Frederick Emerson Peters
Famously, when Frederick Emerson Peters was found lying dead in a New Haven hotel room, his shirt pocket contained five checks. All of them had different names on them. This was a man who spent decades posing as other people. Not only would he pretend to be ordinary Americans, he even had the audacity to pose as some of America’s most famous individuals and, for the most part, he got away with it. His was a story that combined unique skill with unparalleled gumption and even today, he is regarded as one of America’s most infamous impostors.
Relatively little is known about F.E. Peters’ early years. He was born in West Salem, Ohio, in 1885 and, clearly a honest life was not his thing because, by his teens, he was already an accomplished conman. Highlighting just how brazen he was, by 1902, at the age of just 17, Peters was passing himself off as Theodore Roosevelt II, the son of the President. What’s more, it was working. He would make countless purchases in shops and restaurants using bad checks and would always be gone by the time the victims knew they had been conned.
Even when he was arrested and imprisoned in 1915, Peters refused to go on and straight and narrow. During his decade behind bars, he used his time to study and plan future cons in the prison library, identifying the trade in rare books and museum pieces as the perfect opportunity for his unique skill set. Upon his release, then, he returned to his old ways, adopting dozens of difference aliases. He even posed as Franklin D. Roosevelt. So audacious were his efforts to pass bad checks that many victims just kept them as souvenirs.
By the 1950s, Peters had made it onto the FBI’s most wanted list, an impostor among murderers and gangsters. In 1959, he was found in a non-descript hotel room, dead from a cerebral hemorrhage at the age of 73. The forged checks filling his pockets were evidence that even old age couldn’t tame this compulsive liar and persistent impostor.