From Hero to Jerk: Good Old Ed Serves Party Crowd a Dose of Reality

At Hughes Aircraft, minds have changed about Ed Greer.

A Hughes dropout from the corporate fast track, engineer Greer had become the subject of a fantasy cult since he vanished eight years ago without telling a soul.

The colleagues he left behind imagined that Greer, 41, was on some tropical beach, sunning himself--free of deadline stress, his arm around a good-looking woman. His smiling face adorned gag pictures propped on desks at Hughes.

Each year his former co-workers celebrated the anniversary of his disappearance--hailing him last year as the presidential candidate of the “Hughesocratic Party.”

But this year the celebration, held Friday at a bar in Manhattan Beach, had a bitter twist.

Instead of honoring his disappearance, the occasion was the first anniversary of the day the FBI caught up with Ed Greer in Houston--alive, well, and with a new woman, still working with computers, still driving a red sports car, but with someone else’s name on his tax returns. Greer’s scheme began to unravel when the IRS noted that something was funny when two tax returns with the same name--one from the real Kenneth Hearn and one from Greer posing as Hearn--came in from different parts of the country.

The sentiment at Hughes now is as vitriolically anti-Greer as it was sophomorically pro-Greer before.

“We’re not celebrating the guy. We’re getting together to talk about what a jerk he was,” said Sherry McCulloh, Greer’s former secretary and party organizer.

“When he was discovered, it did not live up to our fantasies. We had been having parties for him all those years. When we found out the reasons he left, it seemed kind of cowardly.

“If the reason he left was that he didn’t like his wife, he could have told his kids. We were hoping he had a good reason.”

The invitation this year urged people to come because “Ed’s a JERK!” Two Ed Greer dolls transfixed with pins hung from a light at the party.

In his most recent public interview, conducted in the spring, Greer said he had indeed spent a lot of time on the beaches--Florida beaches--without steady work, with several romantic encounters, before moving on to Houston.

On April 29, Greer married Victoria Hogg, an Exxon tax attorney, whom he met and wooed while passing himself off as Hearn, a computer engineer working for Input-Output Inc. of Houston, a small oil exploration firm.

The invitation to Friday’s gathering had some doggerel verse containing a reference to Greer’s Florida period:

There was a man with a beard

Who wore three-piece suits and was weird.

He grew tired of ‘Hughes life,’

His dad and his wife,

So off to Fort Lauderdale he steered...

Once we gathered in honor of Ed,

But he turned out to be a bonehead.

Our cult had been shattered,

Cause he left all that mattered.

It’s really too bad that he’s not dead!

The party is only one indicator that Greer’s resurfacing has been difficult.

Greer’s two sons, and his former wife, Kit Clark, who is remarried and now is a marriage counselor living in Northern California, have spoken out publicly, and bitterly, about the whole episode. They were the subject of an article in People magazine and have appeared on Geraldo Rivera’s show and “A Current Affair.”

At the Ed Party, a poster quoted an exchange between Rivera and one of Greer’s sons:

Rivera: “But, what kind of guy is he?”

Jason: “Oh, a jerk.”

Greer’s problems with the IRS were settled soon after he was discovered. Still, Greer remains entangled in a pending court case stemming from his attempts to re-establish a relationship with his sons. Clark has filed suit against Greer to terminate his parental rights.

Clark, who had been critical of Hughes personnel last year for celebrating what, in effect, were her personal difficulties, talked about the changed attitude of the Hughes personnel and the latest Ed Party.

“Maybe they found out that reality wasn’t as funny,” she said.