Brenda Heist's criminal record: Missing mom stole woman's identity, had run-ins with police in Florida
Intelligencer Journal
Lancaster New Era
Lancaster New Era
Updated May 03, 2013 08:39
Florida
Originally Published May 02, 2013 18:12
As Lovie Smith, Brenda Heist lived a good life in the Florida Panhandle for two years.
She cleaned beautiful homes, staying in some of them as she hopped from place to place in the northern part of the state in 2011 and 2012.
Photos show her enjoying life in the surf, having a drink with a friend, walking down a boardwalk near a condo complex.
But amid the pools, the beach and the nights out for oysters at a popular beach restaurant called Peg Leg Pete's in Pensacola, she also had a darker, more desperate side.
It landed her in trouble with police earlier this year, under yet another assumed name: Kelsei Smith.
Heist, 54, disappeared from Lititz in 2002, leaving behind two young children, her husband and her suburban lifestyle.
She emerged in Florida last week, telling the Lititz police detective who had investigated her disappearance that she had hitchhiked south on a whim, distraught over a pending divorce and money problems.
More coverage of Brenda Heists's disappearance:
• 2003: 1 year after Lititz woman vanishes, family, friends and authorities still wonder what happened
She said she had lived as a vagrant, under bridges and in tents, panhandling and scrounging trashed food from restaurants.
She did not mention her recent life in the Panhandle, in northern Florida.
But it was during that time that she got into trouble with the law, perhaps due to the fact that she had left behind her identity when she vanished.
Police never found any evidence that she used her Social Security number or opened credit-card accounts during the 11 years she had disappeared. They, and her family, assumed she most likely had died.
To manufacture a new identity, Heist stole a driver's license from one of her housekeeping clients.
The woman, who asked not to be identified, thought for a time she had lost the license, but discovered the theft after she got a traffic ticket in the mail. Heist apparently had only partially paid the fine for it.
At first she did not realize that the culprit was her cleaning lady, a woman she knew as Lovie Smith, who also cleaned house for her mother.
"I was at my mom's house and I said, 'Somebody took my license and stole my identity,' " the woman recalled Thursday. "She was there cleaning, while I was talking to my mom."
The woman told her mother that the police were getting to the bottom of the theft, working on figuring out who stole her license because they had the make and model of the car linked to the ticket.
"The next day, Lovie called my mom and said, 'I can't clean your house anymore. I've been diagnosed with cancer.'
"She pretty much disappeared off the face of the earth after that."
Sondra Forrester, who let Heist live in her Pensacola home for a year shortly before this happened, said that Heist was living with another housekeeping client when she vanished from the Pensacola area.
Forrester's ex-husband, who also was friends with Heist, became concerned about "Lovie" after her cell phone was disconnected and her Facebook page was taken down.
He went to look for her last fall, at the house where she had been staying at the time, and the man who answered the door said she had just disappeared. Her belongings were there but Lovie had left and never came back for them, the man said.
Police records from Santa Rosa County in Florida show the license was reported stolen in October, two months after Heist was pulled over for what apparently was a minor traffic infraction in Gulf Breeze, Fla.
In January, three months after the theft was reported, a woman named Kelsei L. Smith was charged having with an expired registration and suspended license in Pinellas County, Fla., a county about halfway down the Gulf side of the state and home to St. Petersburg. Court records indicate she still owes $506.50 on the two fines.
Heist indicated last week to police in Key West that she might be wanted in Pinellas County on charges.
Then, in February, Kelsei L. Smith — whose mug shot is clearly Brenda Heist — was charged with the fraudulent use of a driver's license. However, records do not indicate if she paid a fine or received jail time for the offense.
While Heist didn't tell Lititz Detective Sgt. John Schofield about her life as Lovie Smith when she spoke to him last week, she did inform him that she had been charged with identity theft, and had served three months in prison for that, though that jail time could not be confirmed.
Schofield said the emerging story of Brenda Heist, as Lovie Smith and Kelsei Smith, is disappointing and continues to be heartbreaking for her family.
"It doesn't change any of the facts of what she did," he said, "that she left her family here.
"It's just that she painted a picture that she lived a homeless life and a tough life. Life wasn't as bad as she portrayed it. That's obvious.
"The new information that is now surfacing, as people are coming forward, is just showing that she is not telling us the whole truth, and life was not as bad."
The sad thing is, he said, "Some of the things we've learned are going to upset the children that she left even more now."
Read more: http://lancasteronline.com/article/local/844818_Brenda-Heist-s-criminal-record--Missing-mom-stole-woman-s-identity--had-run-ins-with-police-in-Florida.html#ixzz2SYt17Ycm
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