‘Password’ Champion Faces Federal Mail Fraud Charge

A “Password” champion accused of swindling banks across the country was charged Friday with mail fraud for allegedly bilking an insurance company out of $100,000 with a phony death report on his wife.

Kerry Ketchem, 36, the biggest one-day winner in the history of the television game show “Super Password,” was ordered by a federal magistrate to be held without bail pending a hearing on Jan. 28. The game show whiz was arrested Thursday when he arrived at the production company’s Sunset Boulevard headquarters to pick up the $58,000 he had won while appearing on the program under the alias Patrick Quinn.

U.S. Secret Service agents, alerted by an Alaska banker who saw the show, caught him hiding in a stall in a men’s room after he spotted them waiting in the office with his check.

The mail fraud charge filed Friday by the U.S. attorney was one of a string of pending federal and state charges stemming from fraud investigations in Alaska, Indiana and elsewhere.

In 1985, Ketchem allegedly sent the Amex Life Assurance Co. of San Rafael what appeared to be a U.S. Air Force death report on his wife, Kelly Ann Ketchem, according to a sworn statement filed Friday in federal court in San Francisco by FBI Agent Thomas Hopkins.

The report said she had been killed in a traffic accident at a Royal Air Force base in England, where she was then stationed, and the insurance company mailed Ketchem a $100,000 check on Dec. 9, 1985, Hopkins said.

In fact, the agent said, investigators found that Kelly Ann Ketchem is alive and on active duty at Lackland Air Force Base in Texas, where she was transferred from England. In an interview with the FBI, she said she had “no knowledge of the fact that her husband had made a claim for her death and had been paid the $100,000 death benefit,” Hopkins said.

The Ketchems were not living together, said the FBI’s Chuck Latting, who did not know their exact marital status. Ketchem’s most recent address is in San Bernardino.

“This guy has a personality that won’t quit. He could talk you out of your eyeteeth,” said Detective Mike Mischler of the Indiana State Police.

Ketchem, a native of Odon, Ind., was charged there in August, 1987, with forgery and defrauding a financial institution, said Davies County Prosecutor Gregory A. Smith. Ketchem allegedly defrauded the United Southwest Bank of Washington of $14,000 by depositing worthless checks and withdrawing cash, Smith said.

The Secret Service, which got involved in the case because it investigates credit-card fraud, is looking into allegations that he defrauded an Anchorage, Alaska, bank of $25,000 in a credit-card scam, Williams said.

The “Password” shows were taped Dec. 7 and 8 and broadcast this week, said Williams, who refused to identify the banker who tipped off authorities.

NBC has yet to decide whether to award Ketchem his prize money, network spokeswoman Merry Aronson said Friday. He won more money that anyone else on a single episode of the show, though others have won more in multiple episodes, she said.