Jailed wife caught in ‘tangled web’ Zeigler denies baby scheme

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PORTLAND – Slumped in a chair inside a stark room at Cumberland County Jail Friday morning, 24-year-old Lynn Zeigler started to cry. Her bright orange jail suit contrasted sharply with her gray eyes, long brown hair and pale, youthful face.

“I just want to go home,” she said, removing her glasses and wiping her eyes. “It cannot be fair that they have kept me here this long.”

Zeigler was arrested Sept. 3 and has been held in jail for more than four months on a charge of Class C theft. She and her husband, John Zeigler, 43, are accused of bilking the town of Fairfield and the state out of $6,600 worth of welfare benefits.

Because Somerset County Jail cannot house women, Zeigler has spent the last three months in Portland, unable to post $10,000 cash bail. John Zeigler remains in Somerset County Jail unable to meet his $15,000 cash bail.

Normally, such a theft charge would require much smaller bail amounts of several hundred dollars or less. But this is no normal case.

What has pushed the bail so high for the Zeiglers is the possibility of further charges stemming from a nearly two-year, multiagency investigation into Internet fraud and babies being offered for sale online.

Lynn Zeigler denies any involvement in such a scam and portrayed herself as a victim of an abusive husband.

“I’ve never seen quite such a tangled web,” said Assistant Attorney General David Spencer last week.

Spencer’s rendition of what happened in Fairfield last year expectedly differs from Lynn Zeigler’s version.

He said the investigation into the welfare fraud case revealed as early as last February that the Zeiglers “were trying to get their hands on a child” and had offered a baby for adoption on the Internet.

“We know they were attempting to sell babies over the Internet and they were determined to obtain a child either by birth, through a friend or abduction,” said Spencer. He said a search of the couple’s computer uncovered instructions on how to abduct a child and alter its identity.

Since March 2002, Spencer has been trying to determine whether the Zeiglers had a child of their own, a baby identified as Rose in documents the couple filed to obtain welfare benefits.

Police also were investigating allegations that Rose – along with other babies – also was offered up by the couple for sale by adoption on the Internet.

“At this point we have no credible information that the child ‘Rose’ existed,” Spencer said last week. “My concerns, however, are that the Zeiglers went far beyond what they needed to do to pull off these scams.”

He said the couple had baby clothes, furniture and toys and had even filled a baby book with pictures. “It would be one thing if all we were seeing were statements on the Internet or on documents that involved a scam and fraud,” Spencer said. “It went way beyond that.”

He would not comment further, other than to say the case was still under investigation and that more charges were likely.

In an e-mail sent to the Bangor Daily News shortly after reports of the Zeiglers’ arrests were published, a military couple from Okinawa said they paid the couple “thousands of dollars” for medical costs as part of an adoption deal.

Steven and Katherine Henry claimed they were one of more than half a dozen couples whom the Zeiglers convinced to pay money for adoption services that never materialized.

“We are a military family that they scammed out of thousands of dollars and we were supposed to adopt the baby, Rose. They said a friend in Alabama was keeping the child for them. They had created this whole adoption agency with a Web site and pictures of children available for adoption,” wrote Katherine Henry. “These are horrible, horrible people.”

A query posted by the NEWS on adoption support group Web sites resulted in dozens of other e-mails from concerned couples and attorneys across the country.

Many said they, too, had visited a Web site on which the Zeiglers offered babies for sale, including a child named Rose. No such site now exists, but at least nine couples said they reached a point where they were preparing to send money to begin the adoption process before they pulled out because of feelings the Web page offering was not legitimate.

During a jailhouse interview on Friday, Lynn Zeigler said she never had a baby and denied any knowledge of a baby-for-sale business.

She also said she never saw the thousands of dollars people claim the couple was paid.

“We lived from eviction notice to eviction notice,” Lynn Zeigler asserted. “I don’t have that kind of money.”

She said that if her husband was conducting such activities on the Internet, she was not aware of it. “I learned that if I questioned him, I was beaten,” she said. “He’d hit me or lock me in the bedroom.”

Slowly, over two hours on Friday, Lynn told the tale of her two-year marriage, portraying herself as a victim of John Zeigler, who refused requests to be interviewed for this article.

Quietly and often emotionally, she explained that she was deceived and repeatedly abused by her husband, whom she said she would divorce as soon as she is released from jail.

“Twice he was arrested for assault [on me],” she said, “once in Androscoggin County and again in Kennebec County.”

The complaints could not be verified over the weekend since the courts were closed.

“I had talked to him [on the Internet and by telephone] for about four months, but I had only known him four days when we got married,” she said. “I know now what a terrible mistake that was.”

Then 21, Lynn said she was a college student, working and living on her own when she met and married the then-41-year-old Zeigler. “He was so much older than me. I guess I was depressed, not sure of myself. I really wanted the marriage to work.”

Almost immediately, Lynn Zeigler said, she realized her new husband was not the person he portrayed himself to be. He told her he had worked for NASA, but did not tell her the job was as a janitor. He said he was a Navy SEAL and had been a prisoner of war.

Other discrepancies began appearing, but, Lynn Zeigler said, “it was when I began to question him that the abuse started. John did his own thing and I couldn’t be nosy. I had never been in an abusive relationship before and I didn’t know the warning signs. I had no idea what to expect.”

“At first it wasn’t so bad and I thought, ‘Well, if I leave him because he hit me just once and he swears he won’t do it again, is that right? Where is what he gives me emotionally going to come from? And how would I get out? I was asking myself that right up until I got arrested – ‘How do I get out of this?'” she said.

Lynn Zeigler maintained that she was unaware of the state’s Internet fraud investigation until after she was arrested. She also said she was unaware that just months before John Zeigler began courting her, he was the subject of an intensive investigation into a teen sex ring in Washington state.

According to 37 pages of court documents from that state, including search warrants, affidavits, an police and witness statements, John Zeigler was investigated after allegations that he and other adults in his home were involved in a sadomasochistic ring targeting teenage runaways.

No charges were filed, according to Detective Edward McGowan of the Grays Harbor Sheriff’s Department in Washington.

“Our witness, a 15-year-old runaway from Texas, was picked up by her father and they then disappeared,” said McGowan. “We couldn’t press the case forward without her.”

Lynn Zeigler said Friday that “all of the state’s concerns are well-founded,” but she also hoped that after more than four months in jail, her situation could be cleared up quickly.

“There should come a time when you accept that [the investigation] is done, over. This is not fair. I am here on a theft charge – nothing else. My bail does not fit the crime, and I am certainly not a flight risk.”

Her attorney, Philip Mohlar of Norridgewock, agreed. When asked at what point the investigation should be concluded, Mohlar said, “It is already there.”

Mohlar said that in an earlier court hearing regarding custody of the fictitious “Rose,” the court ruled that the child does not exist. “We can now use that to our advantage,” he said.

Mohlar said he plans to get Lynn Zeigler before a judge within the next week or two and allow her to plead guilty to the theft charges. He is confident that she will be sentenced to time served and released.

Lynn Zeiglar said that if any good has come of her situation it is that she and her family are drawing closer after years of little or no contact.

She would not give her maiden name or name her parents, but said they were elderly, disabled and reside in Monmouth.

She said her intent after getting out of jail was to care for her parents and go back to college, where she was studying social services and early childhood education.

Meanwhile, she said, “I just wait, just wait, just wait. How can I just wait like this? I am beginning to think this will never be taken care of.”