Woman’s Long Disappearing Act Unravels

Linda Redfield and Margie Waugh both lived in tiny towns on city fringes. Both married older widowers named Robert. Both, by all accounts, were friendly, helpful, civic-minded people.

In Sadieville, Ky., population 300, about 30 miles north of Lexington, Margie helped organize a fish fry that raised money to paint a struggling church.

In Glen Rose, Texas, a town of 2,075 about 100 miles southwest of Dallas, Linda put together one of the largest dances for senior citizens the town had ever seen.

Linda and Margie, it turns out, are the same 51-year-old woman.

Margie had become Linda after she fled Kentucky in December 1990, just ahead of charges she stole $53,000 from the city of Sadieville. She is back in Kentucky now, in jail and facing up to 20 years in prison if convicted of theft by deception. On Monday, Scott County Circuit Court in Georgetown, Ky., set a trial date of Sept. 30.

For seven years Margie Waugh had been a missing person. Her story shows that while it’s easy to disappear into the vastness of America, staying hidden is another matter entirely.

The FBI says it doesn’t keep statistics, but John Newman, an expert in identity changes, estimates that at any given time up to 80,000 people wanted by the federal government are missing, while untold thousands of others disappear for personal, noncriminal reasons.

The problem with staying lost is the absolute commitment it requires to severing all ties with the past.

Margie Waugh’s mistake, it seems, was that she didn’t go all the way.

Prosecutors say Waugh stole the money in the simplest way imaginable: Shortly after being hired to the $300-a-month city clerk’s job in early 1990, she started writing checks to herself on the city’s account. At first it was $400, then more, eventually totaling more than the town’s annual budget of $50,000.

She had been propelled into the job by a bout of local political upheaval. The town clerk had quit, and at a town meeting, when no one else volunteered for the job, “Margie, she jumped up and she said, ‘Well, I’ll try,’ ” Dianne Vest, a town official and neighbor of Waugh, recalled.

Waugh had been married to Robert Waugh, her third husband, since 1978; the couple lived in Sadieville with their children from previous marriages, next door to her mother and stepfather. The couple were regular churchgoers.

Mayor Norris Stacy said his first hint of trouble was from Steve Cornish, a state police detective. Cornish told him a relative of Waugh’s tipped him off that she was embezzling money.

The next day, Stacy said, he went to the city offices. Finding no canceled checks, he called Waugh at home.

Waugh curtly told Stacy the checks were in City Hall and that she was ill. When Stacy tried to question her further, she hung up.

“Well, the suspicion was in my mind,” Stacy said, so he drove to Waugh’s house: “Boom! She was gone.”

Starting toward Georgetown, the nearest sizable city, Stacy stopped at a gas station near Interstate 75 and, to his surprise, encountered Waugh.

“I approached her and said, ‘Margie, I want the bank statements,’ ” Stacy said, adding that she responded: “I’m sick, I’m going to the doctor, I don’t have time to fool with you.”

“So I let her go,” Stacy said.

That, apparently, was the last anyone in Sadieville saw of Margie Waugh for 7 1/2 years.

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Less than a year after Margie Waugh’s disappearance, Linda Sue Rogers showed up in Glen Rose, some 1,000 miles away.

She led a quiet life. Neighbors said she worked in the health care industry. In 1994, Rogers met the recently widowed Bob Redfield and married him a few months later. He was 18 years her senior.

Redfield said his wife never discussed her past, and he wasn’t going to ask.

“At my age, I was just looking for somebody to be my friend,” he told the Lexington Herald-Leader.

Martha Gunn, a friend, said Mrs. Redfield helped out in Glen Rose whenever she could. She and her husband organized the senior citizens’ dance and played music at an annual art show.

“They played all day. She would do it for free,” Gunn said. “She’s quite a girl. She’s a go-getter.”

But Linda Redfield’s past would catch up with her. Even though she had a new social security number--an indispensable prerequisite for disappearing--she had already made a cardinal mistake, according to Newman, the expert on missing persons. The maiden name she had chosen, Linda Sue Rogers, was her sister’s.

One of the first things authorities do when searching for a fugitive is check the relatives’ data and then search payroll records, marriage licenses and other public documents, waiting for the missing person to pop up under a relative’s name.

“She tried to do an identity change, but she did a weak one, and a weak identity change is worse than no identity change,” Newman said in a telephone interview from California.

Back in Kentucky, Margie Waugh’s family never hired a private eye or went to any lengths to find her, said Cornish, the state police detective.

Now, according to Charles Beal, Waugh’s Lexington attorney, it turns out that her family knew she was in hiding. “She would contact them periodically to tell them she was alive and she was OK. But they never knew where she was,” Beal said.

The state police finally gave up in 1995, and a federal warrant was issued. The FBI took over and showed up at the Redfields’ door in May.

The FBI’s Louisville office declined to say how the agents tracked her down. But a few days later, she returned to Kentucky, surrendered and became Margie Waugh again.

According to the Herald-Leader, Redfield is taking out a second mortgage to repay the stolen money and get his wife out of jail.

He doesn’t want to discuss the matter. “There are enough stories going around about this,” he told the Associated Press. “This is a small town. Only 2,000 people live here. My wife had worked all around town, and I don’t want anymore said.”

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Margie Waugh’s family has moved away, including her former husband, Robert Waugh, who divorced her in her absence and now lives in Cynthiana, in the next county.

Attempts to reach him for comment were not successful, but he recently told the Herald-Leader, “I don’t hate Margie. I just don’t want anything to do with her.”

Vest, the neighbor who later became Sadieville’s first woman mayor, says insurance refunded the stolen money. But the incident tarnished the trust and intimacy of small-town life for her. It showed her “that a handshake’s not the right thing. I think that’s kind of sad.”

Although Waugh pleaded not guilty at her arraignment, her lawyer does not dispute his client’s guilt.

“Let’s just put it this way: She came back and voluntarily surrendered, and we are pursuing avenues to try to make restitution,” Beal said in a recent telephone interview.

He depicts his client as a sort of Robin Hood, giving money to friends and relatives, “people who were in need,” although he acknowledges she also bought some furniture for her home.

“I think it was just a situation where she was trying to help others,” he said. She was also clinically depressed when she left Sadieville and was treated for it, he said.

Beal has tried to negotiate a plea bargain whereby Waugh would avoid jail by reimbursing the insurer.

Others feel differently.

“I’m sorry, but she took from everybody,” said Stacy, the mayor when Waugh committed her offense. “Deep in my heart, I’d like to see her pull time.”

John Newman’s book “Reborn in the USA” offers instruction on establishing a new, documented identity. But paperwork isn’t all it takes.

“It takes a lot of work to establish a workable, solid, long-term fake identity,” he says. “A lot of people get caught because they don’t understand what’s involved.”