True Crime Campfire - Chimera: The Crimes of Elaine Parent

Episode Date: October 13, 2023

In July of 1990, the headless, handless body of a young woman named Beverly McGowan was found in a canal near St. Lucie, Florida. As they began their investigation, detectives had no way of knowing that they were embarking on one of the strangest cases of their careers—the twisting, turning story of a consummate con woman, killer, and master of disguise…a criminal so skilled at deception that she would manage to stay one step ahead of the agencies hunting her for more than a decade, even after being named the Most Wanted Woman in the World. And even after they found her, she would still leave a long trail of mysteries behind her. Sources:The Telegraph: https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/northamerica/usa/1391705/Chameleon-Killer-cheats-the-Florida-police-by-ending-her-many-faced-life.htmlIrish Times: https://www.irishtimes.com/news/a-killer-s-many-faces-1.165231South Florida Sun-Sentinel: https://www.sun-sentinel.com/1996/12/11/90-murder-trail-leads-to-woman/The Guardian: https://www.theguardian.com/theguardian/1999/mar/11/features11.g22TV show "Unsolved Mysteries" with Robert StackWikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elaine_ParentMurderpedia: https://murderpedia.org/female.P/p/parent-elaine.htmFollow us, campers!Patreon (join to get all episodes ad-free, at least a day early, an extra episode a month, and a free sticker!): https://patreon.com/TrueCrimeCampfirehttps://www.truecrimecampfirepod.com/Facebook: True Crime CampfireInstagram: https://gramha.net/profile/truecrimecampfire/19093397079Twitter: @TCCampfire https://twitter.com/TCCampfireEmail: [e-mail]! https://true-crime-campfire.myspreadshop.com/Become a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/true-crime-campfire--4251960/support.

Hello, campers. Grab your marshmallows and gather around the true crime campfire. We're your camp counselors. I'm Katie. And I'm Whitney. And we're here to tell you a true story that is way stranger than fiction. We're roasting murderers and marshmallows around the true crime campfire. In July of 1990, the headless, handless body of a young woman named Beverly McGowan was found in a canal near St. Lucy, Florida. As they began their investigation, detectives had no way of knowing that they were embarking on one of the strangest cases of their careers. The twisting, turning story of a consummate conwoman, killer, and master of disguise, a criminal so skilled a deception that she would manage to stay one step ahead of the agencies hunting her for more than a decade,

even after being named the most wanted woman in the world. And even after they found her, she would still leave a long trail of mysteries behind her. This is Chimera, the Crimes of Elaine Parent. So, campers, for this one, we're in Pompano Beach, Florida, July 19, 1990. Jane McGowan was opening her mail, and as she flipped through the bills and flyers, she was surprised to find a letter from her 34-year-old sister, Beverly. It had been postmarked just the day before in Miami. In Bev's neat cursive handwriting, the letter said, I've got to make some major changes in my life. I quit my job, sold the condo and the furniture, and I'm leaving for a while.

The next day, Beverly and Jane's brother Steve got basically the same letter. Both ended with the words goodbye, Bev. She usually just ended letters with her name, so the goodbye felt ominous. Neither one of the siblings could figure out what to make of it. It was so weird, so totally out of character for their sister. Steve later told the TV show Unsolved Mysteries, Something bothered me, because that's not the type of person she was. She was not the kind of person after spending all her money to try and get that condo and, you know, land a job at the bank, which she seemed to be happy with.

It was not her nature to just give up on everything and just walk away from it. Beverly had been through some major trauma when she was younger. She'd lost not one but two boyfriends, both in car crashes, and it took its toll on her. I mean, of course it did. I can't even imagine. She developed a hesitancy about relationships. It wasn't that she avoided them, per se. I mean, she'd date, but when she started to get really close with a guy, she'd get freaked out and pull away.

Who can blame her? Maybe it was partly that history of trauma and grief that got her interested in some of the new age philosophies and practices. Just trying to make some sense. out of all the chaos in her life. Bev had gone through some serious shit, no doubt. But lately, she'd seemed happier than they'd seen her in years. She loved her new condo. She liked her job as a loan processor at the bank.

Steve and Jane just couldn't imagine her dropping her entire life and leaving, without even talking to them about it first. But it sure seemed like she had. When Steve and Jane went to Beverly's condo, her phone had been shut off, her car was gone, her two cats were gone. and when they talked to her co-workers, they found out she hadn't been to work in two days. But it was strange.

