[narrator] When a nurse from the Cherokee Nation
meets a charming Southern gentleman, sparks fly.
He was a golfer. He was a pilot.
He'd gone to Ohio State
and played football with Woody Hayes.
[narrator] But is it all smoke and mirrors?
My husband says I'm not real sure about that guy.
I was in horror. I couldn't speak.
This is something that you would see on 20/20.
This doesn't happen to us.
[narrator] Questions about his past
come back to haunt Deborah Proctor.
The reason why he went missing was there was a barn fire.
They never found any remains.
[Holly] He would do anything for me.
And I thought maybe he murdered someone.
[Deborah] I was afraid he would burn the place down.
I was frightened at this point.
[narrator] And when a cold case is reopened,
Debra's marriage goes up in flames.
It was just a nightmare.
[Deborah] It was like, "Who are you?
How have you done these things?"
Tahlequah is the...
the heart of the Cherokee Reservation.
My father was originally sent here in early '30s.
He and his siblings were sent to boarding school.
I personally have lived at four boarding schools
and most of my years were spent at Seneca Indian School.
[narrator] Deborah does well in school
and graduates from nursing college.
She then goes back to work in her community.
[Shawnna] Everybody knows Deb.
She's always out in the public.
Very kind, very sweet, always,
I mean, always out to help anybody and everybody.
You know, she's a very good hearted lady.
[Deborah] I'm very active in my community.
And it's just a celebration of...
of the Cherokee,
can be community activities, friendships, concerts,
might be birthdays.
There are the powwows.
There's the parade.
There's tournaments, softball, golf.
We love golf.
I've been playing golf a while for years and years.
[narrator] Deborah has spent almost her entire life on the reservation
and even married and then divorced a local non-native man.
In 1998, she's single with two sons
when she decides to broaden her horizons
by posting a dating profile online.
[Deborah] I had hoped for a long-term relationship.
I wasn't looking to move,
but if someone was free to move here,
that was an option for me.
I met a... a number of gentlemen,
but the one that seemed the most appealing to me,
his name was Jeff Walton.
Jeff's profile shared of all the things he had done in his life.
He was a golfer, he was a pilot,
was a project manager for large industry, construction.
He'd gone to Ohio State
and played football with Woody Hayes.
[phone ringing]
[narrator] They exchanged messages
and he tells her that he had been married
and divorced once and has one son.
When they finally talk on the phone, Deborah is charmed.
[Deborah] His favorite word was darlin' in a New Orleans accent.
I just thought that was amazing.
[laughs]
When he began to talk about Native American music,
I think I was just gone.
At that point, I was like, "This guy really gets me."
[narrator] Three months into their online relationship,
Jeff tells Deborah the business is bringing him to Oklahoma.
It's time to meet.
I had a big event planned.
Was having my family over and I was having dinner
and I'd fix dessert and, you know,
just doing a h... home welcome.
Here's my family.
Welcome to Tahlequah, that kind of thing.
But everyone came but Jeff.
[narrator] Jeff is a no show.
[Deborah] Well, I was sick of my stomach.
And then he reached out in an email,
and that's when he explained what all had happened.
His mother had called him home to Canada.
His brother John was missing.
The family was worried about him and he just had to go home.
I just felt such compassion for them that he was missing.
[Katie] I've known Deb a long time.
She is a good judge of character.
I felt cautious, but I also felt happy for Deb.
She told me all about him. She showed me pictures.
She was just happy as could be.
[narrator] When Jeff's brother returns with little explanation,
Jeff is ready to carry on where he and Deborah left off.
He came here on April 23rd, 1998.
I went to visit a medicine man,
and I did have him bead a feather.
Then I gave that to Jeff when I picked him up at the airport.
It's a part of my culture.
I was very nervous.
Very nervous.
It's scary, 'cause I'd been single a number of years.
You know, I really love this guy.
And... and I'd never met him.
And our first weekend together,
I took him all around,
introduced him to as many friends as I could,
took him to my golf course.
Everyone was friendly.
Even my guy friends were friendly.
It was beautiful.
It was very lovely.
My boys, they liked him.
He was, he was a very personable guy.
And one of my dearest golf friends was like,
well, you know, "I'm not sure that you know yet. Do you?"
