Past Lives

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Speaker 4 A wealthy American executive was found dead in his car in Mexico.

Speaker 4 It looked like an accident until a forensic anthropologist found evidence of a chilling tale of fraud and deceit.

Speaker 4 34-year-old Madison Rutherford had everything. He was ambitious, successful, happily married, and rich.

Speaker 4 He worked as a financial advisor in Connecticut with an uncanny ability to make money for his clients. He also managed money for his friends, like Brigada Beck.

Speaker 5 I thought, since I am alone in this country, I thought it might be wise, if anything would happen to me, I thought I I should have him as my executor.

Speaker 4 By all accounts, Madison Rutherford and his wife Reni lived lavishly and had expensive tastes.

Speaker 4 So it wasn't unusual for Madison to travel outside the United States pursuing his various interests. Madison Rutherford and his wife had a penchant for various types of animals, including dogs.

Speaker 4 And part of the reason for supposedly going to Mexico was to obtain another exotic dog.

Speaker 4 But a few days later, Mexican police found Rutherford's car in a ravine near Monterey.

Speaker 4 It appeared that the car had swerved off the road and caught fire.

Speaker 4 When they got there, the car was burnt beyond recognition. Everything was gone.
And he opened up the driver door and found some bone fragments on the driver's side.

Speaker 4 Inside, investigators found a medic alert pendant and a wristwatch.

Speaker 4 On the back of the watch, barely legible, was the inscription to Madison, Love Rennie.

Speaker 4 Also inside the car, the charred remains of a human. All that was left were some bones and teeth.

Speaker 4 The cause of death was listed as total carbonization, meaning that it just disintegrated from the heat. When Rutherford's wife Rennie got the news, she was devastated.

Speaker 4 Fortuitously, Rennie said she could help investigators with the identification of her husband.

Speaker 4 She proceeds to tell the insurance carriers that she has one of Rutherford's teeth that was left over from some type of dental work.

Speaker 4 The tooth was extremely helpful since its hard enamel shell often protects its inner core in a fire. That core contains an individual's DNA.

Speaker 4 But one of the forensic scientists in Mexico was suspicious, particularly when he examined the items recovered from the car.

Speaker 8 The clasp of the medical ERC bracelet was found in the open position. He thought that very odd.
If somebody had died, and that bracelet was on them, it would have been in the clasp position.

Speaker 4 Investigators wondered whether the open clasp was a clue or simply an unimportant detail.

Speaker 4 Although there were some inconsistencies in the accident scene,

Speaker 4 The Mexican authorities ruled that Madison Rutherford had burned to death in a car accident. Mexico wasn't pursuing this.
There was no complainant.

Speaker 4 They had a body and a tragic death, and they've closed their case.

Speaker 4 As a financial planner, Madison Rutherford had planned for his family's future in the event of his death. He had purchased an ample amount of life insurance.

Speaker 4 Rutherford had two separate policies, with two separate companies.

Speaker 7 He's doubly insured. He's insured for $7 million,

Speaker 7 $4 million from one company and $3 million from another company.

Speaker 4 As a routine matter, insurance companies like to make sure that a person who dies in a fire is, in fact, their client.

Speaker 4 The tooth given to them by Rutherford's wife could be used for DNA comparison, but it wasn't enough.

Speaker 4 So they sent the charred remains from the accident to one of the most respected forensic anthropologists in the world, Dr. William Bass.

Speaker 4 The best bone evidence was a small skull fragment and four teeth.

Speaker 4 Dr. Bass found something highly unusual about the skull fragment.

Speaker 4 The top outside of the skull wasn't burned.

Speaker 11 If you're sitting in your car and it's on fire,

Speaker 11 the top of your skull is going to burn. It's going to burn up in little pieces the size of a quarter.
And here's a situation in which this doesn't happen.

Speaker 4 Dr. Bass concluded there was only one way this could have happened.
The victim's head had to be on the floor of the car at the time of the fire.

Speaker 11 This tells me then

Speaker 11 that this is a stage scene.

Speaker 11 That this is not what happened

Speaker 11 in the normal crash of a car. That this is a body that has been placed in there in a position that it was not in before.

Speaker 4 The skull fragment also provided clues about the victim's age.

Speaker 4 The human skull has 28 different plate-like bones. These bones come together in a process called fusion.
Where they meet often looks like the stitching on clothes.

Speaker 4 As a person grows older, that stitching or fusion tends to disappear. In this case, it was almost non-existent.

Speaker 11 It tells me that this is not a 34-year-old individual. That this is an individual

Speaker 11 maybe twice that, certainly 50-plus,

Speaker 10 because you don't normally

Speaker 11 get that much fusion in a 34-year-old white male.

Speaker 4 The teeth also told a story.

Speaker 4 Sometimes different races have different shaped teeth. The ones recovered from the car had shovel-shaped incisors, not something associated with a white or Caucasian person.

