Impostor Keeps Root of Deception to Herself

Wilma Alford’s professional house of cards came tumbling down one week after Thanksgiving when she was asked to report to the principal’s office at Sun Valley’s Glenwood Elementary School.

Alford would leave the principal’s office by the backdoor, under arrest by Ventura County sheriff’s deputies for crimes resulting from 12 years of impersonating someone else.

But even that last afternoon, as she was accused of more than a decade of deception, the elegant 37-year-old Oxnard woman insisted that she was Ann Wood Wesley Ph.D., a speech pathologist who needed a five-page resume to summarize her expertise and achievements.

Sentenced to 5 Years, 4 Months

In fact, Alford would eventually confess that she had never earned a college degree and that her imposing professional credentials were fraudulently obtained using another woman’s academic transcripts.

Alford was sentenced Friday in Ventura Superior Court to five years and four months in state prison for two counts of forgery and grand theft of wages paid her between 1977 and 1983 by the Rio School District in Oxnard.

In spite of a guilty plea, Alford never told the court exactly why she abandoned her own identity and assumed that of Dr. Ann Stace Wood, 44, a speech pathologist with a medically oriented practice in Cincinnati.

No clear answer appears in an 18-page handwritten statement Alford submitted to the court, a rambling document full of inaccuracies. She also declined through her attorney to be interviewed. But in earlier interviews, court documents and testimony, an intriguing, though incomplete, portrait of the impostor emerges.

Taking on Wood’s identity afforded Alford the salary and status of a professional. But she herself was a gifted woman who, in her teens, transcended the impoverished sharecropper’s existence of her childhood through talent and ambition.

Something happened to Wilma Alford around the time she dropped out of college in 1970, something she has not made public. At that point, she turned her back on everything she had achieved against considerable odds and built her future on a fraud.

Positive Comments

Many of the people Alford deceived still have good things to say about her. One is Jim Cobb, an administrator at Florida Junior College who interviewed Alford, posing as Wood, last summer in Jacksonville. Cobb wanted to hire her on the spot to teach speech.

“She’d dazzle your booties off you; she’s that good in an interview,” Cobb said. “She’s absolutely the best interview I’ve ever had.”

Alford was, Cobb recalled, “magnificently dressed. Her makeup was gorgeous, she was poised, she was charming.”

In an exotic accent that hinted to Cobb of the Caribbean island of Aruba, she nimbly answered questions, including those on her professed knowledge of speech. “You raise a topic that’s in the area, and she runs with it, intelligibly and intelligently,” he said.

Alford may have been impressive, but she wasn’t what she claimed to be, as Cobb discovered when he tried to verify the claims on her application.

In fact, it was Cobb’s secretary who first sensed something amiss in Alford’s documents. “How old would you guess her to be?” Cobb’s secretary had asked, surprised that such a young-looking woman could be 43 years old, the age of the real Dr. Wood.

The application included a glowing letter of recommendation Alford had written for herself over the forged name of an official of the American Speech-Language-Hearing Assn., a letter lauding her “academic brilliance” as well as her “patience, love, devotion, grace and self-discipline.”

Also included were forged recommendations written on the letterhead of the Rio School District, which Alford left voluntarily in 1983 before moving to Florida.

When Cobb contacted the Oxnard school district to verify the recommendations, the forgeries were discovered. The district notified the Ventura County district attorney. A four-month investigation by Ventura County sheriff’s detectives established Alford’s real identity and led to her arrest and conviction.

But just before her deception was exposed, Alford was able briefly to fool the Los Angeles Unified School District, which hired her for Glenwood Elementary School in the fall of 1984. Recalling the impostor, Principal Elma O. LaPointe said: “She had to be a very bright person because she was doing a good job.”

Check of Credentials

By the time she was arrested, the school district had independently discovered that Alford’s credentials were fake and had planned to dismiss her even before she was arrrested.

She had been at the school only a month, teaching a class of seven children with aphasia, a language disorder that interferes with their ability to learn.

LaPointe didn’t hire Alford, but the principal was happy to have her.

