The Lost Art of Faking Sextuplets
“There is no kind of dishonesty into which otherwise good people more easily and frequently fall than that of defrauding the government.”
— Benjamin Franklin
I WAS CHATTING WITH A PAL THE OTHER DAY ABOUT the origins of really stupid ideas. Desperation is probably a favored spawning ground.
A timeline or so away, in Grain Valley, Missouri, a couple staged an elaborate hoax to raise money.
Nope. It wasn’t a Ponzi scheme or plot to print counterfeit food stamps. According to The Associated Press, Sarah and Kris Everson pretended they gave birth to sextuplets.
For those of you who don’t speak Latin, that’s like, six babies.
I’m a guy who can think outside the box. But not even in my wildest imaginings has the idea suddenly presented itself: “Hey. Let’s pretend we had a half-dozen bald little buddies.”
According to the AP reports, the Eversons checked out library books on multiple births and left them hanging around on the coffee table for visitors to see. They piled a small mountain of baby clothes around the house including a stack of premature diapers and spread the story of how they had given birth to four boys and two girls the size of possum babies and that the entire brood was still in intensive care in a secret hospital and unable to come home. The couple said a court order prevented them from revealing where the babies were.
Why?
Adding spice, Sarah would break down in tears and confess how members of her husband’s family had promised to kill both parents and infants.
I know.
Very Southern.
It must have been a tale convincingly told.
“I’m so afraid they’re not going to make it,” Sarah sobbed to reporters. “Nobody understands how hard this is. I know that they’re here. I know what I had to go through to get them here.”
Neighbors started a Web site to get the couple a van, washer and dryer, baby stuff, and, everyone’s favorite gift — cash. One soft-hearted real estate agent started working his contacts, trying to give to the couple a house.
Aided by a front-page story in the local paper, gifts started pouring in.
One problem.
No babies.
The Eversons became victims of their own success. The story captivated not just the town of Grain Valley, but the greater Missouri area as well. A large regional daily picked up the story. Reporters started to swarm.
But in making routine calls to hospitals, no one seemed to have a spare set of sextuplets, premature or otherwise, hanging around.
The ruse came crashing down upon the couple’s little pumpkin heads. They were arrested on a variety of fraud charges, which is just as well.
I’m guessing in a small Southern town, after 10 or 11 years rolled by, the neighbors might get suspicious why the six kids never came out of the house to play.
You’d think with that tonnage of energy and spirit of enterprise, the Eversons could have come up with a better way to make a buck.
You know.
Like maybe getting that dirtiest of words: a — well.
A j-o-b...?