And I go, "Oh, yeah, this... this is the one."
[Katie] He was handsome.
He was kind.
He had that New Orleans drawl.
He treated her like a princess.
In fact, he called her "my Indian princess."
[narrator] Katie's husband, Jesse, isn't as impressed.
We hug each other here,
and they gave each other a hug.
[narrator] And then Jeff does an odd thing.
[Katie] Well, Jeff put Jesse in a headlock.
No one was looking.
And so, you know, I was just thinking,
"Why would he do that?"
Well, later on, Jesse told me he hurt him
because his back's jacked up,
and then he said something to him like,
"Oh, you sissy or something."
[narrator] Later, Jeff reveals another surprising side of himself
that Deborah had been unaware of
when he goes to dinner with Deborah and her sons.
Something came up about him being a veteran,
and he told both of my sons.
He said, "I'll...
I will let you ask me one question about my being a veteran,
about being in the Vietnam War."
We began to learn about the prisoner of war story and the horrors of it.
They were ambushed, his unit
and he was captured
and they took gun butt
and busted his feet.
And he was able to finally get free
and followed water back to American troops.
I just thought he was a phenomenal man
with all that he had done in his life.
There was an annual trip that we typically made right after Christmas,
and I typically would travel with all my golf couples.
And so finally I was like, now I have a golf partner.
[narrator] Four couples, including Jeff and Deborah,
travel to Florida to play golf.
But there's a small problem.
[Deborah] He didn't bring his golf clubs.
A real golfer is not gonna lose their clubs, but...
he said his was taken.
So we bought him all new clubs.
Eight of you can't play together,
so we always played in different groups.
[narrator] The guys play together on the first day
and Jeff stuns Deborah
when he wins the tournament and a pot of money,
but he's the only one happy about it.
[Deborah] I noticed that there was a strangeness,
there was a distance, and these were my close friends.
I've traveled with them for years, and...
but I, I couldn't put my finger on it.
And I learned that what happened
and they were just observing cheating.
And they witnessed that he might not count all of his strokes
or if he hit out of bounds,
he wouldn't take his penalty shot.
And if you cheat, that says a lot about you.
[narrator] Deborah turns to her best friend, Katie, for advice.
[Katie] She was crying.
She was upset
because they were badmouthing Jeff, which made me upset.
They just didn't like his personality.
They didn't like to be around him.
[Deborah] After we made that trip to Florida
then we weren't invited anymore.
That was the end of our couples traveling out of state every year.
[narrator] Despite this, Jeff decides to leave his home
and contractor job in Kentucky
to live with Deborah in Oklahoma.
[Deborah] He expressed that he liked it here
and we began to talk about him moving.
That was the next plan that we talked about.
I was just really committed,
you know, we'll find work for you.
I was just all in, really committed.
I just felt so warm in his presence, you know.
I just felt such love in my heart for him.
[narrator] Three months after they first met,
Jeff arrives in Oklahoma
and Deborah rushes to the airport.
He was a little late.
So, he was already off the plane and...
and out into the big common area,
and his voice was kind of shaking.
And so, I was like, I guess he's really scared,
you know, I would be, too.
He's... he's really taken a big step...
giving up everything.
Of course, he's probably a little frightened, you know.
But I remember his voice shaking a little bit...
and he just said, "You're...
you're gonna marry me.
You are... You're marrying me, right?"
Looking back at that very moment
that he came here, it's...
it's like the darkness came in the door.
[Katie] I was in horror.
I... I couldn't speak.
This is something that you would see on 20/20.
This doesn't happen to us.
He was brilliant.
You know, an evil brilliant.
[narrator] Deborah Proctor's boyfriend, Jeff,
has surprised her with an impromptu proposal.
I wanted to be married and I was very happy about it.
We just wanted a small, intimate ceremony
in Eureka Springs
a couple of hours from here.
His son, little Jeff and daughter-in-law came.
I was so happy to meet his family.
Just... just thrilled.
At the time, Dustin, my oldest son,
was living in Fort Worth, Dallas,
and he just said they weren't able to make it.
And so that... that was a bit painful to my heart.
My youngest son, Derrick, was there, and he walked me down.
