Telling Tales (22 page)

It was in the early 1980s that her neighbourhood, Bakersfield, was first rocked by stories of a satanic sex cult which had been using young girls as slaves. A popular memoir of one victim was published and Laurel was apparently glued to the book. It was not long before she managed to attach herself to the case by befriending the families of people involved, setting up a support group and ultimately pretending that she too had been a victim of a sex cult.

She began to appear on radio and television and eventually put her bogus memories into a book-length manuscript which, with satanic abuse being such a hot topic at the time, Eileen Mason, the editorial director of Harvest House, jumped at the chance to publish.
Satan’s Underground
, published under her new, made-up name of Stratford, tells how she was used as the plaything of devil-worshipers, pimps and pornographers for her entire childhood, with the full knowledge of her family. She was repeatedly raped, beaten and forced to witness rituals of human sacrifice. As soon as she was old enough, she was made to produce two babies which were sacrificed in front of her, and another one which she had to give up for adoption. Eventually she graduated to become the personal sex slave of the group’s charismatic leader, Victor, who used her to satisfy his many extreme perversions. Only after the death of her father had she been able to break away from the cult and work through her feelings with therapists. She still bore the physical and mental scars of her years in slavery, she said, particularly from cuts to her arms and wrists.

The poor woman’s book was a sensation. All America was up in arms about the appalling new scandal of satanic sexual abuse (a phenomenon that was making headlines across Europe as well) and Laurel became a spokesperson for recovering victims. The popular television talk-shows
Geraldo
and
Oprah
had this fluffy-haired, bespectacled, crucifix-wearing woman on to talk about her trauma, and the royalties and accolades came flooding in. But a year after publication, spurred on by other abuse victims who claimed Laurel’s story didn’t ring true, the magazine
Cornerstone
outed her as a fake after it uncovered her real identity as Laurel Rose Willson. They contacted her publishers, who admitted they had seen no evidence to support her claims, and asked friends and family from her school days whether she had indeed been pregnant three times, drugged and covered in injuries. But the most people recalled of her troubles was her inveterate lying.

The book – as well as her subsequent self-help titles on how she had managed to heal herself – was recalled by the publishers, who realized they were dealing with an unstable fantasist rather than a greedy extortionist, and Laurel was shamed into changing her name and starting a new life away from the Californian evangelical scene.

What did she do next? She reinvented herself as a Jew. And not just any Jew, but an important victim of the infamous Nazi doctor Mengele, whose cruel experiments had rendered her infertile. Her new identity was Laura Grabowski, a Polish-Jewish war orphan who had been sent to an orphanage in Krakow after doing time in Auschwitz and then was adopted by a Christian couple in America in the mid-1950s. Just as she had once pretended to friends that she was blind, she now said her eyes had been irrevocably damaged by having had chemicals injected into them by Mengele. And just as she had pretended that it had taken years for her to confess to her involvement in the satanic cult, she now told people at survivors’ groups that she had never told anyone about her time in Auschwitz until now, half a century after the event. Although she stopped short of publishing a book about her supposed Holocaust trauma, she did write and distribute a poem, ‘We Are One’, in honour of her fellow survivors, and she struck up correspondences – in a spidery, copperplate scrawl such as you might expect from an old Eastern European lady – with elderly Jews who had lived through the Second World War. And most famously, she made contact with Binjamin Wilkomirski, the fellow Polish child of the camps who also turned out to have added a Holocaust element to his own difficult childhood for the media.

Another exposé in
Cornerstone
followed, and by this time Laurel, now becoming frail and losing her grip on reality once and for all, had not the energy to re-invent herself. Some of her friends both from the cult survivors’ groups and the Jewish groups stood by her until her death in 2002, but by and large she had alienated everyone who might have helped her find happiness.

There are no winners in the sorry tale of Laurel Rose Willson, but there are many casualties, not least the fragile voices of those genuine witnesses to the abuses she described, who feel diminished every time a hoaxer is found in their midst. No one knows the precise nature of Willson’s mental illness, but whatever it was, it reacted spectacularly with a media that was, in the early 1980s, just gearing up for the great era of confessional misery literature which would spawn more hoax memoirists than ever before. She was simply the wrong person in a strange place at the right time.

