A Bizarre Case of Assumed Identities

The role of the ID and secure document industry is to ensure that procedures and checks are in place that grant each citizen secure access to the rights and privileges that are associated with their unique identity. But, as a report in AP News demonstrates, the longer a person lives under a stolen identity, the harder it becomes to unravel the truth of who they really are – and what they’ve been doing.

Walter Glenn Primrose was ordered to be detained until his trial at a hearing in Honolulu, near to where he and his wife Gwynn Darle Morrison were arrested and charged with assuming the identities of two children who died in Texas in the late 1960s.

According to the AP article ¹, Bobby Edward Fort was 27 years old when he enlisted in the US Coast Guard in 1994 and retired 22 years later with a secret security clearance that allowed him to land a job in Honolulu as a defence contractor.

But in reality, Bobby Fort died in a Texas hospital in 1967, when he was less than three months old.

What came to light at the hearing in Honolulu was that the Bobby Fort who enlisted in the Coast Guard had stolen the dead baby’s identity 35 years previously. A false birth certificate helped him get five passports, driving licences and Department of Defense credentials. But when the judge at the hearing in Honolulu asked the man in the dock to state his name, the 66-year-old defendant replied: Walter Glenn Primrose.

Primrose was ordered to be held without bail by a US District Court judge after a prosecutor provided new details about how he and his wife had been fraudulently living for decades under the stolen identities of the two dead Texas infants.

While the hearing further deepened the mystery of why the couple shed their past, it provided little clarity about whether the case against them goes beyond stolen identity, though a prosecutor suggested it could have ties overseas.

‘We think the defendant is obviously quite adept at impersonating other people, obtaining government ID documents, fraud, avoiding detection,’ Assistant US Attorney Wayne Myers said. ‘He may — we’re not saying for sure — but he may have some troubling foreign connections. And if he does, he might be able to use those to enlist help.’ 

A search of the couple’s Hawaii home turned up faded Polaroids of the two wearing jackets that appear to be authentic Russian KGB uniforms, Myers said. An expert determined that the snapshots were indeed taken in the 1980s. The search also yielded an invisible ink kit, documents with coded language and maps showing military bases, Myers said.

Federal defence lawyer, Craig Jerome, said the government only provided ‘speculation and innuendo’ and that the couple was involved in nothing more nefarious than ‘purely white-collar nonviolent offences.’ 

‘If it wasn’t for the speculation that the government has injected into these proceedings without providing any real evidence ... he (the defendant) would certainly be released,’ Jerome said.

Prosecutors feared Primrose would flee if freed. They noted in court papers that he was an avionics electrical technician in the Coast Guard and was highly skilled to communicate secretly if released.

The points of fact on which all parties agree are that the man born with the identity Walter Glenn Primrose was entered into court documents as Bobby Fort and the woman born as Gwynn Darle Morrison took the identity of Julie Lyn Montague.

Primrose and Morrison went to high school and college together and married in 1980, according to court documents. In the early 1980s, they told family members that they were going into the witness protection program before abruptly abandoning their house and leaving Texas, Myers said. Other testimony from associates of Primrose and Morrison say that the pair needed to change their names because of legal and financial reasons and others speculated that they had lived in Romania during the communist era, had joined the CIA or had become terrorists.

US Magistrate Judge Rom Trader said he based his detention order on the alleged fraud ‘over multiple occasions spanning a long period of time.’ The couple face up to 17 years in prison if convicted of all charges.

Using newborns for identity fraud is not a new phenomenon. The practice of adopting a deceased baby’s identity was popularised in Frederick Forsyth’s 1971 novel ‘The Day of the Jackal’, in which an assassin trawls small parish graveyards to locate a dead child whose identity he could assume in order to apply for a passport in their name.

While the technique of taking over the identity of a dead child is still used today, online registries present a much easier way for fraudsters to collect personally identifiable information. Because the default visibility settings of registries for weddings, birthdays, new babies and other occasions are pre-set to public, online shopping sites such as Amazon reveal information to the world that financial institutions and other service providers request for identity authentication.

Using multiple online shopping registries could reveal large amounts of information not just about living people but even of a baby yet to be born. A wedding registry would show the mother’s maiden name, and a birth registry would list the projected date of birth, location, and either the expected child’s or the parents’ names.

I think it fair to say that if Primrose and Morrison were looking to change their identity today, they wouldn’t bother visiting a graveyard or a county registrar’s office when they can just as easily search for registries online – and with a lot less chance of being caught.

1 - https://apnews.com/article/texas-honolulu-government-and-politics-685756de54ccb1ad14003bdf35 0710e7