It was April 23rd, 2000, we married.
That was two years to the date
that we'd actually met in person the first time.
Jeff, he had the usual smile and seemed...
seemed to enjoy and engage in the day.
I just went right on like I would normally go,
except now I had a partner and a husband to...
to go with me.
You know, immediately I went to work trying to help him get work,
and a friend gave him a job,
and he didn't keep that longer than three days.
He came home and he just said
"that really wasn't what I was looking for."
And I was like, "Oh, well, that's disappointing, but it's okay.
Well... well, something will work out."
[narrator] In March 2004,
Jeff redeems himself
when he lands his best contract yet
for a construction job at a prison in North Carolina.
I was very excited about it.
I was just gonna give up everything.
I gave notice of two or three months.
[narrator] It's a big step for Deborah,
who is a hospital nurse and the director of a health care clinic.
[phone ringing]
[narrator] But just before she's ready to leave,
she gets a call from Jeff.
[Deborah] And he said that there was another contractor
who got upset with Jeff over something
and kind of approached him like he was gonna hit him.
And Jeff said, "I told him,
you're picking on the wrong guy."
He said, "He didn't stop.
So, I took him out."
He said, "I broke his teeth."
He said, "Deb, there's no tolerance.
It doesn't matter that he attacked me.
There's just no tolerance."
So, he lost that job.
You know, this was a great job.
I was moving out there.
I'd already given notice.
I was gonna finish a different degree at Duke.
I was pretty excited.
[narrator] Deborah resents her notice
but it's hard to turn a blind eye to Jeff's violent outburst.
[Deborah] And at that point, I was like, I don't... I don't know.
I think I'm just dying. I can't.
What is this work stuff?
How can you mess this up?
I talked to my closest friend, Katie.
By this time, everyone liked Jeff.
They just felt like, you know,
I needed help to pack him up and move him home.
That there wasn't anything he could do
if he was being attacked, that he warned the guy.
I mean, we just made excuses for him.
That's what honest, loving people do, I think,
that can't see evil in people.
Deb can't see evil in people.
[narrator] But the stressful ordeal takes a physical toll on Deborah.
[Deborah] And when we came back, I was just deathly ill.
But I'm such a...
I'm such a fighter and I push on.
I just didn't pay attention.
By the time we got home late morning,
I was like, I... I can't breathe.
You have to take me into the hospital.
And of course, I was a nurse at the hospital at that time.
So, the... the crowds were gathering.
You know, everyone was very concerned.
[narrator] Everyone but Jeff, who goes home.
Deborah is so sick with pneumonia
that she's unaware he's left her side.
I ended up having to go on life support.
He was absent.
He wasn't there.
He never called.
You know, it was an hour by hour.
Is she gonna make it?
My husband would have been right there by my bedside.
[Deborah] I think it was nine days
and six or seven on life support.
My friends were just furious...
furious that he left me.
When I kind of came around,
they were all still very angry
that he would just walk out not knowing
if I was gonna live or die.
[narrator] Deb bounces back quickly and forgives Jeff for his absence,
but her friends think she should walk away from the relationship.
[Deborah] I didn't feel like I was making excuses.
I felt like they just didn't understand.
[narrator] Over time, most of Deborah's friends forgive Jeff,
who is suitably remorseful,
and he finally settles into his new life in Oklahoma.
When he did locate employment, it was typically good.
He might have traveled to Arkansas or Tulsa or Bartlesville from here,
but, you know,
he made a good living at times.
[narrator] But before long, another shoe drops.
[Deborah] Somehow IRS bills arrived and I was like,
"What... what's this about, Jeff?
I didn't know you owed thousands of dollars to the IRS.
You... you probably should have told me that."
And he said, "Well, we're still fighting it."
I was just angry.
Oh, here was this enormous tax bill
that he didn't tell me he owed.
There wasn't any way around it.
We had to pay it.
[narrator] In January 2003,
Deborah and Jeff finally receive welcome news.
It's his mother Dot's 80th birthday,
and they are invited to a party in Edmonton, Alberta.
[Deborah] He'd been in my life for...
five years and I'd never met anybody
in his family except little Jeff.
So that's when we flew to Canada
for the birthday party.
[narrator] Jeff's Canadian family
has a completely different surname.
