Trail of Names Leads to Woman Suspected in Welfare Fraud : Crime: Investigators seeking the person they call the biggest abuser of the system in a decade didn’t find a con artist indulging an upscale lifestyle. Far from it.

For a time, the Los Angeles County investigators tracking one of the largest and longest welfare frauds in recent years didn’t know exactly who it was they were after.

Their quarry was just a face--the same face--found on a handful of driver’s licenses bearing different names--Corrie Mae Moorehead, Corrie Grayson, Paula Garry among them. She had allegedly used the aliases to gain welfare payments and food stamps totaling up to $5,000 a month during the last few months of her seven-year scam.

She was a worthy opponent, the investigators said. She always gave phony addresses, never applied for aid at the same welfare office twice and kept a “drop pad” in Burbank--an apartment unlived in but used as an address to which the government checks were mailed.

But any expectations investigators had of finding a sophisticated con artist using the money she took to support an upscale lifestyle evaporated when they tracked her from the San Fernando Valley to a low-income neighborhood in North Las Vegas.

The suspect--later identified as 28-year-old Teresa Towns--was living there with six of her eight children. A broken-down car was parked out front and there was little food in the kitchen. Investigators who confronted her said Towns freely admitted taking the payments. But only, she said, to help support her family.

“This is not a welfare queen case in the traditional sense,” said Gary Edgington, one of the district attorney’s office fraud investigators who tracked Towns. “There was no indication of affluence. She had no mansion or a lot of cars.”

Stephen Ramirez, another district attorney’s investigator, said Towns told him she chose welfare fraud to support her family because it was safer than prostitution or drug dealing--the only other means of earning money she felt were available to her.

“She needed money to support her family,” Ramirez said. “She said this was easier and safer than turning to street crime.”

Towns, who is pregnant with a ninth child, was moved Nov. 19 from Nevada to Los Angeles, officials said. She has pleaded innocent to six counts of welfare fraud, six counts of perjury and one count of grand theft. She faces a sentence of up to 49 years in prison if convicted on all counts. She remains jailed in lieu of $100,000 bail and declined through her attorney to comment on the case.

Six of Towns’ children are now in the care of her mother. Two other children are in the custody of their father. Investigators said it is unclear how many men had fathered Towns’ children because she provided false information on forms seeking benefits.

Ramirez said the Towns case is unusual because the alleged fraud went unnoticed for nearly seven years, during which time the losses in Los Angeles County amounted to at least $163,797--believed to be the highest loss to an individual fraud suspect in a decade. Authorities said Towns could have received $60,000 to $80,000 during the period if she had applied legally for benefits.

In a case investigators said is symptomatic of the difficulties in detecting fraud in the welfare system, Towns is accused of receiving benefits through seven different county welfare offices here and two offices in Clark County, Nev.

Investigators said she was able to avoid detection until a routine computer check in 1989 because she moved often, applied for benefits at different welfare offices and used a variety of different identifications when applying.

She relied too, investigators said, on a large, unwieldy welfare system spread through 31 offices in Los Angeles County. More than 1.2 million people receive some form of welfare assistance here, and there are about 185 investigators assigned to rooting out fraud in the system.

“We usually trip them up before it gets this far along,” Ramirez said. “But she had a pattern that helped her avoid detection. She would move cases around to different offices. She would open and close them. She would never appear at one office more than once or twice.”

According to court records, the Towns case came to light Dec. 21, 1989, after a woman who identified herself as Corrie Mae Moorehead applied for benefits from the Aid to Families with Dependent Children program at a county Department of Public Social Services office in Panorama City.

When a DPSS eligibility worker routinely entered information provided by Moorehead into a case management computer, a flag was raised; two other women named Corrie Moorehead, with different birth dates, addresses and names and numbers of children, were receiving welfare benefits out of DPSS offices in Glendale and Pasadena.

Though such matches are not unusual, the information was evaluated by DPSS investigators and forwarded to the district attorney’s welfare fraud unit, which is contracted by the DPSS to handle the often tedious investigations of people suspected of making multiple applications for benefits.

