with no medical training.
A Hollywood producer whose most outrageous story
turned out to be the one about himself.
And a jazz musician whose greatest performance
was the one that was given offstage.
What makes a person want to become someone else?
Is it to escape their life?
Or is it to fool someone?
Or is there an even more profound reason?
Well, that is what we'll try and find out.
♪ ♪
SHATNER: As the Korean War rages around it,
the Royal Canadian destroyer HMCS Cayuga brings aboard
19 badly wounded South Korean soldiers
requiring immediate surgery.
Dr. Joseph Cyr, the ship's newly arrived physician,
is called upon to perform a series of procedures
to save the men's lives.
There's quite a few wounded men.
They're taken on board, and the ship captain tells Dr. Cyr,
"You have to operate. You have to save these guys."
So, according to all accounts,
Dr. Cyr takes this relatively calmly
and goes to it.
SHATNER: While the patients are prepped for surgery,
Dr. Cyr reviews a medical textbook
in his private quarters to prepare himself
for what would be the defining moment
of not only his career, but his entire life.
NATE HENDLEY: He performs a number of operations
on these wounded South Korean soldiers,
removing bullets, doing chest surgery.
And by all accounts, he was successful.
SHATNER: The story of Dr. Cyr's valiant performance
hit Canadian newspapers and spread like wildfire.
Across the country, people read about the naval doctor's
heroic efforts to save the lives
of the Korean soldiers.
But there was at least one woman who was stunned
by the news that Dr. Joseph Cyr had become a national hero.
And as it turned out, she had a very good reason
to be surprised.
HENDLEY: The mother of Dr. Joseph Cyr was reading the newspaper,
and reads this account of her son.
So she phones her son up, and her son is sort of like,
"Uh, no, I'm still posted in New Brunswick.
I'm not on a ship. What are you talking about?"
And it becomes obvious very quickly
that the guy on board the destroyer is an imposter.
The mother of the real doctor contacts the RCMP,
Canada's equivalent of the FBI,
and the shipboard captain on the destroyer is told,
"Uh, well, your surgeon is an imposter.
Uh, we've, uh, got to take him into custody."
He's taken back to Canada, he's put before a court
that would reveal that he's Ferdinand Demara,
of Lawrence, Massachusetts.
SHATNER: An American from Massachusetts
masquerading as a Canadian naval doctor
in the Sea of Japan?
But how?
And why?
HARVEY ROSENSTOCK: Ferdinand Demara
is a very fascinating man.
First of all, he came from a middle‐class family.
Very comfortable.
But then they suffered the Great Depression,
They had to move.
They had to downgrade, as it were.
They get to a poor neighborhood,
less of the affluent or semi‐affluent amenities.
So he went from a lot to less,
but it seemed to bother him more than his parents,
the best that we can tell.
And therefore, he had to fill in the difference.
HENDLEY: By all accounts, he's a very smart kid.
You know, does well at school.
But he drops out of high school,
and he starts this weird sort of moving around
and trying on new personas.
ROSENSTOCK: It turns out that he has the ability
to memorize very quickly.
He even claimed that he had a photographic memory.
So that he could look at something,
say, "That really belongs to me,"
and with a very good intellect, he could carry this off.
And he found
he could "borrow" any kind of credential
and become that person represented by that credential.
HENDLEY: He starts that from a very early age,
and he joins the military, goes AWOL,
joins other branches of the military.
In one of his very early impersonations,
he pretends to be a Trappist monk
and joins a monastery.
At the time he was pretending to be a Christian monk,
he made friends with a Canadian doctor named Joseph Cyr,
and he then goes to enlist in the Canadian Navy
and announces that he's Dr. Joseph Cyr
and uses the same credentials that the real doctor had.
There's a war going on at the time in Korea,
so they don't ask too many questions.
They're just delighted to get a surgeon.
SHATNER: In addition to posing
as a military surgeon and a monk,
Demara tried his hand at impersonating
a number of other professions, including
civil engineer, zoologist,
psychologist, philosophy professor
and lawyer, among many others.
Demara became so adept at impersonation
that he eventually became known by his most famous alias of all:
The Great Imposter.
Ironically, Demara's life went full circle.
After pretending to be all these different identities
his whole life, in the end he became famous for who he was.
