11 Crazy Stories Of People Stealing Identities For Their Own Vicious Vendettas

Identity theft is an all too common problem. If it hasn't happened to you, you probably know someone who had their credit card used by an imposter. While this can certainly be an annoyance, it pales in comparison to more extreme cases of identity theft - ones that involve kidnapping, mysterious disappearances, and even unidentified murder victims.

Unsolved mysteries involving stolen identities and unidentified bodies give Hollywood thrillers a run for their money. Consider the case of Joseph Newton Chandler, a fraudster so careful that some assume he was fleeing some terrible past crime. Or Elaine Parent, whose murderous tendencies earned her the nickname "The Chameleon Killer." And then there are cases of people who have simply disappeared. Had they died, as authorities assumed? Or were they secretly living somewhere else, under new identities?

These unsolved crimes are enough to puzzle any armchair detective. More outrageous than any fiction, here are some of the most fascinating and strangest mysteries involving stolen or assumed identities.

Elaine Parent, "The Chameleon Killer," was a con woman who killed her roommate Beverly McGowan in 1990. McGowan was found on a canal bank in southern Florida, her head and hands removed by chainsaw, and her stomach tattoo sliced from her torso. Parent had moved in with McGowan just 72 hours prior to the murder, under the guise that she was an English employee of IBM.

In truth, Parent was born in the Bronx in 1942. She quickly fled to Britain after McGowan's murder, purchasing the plane ticket with her victim's credit card. Over the next 12 years, Parent was pursued by UK and American authorities; she was spotted in London, Paris, Turkey, Australia, and South Africa along the way. 

Parent used over 20 different aliases and hid out with a variety of lovers in Europe and the U.S. In 1998, she taunted Florida authorities by mailing them an oil painting of herself, with the words "Best wishes: your Chameleon" typed on the back. 

When law enforcement finally closed in on Parent in 2002, she fatally shot herself. An advanced, psychopathic criminal, she's believed to have killed several victims, though her body count remains a mystery to this day. 

In 2011, Russian ex-surgeon Dmitriy Yakovlev was sentenced to 30 years in prison for the murders of Irina Malezhik and Viktor Alekseyev. Yakovlev had lived and worked in New Jersey and knew both of his victims. The crimes themselves were brutal: Yakovlev left a trail of dismembered body parts - along with a really creepy Dracula mask - that were discovered in 2006 in the New Jersey woods. 

Yakovlev's motive was clear. After the murders, he immediately began using his victim's identities, going on lavish shopping sprees with his wife using the deceaseds' credit cards. But that's not a smart way to get away with murder, and Yakovlev was caught pretty quickly.

Authorities suspect that the serial killer was also involved in the 2003 disappearance of former NYPD mechanic Michael Klein. An associate of Yakovlev had purchased a home from Klein, and shortly thereafter he vanished without a trace. However, Yakovlev wasn't charged with the crime.

On September 15, 2001, a young man checked into an Amanda Park, WA, motel under the name Lyle Stevik. He paid in cash and offered no ID. He was seen hanging around the motel for a couple of days, but by all accounts he kept to himself. Three days into his stay, a maid entered Stevik's room and found him kneeling in the room's closet. She assumed he had been praying, and asked the motel's owner to check on him. When the owner entered, he got a clearer view: Stevik had hung himself with his belt on the closet's cross bar.

Stevik left behind some clothes, cash for the room, and a note that simply read "SUICIDE." It was a strange scene for sure, and some have speculated it was a murder. To make the situation even odder, no one has ever found a record of a Lyle Stevik.

The 2012 documentary The Imposter tells the story of the disappearance of Nicholas Barclay, a 13-year-old Texas boy who left home on his bike one day and turned up in Spain three years later. Except, as the film's title suggests, it wasn't really him.

Barclay did leave his home in San Antonio on June 13, 1994, but he was never seen again. When The National Center for Missing and Exploited Children received a call from Spain in 1997 saying a boy showed up at a shelter claiming to have escaped a sex ring, they thought a miraculous recovery had been made. But the boy claiming to be the 16-year-old Barclay was actually 23-year-old Frederic Bourdin, a French con artist.

The fact that Bourdin wasn't Barclay seemed obvious. He looked nothing like the missing boy and had a French accent. Still, the Barclay family took him in for six months before the ruse was uncovered. Why Bourdin did this is unclear, but why the family went along with it could be much more sinister. Bourdin has since claimed that the family killed Barclay and buried him on the property. Coming from a pathological liar, this accusation should come with an Everest-sized grain of salt, but it does make an eerie amount of sense. 

Franklin Delano Floyd has been on death row in Florida since 2002 for the 1989 murder of dancer Cheryl Commesso. In 2014, Floyd finally confessed to another crime he had long been suspected of: the murder of his stepson, Michael Anthony Hughes.

