A lot of mysteries were solved when Tom Collins died.
Working backward from the moment of his death, investigators figured out where the fugitive accused Chicago swindler had been–where and how he lived, who he knew and how he knew them. Two years of his life as a fugitive were carefully pieced together.
About the only thing they haven’t yet figured out is where did all the money go and why did the man who seemed to be living comfortably as Bill O’Hara, purportedly a wealthy retired stockbroker, end up shooting himself after a highly amateur bank robbery?
In death, as in life, Collins was a chameleonlike character who adapted to his surroundings, hiding wide open by flawlessly becoming different people almost at will.
In San Diego, he wore his graying hair in a ponytail and cheered for the baseball Padres. Chauffeurs in limousines met him at home and drove him to the ballpark. If anyone asked, he was Bill O’Hara, retired.
Money and free time he seemed to have plenty of, just like a lot of his neighbors in Southern California. He told his neighbors he had made money and got rich, but a bad heart condition cut short his career as a stockbroker. Now, in his late 40s, he found early retirement in San Diego suited him just fine.
“He seemed to like being a conversationalist,” said Sharon Gruby, a San Diego schoolteacher and one of Collins’ neighbor. “But what he talked about was nothing outstanding.”
He had a companion in the beige stucco condominium overlooking the ocean in the Bird Rock section of LaJolla, a swank coastal suburb, but she kept pretty much to herself.
Neighbors knew her as Meg and described her as an ordinary woman who smoked cigarettes a lot. She was a Padres fan, they recalled, even more than he was.
On July 22, the man known as Bill O’Hara put a bullet in his head not far from his Chelsea Street condo and hideout. San Diego police said he shot himself as they were closing in on him after he robbed a bank of $800.
Detectives investigating the crime quickly learned they were not dealing with a retiree but with Thomas W. Collins, the subject of a 2-year search for the accused mastermind of a multimillion-dollar scam.
The FBI manhunt began after authorities say Collins absconded in 1994 with as much as $10 million that 450 investors had entrusted to him and his now-defunct suburban commodities business. Most of the investors were from the Chicago area.
Collins’ friend, Meg, whose name is actually Kathleen Chambers, left California soon after his death and is back in Illinois. Her attorney said she has been subpoenaed by a federal grand jury to tell what she knows about Collins’ financial affairs.
After his suicide, Chambers returned to the same northwest suburbs where she and Collins had met several years ago, when she waited tables at a Palatine restaurant. She has not been charged with any wrongdoing.
U.S. Bankruptcy Court records in the case of Collins’ Rolling Meadows-based Lake States Commodities Inc. contend that, in the year before Collins and Chambers disappeared, he gave her $450,000 obtained through fraud.
On July 31, about the time Chambers was leaving California, FBI Special Agent Bridget Manion executed a search warrant at the condo. What, if anything, she found among the items left behind, including some expensive white leather furniture, hasn’t been revealed.
But an affidavit for the search warrant is believed to describe in detail how some of Collins’ associates and employees in Lake States may have joined in the alleged scheme to defraud investors.
Whether anyone is ever held legally accountable for what is alleged to be one of Illinois’ biggest Ponzi schemes remains to be seen.
Federal authorities still hope that their painstaking reconstruction of Collins’ last two years may shed light on what happened to a fortune in other people’s money. It also may determine whether anyone faces trial for criminal fraud.
It was to San Diego that Collins and Chambers came in late 1994 after a sojourn in Costa Rica.
Private detectives hired by some of Collins’ creditors believe the couple sailed on a cruise ship from Miami to Costa Rica. There, they rented a villa and paid in cash for a stay of nearly two months.
They next showed up in San Diego, renting one of the 20 luxury condos in a three-story building on narrow, winding Chelsea Street.
Collins’ story of being a retiree with a heart condition and from somewhere in the Midwest apparently was accepted without question. It even fooled the condo owner to whom Collins paid the rent, a former Pennsylvania law enforcement officer.
The couple’s interest in baseball came to light, neighbors said, after Collins shot a game of billiards in his condominium clubhouse and ran into another condo owner, former major league player Davey Lopes, now a Padres coach. Neighbors said the couple they knew as Bill and Meg began going to games in limousines after meeting Lopes.
“She really liked that idea,” Gruby said of Meg’s delight in having Lopes as a neighbor. “She liked baseball.”
The couple also were said to enjoy quiet meals together and occasionally could be seen dining on their patio, a place partially secluded by a redwood fence and mounds of fresh impatiens. The patio overlooked sheer cliffs, leading to a rocky shore.
If Collins had not one morning decided for some still-mysterious reason to try to rob a bank and had not subsequently shot himself, he might still be on the secluded patio, just another wealthy man of leisure.
