Jan Brockelman was chasing an illusion that grew ever more terrifying.
It led her to race from her home in Joplin, Mo., to Texas, thinking she could rescue a long-lost daughter who had just miscarried in a hovel too remote for even ambulance crews and police to find.
It took four surreal days for Brockelman to wise up.
“After four days of searching, crying, and being scared half out of my mind, I had to admit I’d been scammed,” Brockelman, 49, said recently. “How could anyone be so cruel?”
That question torments a dozen women from Arizona to New Jersey–and maybe many more. Each was using the Internet to search for a daughter she reluctantly gave up for adoption years ago. Each received e-mails from a woman posing as her long-lost daughter. And each was hurt when she opened her heart to the mystery woman.
The “daughter” who called them Mom, e-mailed photographs showing a family resemblance, and had such a sweet voice began to manipulate them with tales of woe, playing on their deepest maternal regrets, guilt and fears–and then vanished into cyberspace.
After two years, the con artist does not seem to be tiring of the heart-wrenching ruse. She doesn’t seem to be out for money. She has passed up gifts, plane tickets and cash, according to seven birth mothers interviewed for this article. But, precisely because she has committed no clear-cut crimes, her victims are frustrated in their efforts to identify and stop her.
Indeed, cyber torment seems to be such a bizarre, vague Internet abuse that there is practically nothing to stop it.
“This is happening more and more,” said Parry Aftab, a New Jersey-based Internet lawyer, a privacy and security expert who has tried to help the birth mothers. “I don’t know what to tell people, except don’t trust anybody you meet on the Internet. It’s scary because it’s hard to protect somebody’s heart.”
In retrospect, the birth mothers say they ignored red flags. The con artist would never give an address or phone number. She used a cell phone, a pay phone or Internet voice service. She gave bogus post office boxes. She always had excuses.
“At first I was just so happy, I just accepted what she said,” said Vicky King, 51, from Elkhart, Ind.
Brockelman did get a home address during the “miscarriage” episode. It was phony, just like the screams of premature labor over the phone, and the woman’s claim that she had called an ambulance. When police told Brockelman they could not find her daughter, she made the frantic, futile drive to Texas.
“Even when there are red flags,” Brockelman said, “you’re hearing this sweet voice saying, `I love you, Mama.”‘
Today, the stigma of unwed motherhood that drove these women to relinquish their newborns is hard to fathom, as is the secrecy of the closed-adoption era, which lasted through the mid-1970s.
Thanks to the Internet, that secrecy is crumbling. Search Web sites and reunion registries abound, filled with “in search of” messages posted by birth parents and adult adoptees.
“ISO Birthdaughter. DOB on or around 5/23/70. St. John’s Hospital and Salvation Army unwed mothers home, Tulsa, OK. Would love to know if you are alive and well,” Brockelman wrote on one site.
From sites like this, the con artist gleaned the information she used to fool the birth mothers.
In early 2001, she used the address sweetangel182000@hotmail.com to contact at least three women: Brockelman in Missouri, King in Indiana, and Rose Marczak, a homemaker in Sayreville, N.J.
Marczak, 59, was especially vulnerable.
In 1967, she says, her husband unfairly accused her of infidelity, denied paternity of their third child, and arranged to have the girl adopted at birth, just after Christmas.
Marczak subsequently divorced him and began searching for her daughter. No luck–until she opened sweetangel’s e-mail in February 2001 and saw the matching data:
“I am searching for my birth mother. I don’t want to upset her life. I just would really like to find her. My DOB is 12/27/67. … I was born in Englewood, N.J.”
Marczak was delirious with excitement. Still, she replied cautiously, asking sweetangel for more information, such as her blood type.
There was no reply. Day after day. Cyber silence.
“Please, please contact me,” Marczak wrote in increasingly desperate e-mails. “I really need to talk to you. I look every day to see if you have written me.”
From then on, the con artist had the upper hand. Her name was “Jennifer Lawson.” (She was “Victoria Lawson” in e-mails to King, and “Jennifer Davidson” in e-mails to Brockelman.) She asked for family photos, then reciprocated with a photo that resembled Marczak’s older daughter, Gina. Jennifer began signing off with “I LOVE YOU, MOM.”
“When I heard her voice, it was as if the angels were talking to me,” Marczak recalls.
Jennifer described “a hard life” in her adoptive family. “My mom didn’t like to hug much. I hugged her maybe 10 times in my whole life.” Her adoptive father, she said, had died young. Her husband was abusive. Now, she said, she was pregnant in a tiny town outside Houston.
By pooling e-mail and phone clues, the birth mothers traced their tormentor to Cleveland, Texas.
Now, they are stymied. The reaction from police, FBI and other law enforcers has been: That’s awful, but what’s the crime?
Incredibly, after Brockelman returned home from Texas, shattered by her monumental gullibility, the scammer messaged to apologize.
And to try again.
“What if I told you,” she typed, “I was almost 100 percent sure I know your real daughter?”