Other than the few things I just mentioned, nothing really seemed out of place. Bev's bed was unmade, her nighty was lying there like she was planning on coming home that night and wearing it to bed like always. Despite the general first impression that nothing was out of order at Beverly's place, though, on closer inspections, Stephen Jane noticed a few key things missing. Bev's passport, her address book, and strangely, her answering machine. You could see the little space where it was supposed to sit next to her phone. They also found out that she'd called in sick to the bank on the day before her siblings got their goodbye letters,

something she usually had to be half dead to do. And according to her boss, she'd done more than just call in sick. She'd also asked to speak to a manager in the mortgage department. She was tired of her condo, Beverly said, and she wanted to unload it. basically sell it back to the bank. The mortgage officer was a little taken aback but said, sure, they could do that. They just need her to send them a certified letter

and put her request in writing. The bank did get a letter from Beverly a couple days later with one extra request that the bank please take charge of all the stuff she left in the condo, all the furniture, electronics, everything. They could sell it, auctioned it off, donate it, whatever. Weird. Steve and Jane were totally baffled.

This was the last straw for Beverly's brother. He filed a missing person's report on his sister, and he took one more important step, too. He cancelled Beverly's credit cards. If Bev left on purpose, Steve thought, this might piss her off enough to make her reach out and explain what the hell was going on. All he and Jane wanted was to make sure their sis was okay.

But the truth was, Beverly wasn't okay. On July 19th, a guy named Jesse Moore, forehead was out for the day with his niece, trying to catch minnows for bass fishing, when something caught his eye. A bag of clothes, maybe? People throw away all kinds of stuff, sometimes nice stuff. So Jesse moved closer to take a look. It wasn't a bag of clothes. It was a body, a woman, dressed in a tank top, jeans, and one sandal, but missing her head and hands. Jesse could see pale skin where the shirt had scrunched up. It looked like somebody had cut out a little squid, wear-shaped piece of her skin right above the waist. Horrified, Jesse stumbled back to his car

and raced to call 911. It was Beverly McGowan. How do we know? Well, the killer had gone to disturbing lengths to try and prevent the body from being identified, cutting off the head and hands and cutting out a patch of skin to take a tattoo of Thumper the Rabbit off Beverly's torso. But they made two mistakes. The decapitation was very crude, no surgical precision here. The killer appeared to have used a chainsaw or something similar, which is horrible, and they left part of Beverly's jaw intact. There was one tooth still there, and a forensic dentist was able to match it to Beverly's dental records. The killer also missed a tattoo.

Beverly had two, and her killer apparently hadn't noticed the little yellow flower on her ankle. And that was how the police found out who she was, by her little yellow rose. The story hit the news. One of Beverly's friends saw the story in a picture of the tattoo, and she called Steve McGowan in a panic. Steve and Jane couldn't stand the thought of seeing what remained of their sister, so they had to identify her body by a close-up shot of the Yellow Rose tattoo. I can't even imagine what that felt like for them.

And apparently she was really close with her little nephews, so those poor kids had to be caught up in the nightmare too. So who killed Beverly? It made no sense at all. at first glance. She didn't have any angry exes. She didn't have a gambling or drug addiction. She didn't run around with a bad crowd. She had her life in order. She wasn't the type to chase after risky adrenaline highs. But there was one weird thing. About a week before Beverly dropped off the map, she got a creepy message on her answering machine. Some dude, who he was,

she had no idea, said, I know where you live. And I can't wait for us to be together. Yeah. Beverly was so creeped out, she took the answering machine tape with her to the bank and played it for her work friends. It gave them the Wiggins too. This was kind of interesting since one of the only things missing from her condo was her answering machine. There wasn't much you could tell about motive from the body. There was no sign of sexual assault, but the cause of death wasn't even certain. It looked like Beverly's throat had been cut, but it wasn't clear if that's what killed her. She might have been shot or hit in the head. We just don't know because her head was.

wasn't found with the body. It didn't take long, though, for a suspect to pop up. See, before she went missing, Beverly had been having kind of a rough time financially. She was working plenty. Two jobs, the one at the bank and one part time at Goodwill, but money was still tight. She'd just bought a new condo she was incredibly proud of, and the mortgage was a little higher than she could easily manage. So after going back and forth about what to do, she decided to try and find a roommate. She'd tried it before, and it hadn't worked out very well. She'd clashed with the last one over a bunch of little stuff, so it wasn't something she was super excited to do, obviously. I mean, who would be? But she needed help with the mortgage and bills, and this would do the

trick. So, Beverly placed an ad in the local paper and hoped for the best. The ad said, Palmineau Beach, share two-bedroom, two-bath condo, female, 34 plus two cats, $290 plus half utilities. Man, get that in the early 90s rent. Wow. Soon, Beverly had enough responses to pick a candidate she really liked. She told her friends and siblings about the woman. Her name was Alice, and she was from London, England. She'd come over on a temporary visa to work for the South Florida branch of IBM computers. Beverly was impressed with Alice.

