High-Tech Hunt Tracked Family to Caribbean

A love for the good life apparently followed Robert and Kimberly Morgan to St. Lucia. The law wasn’t far behind.

Using false identities, the Morgans rented a home in one of St. Lucia’s most exclusive communities, enrolled their kids in private school and even set up their own Internet site to conduct a new marketing business, investigators say.

But their life on the run ended this week, seven months after the couple, accused of insurance fraud, fled to the Caribbean island with their two children and a nanny.

The mystery was pieced together by Santa Clara County Deputy Dist. Atty. Stephen Lowney and his investigator, Kevin Richlin, with a combination of old-fashioned detective work and high-tech sleuthing.

After chasing false electronic leads to another island chain, the prosecutor and his sidekick decoded encrypted e-mails between relatives and combed public records and databases to help crack the case.

“It was the best phone call of my life,” Lowney said Wednesday, referring to the call he got Aug. 3 shortly after Richlin, with the help of an FBI agent and the Royal St. Lucia Police Force, surprised the Morgans as they slept.

The family fled after Robert and Kimberly Morgan were accused of swindling 700 clients of about $10 million through their ISU Diligent Insurance Agency in San Jose.

Now they face charges of identity theft and unlawful flight to avoid prosecution, Lowney said.

Robert and Kimberly Morgan, 37 and 36, remained in a Puerto Rican prison Wednesday. They await a Friday extradition hearing.

One of their lawyers, William Graysen, said he expects them to waive extradition. U.S. marshals indicated that Aug. 26 would be the earliest they would be returned to San Jose.

Their two children, Connor, 7, and Taylor, 5, and the family’s nanny, Jean Checketts, are already back. They returned Sunday. A tanned Checketts joined Taylor at the front door of a relative’s home and refused to comment. Checketts, a former South African, is being treated as a witness and will not face charges, Lowney said.

The couple’s evasion plan was tripped up by their own family members, who began to cooperate more with police after Kimberly Morgan’s father, Victor Lain, was convicted in March of destroying evidence about the couple’s plans to flee, Lowney said.

After Lain was put in jail, family members who say they did not know where the Morgans were staying sent them an encrypted e-mail message imploring them to return and come to Lain’s aid. What the Morgans sent back, Lowney said, was an obscenity-laced message telling the family, “We didn’t ask for his help or yours. You’ll never see us again.”