Status: Hoax
A Missouri couple, Sarah and Kris Everson, have been charged with
staging an elaborate hoax to fool people into believing they had sextuplets. Supposedly Sarah gave birth to the six babies on March 8. Stories about the multiple birth ran in local papers, and people who heard about the family's tight financial situation began to organize donations for them. Sarah also supplied the Associated Press with a photograph of herself looking very pregnant, as well as sonograms of the kids. The babies themselves were supposedly still in intensive care. But the authorities became suspicious when all the hospitals in the area stated that they had no clue who these people, or their babies, were. Turns out there were no babies. Just a bizarre scheme to con people into giving them money.
I write about birth hoaxes in
Hippo Eats Dwarf, where I note that they're more common than you would think (
Reality Rule 1.1: Just because a woman looks pregnant, it doesn't mean she is). Nowadays the most common birth scam is for a woman to pretend to be pregnant and then con a couple who want to adopt her child into supporting her until the baby is delivered. She lives in high style for a few months and then skips town. Multiple-birth hoaxes, such as the Missouri case, are quite rare, though as I note in the
Gallery of Birth Hoaxes, there were a number of them from the 1930s to the 1950s, following the 1934 birth of the Dionne Quintuplets. But multiple-birth hoaxes began to go out of style once fertility drugs made multiple births more common. The phenomenon lost its novelty.
What surprises me about the Missouri case is that the couple must have known they couldn't keep the hoax going without, at some point, producing six babies. So what exactly was their plan? Obviously these weren't the most brilliant criminals in the world.
Comments
Someone I know who lives near them said that a neighbor even reported seeing the babies at one point.... bizarre!
Thank god that it was a hoax, otherwise there would have been 6 more simpletons.
http://www.kctv.com/Global/story.asp?S=4765176
Now they are getting national media attention. Probably not good for their future business projects.
You know if I had given these two people money it would have been pretty lame. Losing money to a couple of con artists like that. I'd probably complain for a good while after the fact, try to get the money back, etc. Then I'd kick myself hard for being so naive. Should they be incriminated for accepting gifts from people? It sounds like the donations arranged were merely gifts of money that people had given "unofficially". Like a friend giving me $20 as a gift. I don't think it's tax deductible and I don't really think it would be right to try these people in court for accepting gifts based on a lie. For the most part those who are scammed pretty much just lose out. I might be wrong. Anyway, maybe this will teach people not to be such suckers.