Oh, I've been a surgeon lieutenant
in the Royal Canadian Navy.
‐You operated on people? ‐Mm‐hmm.
(audience gasping, chuckling)
Isn't that rather dangerous?
‐You might say that. ‐Uh‐huh.
Where did you steal your new credentials?
‐I acquire these things. ‐Oh.
I know. You keep telling me that.
I hate to bring the word "steal" into this conversation.
HENDLEY: He appeared on You Bet Your Life with Groucho Marx,
and he makes it clear
that he, "acquired credentials,"
and that he's going to use his prize money
to buy more credentials.
Were you in jail in... in, uh, Canada?
‐No, no. ‐In the United States, have you ever been in jail?
Yes, I have been in jail. I spent a year
in the Texas State Penitentiary.
‐Well, it's about time, I... ‐(laughter)
that somebody nails you.
What were you in there for?
Uh, I was in there as deputy warden.
(laughter)
ROSENSTOCK: As a result of that,
everybody wants to meet him,
wants to talk about him, wants to hear about him.
‐Are you Martin Goddard? ‐Yes, I am.
And your real name is Ferdinand Waldo Demara Jr.?
ROSENSTOCK: And then when Tony Curtis acted
in The Great Imposter, he became famous
because he could fool the world.
ALEXANDER STEIN: In many respects,
to be an imposter is...
fairly normal, although we think of them as...
somehow pathological.
In fact, there are many people who do it for work.
Actors are a form of imposters.
There are people who put on a costume or a uniform
to transform themselves in some way that gives them
some measure of authority in their work.
SHATNER: Let's face it: at one time or another,
most of us have fantasized about trying on a new identity.
Like when we engage in role‐playing games
or wear costumes on Halloween.
For most of us, of course,
the fantasy remains simply that: a fantasy.
But in the case of Ferdinand Demara,
The Great Imposter,
by pretending to be a surgeon,
is it possible that‐‐ in his mind, at least‐‐
he actually became one?
Ferdinand Demara impersonated a surgeon.
He wasn't a surgeon, but during the Korean War
while he was on a ship, he saved lives.
His ability to adapt from impersonation
might have given him the ability to adapt
under a stressful situation.
"Con man," of course, "con" is a kind of a nickname.
The origin of that word is "confidence."
In the case of someone like Ferdinand Demara,
because of his success
in being able to truly believe every one of his fantasies
as one new piece of reality,
he can act it out in such a real way
for a limited period of time.
SHATNER: By the time of his death,
from a heart attack on June 7, 1982,
Ferdinand Demara had spent the last several years of his life
as a Baptist minister
and later a counselor at Good Samaritan Hospital
in Anaheim, California.
In his obituary, Demara's lawyer and good friend, Melvin Belli,
is quoted as saying...
And why should there be?
After all, most of us can only live one life at a time.
Ferdinand Demara was able to live several.
PETER LANPHOTOGRAPHER: Chris! Chris, Chris!
SHATNER: French movie producer Christopher Reyes
is the talk of Tinseltown.
PHOTOGRAPHER: Where's the girls tonight?
SHATNER: Between a movie deal
with action star Jean‐Claude Van Damme,
co‐ownership of two chic Beverly Hills boutiques,
a perfume line endorsed by singer Michael Jackson
and a Playboy Playmate wife,
it appears Reyes's burgeoning reputation
as a Hollywood player is secure.
PHOTOGRAPHER: Thanks, Chris.
‐Good to see you. ‐All right.
He would mix with some of the movers and shakers in L. A.
Uh, so he'd throw kind of glamorous dinner parties.
He'd invite all of his friends that he'd met,
and he'd make sure that they saw that he was being generous
during these parties.
He said he was a venture capitalist.
He was in L. A. and he was mixing with the kind of people
who are also millionaires.
He would talk of how he was Sophia Loren's son,
he was Oscar de la Renta's nephew, and there was no reason
for people to disbelieve him.
He would maybe say, "Do you want to invest?
He'd give them an opportunity, and they would think
that they were gonna get something from him.
PHOTOGRAPHER: Chris! Let's go.
SHATNER: To everyone he meets, it seems Christopher Reyes
has perfected the recipe for Hollywood success.
Except there's one key ingredient missing.
Because, as it turns out, the man claiming
to be Christopher Reyes is a bigger fiction
than any conceived by a Hollywood screenwriter.