On her second day on the job, Alford insisted on holding the conferences with parents her predecessor had scheduled, explaining that she wanted to gather as much useful information as possible on each of her students.

The principal dropped in several times to observe Alford’s class. Each time the new teacher was leading her students through their individualized regimens of study.

“I was pleased with her performance with the children,” LaPointe said.

One of the other teachers once asked Alford about her distinctive speech pattern, so refined and somehow Caribbean. “She said her mother spoke French, her father spoke Spanish, and the children had had to learn English, something like that,” LaPointe said. That, too, was a lie.

But it was Alford’s music that most impressed the Sun Valley staff. Alford was commuting from Oxnard, where she had a husband, maintainence engineer Theodore Wesley, whom her new school friends didn’t know about. She had only mentioned a wealthy physician husband in Florida.

She was always one of the first teachers on campus. “She would come in very early in the morning, and she would sit in the auditorium and play the piano,” LaPointe said. Each morning, the working-class neighborhood of industrial buildings, modest houses and auto carcasses surrounding the school would be filled with the exquisite sounds of Bach and other masters.

Born in Salley, S.C.

Wilma Alzenia Alford was born in Salley, S.C., on Jan. 29, 1947. In the statement she submitted to Judge Bruce A. Thompson before her sentencing, she described the circumstances of her birth.

She wrote: “My father, a metropolitan French, my mother, Guadalupian French (black). When I was born, mother was traveling with dad in military. I was born in an outhouse (toilet).”

She also said that her middle name was supposed to be Annzenia, not Alzenia, as recorded on her birth certificate, perhaps to explain her subsequent use of the name Ann.

According to Robert Alford, who was her husband from 1965 to 1971, only the date and place of her birth are correct. Her parents, who still live in Salley, were just average, struggling people, rural South Carolinians trying to raise six children in a town with little to offer but chitlins, cotton fields and a paved road out.

Wilma Alford’s ticket out was her musical ability, according to Robert Alford, 44, who was her band teacher at A.L. Corbet High School in Wagner, S.C. She was a beautiful sophomore when he first saw her. “She caught everybody’s eye,” he said.

“Wilma was destined to be another Leontyne Price. She could have easily made it. She had the most beautiful operatic voice you could ever imagine, and she was equally talented on the piano.”

‘Loved Being on the Stage’

Wilma Alford also had starring roles in all the class plays, he recalled. “She loved being on the stage for acting.”

He realized that the Carolina schools could not adequately serve her talent, he said, and helped arrange for her to study music in New York City.

They were married in 1965 after she graduated from New York’s selective Julia Richman High School. She moved with him to Cincinnati to study music at the University of Cincinnati, where he was a student.

“Wilma, although she was young, knew where she was going. She was going to pursue a career in music and she wanted to have a family,” her former husband recalled.

Interviewed by phone in Hampton, Va., where he lives with their 15-year-old daughter, Inglish, Robert Alford spoke with apparent affection of his ex-wife, of her beauty, her warmth, her intelligence, her verbal gifts.

Always “a very Christian girl,” according to Robert Alford, Wilma Alford and he converted to Roman Catholicism before they were married “because we wanted to assume a mutual religion.” Their love of music and theater was another bond.

In 1965, Wilma Alford entered the University of Cincinnati. After a year, she transferred from the music program to the College of Arts and Sciences. During her first semester, she did well in voice and piano but failed Speech 101.

She began to take more and more courses in speech, accumulating the credits required for an undergraduate major.

In 1967, Ann Stace, a tall blond who had a master’s degree in speech and theater from Miami University of Ohio, began racking up A’s as a graduate student in the Cincinnati speech and hearing program. Stace married in 1971 and began using the name Ann Stace Wood.

Speech faculty at the University of Cincinnati remember Wood as an excellent student and Alford only dimly. “Unfortunately, the one member of the faculty who did know her rather well has passed away,” said Ken Donnelly, a professor of audiology whose name appears, misspelled, as a reference on the doctored resume Alford had with her when she was arrested.