She seemed so cool and sophisticated. The posh British accent, the high-powered job, the company had been so eager to have her that they brought her over from London. And Alice was glamorous, too. She was blonde and beautiful, she knew how to dress, and she drove a really sweet car. They'd probably have a ton of funding. together. Beverly told her friends they'd agreed for Alice to move into the condo on July 20th. And there was something else Beverly had bonded with Alice about. Numerology, which is basically

like number mysticism. Numerologists believe that you can connect important events in your life to numbers, that there are numbers that correspond to the letters of your name, stuff like that. It's kind of like astrology, but with numbers instead of planets. And yes, I know that's the tip of the iceberg. I'm sure it's more complex than that. I'm just giving you a thumbnail sketch. So, anyway, Alice was way into it. She said it could predict your future, and she offered to do a chart for Beverly. To do this, Alice said she'd need some information. No big deal, just some of the significant numbers in her life.

Her birthday, her driver's license, and passport numbers, her social. Oh, and her bank account number, of course. Beverly handed it all over, excited to hear what the universe had in store for her, and the news was good. Well, mostly good anyway. you'll meet the love of your life in about five years, Alice told her, and you'll mostly be worry-free for the rest of your life. Eventually, you'll even have wealth. But there was one dark cloud hovering over Beverly's future. There are a couple of people in your life, Alice said,

a man and a woman, who are trying to hold you back, keep you from finding happiness. Who, Beverly wanted to know, but the numbers didn't get that specific. There are people you know, though, Alice said, not strangers. That was confusing, but by and large, Beverly was excited enough about her reading to tell her friends about it. Now, y'all know Katie and I tend to be skeptics, open-minded skeptics, but we don't usually go in for stuff like numerology. But if you do, that's all good. We're not throwing any shade. But anytime somebody comes swooping into your life claiming to have all the answers, you really got to stay frosty. Especially if that person starts asking you for private information, like your banking details and your social security number.

That is a flaming red flag. We should say, though, that in the early 90s, when this happened, a lot of people wouldn't have known how dangerous it is to give out that kind of info. Identity theft didn't really get on the public radar until years after this, so Beverly was vulnerable to it, partially from a lack of awareness that criminals even did this kind of shit. Obviously, the investigators wanted to talk to this Alice lady, ASAP, especially when they heard about the numerology stuff and all the sensitive personal info Beverly gave her. but they were thwarted by a frustrating lack of information. Beverly had talked to friends and family about Alice, but nobody knew her last name. She hadn't left any stuff at Beverly's condo,

hadn't filled out any rental forms or anything like that. And when the detectives called IBM to try and find her, they got a nasty surprise. The company didn't have any record of an Alice being transferred over from England, and the office Alice claimed to be working for in Fort Lauderdale didn't exist. Quickly, detectives realized they were dealing with a phantom identity. Alice wasn't who she said she was, and that put her right in the crosshairs as suspect number one. But it was going to be a frustrating hunt.

Alice hadn't left any fingerprints, hairs, or any evidence at Beverly's condo. There was nothing to prove she'd ever set foot in it, even though Beverly told her friends that she had. The only hard evidence of Alice's existence was a scribbled note in Beverly's handwriting. Alice, Tuesday. But fortunately, Beverly's financial statements had their own story to tell. On July 19th, the day her siblings got their goodbye letters in the mail, and the day the body was found, somebody used Beverly's credit card to buy books in women's clothes from a fancy mall in Miami.

On that same day, somebody took $795 out of Beverly's bank account, $5 short of everything she had. And when police spoke to witnesses at the mall, the description matched Alice perfectly, a tall, classy-looking blonde lady with a British accent. Boom. Interestingly enough, right at the time this was happening, a woman named Lorencia Bambenick was all over the news for her escape from prison in Wisconsin. Lori Bambenick was a former playboy model and a former cop, and in 1982 she was convicted of killing her husband's ex-wife. And she'd managed to escape from prison not long before Beverly McAllen's murder. It was huge news. The media were calling her Bambi, and people were sort of rooting