Speaker 11 These teeth had characteristics that are very specific to mongoloid, this is a Japanese, Chinese, or American Indian

Speaker 11 characteristics.

Speaker 4 In addition, the teeth had large unfilled cavities.

Speaker 4 inconsistent with a wealthy man with access to the best in dental care.

Speaker 4 Dr. Bass informed the insurance companies of his findings.

Speaker 11 I was told that the individual in this car was a 34-year-old white male. That's not what I see.
What is in that car is a 50- to 60-plus-year-old Mexican peasant who has,

Speaker 11 from a lower socioeconomic level, obviously be a peasant, but had done manual labor.

Speaker 4 There were even more reasons to be skeptical and more evidence that the scene might have been staged.

Speaker 4 Insurance investigators looked more closely at the MedicAlert pendant and the watch found in the ashes.

Speaker 4 If the body had burned almost to ashes, why did these items remain relatively intact?

Speaker 4 And witnesses said they saw a bicycle on the back of Rutherford's car earlier in the day. But no bicycle was found at the accident site.

Speaker 4 If it wasn't Madison Rutherford in the car, who was it?

Speaker 4 And where was Madison Rutherford?

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Speaker 4 Forensic scientists were certain that Madison Rutherford was not the man killed in the car explosion in Mexico.

Speaker 4 The focus switched not so much from we need more proof of death, we actually think he's alive. And now we want to find out where.

Speaker 4 The authorities weren't the only ones concerned. His neighbor, Brigitte Beck, had entrusted Madison Rutherford with her entire life savings, about half a million dollars.

Speaker 4 And she wanted to know where it was.

Speaker 5 I was uncomfortable about the whole thing. I said, how is this going to play out?

Speaker 5 When do I get my money?

Speaker 5 When do I have a clear picture of this whole thing?

Speaker 4 Brigada went to the Rutherford's home and asked Rennie for answers.

Speaker 5 She

Speaker 5 said, just I need to speak with you and just don't make a sound. Please don't make a sound.
Don't say anything.

Speaker 9 And I said, what could, what's happening?

Speaker 5 So she leaned over kind of and she whispered, he said, Mariset is not dead. I said, what?

Speaker 5 And I said, what happened? Where is he? And she said, said, he's in hiding.

Speaker 5 I just lost it. I just thought this was just too much.
I just walked away after a few moments and I just cried.

Speaker 5 I just broke down.

Speaker 5 This was too much.

Speaker 4 For Brigada, things soon got even stranger when Madison Rutherford showed up alive and well at her house.

Speaker 5 This was all very bizarre. And how could he do that? And wouldn't he be afraid that he might get, you know, picked up, but somebody might damage the house?

Speaker 4 Rutherford told Brigitte that his death had been staged for him by none other than the FBI.

Speaker 4 He said that organized crime members were after him because he had refused to launder drug money.

Speaker 4 He assured Brigitte that her money was safe, but instructed her to tell no one he was alive.

Speaker 5 He asked me, would you mind if I could spend a couple of weeks weeks with you until I find out what I need to do next?

Speaker 5 I said, of course. I mean, the poor guy had to be hiding from the mob.
Why wouldn't I help somebody?

Speaker 4 Without warning, Madison left Brigitte's home, and she never heard from him again.

Speaker 4 A few weeks later, Brigitte got another visit, this time from the FBI.

Speaker 4 Their investigation into Madison Rutherford's financial dealings revealed he had withdrawn Brigitte's entire life savings.

Speaker 4 She was penniless.

Speaker 5 The agent said, There is no money. And I thought, maybe they made a mistake.
This cannot be. And I realized I had nothing left.
He had dismantled everything little by little.

Speaker 5 And I said, My God, what do I have in my pocket?

Speaker 5 Excuse me.

Speaker 5 I had exactly $500 in my checking account.

Speaker 9 That's what.

Speaker 4 Investigators had Rutherford's home under surveillance. Madison never appeared, but they finally got a break.

Speaker 4 A check of motor vehicles revealed that Madison owned a car that was being driven by a businessman in Massachusetts. His name was Thomas Bay Hamilton.

Speaker 7 He works as a controller for a technology company. It's a fairly small company in downtown Boston.

Speaker 4 As investigators were about to question Thomas Bay Hamilton, they got a call from Mexican authorities.

Speaker 4 They said they found a bag full of bloody clothes, and DNA tests concluded the blood was Madison Rutherford's.

Speaker 4 One year after Madison Rutherford's disappearance, Mexican police found a bag full of bloody clothing near the site of his car fire.

Speaker 4 The clothing showed numerous knife holes all over the chest area.

Speaker 4 DNA tests of that blood confirmed it belonged to Madison Rutherford.

Speaker 4 But this time,

Speaker 4 investigators didn't believe it.