He is actually a notorious French con artist
named Christophe Rocancourt.
Well, Rocancourt was the world's coolest con man, in essence.
Um, you know, he was smooth, he was charismatic.
He was ambitious.
So, he had all the traits of a classic con man.
HENDLEY: By all accounts,
Christophe's approach was very simple, but direct.
He would tell people, you know "If you invest
in my various enterprises,"
you know, "I can vastly increase your money."
So his methods were not terribly,
you know, sophisticated, but they worked,
and he pulled in a lot of money from people.
IANTORNO: In Paris, he'd set up this alias for himself,
a wealthy Russian nobleman.
From just sheer confidence and imagination,
he was able to pull off a few scams. Uh, most notably,
when he managed to forge the deeds to a building in Paris
and sell it for over a million dollars.
SHATNER: As he scammed his way across Europe,
Christophe Rocancourt defrauded dozens of victims
under numerous aliases.
But while authorities had a mountain of lies
and fake identities to sort through,
they were missing one elusive truth:
who actually was
Christophe Rocancourt?
IANTORNO: Rocancourt grew up, um, in a small town
on the Normandy coast,
uh, just where the‐the River Seine meets the English Channel.
Uh, it's a lovely place, um,
but he didn't have the best childhood.
His father was an alcoholic
and his mother had to resort to prostitution.
HARVEY ROSENSTOCK: Here is a young person who is in
a desperate survival mode from the earliest stages.
This kind of person really has no reason to trust the world.
And so he found out
that he can acquire wealth by deceptive means.
There's no reason for him to feel sorry
about the next person, 'cause in his mind,
presumably, no one felt sorry for him.
JONATHAN YOUNG: I think the game had its own reward.
This is a very hostile game,
and this is a wounded, aggressive person.
He wanted to hurt people. He wanted to take their money.
It was a coldhearted transaction.
SHATNER: For most people, the notion of scamming
and conniving their way to wealth and happiness
is unthinkable.
So, what drives serial impostors
like Christophe Rocancourt to use impersonation
to not merely pretend to be someone else,
but to actually inflict harm?
And not just once or twice, but over and over again?
ROBBINS: For a lot of impostors that grow up
in a damaged childhood where they're facing abuse
or traumatic events, they have to develop
these sort of coping mechanisms.
One, they start to see themselves on the outside
of the normal reality that everyone else does.
The society as a norm is here,
and they're on the outskirts of that.
So, then they start to categorize people as others.
The second is that they have to be able
to anticipate the actions of their abuser.
So, this starts to form an unusual kind
of predictive empathy in order for them to survive.
SHATNER: No matter the reason for their duplicity,
once discovered, most impostors' lives
are shattered beyond repair.
But while you might think someone
as internationally notorious as Christophe Rocancourt
would stop his antics
after being so thoroughly exposed, well,
you'd be wrong.
Eventually things came tumbling down when people
started suspecting that he was a fraud.
So when he moved from L. A. to New York,
Rocancourt was running the same scams
as he always had done.
He was having lavish dinner parties,
he was inviting exclusive guests.
He was getting them to invest large sums of money,
$50,000 or a $100,000 at a time.
I think people started suspecting Rocancourt
when a few things just stopped adding up.
He was driving a Mazda rather than the kind of car
that you'd expect a millionaire to be driving.
He tasted some wine that was cheap wine,
and he thought it was expensive wine.
Maybe he was just getting sloppy.
And it was an unpaid hotel bill in the end
that was the thing that got him caught.
SHATNER: In 2003, Christophe Rocancourt plead guilty
to charges of bribery, theft and fraud.
He was ordered to pay $1.2 million to his victims
and sentenced to 46 months in federal prison.
After his release in October 2005,
Rocancourt returned to Europe
where his notoriety as a smooth‐talking con man
continued to make headlines.
But Rocancourt's deceptions appear almost benign
when compared to those of another famous impostor,
one who became so desperate to hide his true identity
that it not only cost people their fortunes,
it also cost them their lives.
SHATNER: Sandra Boss, a recent Harvard Business School graduate,
marries Clark Rockefeller, a man who is known to her
as a member of one of the wealthiest
and most powerful families in America.