Stan, not Walton.
[Deborah] Jeff told me that he was born in Alaska
sometime in grade school, that they moved to Canada,
and that's why his name was different.
He had a different dad.
But in 2003, when we went, just his mother was alive.
And I met his sister, Wendy.
She's just got to be a great human.
And then his brothers, two brothers, Alan and John.
[narrator] Deborah is also about to meet a man named Dave Semple,
a law enforcement officer
who is attending the party for Dorothy Stan as well.
In 2003...
my mother called and said
that there was an 80th birthday party...
for Dot and suggested that I go up represent the family.
The birthday party was in an apartment building
where his mother lived.
By the time I got there and...
and got out of my car and started walking towards the building.
And I saw two guys walking towards me
and I saw that... that big toothy grin.
But I recognized it right away.
I said, "Ronnie Stan, that's got to be you."
Well, here was your closest friend back in 1947,
and he recognized me then and gave me a great big bear hug.
And that's when he said, "I'm not Ronnie Stan.
My... my name is Jeff Walton."
[narrator] If Dave looks like he's seen a ghost,
it's because the man who Dave Semple knew
was Ronnie Stan died in a barn fire in 1977.
There was a bunch of pigs that were in the barn that had died.
The fire department and the OPP did an investigation.
Everybody just assumed that he had died in the intense fire,
it had just rendered everything right to dust.
[narrator] Now, Ronnie Stan has risen from the dead
with a different name, Jeff Walton.
But why is Jeff's family keeping Deborah in the dark?
[Tim] Double lives are fascinating.
We all wonder if we've met somebody
who has some kind of secret life behind them.
[Katie] I didn't want to see it.
I thought he was a good guy.
[narrator] Three years after marrying Jeff,
Deborah Proctor finally meets his mom
at her 80th birthday party in Canada.
I was so happy to meet his family.
Just... just thrilled.
And we all just hit it off famously.
Um, I was happy to meet Dave, a childhood friend.
[narrator] She is unaware that everyone at the party,
including his family, knows Jeff by another name
and are colluding to keep it from her.
Jeff asks Dave not to tell Deborah,
and he obliges out of loyalty.
I'd always called him Ron and...
and now all of a sudden, I have to catch myself and call him Jeff.
So, I basically tried not to call him anything at all.
There's not a lot of questions running around in my head,
but it wasn't time to be asking anything at that point
and just sort of glad to see him again.
[narrator] She's so delighted to meet Jeff's Canadian family,
Deborah doesn't notice any awkwardness.
[Deborah] I had no idea. None.
And they all called him Jeff.
His family is sick together.
They were just happy to have him back.
Make the family complete again.
After talking to his mom and to his brothers and sisters
on that very, very first night...
I... I was satisfied that there was... there was nothing that was...
There was no wrongdoing.
He had simply disappeared.
[narrator] But the story of how Ronnie Stan became a fugitive
and what crimes he may have committed
while on the run is far from simple.
With Jeff's friends and family know
and what Deborah won't find out for another ten years
is that back in 1977,
Ronnie Stan was married to a woman named Gail and had two children.
He was living in southwestern Ontario in the 1970s.
He was working as a teacher at Fanshawe College.
He also had a farm,
so he was working on the farm at night and by day he was teaching.
He had become involved with a student.
It's not good to be involved with a student at that...
at any time, but especially if you're married with children.
This student told her mother
that she was gonna marry Ronald Stan.
And her mother phoned his mother
and his mother told him, "You're in big trouble.
She's from a very rich and powerful family."
So, on that day, his whole world was gonna come apart.
There just happened to be a fire
which presented an opportunity.
He's sitting there in the field
and he can hear his wife screaming
as she sees the barn burning,
knowing that he was supposed to be in there feeding the pigs.
He had $3,000 that was in his pocket.
And under the cover of night, he hopped on a bus
and crossed the border and decided to go to New Orleans.
[narrator] Initially, Ron's family presumes that he died in the fire
with the pigs and are unaware that he now adopts a new identity.
[Tim] So, Ron Stan decided to change his name to Jeff Walton.
Jeff was after the son he abandoned in Ontario,
and Walton was after the television show The Waltons
because he thought it was a nice, friendly American family name.