I
N
1993
A
fourteen-year-old boy dying of AIDS in New Jersey wrote a memoir that brought him considerable celebrity and also brought a number of celebrities to him, seeking to help him live out his final days in comfort. His book was
A Rock and a Hard Place
, his name was Anthony ‘Tony’ Godby Johnson and he was living with his saintly adopted mother, Vicki Johnson, who had rescued him from a life of appalling sexual abuse at the hands of his biological parents. He had been eleven when he discovered he was infected with the virus and by the time his book was published he was seriously ill; but with the support of Johnson, her husband and a coterie of admiring, kindly adults, including an AIDS counsellor from Arkansas called Jack Godby whose name Tony had taken, he was making the most of what time he had left. Vicki had always encouraged him to write his feelings down, and when the Make A Wish Foundation bought him a computer, he was able to complete the manuscript of his memoir, writing against the clock through every numbered day.

The vogue for misery memoirs was in full swing, but his was not so much a grisly account of being locked in a cellar by his father and raped by paedophiles (although that is what he said happened), but a heart-warming redemption story about how wonderful his new mother was, and how his love of literature had helped him through the dark times. One of the writers he particularly admired was Armistead Maupin, whose
Tales of the City
had recently been aired on American radio, and when Vicki encouraged him to make contact with Maupin the pair began a telephone relationship which would bring great comfort and inspiration to them both.

Anyone who has read Maupin’s
The Night Listener
, which he based on his experiences with Tony, or seen the film version starring Robin Williams, will know how things turned out. Because although Vicki Johnson (real name Joanne Vicki Fraginals) swears to this day that she did have a poorly, adopted son who wrote a book, every investigator who has looked into the case is certain she made the whole thing up.

Tony would only communicate by letter, fax, email or telephone. And when he called up his ‘friends’ for one of his long discursive chats, he had a voice that was not only very feminine-sounding, but noticeably similar to Vicki’s. Maupin’s business partner Terry Anderson was convinced from early on that Vicki and Tony were one and the same, but Maupin, who had spent hours talking to the remarkably wise and witty Tony, was confused: ‘My brain was divided down the middle. There were days when I would talk to Tony and think, “this is clearly a boy, why would I ever doubt this?” and other days when I would think, it’s her.’

The agent Ron Bernstein, who represented Tony and was in the process of selling the rights to his story to HBO, also happened to be working with Maupin in the mid-1990s, and when the two men got talking about their young associate, alarm bells began to ring for them both. Neither Bernstein nor anyone he knew had ever laid eyes on the child because, Vicki said, he was too sensitive to germs to see visitors or even go outside. But during their cell-phone calls, exterior street noises were clearly audible. Maupin knew that other supporters of Tony, including a rabbi, had flown in to New Jersey to call on the ailing young writer but had been turned away at the door by Vicki, who refused to admit anyone to her apartment – an apartment into which no neighbour had ever seen a child enter, and from which no youthful sounds had ever been heard. Nor had a husband ever been seen or heard of by the many people who lived near her town-centre block or patronized the pharmacy downstairs.

Due to Tony’s inability to show his face in public or face a film crew, the HBO production was scrapped and his key role in an Oprah documentary about child abuse had to be played by an actor. As the 1990s wore on Tony, now communicating via a blog, announced a series of increasingly terrible physical ailments that were besetting him: paralysis, a stroke, the amputation of a leg and a testicle and TB were just some of the hardships he suffered; but despite having had full-blown AIDS for nearly a decade, he was still very much alive. Maupin, who had written a blurb for his book, was starting to be seriously doubtful that a boy with no immune system could weather so many new illnesses: ‘It did get more and more melodramatic,’ he admitted later. ‘And as it did, my doubts grew.’

