In Death, Man’s Life Story Starts to Fall Apart

To the people of Noblesville, he was Bob Hoquim, an entrepreneur who started an Internet provider used by the Indiana state government and the local police department.

But when he died recently of a heart attack, police discovered he wasn’t Robert Paul Hoquim at all, but a fugitive who had been on the run for 14 years for the attempted murder of a Texas police officer.

His real name was John Paul Aleshe, though he had used more than 10 aliases. He also was wanted on warrants from Minnesota and Colorado.

Aleshe died in the bedroom of his $300,000 home on May 23.

Sgt. Tom Madden of the Noblesville Police Department was trying to track down relatives when he noticed something strange--Hoquim’s driver’s license was a masterful fake. When he checked the Social Security number, it belonged to a St. Louis woman.

Investigators searched the businessman’s rented storage area, where they found a Colorado driver’s license in the glove compartment of an old pickup truck. The photo was of a younger Hoquim. The name was John Paul Aleshe.

That name pulled up several hits on a national crime database, and the FBI used fingerprints to confirm that the man known as Hoquim was in fact Aleshe.

Agent Marjorie Poche of the FBI’s Dallas division was surprised to hear of Aleshe’s death.

Poche said Aleshe was wanted for the attempted murder of an Irving, Texas, police officer 14 years ago, and also wanted in Texas for possession of controlled substances, theft of property and theft of computer software, and in Colorado for issuing bad checks.

A profile in a 1996 issue of the Indianapolis Business Journal said Hoquim was a native of Greenfield, had postponed college to serve in Vietnam, earned a degree in mathematics from Indiana University and went on for a doctoral degree at Caltech.

Police say none of that is true.