Floyd married Michael Hughes's mother, a woman then known as Tonya Hughes, in 1989. Tonya died in a hit-and-run in 1990 and Floyd abandoned Michael. He became a ward of the state and was placed in foster care. In 1994, Floyd decided he wanted custody of Michael, but the state refused to grant it - Floyd was not Michael's biological father and they had severe doubts about his ability to take care of Michael. So, Floyd kidnapped Michael from his elementary school. Floyd was caught, but there was no trace of Michael. In 1995, Floyd was convicted on charges related to the kidnapping and sentenced to 52 years in prison. Despite this, Floyd maintained for years that Michael was alive and well.

But when Floyd confessed to murdering Michael, he also shed some light on Tonya. Tonya Hughes's real name was Suzanne Marie Sevakis. Floyd was married to Sevakis's mother in 1975. When Sevakis's mother went to jail for a petty crime - she served only 30 days - Floyd took off with Sevakis. She was six years old at the time. Floyd and Sevakis lived on the run for the rest of her life. They married in 1989 before she died in 1990. Floyd is also considered a suspect in Sevakis's death.

The disappearance of Maura Murray has perplexed authorities and fascinated countless amateur sleuths. The University of Massachusetts student crashed her car on a desolate New Hampshire road on February 9, 2004, and seemingly disappeared into thin air. With no footprints left in the snow, it's widely believed that she got in someone's car near the site of the crash. 

While Murray's family believes the 21-year-old was abducted against her will, an alternative theory has emerged that paints a different picture. Prior to her disappearance, Murray had run into some legal problems related to possessing stolen credit card numbers, and she had been previously been asked to leave West Point due to honor code violations. She also emailed her professors prior to her disappearance to notify them she would be gone for a while. There's also the fact that no one knows what she was doing in New Hampshire. 

Did Murray walk away from her own life? Is she currently living under an assumed identity? There have been several claimed sightings of the missing woman in Canada, and there's speculation shes's since had a Facebook account (now removed). She could be alive and well, with a completely different identity.

In July of 2002, Joseph Newton Chandler put a gun in his mouth and squeezed the trigger. The Eastlake, OH, man had been battling colon cancer and decided enough was enough. It's a sad, if not uncommon story, save for one detail - it wasn't the first time he had died. 

The real Chandler, an eight-year-old boy, had previously died in a car crash in Texas in 1945. The man who claimed his identity did so in 1978 by filing for a social security card in South Dakota. He then moved to California, and later Cleveland.

After his death, the faux Chandler left little behind other than $82,000 in the bank, leading authorities to believe he was some sort of fugitive. Some amateur detectives have even painted Chandler as possibly being the Zodiac Killer, though the connection is based on nothing more than conjecture. His true identity remains a mystery.

Imagine that you become the unwitting victim of identity theft beginning at 11 years old. At age 19, when you go to rent your first apartment, you learn that your FICO number looks more like a decent bowling score. You then request a copy of your credit report, and see that you're $500,000 in debt. A nightmare, right? Now imagine that the culprit behind this is your own mother. 

For Axton Betz-Hamilton, that surreal case of fraud was a reality. Now an assistant professor of consumer studies at Eastern Illinois University, Betz-Hamilton is an expert on child identity theft, largely inspired by her own horror story. After her mother Pam Elliott's 2013 death, her father discovered a credit card statement that revealed she had been stealing her daughter's identity for decades. The clues Elliott left behind suggested she led a double life and likely owned additional property, but all of the money appears to have vanished.

Unable to ask her mother why she would do this, Betz-Hamilton has theorized that Elliott was a "low-grade psychopath."

On Christmas Eve of 2010, Lori Erica Ruff committed suicide in the driveway of her Texas home. The wife and mother had become increasingly erratic in the months leading up to her death, and she was facing divorce proceedings that seemed to have broken her. It was a tragic ending, and it would ultimately leave many more questions than answers. 

After Lori's funeral, widower Blake Ruff opened a lockbox that his wife had previously forbidden him from touching. In it he found an Idaho ID with Lori's image, but bearing the name Becky Sue Turner. It came with a matching birth certificate. A private investigator later discovered that Becky Sue Turner had died at two years old in the state of Washington. 

Soon, everything Blake knew about his late wife unraveled. Her upbringing in Arizona proved false, and the authorities got involved in an effort to learn the women's true identity. Was she hiding from some terrible crime? Just who was Lori Erica Ruff? The official investigation never uncovered the truth.

Dr. Sneha Anne Philip left her New York City apartment on September 10, 2001, and was never seen again. On the morning of September 11, her husband Ron Lieberman had still not heard from her, but he wasn't worried; it was not unlike Philip to spend the night with family. But when the terror attacks happened, and he could still not reach his wife, he began to fear the worst. 

Lieberman hired a private investigator, and the two later concluded that Philip had likely rushed to the World Trade Center to assist with any victims. It's an altruistic and tragic death that Lieberman painted, but it may have been far from the truth.

In reality, the two had been having marital problems. Reported to have taken on a serious drinking habit, Philip seemed to be avoiding her husband at all costs. Though she was officially ruled dead in 2008, nothing has ever tied her to the tower attacks, and some speculate that she used the tragedy as an opportunity to start a new life.