And in his words, he had to find
someone with a little bit of money to marry.
And the woman that he found was Roseanne.
He described her as a beautiful young woman
from a well-to-do family in New Orleans.
[narrator] Jeff tells Roseanne his family died in a plane crash in Alaska.
But when the two start talking marriage the following year,
there's a snag.
[Tim] Jeff Walton, he didn't have a birth certificate.
So, they went to another county
where you didn't need a birth certificate
to get a marriage license and they got married there.
And he was clearly still married to Gail, his Canadian wife.
[Dave] He told me that he wound up getting married
and having a child with her, little Jeff.
[Tim] My first impression of Roseanne was
she seemed like a very nice woman
who had a very bad relationship with Jeff Walton.
In her words, she said he could charm a snake.
[sirens blaring]
[Tim] Roseanne got in some kind of a car accident
with a commercial vehicle,
and there was a lawsuit with a settlement of $500,000.
Roseanne said that Jeff spent a lot of money
on booze and women and partying in New Orleans.
[Dave] He wound up divorcing her.
And she said then he...
he wound up marrying a Playboy bunny.
And again, I... I...
I figured, well, that's... really? And...
But that turned out to be true.
[Tim] Jeff Walton's second wife
or Ron Stan's third wife is Holly Kelley.
I was in Baton Rouge, Louisiana,
and Playboy came into town.
And I wanted to get into Playboy.
I thought it was very classy
and I didn't see anything wrong with it.
They ended up taking about 5000 pictures of me,
which I always wondered what in the world happened to the negatives?
[narrator] Holly's living in New Orleans in the 1990s.
When her friends say there is someone they'd like her to meet.
Jeff was charming. We hit it off great.
He had everything that you could ever imagine.
You know, I mean, he had the looks, he had the charm.
He had money.
You know, that helps.
[narrator] Holly knows her new boyfriend, Jeff,
is still technically married,
but Jeff no longer lives with Roseanne and little Jeff.
What Holly doesn't know
is if he has any other living relatives,
including other wives.
[Tim] I know that Jeff started reaching out to his family
in Canada in the early '90s.
I don't know if they were actively searching for him.
He had been declared dead.
[narrator] In 1993,
Jeff divorces Roseanne and marries Holly.
[Holly] It was a beautiful, beautiful wedding.
Beautiful day.
I did want to marry Jeff beyond a shadow of a doubt.
I mean, I... I loved Jeff.
I mean, he really was a great guy.
None of us knew that he had just been lying
about his entire life the whole time.
I mean, we just totally fell for what he was telling us.
He would do anything for me except tell the truth.
Yeah.
He told my father
that he was in Vietnam.
I guess it was to impress my father
because my father was a marine in World War II, Iwo Jima.
You question yourself because you think...
"You know, am I nuts?" [laughs]
He was very, very smart.
He would cover it up somehow.
Somehow he would just...
he would make it believable.
[narrator] And Holly did believe in Jeff
until the day the phone rang.
And it was a call from Canada.
[Holly] His brother called and said,
"You know, we've been looking for... for Jeff."
And when he got home from work,
"Hey, somebody called and said
they were your family from Canada."
And, you know, and his face turned white as a sheet.
And I thought maybe he murdered someone.
What was so horrible that you would have to do this?
It's just...
No words.
[narrator] In 1990, Jeff Walton's third wife, Holly Kelley,
learns that everything he told her and her parents
about his life is a lie.
I had to go tell my mother and father all of this
that this guy that they thought was Jeff Walton, his name is Ron Stan.
The question is, is where do you take it from there?
I knew at that point that it was over and he did, too.
[narrator] More than 20 years later,
his fourth wife, Deborah Proctor,
remains ignorant of his past.
But a lifetime of lies seems to be catching up with Jeff.
Jeff had had a number of hospitalizations,
one was hemorrhaging.
And they felt like he had bladder cancer.
And I never left his side.
And then he said, "Deb, I'm not feeling right.
I... My eyesight's really blurry.
I'm not making sense with my words."
And I took him in and he had had a stroke.
So, I was just trying to pay for everything.
[narrator] On the verge of bankruptcy,
Deborah asks Jeff to access his veteran's health benefits, but he refuses.