By 2000, with not one of his famous correspondents (he had added Jermaine Jackson and Tom Robbins to the list) ever having seen him or heard Vicki in the background when talking to him on the phone, the ABC news programme
20/20
decided to investigate. At the same time,
New Yorker
journalist Tad Friend was also researching the case of the ‘invisible boy’, and together they made a very convincing case for Tony being a figment of Vicki’s imagination.

Vicki, it transpired, was actually a lonely, overweight former schoolteacher living in a small flat above a shop in Union City, New Jersey. Her former students and colleagues from Sacred Heart Grade School in North Bergen remember her as being extremely involved with every aspect of her charges’ education, often volunteering to help with extra-curricular activities, but being somewhat self-pitying when it came to her personal life. There was no sign of a husband until some time after
A Rock and a Hard Place
was published, when she got together with a man called Marc Zackheim, a child psychologist whose work with troubled youngsters nearly came to an abrupt end when he was put on trial for abusing children at a care home in Indiana in 2004. By the time he was acquitted, Tony’s website had been long dormant and nobody apart from the Arkansas AIDS counsellor who shared his name seemed to be getting any more phone calls in that strangely lady-like voice.

In 2007, a follow-up investigation by the
20/20
team who first exposed Vicki’s double life added a new piece of evidence to their dossier: one of the rare photographs of Tony which she had allowed journalists to see, which shows a cute, dark-haired boy with a cheeky smile and a big red baseball cap, turned out to be an old snapshot taken by Fraginals of one of her former students, Steve Tarabokija. The mother of one of Tarabokija’s classmates had seen the image on television and alerted him to the fact and he, now in his mid-twenties and in good health, was astonished to learn that his face was being used to illustrate a story about a young AIDS victim. He appeared on the ABC show to set the record straight and said he hoped for an apology. Another former acquaintance from Sacred Heart went on the show with him and agreed that, although Vicki was a kind woman, she was an inveterate attention-seeker.

Faced by such seemingly incontrovertible evidence, it might be supposed that Vicki would finally admit what she had done and say sorry to the people she deceived; but all the Zackheim household has put out is a legal document containing a sworn statement that Tony did exist. The reason, apparently, for keeping him so secret was not only his ill health but the fact that evil paedophiles were trying to track him down and stop him from identifying them.

To this day, Vicki has never admitted her deception. But looking back over the life of her young alter ego, she must realize that her biggest mistake was not learning enough about HIV/AIDS to know that while you can live for many years with HIV there is no way – least of all back in the early 1990s when drug therapies were so much less sophisticated than they are now – that a boy could have had full-blown AIDS for as long as Tony did. Her next mistake was actually imitating him on the phone: when ABC retained the services of the same voice recognition expert who had identified Osama bin Laden on a scratchy voice recording, he said it was obvious that the two Johnsons were one and the same. But although she might have executed her hoax more carefully had she been less desperate, damaged or deluded, she could not have hoped for a better response – or literary afterlife – than she got from Armistead Maupin, the big-hearted American writer who was happy to help a child in need and never really let go of him even after he realized he didn’t exist. As he said after Vicki’s hoax was debunked: ‘I think maybe Tony was her imaginary friend. He was certainly mine.’

T
HE NEW YORKER
Laura Albert is not the first literary hoaxer to employ a stand-in to appear in public as their fictional author, but she is by far the most talked-about. Few readers of books pages of fashionable magazines around the turn of the millennium can have failed to notice the enigmatic figure of J.T. LeRoy, the cross-dressing teenage prostitute and junkie who had dragged himself out of the trailer park to pen a series of shocking autobiographical writings. He first came to public attention in 1997 when one of his stories, ‘Baby Doll’ – about a dress-wearing boy locked in competition with his mother’s lover – appeared in a collection of new writing. His author profile, which featured hard drugs, cheap sex and gender-bending against a backdrop of truck stops and anonymous American downtowns, made him an instant hit with publishers and editors seeking the latest, hippest thing. Commissions to write journalism and requests for interviews began to flow in, and as soon as his first full-length book,
Sarah
, came out in 1999 LeRoy’s trajectory seemed unstoppable.