Eileen Marie Farquer, who likes to be known as Lara Brown, was once wanted by the FBI.

She made headlines when she was convicted of benefit fraud at 83 - but there was much more to the story of Eileen Farquer. TONY WALL reports.

When I first met Eileen Marie Farquer, or Lara Brown as everyone in the small seaside settlement of Little Waihi knew the 83-year-old, she was on home D, an electronic bracelet strapped around her scrawny leg.

That was in 2013, and she'd recently been busted for benefit fraud for collecting $215,000 over 25 years under the fake name Lee Strauss.



She was an hilarious old chook, complaining that she'd become a "hero" to all the wrong kinds of people.



"Everybody feels it's OK to rip off the Government. If I'd ripped off a little old lady, I'd be stoned to death. But the Government? 'They've got plenty of money,'" she said.



She'd only been caught because she'd driven into the path of a fully-laden fuel tanker near Te Puke the previous year. As she was being "scraped off the road" police discovered cards in the false name.

Ross Brown Little Waihi near Maketu - where Eileen Farquer lived in a caravan park.

Eileen was something of a mystery around Little Waihi, just over the hill from Maketu in the Bay of Plenty; there were hints of an exciting life but no-one knew much about her.

It was difficult to communicate because of her deafness, but I managed to prise out a bit of information.



I couldn't place her accent - she claimed that she'd been abandoned by her mother as a child and didn't know her birth country.



As an adult, she'd travelled the world, she said, sailing on yachts, once appearing in a feature article in Playboy magazine. "They took some brilliant photos of me on a sloop."



She was paying back the stolen money at $10.50 a week, which she said was insulting to the taxpayer: "We all know I'm never gonna pay it, I won't live that long. Unless I win Lotto."



After that enjoyable chat, I forgot all about Eileen Farquer, or Lara Brown, or whoever she was.

Then, out of the blue in November, an email arrived from a woman called Kim MacIsaac, of Marietta, Georgia in the US.

DIGITAL ILLUSTRATION: AARON WOOD Eileen Farquer says she become a hero for "ripping off the government".

"This is going to sound complicated," it began, referencing my 2013 article about Farquer. "How much do you know about her and her case? I'm desperately trying to find her, and here's why."

What followed was a fascinating tale about a woman who abandoned her family in America in the 1950s and set off on adventures around the world, becoming an FBI fugitive in the process.

MacIsaac had conducted a quite brilliant genealogical investigation on behalf of her best friend, Bonnie Metzger, who'd spent her whole life trying to find her birth mother, a woman called Eileen Marie Allen.

They were convinced that Allen was Farquer, and they had photographs, documents and newspaper clippings to prove it.

The story begins in Australia in 1948 when American sailor Ray Metzger's aircraft carrier visited Sydney.

He went to a cafe or restaurant near the harbour and met a 19-year-old waitress from Melbourne called Eileen.

"I liked her right away," says Ray, 88, on the phone from his home in Florida.

"She was great - very funny and full of life - what everybody looks for."

Two weeks later, he proposed and began making arrangements to bring her back to the States.



She set sail in October, 1948 and joined Ray in his hometown of Williamstown, New Jersey, where they married in a church in January, 1949.



They moved to Chester County, Pennsylvania and Eileen gave birth in quick succession to three children - Marie Louise in September, 1949, Raymond Michael in September,1950 and Bonnie Lea in September, 1951.

But motherhood wasn't for her, it seems.

"She worked in a restaurant, and she started going out with the girls after work," Ray recalls. "Then she met a girlfriend who liked to travel and she hooked up with her and that's when she took off."



It was 1952, and Bonnie was only eight months old.

Ray tracked Eileen to Orange City, New Jersey where she'd found work in an advertising agency.

He tried to impress upon her that the children needed their mother. "She didn't seem to care. She refused to come back. The company would give her big fancy cars to ride around in - Cadillacs, Lincolns - she loved that, it was right up her alley."



He never heard from Eileen again, except for a card that arrived on Bonnie's first birthday.



"I miss you lots but hope you are very happy because that is what I want," said the note, signed "Mommy" and sent from Iowa.

Eileen's departure was devastating for Ray and it split the family - the children were sent to live with various relatives and friends.

Ray re-married about two years later and his daughters came back to live with him, but his son, Ray Jr, had been adopted and it would be years before the family re-connected with him.

1 of 3 The only birthday card Bonnie Metzger ever got from her mother. 2 of 3 "From Mommy" it reads inside. 3 of 3 But on the back is a longer message.

"I tell you, we could make a movie out of this," says Bonnie, 66, who also lives in Florida.



When she was little, she thought her father's second wife was her mother.



It wasn't until she and her sister found their brother's adoption papers in a box in the attic when she was about 10 that she started to learn her family's secrets.



Shortly before she died a year ago, her step-mother told her that Eileen had once contacted her.



"She wanted to know about us girls and mom told her never to contact her again, that we were her children now."