I said, "You don't understand.
We have nothing left."
And that's when he informed me,
"I'm not going to the Veterans for Care.
And besides that, I was in Special Forces.
I did have a dishonorable discharge."
And so, they're not even gonna have a list of me at the Veterans.
They're not gonna see me and I'm not going anyway.
And I remember at the time
feeling like my throat was closing
and my heart was heavy.
And I thought, something's not right.
It's just not right.
I thought maybe I should get a private investigator.
Anyway, I didn't.
I do think it... it was about that time
that I did go into what I would say is a severe depression.
I was sad.
I'd be somewhere in the house by myself,
but just sobbing and crying and just saying,
"I hate my life."
August 1st, 2014,
I was just in my office and my phone rang
and I picked up this particular phone call.
And he identified himself, his badge numbers.
He said he was in OPP,
Ontario Provincial Police.
He said, "Well, we have reason to believe
that you're married to Ron Stan.
We have reason to believe that he is a man
that burned his place down 37 years ago.
And left a newborn son and a toddler and a wife."
I was in so much shock, disbelief.
And when we hung up, I called my friends.
They said, "Oh, for God's sake,
you know, your life is probably in danger.
And we have to go out to the Cherokee Nation Marshal Service
and we have to get some help."
So that's what we did.
She was really confused.
This man that she had been with
for at least 14, 15 years
was possibly not the man he'd been saying he was.
I contact Canada.
I spoke to a female officer and she said, yes.
We opened up cold cases
and we came across his
and started working on it again.
[narrator] The officer said they found him by examining the social media pages
of his various family members.
[Shawnna] And we were shocked
that we actually found him on Facebook.
They explained that the reason
why he went missing was there was a barn fire.
And apparently, he was in the barn fire.
But they've never found any remains.
The case just kind of set for years
because they had no clue
and nothing ever surfaced again.
And they asked me at that time, they said,
"If you don't mind, could you interview him and see what he says?"
We're trying to figure out if this is him or not.
[narrator] Shawnna drives to the medical facility where Jeff is staying
while he recovers from his stroke
and meets him in a private room.
[Shawnna] I proceeded on to explain to him
that I had received a call from Canada police.
So, I eventually told him, I was like,
"Do you at least have your birth certificate?
Do you have your birth certificate so I can see?"
And he said, "Yes." And I said, "Well, where's it at?"
'Well, I don't know. I... I can't remember where."
And I said, "Well, that's okay."
I said, "I'll ask my dispatcher
to get a copy of your birth certificate."
And he looked at me.
He just started grinning.
So, you got me, didn't you?
And I said, "You have kids and a wife in Canada."
And he said, "Yes, I do."
Here he was using a deceased individual's Social Security number
and was getting Oklahoma benefits
of the Social Security number for at least 20 years.
He was a very good con.
I felt so sorry for Deb.
Once I got the confession from him.
Wasn't any getting around it.
That was the truth.
Just shocking.
I just didn't...
I didn't imagine anything like this.
I couldn't talk to Jeff.
What... what was I gonna say?
You... you're a liar?
But, you know, I had to plan.
I mean, how am I gonna tell my boys?
How am I gonna tell his boy?
She was very, very upset.
And I could certainly understand why.
[Deborah] I was grateful for my friends.
And we just started making plans.
Oh, we got to go to the bank.
We've got to get with your attorney.
We were able to get a quick claim deed and a quick divorce.
And our Tribe's domestic violence program helped me.
They helped serve the papers 'cause I just couldn't do it.
[narrator] Jeff Jr. agrees to take custody of his father.
It was just really angry.
I was frightened at this point that, you know,
he might hurt us
'cause now I'd learned he burned a place down.
[Katie] It was just a nightmare.
And you feel so stupid.
The time I spent with him wasn't...
was not quality time.
It was all fake time.
I just hated him.
[Deborah] I'm at home alone,
in my bedroom when I got the call that they had left.
Telephone, and they were on the road.
People talk about spiritual awakenings
or a burning bush moment or something.
For me, it... it was absolutely that moment.
I realized I couldn't get up.
I couldn't move.
And then I thought, "Dear God,
if you can just get me up on my feet,
I will not only survive,
but I will always remember to help others."
