The Guardian-US woman who faked being an Irish heiress re-arrested on UK fraud charges
March 20, 2024 6 min 1273 words
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A US-born woman who feigned being the heiress to a $30m fortune while scamming nearly $100,000 from a television producer who later sent her to prison and exposed her on a popular podcast has again been arrested, this time in connection with a raft of fraud charges in the UK.
Marianne “Mair” Smyth is awaiting extradition to Belfast, Northern Ireland, on charges that she bilked multiple people out of hundreds of thousands of dollars while she lived there between 2002 and 2009.
Authorities arrested her in that case on 23 February at a short-term rental home in Bingham, Maine, where she was staying after being released early from the prison sentence she was given for defrauding the podcaster Johnathan Walton.
Walton’s Queen of the Con: The Irish Heiress podcast chronicled his experience with Smyth as well as several of her ruses, including how she even impersonated the actor Jennifer Aniston at one point in a saga that is remarkable even by the no-holds-barred standards of the American criminal justice system.
According to court records reviewed by the Guardian, Belfast police say Smyth worked at several UK-based mortgage companies. And she allegedly convinced five people whom she met through that work to give her a total of about £135,570 (or $172,000) that she promised to invest on their behalf in a non-existent, high interest-bearing bank account – but which she simply kept for herself.
Police in Belfast planned to arrest Smyth in 2009 after the five people whom she allegedly victimized came forward. But she was tipped off in advance that authorities were coming for her, and she fled with her family, facilitating the escape by arranging for the killings of more than a dozen dogs who were living at her home, according to what Smyth’s daughter, Chelsea Fowler, said on the Queen of the Con podcast.
“We had about 15 to 17 dogs in our house,” Fowler said on the podcast. “My mom made my stepdad put all the dogs down, … put them down because there wasn’t time to re-home them.”
‘Career criminal’
As outlined by Queen of the Con, Smyth all but disappeared before eventually re-emerging in Los Angeles. There, she befriended the reality TV producer Walton while presenting herself as a glamorous Irish heiress locked in a legal battle with her family over $30m that she was supposed to inherit.
Walton, from 2013 to 2017, gave Smyth just under $100,000, which she said she needed to secure her inheritance. Only there was never any inheritance, Walton eventually learned. He also came to realize that she used some of his money to deal with a guilty plea that she entered in 2016 on charges that she stole funds from a travel agency where she worked.
After deciding that he urgently needed to investigate the truth about Smyth, Walton discovered she not only had impersonated Aniston, but she also convinced people to surrender money to her by impersonating a psychologist, a court-appointed child custody investigator, a psychic, a cancer patient, a witch and an NHL hockey player.
Walton established that she also blackmailed money out of married men with whom she struck up extramarital affairs.
He first published his findings in a blog meant to warn the public at large about Smyth. He eventually heard from nearly 50 other people across the US who claimed Smyth collectively conned them out of a total of about $1m.
Others who came across Walton’s blog were authorities in Northern Ireland, who informed him that they had been hunting for Smyth for years, had no idea where she was hiding after her 2009 disappearance, and were going to seek her extradition.
Meanwhile, in Los Angeles, Walton ultimately persuaded local police to arrest her in April 2018. Prosecutors followed up with charges, brought her to trial in early 2019 and – after soliciting testimony from Walton and other of her victims – won a conviction against Smyth for grand theft by false pretense.
Smyth received a five-year prison sentence. But she was released in December 2020 – less than two years later – as California prisons officials freed thousands of non-violent offenders from custody early in an effort to stem the spread of the Covid-19 pandemic.
An aggrieved Walton told his and Smyth’s stories more widely through Queen of the Con, which attracted a significant audience after iHeart and AYR Media distributed it in early 2021.
Walton said listeners of the podcast subsequently informed him that she left for Maine after her early California prison release. She tried to maintain a discrete profile by living out of several short-term rental homes rather than settling in more permanent quarters.
But Walton said one of his listeners provided him with Smyth’s most recent address in Maine. The podcast host in turn shared the address with police in Northern Ireland.
Authorities in Northern Ireland then worked with US marshals to arrest Smyth in Bingham.
In the days after that arrest, federal prosecutors argued that Smyth should be held without bail while UK authorities pursued her transfer to their jurisdiction, arguing that she was a flight risk – even if she posted a bond ostensibly meant to ensure her presence in court moving forward.
Prosecutors said her prior convictions in California suggested she was both a “career criminal” and “a danger to the community”. They also alleged that she had continued pursuing cons while hiding in Maine, including one in which she solicited donations to purportedly run rescue missions in Ukraine after that country was invaded by the Russian military in 2022.
Another plot involved allegedly impersonating a satanic high priestess to scam money out of people who believe in the devil and were thought to be unlikely to report her to authorities, according to prosecutors.
The federal judge John Nivison on 7 March granted prosecutors’ request to detain Smyth without bail.
The extradition treaty between the US and the UK empowers both countries to hand over people wanted for a wide range of criminal offenses, including financial – or “white-collar” – crimes.
Each of the charges against Smyth in Northern Ireland carry up to 10 years in prison, prosecutors have said in court. Nivison set a hearing on the UK’s request to extradite Smyth for 17 April.
‘She devil’
One of the Northern Irish accusers recently told Walton that investigators had revealed to her that Smyth had preyed on 25 additional victims not involved in the charges for which the UK is trying to extradite Smyth.
That accuser also said that – more than anything – Smyth “stole [her] trust in human kind”.
“It just sucks the life out of you, because you’re looking at everybody and you’re thinking, ‘Well, is that genuine, or is that not genuine?’” the woman said of Smyth during an interview with Walton which was shared with the Guardian but has not yet been published. “You can end up a mental basket.”
The woman, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to protect her privacy, also added that she regarded Smyth as the “she devil”.
Attempts to contact an attorney for Smyth were not immediately successful.
Walton, meanwhile, has produced five more Queen of the Con seasons after the one focusing on Smyth. The newest one begins on Thursday and centers on Peggy Fulford, who admitted defrauding millions of dollars from Dennis Rodman, Ricky Williams and other professional American athletes.