for her as a kind of folk hero. There was a lot of concerns about her conviction. If I remember correctly, some radio DJ even wrote a song about her, Run, Bambi, Run. So it crossed the investigators' minds that Alice might have been Lori Bambenig on the run and desperate for her new identity. And when they put her picture in a photo lineup and showed it to the clerks at the mall, they said, yep, that's the blonde who used that lady's credit card. Shows you how much stock to put in eyewitness testimony, because it wasn't Bambi. Bambi was way up in Canada already. They caught her and took her back to prison later and verified she hadn't been in Florida

at the time of Beverly's murder. Womp, womp, womp. But a more promising lead popped up with the next charge on Beverly's credit card made on July 20th. This one was at a travel agency, and when the investigators questioned the clerk, she described a strange encounter. She'd sold a British Airways ticket for a flight to London to a tall person in a really cheap, party-city-looking jet black wig and glasses who had introduced themselves as Sam. It looked like either a man dressed up like a woman, the clerk said, or possibly even a woman trying to look like a man in drag. Like, it kind of seemed like a woman

trying to make her voice sound artificially deeper, but like not trying hard enough to make it convincing, it was strange. The person had an English-sounding accent and had also used Beverly McGowan's credit card to reserve a car at Heathrow Airport in London. When the investigators dug into it, they found that that rent-a-car office at Heathrow had actually gotten a call from Beverly's home number the day before. So this was a new wrinkle, right? The detectives figured that this was either Alice in disguise or Alice had herself an accomplice. The flight to London was scheduled for July 22nd, and by the time the investigators found out all this, that date had come and gone. But there were a few things they could do to try and track their suspect, or suspects.

They searched the parking lot at the Miami airport, then searched a few hotels nearby, and lo and behold, in one of the motel parking lots, they found Beverly's Little Red car. It had been sitting there for almost a week. Much to everybody's frustration, they didn't find any fingerprints on or inside the car, but they did find some synthetic black wig hairs. Hello again, Sam. So they took those into evidence. They also got hold of the passenger manifest from British Airways.

First, they checked to see if anybody had boarded under the name Beverly McGowan. No joy. But at Heathrow, a clerk at the car rental place said that a person with short, dark hair and glasses had come to pick up a car rented under Beverly's name. They showed her driver's license to get it, and Beverly, by the way, also had short dark-haired and glasses. When the person tried to pay with Beverly's credit card, though, it came back to Klein, because see by this point her brother had already canceled her cards.

Oh, it's no problem, the dark-haired customer said, I must have just gone over my limit again. Here, I'll pay you in cash, and I'm purposefully doing a stupid British accent there, because I assume that it was probably pretty stupid. They hadn't seemed remotely nervous or unsettled. They'd just picked up their rental car and gone. Interestingly, although the other parts of the description matched really closely with the one the Florida travel agent had given, the rental car clerk in London described her customer as definitely female.

Now that the suspect slash suspect were in the UK, the U.S. detectives needed help from the British police to go any further with the case. Fortunately, the Brits were willing, and their first move was to get in touch with the car rental place at Heathrow. If this person calls or shows back up, they said, tell him they need to go. go to your other branch on whatever street. Then call us ASAP. We'll be waiting for them when they show up. Sure enough, Sam called the rental place a couple days later, wanting to rent the car for a few extra days. No problem, the clerk said. We just need you to go to X office to do that. The police raced to the location to wait for their suspect to show up, but she never did. And when they set up yet another stakeout at Heathrow on the day Sam was supposed to bring back the car, she didn't show up there either.

Later that same day, a patrol officer found the rental car, abandoned not far from the airport. CSIs didn't find a single fingerprint. Somebody had wiped down every inch of that car. Shit, the detectives thought. Or no, they're British. They probably thought, oh, bollocks. Bugga. Whoever this was, this was not their first rodeo.

This was an experienced criminal. The hardest kind of catch. And for a while, the case went pretty cold, although the detectives never gave up on it. Yeah, there was a big delay in getting the specific info from that British Airways flight manifest. There were issues because not all the passengers were from Florida, and there were some jurisdictional problems there, so it took years for them to get all the passengers' information and track everybody down. And in the meantime, Beverly's family suffered.

Finally, though, they got the full list of passenger info. Sam hadn't used Beverly's passport to board the plane, so they set out to figure out what name they had used. One name stood out, Sylvie Ann Hodgkinson, a woman's passport listed her as a British citizen with dark hair and glasses. Sounds like our Sam, right? And when they started looking into Sylvie's background, Red Flag started flying. Sylvie had had a hard life. She'd grown up in a really low-income area, had to drop out of school young, and lost her husband suddenly in 1985. After that, she'd ended up in a women's shelter, and there the trail went cold.