After the couple's fairy‐tale wedding,
Sandra went to work
for a prestigious consulting firm in Boston
while Clark resumed working on international poverty relief.
But the fairy tale didn't last long.
MARK SEAL: He claimed he was working on so many high‐level things,
but he wasn't contributing to the marriage financially.
And he said, "Well, to charge these struggling countries
a fee would be, you know, unconscionable."
He didn't seem to want to go out and get a regular job.
And so she was beginning to get tired of this.
SHATNER: After more than ten years of marriage,
Sandra Boss finally had enough and filed for divorce.
It was a decision that would not only unravel her marriage,
but also unravel the strange truth about her husband.
SEAL: Clark Rockefeller had
no passport, no credit cards, no birth certificate
that she could find.
HENDLEY: She can't come up with any documentation.
So she really has the whip hand during the divorce,
and she ends up winning custody of their daughter, Snooks.
He's absolutely gobsmacked by this, and he's miserable,
because he is actually devoted to his daughter.
So he comes up with this harebrained plan
and he kidnaps his daughter.
SHATNER: The FBI immediately launched
a nationwide manhunt,
but Clark Rockefeller had vanished into thin air.
And the reason the authorities had such a hard time
tracking down Clark Rockefeller
was because
there was no Clark Rockefeller.
So, I'm at home. My brother calls me.
He goes, "Turn on CNN right now."
I turn on the TV, and I look, and I go,
"That's Christian Gerhartsreiter."
And it says right across the top, "Clark Rockefeller."
So we called the FBI and said,
"This is Christian Gerhartsreiter."
He was a German exchange student that came to our house.
I was 15 at the time,
and he was 17.
But the FBI, like, they didn't even know his name.
SEAL: It was covered in all the media, on television,
and when the AMBER Alert was issued, he was apprehended.
He was returned to Boston to face charges.
And that's when his incredible life
of all these different personas unspooled.
SHATNER: At trial, Sandra watched as her husband, the man
she had believed to be a member of the Rockefeller family,
was sentenced to four to five years in prison
for custodial kidnapping.
But what was it that compelled Christian
to lie to his friends, family
and associates for so long?
ROBBINS: The phenomenon of an impostor is an interesting dichotomy
that somebody has to live with.
They have two stories constantly colliding.
And often, if you're going to perpetuate that consistently,
you have to almost have a form of delusion,
to be able to compartmentalize one of those realities
so that you can live your life
without having this other one on the back burner.
SHATNER: Are impostors who carry out elaborate deceptions
acting out a kind of wish fantasy?
And if so, how does this fantasy
first take hold in their mind?
For the answer, perhaps it's best to look all the way back
into Christian's past.
Christian Karl Gerhartsreiter
grew up in West Germany.
By all accounts, he was kind of a bit of an oddball,
prone to fantasy, a little on the nerdy side,
and really wanted to get out of West Germany.
So in 1978, he travels to the United States
and shows up on the doorstep of this family in Connecticut
called the Savios,
and just sort of went into high school,
said he was an exchange student, and things got
progressively stranger from there.
SAVIO: He told me that his father created parts
for Mercedes‐Benz.
And, of course, you know, they had money.
You know, servants.
We all knew it was ridiculous.
We laughed at it at the time.
SHATNER: By 1985, Christian had taken up residence
on the West Coast.
He had also taken a new name.
He moved to San Marino, which is a rich community
in Southern California,
and assumed the name Christopher Chichester,
and announced that he was part of the British royal family.
He would go get free lunches at social clubs
and private members clubs.
He'd start schmoozing up all the rich ladies in town,
attends a very fancy church.
Ends up living in the guesthouse
of a local woman named Ruth Sohus.
He lives there rent‐free,
and all is well for a while, but then
Ruth's son, John, shows up with his wife Linda.
And John, apparently,
was a bit suspicious of this
strange guy living in Mom's guesthouse.
And then, all of a sudden, Linda and her husband disappear.
SHATNER: Soon after Linda and John Sohus disappeared,
so did Christopher Chichester.
And Christian the imposter moved back to the East Coast,
where he would eventually live under his most infamous alias:
Clark Rockefeller.
The rest, as they say, is history.
But not before this bizarre story
took yet another unexpected twist.
In March of 2011,
after Christian was convicted of kidnapping his daughter,
authorities in California gathered enough evidence
to charge him with a more serious crime
than any he had been charged with before:
the 1985 murder
of John Sohus.