It was just a profound understanding
of what I've been through and what I had yet to do.
[Dave] I think it was a couple of days
after that I had a conversation with Jeff.
I think he was kind of somewhat relieved about the whole thing
coming out in the open after all these years.
An Ontario man who went missing in the '70s
and was declared dead in the '80s
has been found in the United States alive.
Police say the 69 year old has been living in Oklahoma under a different name.
Once it came out, it just snowballed.
[narrator] Deborah is about to learn
the full extent of Jeff's lies,
and it makes her ordeal even more unbearable.
And that's when I learned about all the lies.
[narrator] For 37 years,
Ronald Stan has been living under a fake identity in the US.
In 2014,
the Ontario Police issue a press release about the case.
[Tim] This story landed on my desk
and it said, "A man named Ronald Stan,
who was missing in 1977,
has been found alive and well in the United States."
Which was a crazy story. Like what...
what happened there?
[narrator] Tim Alamenciak finds Jeff in New Orleans,
where he is now living with his son Jeff Jr.
And he agrees to an interview.
[Tim] He had this kind of unmistakable charm
that I could see disarming somebody.
Every successive wife would eventually find out
about his past,
um, and his stories would just fall apart
and wouldn't quite hang together.
But he had this capacity to charm people off the hop
and to get people to kind of not dig deeper into his history.
[Holly] He just was a pathological liar.
Only a narcissist person could do something like that to...
to make people think you're dead
and to leave your children and never call them.
I don't think he was actually a very good liar.
And that's evidenced by how his story fell apart along the way.
And when you look into it and when you talk to people,
his family knew that he was alive.
His... his brother had contact with him on Facebook.
[narrator] Even his Canadian wife, Gail,
eventually found out about his lies in 1998
when he shows up at his dad's funeral.
[Tim] He said that his wife was at the funeral
and that she wouldn't even look at him.
As far as I know, he never spoke with Gail again.
[narrator] Ron had been declared legally dead in 1986
and Gail had received an insurance payout.
[Dave] He... he explained to me later on that insurance money
that his first wife had got,
once he contacted her,
she was quite PO'd about the whole thing and...
and paid the money back to the insurance company, so.
So there's no fraud or anything there.
[Tim] His father's funeral may have been a time
when he realized that he can't undo what he did in 1977.
And so, in reaction to that,
that might have been what spurred looking for another new life.
[narrator] Deborah never talks to Jeff again.
[Deborah] I was sitting in one of the airports
and he... I saw that he was calling
and it just went to voicemail
and he said that he had forgiven me
for everything I'd done to him.
And at this point I was just done.
I just could hardly even react,
you know, I just couldn't stand him.
[narrator] Months later, Deborah speaks to his old friend Dave Semple,
who explains why he never told her the truth.
He just explained that, you know, we had a good life.
We seemed happy,
and they just did not feel like
it was their place to fly in here
and tell me everything and destroy my life.
I myself submitted letters to HHS, Fraud Abuse.
I think I wrote three different divisions
of Medicare and Social Security
and let them know who Jeff really was.
And as far as I know, you know, nobody ever pursued it.
[narrator] Jeff never faces criminal charges for arson,
identity theft, bigamy or any of his misadventures,
but his life goes downhill after his divorce from Deborah.
I don't know what happened there,
but he wound up, I think, living almost a homeless life for a while.
And then he...
the next day I heard from little Jeff.
And that, I think it was 2019 that that...
that his dad had just passed away.
[narrator] Jeff may have left behind a trail of damaged lives,
but Deborah transcended his betrayal,
although it took her some time.
[Deborah] I just went through a lot of periods of just being
furious, angry...
turned it on myself sometimes,
you know, how could you?
Ah, and then resentful at all the best years of my life
I'd spent with him.
The job that I've moved into,
it is the focus entirely is domestic abuse,
family abuse, particularly women, but families.
I'm a director of a program
that that's our total focus.
And I feel like it's fulfilling a commitment I made
right after this happened
that I would always help others in this situation.
Because we can go on to not only survive, we can live.
And I feel like I live.
Not just a survivor, I live.
That's what I would want
for others.
We're warrior women.
We're very strong.