No matter how much they dug, investigators couldn't find any more info about Sylvie. She was nowhere to be found. The one thing they did find was this. About a year after her husband died, records showed a passport had been applied for in Sylvie's name. And very quickly, the investigators realized that it probably wasn't Sylvie who applied for it. In fact, they had a sinking feeling that Sylvie might be dead, that somebody had killed her for her identity. Why? Well, a check of international record showed that the same Sylvie Ann Hodgkinson had come up in an investigation before, along with two other names.

Charlotte Cowan and Elaine Antoinette Parent. About 10 months after Beverly McGowan's murder, Miami Patrol officers noticed a woman asleep in a car by the side of the road. When they ran the license plate on the car, it didn't match the car. Somebody had taken the real plate and replaced it with a stolen one. Turned out, the car was a rental, and the woman sleeping inside it was supposed to return it six months earlier, in L.A. The officers woke up the woman inside and asked her her name. Charlotte Ray Cowan, she said. She was a tall woman, pretty with bright red hair,

and she had her two dogs with her in the car. Charlotte waited calmly as the cop searched the car, and they found some intriguing stuff. Several wigs of different colors and styles, a journal, and a stack of IDs. All the IDs had Charlotte's face on them, but they all had different names. In addition to Charlotte Cowan, the woman had IDs for Elaine Parent and Sylvie Hodgkinson.

So this was all pretty interesting, but the only thing the cops had to hold her on was a failure to return a rental car. They arrested her, gave her a date to show up for court, and let her bond out the next day. On Charlotte's court date, the patrol officer showed up to testify, but when he got there, he was confused. The woman at the defense table did have red hair, but she wasn't the same woman he'd arrested. It took a few minutes for everybody to sort out what was happening. But this was the real Charlotte Cowen. This poor woman had no idea why she'd gotten served with a subpoena to show up in court on this day. But as soon as the prosecutor explained it to her and described the woman the cop had arrested in that stolen rental car,

Charlotte started shaking her head like, oh my God, that bitch. I know who are you looking for, she said. She'd met her almost 10 years earlier, Charlotte said, at a bar in Orlando. She was gorgeous. Red hair and blue eyes, great skin, dressed to the nines, way too classy for the dive bar we were in. She came up and introduced herself to me, said her name was Anne Tremont. She bought me a drink, we got to talk, and I liked her. She said she was getting over a bad breakup with her ex-girlfriend. Eventually, Charlotte said, Anne started talking to her about numerology. She was really convincing, said she could use important numbers in your life to predict your future. I fell for it. Charlotte said. She talked me into giving her my social security number, my birthday, my driver's license number, and then she painted this great picture of my future. Right after that, this guy walked in. Anne said he was her brother, and she had to leave with him, but she got my phone number and the next day we had lunch. I met her brother, she met my mom, we started hanging out a lot.

But then she kind of dropped off the map, and one day she called me out of the blue, said her aunt had died and left her and her brother a big inheritance, and her brother wanted it all for himself, so he'd had her committed to a mental institution. Bonkers. Then, about a month after that, Charlotte said, Anne had showed up at her door in the middle of the night. She was dressed up like a dude, for some reason,

fake mustache and all, and all disheveled and crying. I escaped from the hospital, Anne said. I'm trying to get away where my brother can't find me again. And, Anne said, she needed. Charlotte's help. Please, she said, let me borrow your birth certificate just for a little while so I can build a new identity and stay off my family's radar. Charlotte didn't want to do it, but Anne was sobbing her eyes out and eventually she caved. Anne promised to send the birth certificate back as soon as she could, but surprise, surprise, she didn't. And this was the last Charlotte ever heard

of her until she got that court summons in 1991. So now, the investigators in the Beverly McGowan case had this sort of chain link of names that all connected back to the Sam who rented that car at Heathrow Airport a few days after the murder. And they turned their attention to the one identity they hadn't yet investigated. The third name they'd found in that stack of IDs found on their mysterious suspect in 1991. The real name. Elaine Antoinette Parent. And who boy? They had no idea what they were getting themselves into.

These Florida detectives had stumbled into the most bizarre case of their careers. Elaine Parent was, as the telegraphs Tim Tate put it, a chimera, who had been on the run from the law since 1985 when police started investigating her in a jewel theft case. She had at least 20 known aliases, and she was the closest thing many investigators would ever see to a master criminal. Maticulous, ruthless, charming, and totally without conscience for the people whose identities and money she stole. And she stole identities in all sorts of ways. She might just

swipe your wallet in a bar. She might check into a homeless shelter, pretending to be down on her luck and pump you for information so she can take out loans in your name. She might just go for a walk through a cemetery and pick out somebody who died around the same time she was born and then file a birth certificate request for their name. She was, as much as I hate to say it, because y'all know we like dipshit criminals over here, but she was a master at it. and she seemed to really, really enjoy it. We don't know a ton about Elaine parents' early years. What we do know is that she was born in 1942 in the Bronx, New York, so she's not really British.