Donnelly said he believed the late Vernon Stroud of his department may have encouraged young Alford to enter the speech program, although Donnelly does not personally recall her.

“He was a black faculty member who tried to recruit minority students for the profession, and he might have had something to do with her coming. It was right at the time when he was very active.”

Laura Kretschmer, also a professor of audiology at the university, vaguely remembers Alford as a star minority student. “I remember Dr. Stroud commenting a couple of times that she was very bright and a go-getter,” Kretschmer said.

At Alford’s preliminary hearing, the real Dr. Wood testified that she had never seen Alford. University records, however, show that the women were simultaneously enrolled in two campus speech courses before Alford dropped out in 1970.

Found Name in Textbooks

During a four-hour interview in Ventura County Jail, Alford told probation officer Ellen Gilmore that she had come across Ann Stace’s name in 1968 when she bought textbooks that Stace had used, books that also contained speech tests Stace had taken and papers she had written.

Alford said she asked a friend in the speech therapy program about Stace. That was the extent of her interest, she said, until in 1972.

In the spring of 1972, Alford, who had gone home to Salley and was working as a secretary, requested and received copies of Ann Stace’s transcript from the university, according to court documents. Alford used them to obtain teaching credentials from the states of Arizona and Georgia. She signed the applications “Ann Carolyn Stace” and asked that the credentials be sent to a post office box in Salley.

By the time she was arrested at Glenwood, Alford had obtained similar credentials in Florida, the District of Columbia and California, all using Wood’s transcripts.

Wood turned out to be a particularly good choice for an impostor. She had a master’s degree when Alford first started using her name, but by 1978 she had a doctorate as well, enhancing her impostor’s reputation and earning capacity.

If she hadn’t been found out, Alford would have commanded an annual salary of $24,186 at Glenwood on the basis of her doctorate. Alford may have learned about Wood’s Ph.D. as a result of one of the 10 requests she made for Wood’s University of Cincinnati transcripts.

Wood was also a target for impersonation because she has spent her entire professional life in private practice in Cincinnati. In Wood, Alford hit upon a high achiever with few personal contacts in the profession, a useful combination of good grades and low national visibility. Alford apparently never encountered an acquaintance of Wood as she moved around the country.

Psychiatric Treatment

In her statement to the court, Alford does not explain why she became Ann Wood. But she does speculate on why she may have wanted to. She said her husband, Robert Alford, had sexual relationships with men and forced her to into an “arena of homosexual and lesbian activities.” She indicated that the “depravity” of her life with Robert Alford led to her requiring psychiatric treatment in 1968.

“Alford’s sexual activities and publicity could have been one of the subconscious reasons I wanted a new identity,” she wrote to the court.

Wilma Alford told the court that, although she was desperate, she and her child were financially dependent on Robert Alford, and she wasn’t able to break away until their divorce in 1971.

By 1972, Wilma Alford had a new name and had moved to Phoenix, where she began using her limited speech training with her bogus credentials.

When Alford was hired as a speech therapist by the Rio School District in Oxnard, the school’s only reservation was that she overqualified, not a surprising concern given that her resume included such impressive, though false, claims, such as a four-year study of congenital hearing loss in three tribal communities in Africa.

After moving to Florida, she began applying for jobs, including the position Jim Cobb interviewed her for that led to her discovery.

She also married Dr. Wallingford Bowlin, a Jacksonville physician, without divorcing Theodore Wesley, who declined to be interviewed.

Bowlin wrote an indignant letter to the court prior to Alford’s sentencing describing himself as one of her victims. He said she forged his signature to a Diner’s Club card application and used the card for an expensive stay in France. On Oct. 3, 1984, Bowlin wrote, she removed the grand piano and other items from their home in Jacksonville while he was at work and subsequently disappeared.

Three weeks later, Alford reported for work at Glenwood Elementary School.

Alford told the court that the quality of work and her devotion to children “was never dependent on the number of degrees put on my wall.”

“I only wish you and the courts to give me another chance to obtain the degrees myself,” she wrote Judge Thompson.

And she asked: “Will I be able to go to school at the prison?”