Investigator Catches Drunk Driver : Mystery Woman Led Him a Merry Chase

She was a mystery woman who walked with a limp and disguised her identity behind a wig and a string of aliases, including one for her dog.

Although she once drove a bright white Cadillac with vanity license plates that read “4 JACKY,” when Orange County Marshal’s Investigator Richard Shunkey finally found her, the arrest warrant he carried was made out in the name of Gladys Marie McCarthy.

That is the name on her criminal file, the name under which she has spent more than a year in Orange County Jail and the name by which her fellow inmates will know her when she finally reaches state prison later this week.

For Gladys Marie McCarthy, 56--also known by the names Jacqueline Easton, Betty Jane Cope and at least 17 other aliases--was sentenced Tuesday to three years in prison for felony drunk driving in a 1984 hit-and-run accident that left one teen-age girl with head injuries and another with a fractured neck.

The last decade of McCarthy’s life has been a tangle of subterfuge, as she mixed and matched the factors by which the world identifies its inhabitants in an effort to evade punishment in a string of half a dozen drunk-driving charges dating back to the mid-1970s.

In addition to 20 or more names, McCarthy used eight dates of birth, two Social Security numbers and six California driver’s licenses, Shunkey said. She had post office boxes and property scattered throughout Orange County. Although she was 55 when finally arrested, one of the driver’s licenses she used listed a birth date of 1950, which would have made her 20 years younger.

For more than a decade, McCarthy managed to avoid serious legal trouble by employing one of many ruses. Sometimes she would go to court, plead guilty to one of her misdemeanor drunk-driving charges and then fade away into a different identity and never show up again, Shunkey said.

While customers must give an address when renting post office boxes--which would be an easy way to track a criminal--McCarthy would give one post office box as her home address when renting another.

“She’s very clever,” Shunkey said in a telephone interview. “She would lead investigators around in circles.”

But it could not last forever. Though it took him more than a year, Shunkey finally tracked her down.

“Everybody has one that sets under your craw, and you won’t let go,” Shunkey said. “This one gave me a wild hair.”

On May 25, 1984, about 10:45 p.m., McCarthy was driving east on Orangewood Avenue at West Street in Garden Grove, according to Garden Grove police and the Orange County district attorney’s office, when she came up behind a Volkswagen Beetle and hit the right rear end.

The Volkswagen flipped over, and two of the three passengers--both 16-year-old girls--were injured, said Deputy Dist. Atty. Robert Gannon.

“She had a 0.28 blood alcohol level,” Gannon said, nearly three times the legal limit of 0.10%.

Apparently, Shunkey said, McCarthy posted bail and failed to appear at a later court date, and a felony warrant for her arrest was issued on June 20, 1984. Eight days later, Shunkey was assigned to deliver the warrant but could not find McCarthy anywhere.

He staked out her post office boxes, collected names and addresses from the mail that stacked up and visited any piece of property in any of her names that he could find.

But she had vanished, and about a month later he gave up the search.

Soon after that, however, he was sent to serve an arrest warrant naming a different person. The charge was drunk driving, and the address was a post office box that McCarthy had used before.

“The misdemeanor warrant told me the woman wasn’t out of state and was somewhere in south Orange County,” he said. “So I went back and went over again old information that I had previously worked up, information from jail records, booking slips, letters. I reworked it all methodically, in hopes something might come up.”

At one point, Shunkey said, he went to the building where one of McCarthy’s post office boxes was located. An employee said the woman usually visited near the beginning of the month. When told one morning that she hadn’t arrived, Shunkey went to the shop next door for a doughnut and coffee. Moments later, the employee with whom he had spoken came running into the doughnut shop and asked if Shunkey had seen the woman, who had just left.

“I had missed her,” he said. “I was enraged.”

He went back to the pieces of property she owned and “snooped around, snooped around, snooped around.” His luck finally changed at a Mission Viejo condominium.

When he had visited the place more than a year earlier, it was rented to several Marines who knew nothing of McCarthy. But in the fall of 1985, he found a neighbor who said a woman fitting McCarthy’s description lived in the building.

“I actually knocked on McCarthy’s door, but she never answered,” Shunkey said. “The neighbors said she was very secretive and won’t talk and won’t even answer the door.”

Then, one morning in October, 1985, McCarthy’s neighbor called Shunkey and said that the woman was home. Shunkey drove to the neighborhood and saw a woman leaving the building to walk her dog.

Shunkey and his partner approached McCarthy, who was wearing a short gray wig. The pictures Shunkey had of her showed her with bleached blond hair with black roots and blue eyes. He also knew she was about 5 feet, 4 inches tall and weighed 140 pounds.

When he explained that she was under arrest and placed a set of handcuffs on her wrists, McCarthy protested, “I’m not her. You’re making a mistake,” Shunkey recounted.

“She was so convincing,” he said. “She was just so much like someone’s little aunt or mother that on the way to the jail, I wondered if we had the right person.”

He said she even insisted that her dog had a different name from McCarthy’s.

“I was the one person probably who knew more about that lady than anyone else,” Shunkey said, “and I started getting second thoughts. But when I saw the female deputy take off her wig and saw the blond hair tumbling down, there was no doubt about it.”

McCarthy has been in Orange County Jail since, and Tuesday she pleaded no contest to four felony counts and four misdemeanor counts. All but one involved the drunk-driving incident on May 25, 1984, Gannon said. Orange County Superior Court Judge Phillip E. Cox sentenced McCarthy to three years in state prison.

Neither McCarthy nor her attorney, Joseph R. Jaurequi, could be reached for comment.

“She’s got so many names, I bet she doesn’t even know who she was,” Shunkey said. “This whole thing was like putting a puzzle together.”