Her dad was an American, and her mom was French-Canadian, and quite a few sources say she was a shy, quiet kid. Elaine was her parents' only child, and the family was upper middle class, so she had what she needed in terms of food and shelter and material stuff. and apparently her mom was very loving and supportive, although her dad was kind of emotionally constipated, not abusive, just not very available to his daughter. In the 70s, she worked for a while as a real estate agent, and then the trail kind of cuts off for a while. Until we pick up Elaine again in her early 30s, getting picked up for shoplifting in Florida. That's the first criminal conviction she has on record, but I'm betting it wasn't her first time, just the first time she got caught. As we're about to see, Miss Parent was one of the rarest creatures we cover on true crime campfire. A really, really smart criminal.

Scary, smart. Then came the jewel theft, 40 grandworth stolen from an old lady Elaine befriended around the same time she was working poor Charlotte Cowan. That's what sent her on the run in 1985, and she'd been running ever since. As the investigators tracked down the people who had known her, or whoever she was claiming to be at the time, they started to put together a portrait that seemed almost like a hologram. Elaine could be charming and fascinating to talk to, and then she could turn on a dime and be threatening, aggressive, even violent.

She had relationships with both men and women, and she could be glamorous one day and plain Jane the next. One of the people who knew her was a woman we only know as Witness X, because what this case really needed was more Jason Bourne type shit. I'm right. Witness X. I know. Come to the stand.

It's just somebody whose face is naturally blurry, you know? The way they found this woman is bananas, by the way. While they were investigating Beverly McGowan's murder, they found the notepad where Beverly had written those goodbye letters to her family. And when they flipped through the blank pages, they noticed these faint little impressions where somebody had written a note and then ripped it out, leaving indenting from the pen on the paper underneath. There's a rad little machine they can run those pages through

and bring up clear images of those faint impressions so they can read what was written. And when they did that with Beverly's notebook, they found threatening letters written in somebody else's handwriting. The letters were addressed to Witness X in England. From what the letter said, it seemed like Elaine had been involved with this woman romantically, but it had obviously gone bad at some point.

In one letter, Elaine wrote, you will feel the repercussions. I guarantee it. After your abandonment of me, I have no remorse in tearing down what in truth I created anyway. Give me back my life. Yikes. Yikes. Bitch can write a threatening letter like no one else. I know, right? Witness X was a prominent businesswoman at a blue chip company in London. She met Elaine parent on a trip to Miami in the early 80s and they hit it off, had a vacation romance, and then stayed in touch after Ms. X went home to England. When Elaine went on the run from the cops for the jewel theft, she moved in with witness accent London, and after a short honeymoon phase, it started going all kinds of wrong. According to her ex, no pun intended, Elaine's moods were all over the place. She could go from happy and loving to furious and violent in five seconds flat. When she was angry, she'd

threatened to kill X, or sometimes threatened to kill herself if X left her. Finally, it got to be too much for Ms. X. She broke it off in 1990, and Elaine went back to the States. But at the end of July 1990, days after the murder of Beverly McGowan, the witness X knew nothing about that yet, Elaine came back to London. She dropped in on Ms. X unannounced and poured on the charm. If there's one consistent thing you hear from every single person who got involved with this woman over the years, it's that she was incredibly persuasive. She could talk the spines off a hedgehog. And despite all the bad blood between him, Witness X took her back.

And shocker, it didn't work out. As soon as the novelty wore off again, Elaine was right back to her moody, hostile bullshit. They broke up again, and this time Elaine cast her net for another victim. I mean, partner. She took out a personal ad in the paper, saying she was a gourmet cook and wine aficionado looking for love. But it must not have worked out great because just a few months after returning

to London from Florida, Elaine split again. Kidnapping, witness X's two dogs on the way to the airport and flying him back to the States with her. Asshole. Like, what the fuck? Later, she'd send X more threatening letters, the creepy kind made out of like cut

up letters for magazines, demanding ransom money for the dogs. Who does this? Seriously, who steals two dogs and tries to ransom them back to the owners. It's unbelievable. There is literally nothing that I would put past this bitch. And these were the two dogs that she was sleeping in the car with when she got popped in 91, by the way. So evidently she didn't hurt him. Thank God. And everybody who knew her said she loved animals, so hopefully she treated him well. I really hope Witness X got him back,

but I wasn't able to find out one way or another about that. Now, back to poor Sylvie Hodgkinson, by the way. British police think she probably stole Sylvie's identity during her first time in London, the year that she was living with Witness X. Sylvie, evidently, hasn't been heard from since she landed at that shelter, and investigators suspect