MARK SEAL: Ruth Sohus had passed away,
and another couple had bought her home
and were installing a swimming pool.
HENDLEY: Where Christian lived in San Marino,
they dug up the backyard and discovered human remains.
And the body was cut up into pieces,
but it was wearing the same kind of clothes
that John Sohus typically wore:
jeans and a flannel shirt.
And apparently, parts were in bags from schools
that Christian Gerhartsreiter had attended.
So then he was put on trial for murdering John Sohus.
He was found guilty, and he is now an inmate
in San Quentin Prison in California.
The police detective that I interviewed
said that the motive was money.
He was to inherit a sizable amount of money
from Ruth Sohus, and that's what they believed.
And Linda Sohus had disappeared
off the face of the earth.
What happened to Linda?
That's still an enduring mystery of this case.
SHATNER: Imposters like Christian,
who are willing to lie‐‐
or even kill‐‐ for the sake of protecting an illusion,
would certainly seem to be troubled,
misguided individuals.
But if that's true, then why do so many of us
fall for their deceptions?
YOUNG: Part of the magic story
is using a name like Rockefeller.
It has a mana, a glitter to it.
It draws people.
And there is an element of collusion.
So the inability to catch the warning signs
has to do with the intentional blindness of the victim.
They want something, and they want this story to be true,
so they're participating.
ROBBINS: That's really the secret to a con.
It's not about manufacturing a whole fake reality.
Instead, it's finding the story
that people are telling themselves
and just elaborating on it.
They're able to compartmentalize this reality,
because they're not worried about somebody else.
These, together, present opportunity
for somebody to be very evil.
SHATNER: Today, instead of going by the name Clark Rockefeller,
Christian is known as inmate number AR3108
at San Quentin State Prison.
Hopefully, his days of adopting false identities
have been ended forever.
Unlike another imposter,
whose assumption of a new identity was so credible
and so enduring
that many remain convinced that her deception was true,
even decades after her death.
HENDLEY: In the case of impostors who have a damaged past,
does the assumption of a new identity help them
to recover the details of a forgotten life?
Perhaps the answer can be found by examining the case of a woman
who many called an imposter,
but who, until the day she died,
insisted she was really
a long‐lost Russian princess:
the Grand Duchess, Anastasia.
In the aftermath of the Bolshevik Revolution,
the exiled emperor, Tsar Nicholas II,
his wife Alexandra, and their five children
are awakened in the night by their captors.
Frightened and confused,
they are herded along with four of their loyal servants
into the basement of the Ipatiev House.
There, while waiting for further instructions,
a group of Soviet secret police
enter and raise their pistols.
The last thing the confused family hears.
is the sound of gunfire.
(gunshots echoing)
After the execution, the bodies of the Romanov family
were burned and then buried in a mass grave.
But in the wake of the killing, rumors emerged
that the youngest daughter, Anastasia,
had survived the slaughter.
I think the idea that An‐Anastasia might have escaped,
it seems to be because of the chaos and the time it took
for the true events that night to come out.
It was said that the gunmen were drunk,
and the cellar was full of smoke.
The story, such as it is,
is that she somehow survived the shooting
and that one of the Bolshevik guards
noticed she was alive
and had this residual sympathy for the royal family,
and sneaked her out of the death house
and put her on a horse cart
and rode her to Romania.
SHATNER: The limp body of a young woman
is pulled from a canal
after a failed suicide attempt.
Suffering from traumatic amnesia and severe depression,
she is admitted into a mental hospital.
The doctors, unable to verify the woman's identity,
refer to her as Fraulein Unbekannt:
Miss Unknown.
WELCH: She became known as Miss Unknown,
which lasted for months.
And she was ripe for having an identity
sort of thrust on her.
ROSENSTOCK: Most likely, she has a primary diagnosis
of post‐traumatic stress disorder.
Therefore, we have some deficits
in cognition,
we have some bizarre emotionality,
and we have someone who's in a state
of confusion, which comes and goes in different gradations.
Over the course of about a year or so,
another patient sort of notices she looks a bit like
one of the Romanov daughters, and so these rumors emerge
that she's connected to the royal family.
WELCH: Once they've latched on to some evidence
that she might be Anastasia,
it's all sort of a case of confirmation bias.