Edgington said that he interviewed the caseworkers assigned to the three Mooreheads and gathered copies of driver’s licenses the applicants had submitted at each office. The three Corrie Mooreheads were one woman, he determined.

From there, the investigator went to a Burbank apartment on Shelton Street that was listed on one of the applications. No one was home but there were four women’s names on the mailbox--none of them Corrie Moorehead.

A neighbor, however, told Edgington that one of the women named on the mailbox, Teresa Towns, leased the apartment and only came on the first and 15th of every month to pick up mail--the two dates that welfare benefits are delivered. The neighbor also said she believed Towns came from Las Vegas to make the mail pickups.

Edgington then began some computer sleuthing. He put the four names from the mailbox into the DPSS computer and found that all four were receiving welfare benefits from different offices. He once again gathered copies of photo IDs and interviewed caseworkers. According to court records, the result was the same: the three Corrie Mooreheads and the four other women were all the same person. She had used two different IDs to apply for welfare benefits in 1982 and 1983, and then five more in 1989.

The names were forwarded to fraud investigators in Las Vegas who found two matches on their own welfare computers, indicating the same woman was receiving benefits under two names there.

On Nov. 14, 1990, investigators with warrants simultaneously searched apartments in Burbank and North Las Vegas that belonged to the woman believed to be Corrie Mae Moorehead. Ramirez said they seized numerous sets of identification, including driver’s licenses and Social Security cards, for all the names that had come up in the investigation. They also found plane schedules and ticket stubs for flights to and from Burbank.

Moorehead was detained in North Las Vegas during the search but not charged at the time because evidence in the case was still being put together by fraud investigators who had the tedious job of analyzing handwriting on the seized documents and the numerous welfare checks that had been cashed.

Welfare payments to Moorehead were cut off after the search and she was charged with the 13 felonies the following June. She was not arrested until Nov. 12 when North Las Vegas police traced her to a small, two-bedroom duplex where she was living with six of her children. She told investigators her real name was Teresa Towns.

None of the money illegally received by Towns has been recovered and investigators said they do not know what happened to it. They also said there was no evidence that it had been used to buy drugs, gamble or enrich Towns’ lifestyle. Property searches showed Towns owned no real estate or cars under any of her aliases.

“She said, ‘I was just feeding my family,’ ” Ramirez said.

“As far as where the money went, it’s a mystery to me,” Edgington said. “She may very well have been just supporting the family. But it is a sad situation. She pulled this scam for a long time and the money she got should have been used for other people that were entitled to it. There is only so much money and she took a big piece of the pie.”

Equally disturbing, investigators said, was that Towns admitted that she learned how to get false identification and conduct the welfare scam from other welfare recipients.

“It is kind of a scary thing,” Ramirez said. “We asked her how she did this and she said she learned of this while waiting in various lobbies of DPSS offices.”

Ramirez and other investigators said such easy availability on the street of materials and knowledge enabling people to create false identification documents is at the core of welfare fraud problems.

“This is a constant problem we run into,” Ramirez said, gesturing toward a stack of fraud files on his desk that feature suspects with multiple IDs and aliases.

But Ramirez and DPSS officials said they believe there can be few other cases involving the length and amount of fraud attributed to Towns.

Lowquilla Grenier, director of the DPSS welfare fraud section, said that recent improvements in fraud detection--some spurred by cases like Towns’--would make it difficult for such a fraud to occur now.

“We have put in several systems that help us detect and prevent fraud,” Grenier said.

Chief among them, she said, is the Early Fraud Detection System, which places investigators at most DPSS offices to review applications and uses computer programs designed to find similarities in applications. Also, the county has a fraud hot line and offers rewards of $100 for tips leading to fraud arrests.

“I don’t think it is easy to do what she did,” Ramirez said of Towns. “There is more screening now. We aggressively concentrate on early detection. It is easier to catch it at its inception than it is to put a case together down the line.”