Ray William Johnson: True Story Podcast - He's Supposed To Be Dead // The Aubrey Lee Price Story

Episode Date: July 2, 2026

Aubrey Lee Price is a former Georgia banker and pastor who orchestrated a massive Ponzi scheme that defrauded over 100 investors and led to the 2012 collapse of the Montgomery Bank & Trust. To escape prosecution after losing or embezzling the bank's capital, Price faked his own death.

Do you think this guy really did all the crazy things he says he did? Or is he just a liar? So the guy's name is Aubrey. And Aubrey is 41 when this story starts and he's living in Georgia. And the guy does a lot. He's a minister of a local church. He's also an investment banker at an investment firm. But then one day in 2008, he decides he's done working for other people.

He wants to go into business for himself. So he starts his own investment firm. And he turns to his church to find investors. And so he approaches fellow church members and close friends and just other people he knows. And he gives sermons and seminars in church about being a smart Christian investor. And he tells people that they can trust him with their money. And of course, they believe him. I mean, why wouldn't they?

He's their minister. I mean, he's the guy they should be able to trust. So they start handing over their money. Some even invest their retirement funds. and before long, $37 million is flowing into Aubrey's firm. But pretty quickly, it all starts to go wrong. Because he starts gambling with their investments. Basically, he's day trading with it in some high risk securities.

And he pours huge amounts of their money into this. And he keeps making bigger and bigger bets. And instead of growing the investments, he starts losing their money. like by the millions. And so soon he realizes he's about to be in serious trouble. And so Aubrey decides to hide his losses. And he begins falsifying records to cover up the transactions. And he makes it look like his firm is making incredible returns.

And this lie works. It works so well that he's able to raise even more money from investors, around $14 million. And he uses it to buy controlling shares of a local, bank. Then he takes $21 million from that bank and he uses it to pay back his previous investors and also to gamble in the stock market. And of course, he loses all that too. So by 2012, Aubrey has lost $70 million. And as you can see, this whole thing has become just one big Ponzi scheme. So he needs even more money to keep it all going. But by this point, his clients are

requesting payouts that he doesn't have, and he's finding it difficult to get new funds to pay them back. And he knows it's only a matter of time before he gets exposed. Now, Aubrey, he could, you know, do the right thing and confess and turn himself in and take responsibility for his actions. But nah, what fun would that be? Instead, he comes up with a wild plan. He's going to make himself disappear by faking his own death. that way he won't have to face any consequences. So he gets to work on this plan. One day, that same year, he writes a 25-page suicide letter to his investors and to his own wife and kids.

And in this letter, he admits that he lost all their money investing and he says he's depressed and overwhelmed with guilt and that he's planning on unaliving himself by taking a high-speed ferry boat out to the ocean. and I guess when no one is looking, he's going to jump from it. Then he goes and he gets on a ferry so that there's public record of him being there. But of course, he never jumps. Instead, he secretly leaves the ferry when it docks in Fort Myers, Florida. Then he takes a bus all the way down to the southern border, and he walks across the border into Mexico.

And from there, he immediately catches some long-distance buses and he travels further south into Central and South America. And there, he lives off the grid as a fugitive. He changes his name, he grows his hair out and his beard a little, he gets work as a migrant agricultural laborer, so he, like, works on a lot of local farms down there. Meanwhile, everyone back home in Georgia believes this letter that he wrote. They think he unalived himself out in the middle of the ocean.

And like the Coast Guard comes out and they do a full official search for his body, but, you know, they don't find anything. So they assume that he disappeared into the water. So as time passes, people just accept that he died. His parents, his own wife and kids, they all believe he's dead because he didn't tell them what his real plan was. And so eventually his wife ends up filing paperwork and a Florida judge officially declares him dead.

And so, like, now that the official breadwinner in the family's gone, and he admitted to committing fraud, the feds freeze all of his assets. And so his wife and kids are now broke and in financial ruin, as he had always been their main source of income. So now his three young teenage kids have to get jobs to help mom pay for food and rent. It's actually kind of sad. Here's the thing, though. Not everyone is convinced that Aubrey's dead, specifically the FBI.

See, the FBI, they've dealt with this kind of thing before. I mean, this guy gets into massive financial debt and then he suddenly just disappears? Yeah, they think he might be on the run. So they keep his case open. They even offer a $20,000 reward for information leading to his arrest. Here's his wanted poster. And so for now, no useful information comes in. Meanwhile, south of the border, Aubrey gets a gig working for some Latin American drug kingpin.

as a bag man and as a drug runner, mostly for cocaine. And while he's traveling around Latin America, he also gets a job as an underground cage fighter and as a bodyguard for prostitutes, aka a pimp. Now, him being a cage fighter and a pimp and whatnot, that's all from his retelling of the story. There's no actual proof that he did any of that stuff.

And since he's a con man, there's a chance that, you know, he's probably bullshit. Regardless, in 2013, he's entirely broke, living in poverty, and pretty exhausted from working manual farm labor all the time. And he decides it's time to return back to the United States. So he crosses the border, and he heads to Citra, Florida. And there, he rents a trailer home in a somewhat secluded area, and in that trailer home, he sets up a 225 plant indoor marijuana a grow house and he starts growing a bunch of Zaza and he like sells it in bulk and he starts making a bit of money to pay his bills and his rent and stuff and he's living pretty comfortably now. So it's starting to look like Aubrey may have actually gotten away with ripping off millions of

dollars and faking his own death. Until until it becomes time to renew the tags on his truck. So at this point Aubrey he has this. truck that he uses to get around. And the truck is actually registered, not in Florida, but in the state of Georgia. Now, he doesn't want to re-register the truck in Florida because that may tip someone off that he's a fugitive. So he decides to drive back to Georgia to renew his tags. So he drives from Florida all the way up to Georgia. Now, this truck also happens to have some pretty dark-tented windows. And while he's in Georgia, a cop notices the dark-tinted windows,

and he pulls Aubrey over. And this officer, he can tell that this guy, Aubrey, he's extremely nervous about this routine traffic stop. So he has Aubrey get out of the truck, and he searches him, and he finds a second driver's license with a completely different name on it. So now the cop has no idea who this guy really is,

and so, bam, he arrests Aubrey. Here's his mugshot. And once they get him down to the jailhouse, I guess he's tired of living this crazy, double life because pretty quickly he confesses to everything he's done, even though the police hadn't figured it out yet. And so eventually, Aubrey gets convicted of fraud, but he takes a plea deal and he gets sentenced to 30 years in prison.