Everybody looks for the things.
And I think, in a general way,
people wanted hope out of a terrible tragedy.
It's a human instinct.
And the survival of Anastasia represented hope.
SHATNER: In 1922,
the mysterious woman,
who had also gone by the name Anna Anderson,
was released from the hospital
and soon began calling herself Anastasia.
And it wasn't long before her haunting story
made worldwide headlines,
prompting many to ask,
"Was the woman in Berlin an imposter
or the Russian grand duchess?"
STEIN: She went viral, in a sense, at that time,
because the world was hungry for that kind of scandal.
Because she wasn't out there
energetically trying to perpetrate frauds
under the guise of being this person.
In a sense, she was just put into a role.
ROBBINS: She was somebody who was desperately
searching for a reality,
and she danced through multiple realities.
The question of whether she was intentionally impersonating
someone else or whether that was the truth
is still left up to history.
There were quite a few Anastasia imposters,
but she benefitted from having this sort of definite transition
where she was pulled from the canal.
And the reason for her success was because she was supported
by members of the Romanov family.
Unfortunately, she was also not supported by a lot of them.
She had supporters and detractors.
But I think once you have a grand duke
or a prince on your side,
then people will flock around.
HENDLEY: There's these rumors that the Romanovs banked
outside of Russia, that they had millions of rubles
in a British bank and all this.
So the real Anastasia
could be in for a fortune.
So for a period of time was really living it up.
She, at one point, was staying with European royals.
WELCH: Two of her big supporters
in Germany were aristocrats,
who supported Anastasia, believed in her cause,
even though she was very difficult to handle.
But these people were so sure
that she was Anastasia, they put up with a lot.
SHATNER: Given that she possessed
what was thought to be a Russian accent,
had scarring across much of her body,
which seemed consistent with bayonet wounds,
and cornflower‐blue eyes,
which matched those of the missing Grand Duchess,
there was enough compelling evidence to suggest
that the young woman pulled from the German canal
might really be Anastasia.
But given the nature of the tsar's family's
bloody execution,
how could anyone survive?
ROSHATNER:: The young woman claiming to be the Grand Duchess, Anastasia
has taken up residence at Castle Seeon
as a guest of Duke George of Leuchtenberg,
a distant relative of Tsar Nicholas II.
But the aristocrats and European royalty,
who had been hosting the strangely eccentric woman
are beginning to suspect that there is no way
she could actually be the long‐lost Russian princess.
Especially after it is reported that Anna Anderson
actually had yet another name.
HENDLEY: What happened was in 1927,
a detective looked into her background,
and the detective says, "This is not Anastasia."
This is a Polish peasant girl named Franziska.
And Franziska moved from Poland to Berlin
during the first World War and suffered a severe head injury
while working in a munitions plant.
There was an explosion, so she had brain damage,
went into mental homes after that,
and then all of a sudden jumps into a canal in 1920.
And this triggers this decades‐long argument.
You know, is this really Franziska
or is this Anastasia?
SHATNER: In 1938, as the controversy
regarding Anna Anderson's identity reached a fever pitch,
the woman who had by now firmly convinced herself
that she was the real Anastasia
petitioned a German court to try her case
and restore her birthright.
It marked the beginning of the longest‐running lawsuit
in German history.
For decades, evidence was presented
both for and against Anna's claim,
including comparisons of handwriting samples
and photographic comparisons of Anna and Anastasia's ears.
Officially, Anna's court case ended in 1970,
with neither side able to conclusively establish
the would‐be monarch's identity.
But that was by no means the end of the story.
In 1991, seven years after Anna's death,
the mangled remains of the Romanov family were found
buried in a mass grave just a short distance
from where they were executed.
And the investigators were shocked to find
that the remains of the tsar's son Alexei
and one of the Romanov's four daughters
were missing.
WELCH: In 1978,
one of the killers of the Romanov family
made a confession, and as a result of that,
bodies were found under some railway sidings.
HENDLEY: The guy who found the remains
kept this a secret, though, for two decades
because the communists were still in power
and he kind of sensed this might be a bad idea to tell everybody.
WELCH: This was in the '90s and Anastasia,
Anna Anderson, had already died, unfortunately.
But it was discovered that two of the bodies were missing.