Speaker 4 They were convinced the man they were following in Boston, Thomas Bay Hamilton, was in fact Madison Rutherford.

Speaker 7 Stu Robinson, the agent who arrested him in Boston, has these fingerprints with him. When Thomas Hamilton is arrested and we roll his fingerprints, they're the same prints.
This is our man.

Speaker 7 This is Madison Rutherford.

Speaker 4 The FBI searched his apartment and found books on how to change your identity and travel brochures on Mexico.

Speaker 4 And they found one item that appeared to tie up the case once and for all.

Speaker 7 In the Boston apartment, we find

Speaker 7 an actual to-do list. It says goals for the year 1999 slash 2000.
And the very top thing is collect $7 million from the insurance company. So that was a pretty good clue.

Speaker 4 we uh we we kind of tied him together with just that one piece of paper right after he was arrested rutherford called his wife from prison this call may be recorded or monitored the first thing is we have to keep you from getting picked up for anything they think you did which you didn't

Speaker 15 okay you got to go somewhere where they don't know the address they'll be for you tomorrow morning they'll get it they'll get an arrest warrant by then what happens to everything

Speaker 15 i don't know let's do this piece by piece i'm making i know but we've got to get you out of here.

Speaker 4 Rennie originally denied she had anything to do with the attempted fraud.

Speaker 4 But when investigators showed her evidence that her husband was dating other women while living in Boston, Rennie changed her mind.

Speaker 7 She was not happy. She went through a range of emotions

Speaker 7 within a short period of time,

Speaker 7 and ending with anger.

Speaker 4 With Rennie's help, prosecutors learned that they had been planning this crime for months.

Speaker 4 While Madison was in Mexico, he drove to a desolate graveyard in the Mexican countryside and removed a body.

Speaker 4 Went in to an above-ground tomb, took off the top of a casket, and took out the corpse out of the casket.

Speaker 4 Prosecutors believe he positioned his car with the body inside at the bottom of the ravine,

Speaker 4 doused it with gasoline,

Speaker 4 and started the fire.

Speaker 4 When the flames subsided, he threw in his medic alert bracelet and watch so they would survive the blaze and help identify the corpse.

Speaker 4 He then took off on his bicycle.

Speaker 4 Rutherford returned to the United States and gave his wife the tooth he removed from the body so it could be used for possible DNA testing.

Speaker 4 To this day, no one knows whose bones were inside the car.

Speaker 4 Later, when Rutherford learned investigators were onto him, he was forced to change his plans.

Speaker 4 According to Rennie, her husband got into the bathtub fully clothed and cut himself to make it appear that he had been stabbed. Then he returned to Mexico to plant the evidence.

Speaker 4 Rutherford never realized that forensic anthropology would uncover the true position of the body in the car and that the bones would reveal the man's race and age.

Speaker 4 Madison Rutherford thought of every detail, but he never thought of the bone doctor. Investigators, looking for a motive, soon discovered that Rutherford had gambled heavily in stocks and lost.

Speaker 4 He lost a considerable amount of money in the 1995-1996 period, and I think that he saw that faking his death and getting insurance proceeds was a way of recouping losses and providing himself with a nest egg for future investments.

Speaker 4 Investigators learned that Rutherford used a number of aliases in the past. All were presidential-sounding names, Madison, Rutherford, and now Hamilton.

Speaker 4 His real name was John Zanke.

Speaker 7 I thought it was ironic and quite humorous that he was arrested on Election Day on November 7th, 2000.

Speaker 7 So this man with all these presidential-sounding names didn't get a chance to vote for the next president. People think that the FBI doesn't have a sense of humor, but I think this proves that we do.

Speaker 4 When faced with the evidence against him, Madison Rutherford pleaded pleaded guilty to fraud.

Speaker 4 Federal sentencing guidelines limit his sentence to five years.

Speaker 4 His wife, Rennie, was sentenced to 18 months in prison for her part in the attempted fraud.

Speaker 4 Since Rutherford had withdrawn half a million dollars from Brigade Beck's accounts, she has nothing left.

Speaker 5 He ruined my life. He ruined my security.

Speaker 5 He couldn't care less.

Speaker 5 My wonderful friend Hurtina turned into a monster to me. And I hope that anybody that would find themselves in the same or similar situation, be careful.
You're so-called friends.

Speaker 4 No criminal charges could be brought against Rutherford for embezzlement since Brigitte had given him power of attorney.

Speaker 4 For investigators, Rutherford was clever, but clearly clearly no match for forensic science.

Speaker 11 This is one of the better cases that we have been able to solve from the use of science. And we're able to show that the actual events do not fit the story that we were told.

Speaker 8 There's an old adage that goes something like: you're only as smart as you are educated.

Speaker 8 And clearly, Madison Rutherford, as well educated as he might have been, was not educated in the area of forensics.