Elaine Parent killed her. We don't know, we just suspect. And they worry that she is not the only victim, that she and Beverly are not. Charlotte Cowan and Witness X are interesting to me, by the way, because their stories show that obviously Elaine you know, didn't have to kill to get what she wanted.

I mean, she managed to just manipulate and coax some people to do what she wanted them to do. So what made her escalate to murder sometimes? What made her escalate with Beverly McGowan? Did she just get sick of the time and effort it was taken to charm people? Or was Beverly starting to see through her shit? And that is kind of what I suspect is that Beverly was starting to figure out that she wasn't who she said she was and it escalated it.

But I don't know for sure. It's just a theory. Right. I agree. Investigators did their best to trace Elaine Parent from here. There's some evidence that she ran a cafe in New Mexico for a while. At some point in the mid-90s, under yet another fake identity, she sued the state for a slip and fall injury and won,

which just absolutely floors me like the balls on this bitch to do that under a fake name. Unbelievable. I mean, it shows she has no fear, doesn't it? Like, total psychopath. For sure. Yeah. According to a 1999 Guardian article, there have been sightings as far away as Australia, Paris, Turkey, and South Africa. The trail would heat up in one place and Elaine would somehow

sense it on the wind and take off again. Special Agent Bob O'Bannon told the Irish Times, quote, every time she takes on a new name, we lose all trace of her. She's a very cunning woman. Apparently, she's faked her death at least twice, and she likes to taunt the police. In 1998, she sent them a snapshot of an oil painting with the words best wishes, your chameleon, written on the back. I know. When the detectives looked closely at the picture,

they realized they were looking at a painting of Elaine herself, coming out of a pool and a swimsuit. Your chameleon. Yeah, that's a woman who likes being hunted. She doesn't want you to catch her, but she's definitely getting off on the chase. A lot of the sources in this case

talk about a confusing lack of motive in the murder of Beverly McGowan, but I don't see a lack of motive here. Yeah, it's not hard to figure out what Elaine parent wanted from Beverly. She wanted her identity. This is how a lot of fraudsters operate. It's nothing new. The level of brutality is unusual, thank God. But plenty of con artists have killed to get their grubby little mitts on something they wanted.

As for the dismemberment, that's rare. For a woman to do it especially to another woman is vanishingly rare. Some people would probably argue that to take on something as labor intensive and gross as dismembering a body, the killer must enjoy it or get off on it. That's a possibility for sure. I think it's definitely good evidence of the motive. I mean, if you don't make the body unrecognizable, how are you going to steal her identity? Also, disposing of a body is a huge undertaking. Dead weight is heavy, so dismemberment can be seen as a practical thing to make the body more portable.

There are definitely practical reasons to do it that have nothing to do with actually enjoying it. But that said, I think we do have good reasons to think that Elaine was a psychopath and might have actually liked what she did to her victims. I definitely think she got addicted to being on the run, staying just a step and a half ahead of her pursuers, pretending to be all these different people. The mask would sometimes slip, though. One woman who met Elaine in a shelter in 1992 and took her in as a roommate would come to believe that her new friend was a sociopath. Sometimes she'd say the darkest shit. And once, at a dinner party, she admired a bracelet one of the other guests had on. Smiling, she picked up a knife and mimed cutting the woman's wrist off to steal it. I could see this being funny if you did it right,

but Elaine didn't. It just creeped everybody the fuck out. Later, she said to her friend, you know, the only way you can really have a decent life is to create a fake identity. Then you can do whatever you want. Okay, good, good tip. Very, very practical. Elaine pretty much dropped off the map from 1994 until 2002 when the famous America's most wanted covered the case. And suddenly, there was her face. on TV screens all over the world.

And before long, the cops were knocking at the door in a little ranch house in Panama City. A pretty dark-haired woman in her 50s answered the door in a pair of silk PJs. We're responding to a 911 call, the officer said. We're just making sure everything's okay. Oh, sure, the woman said. Everything's fine.