SHATNER: Two of the bodies missing?
Could it be that Anna Anderson was not an impostor
after all, but the real Anastasia?
WELCH: When the news came through
that two bodies were missing, everybody was rather excited
and thought, "Well, this proves that Ana‐Anastasia lived."
However, the bodies were then tested for DNA.
HENDLEY: They compared samples of Anna
and find that she doesn't match the Romanovs at all.
But there is a match between
Anna and her relatives of Franziska.
Later on, a second plot of bodies was found,
and the body of Anastasia is
actually found and DNA‐tested.
For a second time, DNA testing is brought in
and said, "No, no, no, Anastasia was buried
along with the rest of her family."
And Franziska was totally deluded.
But even today, there's people who insist that the DNA tests
were all fake and that this really was Anastasia,
and someone really did survive
this brutal slaughter of the royal family.
YOUNG: Strangely, Anna Anderson did
become something larger than life.
She became a legend.
There have been many books.
There have been movies, a musical.
We still love the story,
and when it is retold in the fictionalized versions,
she is always really the princess.
STEIN: She was just a puppet of forces
that were beyond her.
And she was clearly quite malleable
and was willing to become
the persona that had been assigned to her.
Her capacity to be
delusional clearly played a part in the formation
of this false identity,
which she seemed to live as if it were actual.
SHATNER: Whether Anna Anderson truly believed
or simply wanted to believe that she was Anastasia Romanov,
she never wavered from her claim
even until the day she died.
But what drives someone
to stick to their story, no matter what?
For some, as it turns out, it is not merely
a choice, a con or a delusion.
Some people are simply born to be someone else.
jazz musician and band leaderpr
during the 1940s and 50s, dies at the age of 74 in his home.
But when the paramedics arrive, they make a shocking discovery.
Billy Tipton was, in fact...
a woman.
Here's someone who was gifted, a great pianist,
a great saxophone player, someone who had dramatic talent.
But every time Dorothy Lucille Tipton
went for a musical audition,
she was turned down regardless of obvious talent.
YOUNG: One day here she is, Dorothy Lucille Tipton
changes her name to Billy Tipton,
cuts her hair short, puts on a suit, goes in, gets the job.
She's got the chops, she's got the talent,
and now she has the work.
And she has a successful career,
decades as a successful jazz pianist.
The Billy Tipton Trio were quite popular.
They played all over the place.
And by all accounts,
they were a well‐regarded jazz trio
back in this era, in the '50s, '60s.
STEIN: Billy Tipton was looking to do something
that was critically important to her life‐‐ to make music
and to be accepted into a society
that would not have her as herself.
She wasn't gonna let something like gender
or prejudice get in her way.
SHATNER: Eventually, Billy became so committed to living as a man
that even his wives, of which he had five
over the course of his life,
claimed to never know the truth about Billy.
The 30s, 40s, 50s were much primmer than today.
Husbands and wives typically didn't parade around naked
in front of each other.
ROSENSTOCK: This individual said,
"I have a certain kind of problem
"where I can't have sex.
"It comes from a childhood injury,
"too difficult to explain.
"But I can be a wonderful husband.
I can be a wonderful father."
And, therefore, he was able to carry out
this facade as Billy Tipton.
STEIN: There are people in certain societies
all over the world who,
by virtue of the prejudice of the society
or the community in which they live,
cannot allow themselves to be themselves,
which seems like a real perversity
that the only way they could be real is to be fake.
Because you are living the secret,
not just living with a secret.
We have many characters within ourselves.
We're not consistent.
We have a business self, we have a social self,
we have a parental self, we have a good‐citizen self.
And this brings up some issues about reality.
An old thief once told me that you have to die with a lie.
If somebody finds out that you're a fraud,
they'll think you're a fraud from that point forward.
Billy Tipton died with that lie, but for him, that wasn't a lie.
That was his truth.
SHATNER: For Billy Tipton, living as a man was more than a role.
It was his life.
But when a person commits themselves
to an impersonation so thoroughly,
which part of them is more real?
Who they were?
Or who they've chosen to become?
Perhaps they exist to remind us that who we are
and who we think we are are not always the same.
And that our own carefully constructed facades
could shatter at any moment,
exposing the parts of ourselves we would prefer to keep hidden
and, um... unexplained.
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