When she was about 20, Bonnie found her brother, who had a new surname. That inspired her to start looking for her birth mother.



The name on the children's birth certificates was Eileen Marie Allen.



"The only thing I knew was that she was from Australia, so I contacted the Australian consulate and got some papers," Bonnie says.



She drew a blank, as did her sister Marie, known as Sandy, who in recent years hired a private investigator to join the hunt.

It wasn't until MacIsaac, who'd been researching her own family, started investigating a few years ago that progress started to be made.

"It was a struggle and lots of mistakes and dead ends," MacIsaac says. "Getting records in Australia is difficult and I was finding conflicting information regarding Eileen. Things just weren't fitting into place."



The breakthrough came with DNA tests on the ancestry.com website.



The tests turned up a couple of second or third cousins in Australia, which gave some new surnames, including Farquer.



"I decided to Google Eileen Marie Farquer and whoa, big hit! Your article popped up."



The accompanying photograph was of an 83-year-old woman, but the face bore a striking resemblance to the young Australian who'd moved to America all those years ago.



Things rapidly started falling into place.



MacIsaac found shipping records that showed Eileen had sailed to England in 1957.

Then she discovered two 1965 articles from Hawaiian newspapers, which reported that the FBI wanted information about an Eileen Marie Farquer.

The articles said her aliases included Eileen Dickson, Eileen Mosier and crucially, Eileen Metzger. MacIsaac sent the article, with a photo, to Ray.



"I knew right away that was her. It floored me," says Ray.



The articles helped shed light on what Eileen had been up to. She'd been living at several hotels in Honolulu in 1963, where she was described as a student pilot.

Then in April, 1964 she'd been arrested at the Waldorf Astoria Hotel in New York by federal agents for stealing three Trans American stock certificates worth $15,000.

She was released on a $25,000 bail bond put up by a 76-year-old man from Las Vegas, with whom she'd toured Europe and North Africa.

He told the FBI he'd lost her somewhere in Morocco, possibly Tangier, and didn't know where she'd gone.

She'd been sighted later in France, Spain and England, according to the FBI.

By 1965 British police were looking for her, after she walked out of a top hotel, leaving her bags behind, saying she'd be back in an hour to pay the bill. Instead, she vanished.

Eileen was indicted by a federal grand jury on bail jumping charges, but it seems she slipped away.



MacIsaac traced her re-entering Australia in 1969 and then the trail went cold, until she hobbled into the Tauranga District Court with a walking stick in 2012, to face the benefit fraud charges.



MacIsaac wondered if I could find out if Eileen was still alive.



I made some inquiries and found that she was indeed still with us, living out her days at one of Tauranga's myriad rest homes.



I turned up at the home and asked for Eileen Farquer. Staff were initially confused - turns out they know her as Lara Brown, the old alias from Little Waihi.



"We know very little about Lara," a staff member said, adding that she had dementia.

I found her sleeping in a chair in a communal area and gently woke her.

I introduced myself for a second time. She said: "I'm sorry I can't hear you, somebody swiped one of my hearing aids."

I moved to her other side, and started asking her about Australia and Ray Metzger and America and Bonnie and Sandy and Ray Jr.

She just looked confused. She confirmed she was born in Australia, though.

"I was adopted and taken to America and passed around like a piece of baggage nobody wanted."

She said she became a structural engineer.

"I worked in Australia, I'm trying to think of the company's name, my mind is gone... it'll come back in time."

She claimed not to know Ray and didn't think she had any children.

Photos of Eileen Allen as a young woman didn't help jog her memory.

But then I showed her the newspaper article from Hawaii.

"That's me!" she said.

She remembered living in Hawaii for a short time.

"I had a boyfriend and I lost him or something, I don't know what happened to him - I didn't kill him if that's what you're thinking."

She wanted to know why the FBI wanted to speak to her back then.

"It says you stole $15,000 of stock certificates," I said.

"I wish I knew where it was. If I had $15,000 I wouldn't be sitting here - I'd be off in Europe again."

Still the same wicked sense of humour.

I couldn't get much more out of her. I said there were some people in America who thought she was their mother.

"Do they want me to go back to America? I don't think America wants me, I don't think anybody wants me."

I took a fresh photo and sent it to the Metzgers. Ray was shocked - she looks identical to his eldest daughter, Sandy, he says.

There are still huge holes in Eileen's story - did she have any more children? When and why did she come to New Zealand?

MacIsaac traced some of Eileen's half siblings using ancestry.com - they've all passed away.

It seems she has no family in New Zealand - her affairs are administered by a hospital social worker.

Bonnie says she'd quite like to meet Eileen, but doesn't want to cause her stress.

"It's not pretty what our mother did, but I can't condemn her, I'm not perfect, nobody is.

"I've only had one daughter and I had her late in life, I was 40.

"I remember looking at her at eight months old and wondering if I could sit her down and walk away and never look back - I just couldn't.

"I don't know what kind of person can walk away from three babies and never see them again."