took a train to Brussels where they tried to get work visas to Botswana. That was unsuccessful as well. Next they went to Luxembourg, where they subsisted primarily on hamburgers. Restless, they began focusing on Thailand, which was where Jens had been born. But Thailand was halfway around the world and air fare to Asia was expensive. So they decided to try to drive at least as far as India.
On October 22 they left Luxembourg in a rented Fiat, first stop Bern, where Elizabeth got an international driver’s license. They also dropped in at the Iranian and Turkish embassies to apply for visas.
At that point, the journal entries began appearing in a different hand, one which Wright later would identify as Jens’s. The detective welcomed the change; Jens’s writing was easier to read. At that point, too, the document changed in style. Up until then the entries had been primarily in note form—short, terse phrases like those a student would take during a lecture. But with the change in writer, the prose
took on a narrative cast. The sentences became longer, the phrases more descriptive and the detail more complete. Datelines jumped from Switzerland to Bulgaria to Yugoslavia. It was there, Wright read, that the trip all but ended in disaster. On a narrow thoroughfare outside Pirot, with Elizabeth at the wheel, they narrowly avoided a head-on collision. Their car ran off the road, rolled over, swerved back onto the highway and smashed into another car. Both Jens and Elizabeth suffered head injuries.
After much confusion due primarily to the language barrier, Jens and Elizabeth were taken to a hospital where Jens had several stitches taken in his scalp. The damage to the car, however, was much worse than it was to its occupants. Abandoning the vehicle, they took a train to Belgrade, and from there they headed for Vienna via Trieste.
By that time, they had run out of money so they began making cash withdrawals on a VISA card. It was unclear from the document whether the card belonged to Jens’s father or to Julian Haysom, but in any case they succeeded in getting cash.
From Vienna they took a train to Salzburg and stocked up on supplies, buying a guitar, a fancy camera, a tape recorder-radio, and shoes for Jens; shoes, stockings, a purse and a bottle of blonde hair dye for Elizabeth. Hoarding their cash, they paid the bill with the credit card.
The next day, November 5, they negotiated another cash withdrawal. They also made their first apparent serious effort to cover their trail. They left a “delayed” letter at the hotel, one which would be mailed long after they were gone so they could not be traced by the postmark. To further confuse anyone who might be trying to find them, they sent another letter to a re-mailing location in Frankfurt, an address they had taken from
Soldier of Fortune
magazine. In the letters, they specified they would be continuing their travels throughout Europe. In reality, they took a plane to Bangkok.
Thailand, however, turned out to be considerably less than what they had expected it to be. For the first few days
they played tourist, taking in the local sites while making a half-hearted attempt to find jobs. In that effort, they were spectacularly unsuccessful.
Although they could find no jobs by which to raise new income they continued to spend. Soon, they were all but out of money. In an effort to find a way to survive, they mailed a flurry of letters to banks around the world applying for credit cards. Their applications were denied. As a result, by early December, they were desperate for cash. It was then, Wright read, that they hit upon the idea of traveler’s check fraud.
The idea was quite simple. They would buy traveler’s checks with their available cash, report them stolen or lost to get refunds, then hurriedly cash the checks they had reported missing. That way, they would have the cash from the checks as well as the cash from the refunds, in effect doubling their investment.
To accomplish this successfully, however, they needed a supply of fake identification. This problem they solved easily enough. For several days they bounced around from printers to photographers to typists to laminators, carrying forged documents which could be copied to give them a look of authenticity. As a result, they ended up with several sets of credible IDs.
About this time, too, they discovered a book about computer crime which exposed them to even more adventurous avenues for fraud. But most of the schemes listed in the book required time, and time was playing against Jens and Elizabeth. They were running short of cash.
In desperation, they put their traveler’s check scheme into effect. Their first try was successful. After reporting the checks stolen, they were immediately refunded $500. But their jubilation died quickly. When they tried to cash the checks they had already been reimbursed for they ran into the impenetrable Thai bureaucracy. They panicked. Certain their attempt at fraud was going to be discovered they returned to the office where they had been given the refund and said they had “found” the checks. They gave back the
money and left, vowing to try the idea again in a different country where currency exchange laws were not so dogmatic.
In the meantime, they made an effort to milk Klaus Soering’s card one more time, only to find out that it had been cancelled. Elizabeth tried Julian’s card, but they discovered that it, too, was no longer valid.
Determined to make something work, they decided to try the traveler’s check scheme once again. Jens invested the bulk of their remaining cash, $900, in traveler’s checks. But instead of trying to cash them in Thailand they left almost immediately, on Christmas night, for Singapore. Their transportation was by the cheapest and most uncomfortable mode available; they made the trip by bus.
IN SINGAPORE, JENS WENT INTO A CHECK-CASHING FURY. In that country, the problem was exactly the opposite of the one they had faced in Bangkok. While the Thai bureaucracy was incredibly ponderous and slow, the apparatus in Singapore was extremely efficient and rapid, so much so, in fact, that Jens panicked again. That time, he feared the Singaporeans would process the checks too quickly and their fraud would be determined before they could get out of the country. While he cashed the checks there, he decided not to report them stolen there. Instead, he decided that he and Elizabeth should take the first plane to Europe and file their claim there. Minutes after cashing the last check, they boarded a flight for Zurich via Moscow.
The plan worked, but only after they got a fright. When they reported the checks stolen, they discovered they could get an immediate refund of only $500. They were told that they would have to come back later to get the $400 balance. Jens imagined that the clerk eyed him suspiciously and was worried that the police would be waiting for them when they returned. Despite their fears, they went back that night and collected the additional cash.
According to the journal, the tingle of risk-taking did wonders for their libidos. They celebrated with a huge feast
and a marathon sex session. Perhaps they over celebrated, because Jens was ill for days afterwards.
Physically and psychologically exhausted, but with a new infusion of cash and renewed spirits, they left Zurich for England on January 8. Destination: Canterbury. There they planned to put into effect still another scheme.
Using the alias M. T. Holte, Jens opened a bank account but quickly discovered they would not be able to draw on the account for two weeks. In the meantime, they raised subsistence money by selling the camera and guitar they had bought earlier. They deposited some of the money they got from that sale in a second bank and used the rest to live on. On January 18 they sold Elizabeth’s jewelry and deposited part of that money in still another bank. The rest they invested in their favorite fraud: the traveler’s check scheme.
READING THROUGH THE DOCUMENT, WRIGHT SMILED TO himself; he was beginning to see the pattern. Jens and Elizabeth planned to open a number of bank accounts under different names. While waiting for the accounts to become active they could survive via the traveller’s check scam. However, once they could use the bank accounts, they could overdraw them outrageously and then disappear before they could be found. They couldn’t be traced through normal means because they were using different fake IDs on each account. And once an ID was used, i.e., once they had written as many bad checks against it as they dared or until they ran out of blank checks, that “personality” was removed from their repertoire.
Damned clever, he mumbled.
Wright flipped through the next dozen pages quickly. They were basically detailed listings of where Elizabeth and Jens bought and cashed traveler’s checks. But he paused when he hit the mid-February entries. At that point, he saw, they had hit upon a new scam: They would be fake collectors for charity. Jens talked a clerk at the Royal Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals into giving him a collection can, and Elizabeth got one from the Red Cross.
Working separate ends of a large subdivision, they went door-to-door asking for money.