Fatal Fraud - Marie Force Page 0,23

driveway, but no one answered the door. That’s when I first started calling my friend with the FBI. It took my friend four weeks to get others at the FBI to take it seriously and another four weeks after that before they started to actively investigate.

“Her scheme began to unravel when the FBI brought in the IRS. With the two agencies on the case, we quickly learned the whole thing was probably a scam. She never intended to buy or renovate that building, and apparently, she’s been doing this shit for years and getting away with it by robbing Peter to pay Paul. At least I get now how she swings the house, the cars, the vacations.”

“What I don’t understand is how it took years for her investors to get suspicious.”

“She was giving others small dividends on the investments, which pacified them. Those dividends came from new investors like us.”

“But she didn’t do that for you?”

He shook his head. “We never saw a dime or a report on our investment or anything after we gave her the money. In fact, with hindsight, Clarissa realized she barely heard from Ginny at all after we gave her the check. Everyone’s busy, so it wasn’t unusual for a few months to go by between get-togethers, but it was unusual for Clarissa to not hear from Ginny at all. Later, when we put the pieces together, we realized that Ginny’s mother, to whom she was always exceptionally close, fell ill shortly after we invested, which probably meant she had less time to bring in new people to provide enough dividends to keep us from raising the red flag.”

“Where were you on Sunday afternoon?”

He gave her a blank look, as if he couldn’t believe she was asking him that.

“I told you I didn’t kill her.”

“I heard you, but you see, it’s like this. People tell us all the time they didn’t kill someone, and then we later find out they actually did. That’s why we ask people to tell us where they were at the time of the murder and make them prove it. Saves us a lot of time in the end. So where were you on Sunday afternoon?”

Through gritted teeth, he said, “With my son in College Park. He’s a freshman at Maryland. My wife and I took him to lunch. He can confirm it, and I can provide a receipt from the restaurant.”

“If you could give us his phone number and a copy of that receipt, that’s all we need.”

He glared at her before reaching for his phone, getting the number from his contacts and reciting it. From his wallet, he produced a receipt that Freddie took a picture of with his phone.

“Don’t tell your son to expect a call from us,” Sam said. “We check those things too.”

“I didn’t kill her, but good luck finding anyone on her list of investors who didn’t want her dead once they found out she’d been scamming us. I mean, who does that to people they’ve known all their lives? She and my wife had been friends for years.”

“It had to be extremely shocking.”

“You have no idea. Sometimes, I still can’t believe it, and I’ve known the truth of what really happened for months now. I still can’t wrap my head around the fact that she actually stole from us.”

“Besides yourself, who else was instrumental in helping the FBI and IRS to make a case against her?”

“There were two of us who did the heavy lifting. The other was Ginny’s cousin, Alison Enders, who lives in Germantown.”

“Do you have an address and phone number for Alison?”

“Yeah.” Again using his phone, he wrote down the requested information.

“What was your sense of Ken’s involvement in the scheme?”

“He was broadsided the same way the rest of us were, or so he said. Some people think he knew, others believe he didn’t. It just depends on who you talk to.”

“How would she have explained to him where the money was coming from if he didn’t know?” Freddie asked.

“That was my question too. But from what he told investigators, he assumed it was proceeds from her various investments.”

“And he was believed?”

“Ken passed a polygraph.” He handed over the paper with the name, address and phone number of Ginny’s cousin Alison.

“Did you ever have contact with someone involved in the scheme who talked about wanting to kill Ginny?”

“Everyone wanted to kill her. People said if she was dead, we might benefit from her life insurance, if she had it. You’ll be

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