She introduced herself as Darlene Thompson. When the officers asked for ID, she offered it right up, a military ID. The woman seemed so absolutely calm and collected, not at all nervous or sweaty like you'd expect a fugitive to be, so much so that they really thought the tipsters must have been wrong, that this woman probably wasn't a lean parent at all. And when they asked if she'd come down to the station for an interview, she said, Sure, just let me go change clothes first. The officers let her go to the back bedroom by herself.

And as they stood there waiting, one of the officers started examining the woman's military ID. and he suddenly realized something that made the hairs on the back of his neck stand up. It was missing a stamp that all ID cards of that type should have. This lady's ID was a fake. She was lying, and they'd let her go out of their sight, behind a closed door. The officers started down the hall toward the bedroom, but before they reached the door, they heard a gunshot, then a thud. Their suspect had shot herself dead.

We've seen this before. as I'm sure some of you recall. Narcissists tend to do this. A lot of killers do it when the law finally catches up with them. Serial killer Israel Keys is a good example, and there are dozens of others. As soon as they realize they've lost control of the situation, that they won't be able to direct the course of their own life anymore,

that they won't be able to control the world's perception of them anymore, they take their own lives. I think it's all about asserting control and the only way they can think of to do it. Elaine Parent, once called the Most Wanted Woman in the Woman in the World, world by the U.S. State Department was dead. When they searched her rented house later that night, they found a whole array of the kind of stuff you'd expect to find in James Bond's secret closet.

Wigs, masculine and feminine clothing, theatrical makeup, a book on how to speak French, and a strange thing. An FBI wanted poster with her picture on it, saying she was wanted for murdering somebody, and it's weird. For some reason, sources differ about the details of this. Some say the flyer said she killed a man in Las Vegas. say it was a woman with like an important job in the government, but the weird thing was she wasn't wanted for a case like that. There was no such case. So investigators think she

must have made the flyer herself most likely to threaten somebody with, which I know. It's so freaking creepy, isn't it? But also very on brand. It is. It's terrifying. Like she wanted to show that to somebody and be like, you know, we know she liked to threaten people, but it's so on brand for her at the same time. I think she really missed her calling being a spy or an actor. Like I think that's what she loved most Was just being different people And sneaking around She just got

Probably an adrenaline rush out of it Oh for sure Sadly for Steve and Jane McGowan She would never stand trial For their sister's murder Or for anyone else's Though authorities in two countries at least suspect that there are more victims out there

We may never know for sure But although she was never convicted I hope her death brought Beverly's family Some kind of peace My theory is that After talking Beverly into giving up all the info she needed to steal her identity, Elaine killed her, dismembered her, and dumped her body in a place known to be an alligator alley, hoping that it would never be identified.

So how do we explain those goodbye letters which Beverly's family said were in her handwriting? Well, there are a few possibilities. Elaine Parent might have somehow talked her into writing them. We know she was given Beverly advice, almost acting like a sort of spiritual advisor. her. She could have said something like, look, you need to get some distance from your family. Why not write them all a letter and tell them you're going away for a while and not to contact you? And remember that thing Alice said when she did Beverly's numerology chart that there was a man and a woman close to her that were trying to hurt her? Yeah. I have a theory about this. We know Beverly had a brother and sister that she was really close to, obviously, Steve and Jane. So I wonder if Alice was able to convince her that she couldn't trust him anymore. If that That's how she talked her into writing those goodbye letters. Or second option, she could have just forced her to write them, like at gunpoint or knife point. And the last possibility, of course, is that Elaine wrote the letters herself.

She wouldn't be the first con artist to master the art of forgery. I mean, I'm pretty good at imitating other people's handwriting myself, and I bet I'd get great at it if I practiced. So I can totally believe that that's possible, even to the point of fooling people who knew Beverly and knew her handwriting. Now, we should be clear. Elaine Parent was never convicted of the murder of Beverly McGowan, so all this is just alleged. But it's scary to me to think of all the question marks that still swirl around this case. Scotland Yard was pretty heavily involved in the search for Elaine back in the late 90s, early

aughts, and I don't know if they're still investigating. Probably not, sadly, since there'd be no way to bring her to justice at this point, but it sucks that there's still so much mystery here. Who was that man that she introduced to Charlotte Cowan as her brother? Was he an accomplice? Was Sam another accomplice? Or was that just Elaine in disguise? One of the detectives involved in the case called her a mistress of disguise, so it's very possible it was her. But we'll probably never know for sure. And that's one of the many reasons why this case is going to haunt me forever. So that was a wild one. Right, campers? You know, we'll have another one for you next week. But for now, lock your doors, light your lights,

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