Come on, Eileen, spin another yarn
Stories continue to pour in about the enigmatic benefit cheat and former FBI fugitive Eileen Farquer after an American family claimed she was their long-lost mother. Tony Wall reports.
She was a fixture of Rotorua’s social scene in the 1980s – a flamboyant raconteur who claimed to be the heir to the fortune of American jeans inventor Levi Strauss.
She went by the name Lee J Strauss, surrounded herself with men and women half her age and liked to be called ‘‘Lee J’’.
But it was all a ruse – she was in fact Eileen Marie Farquer, an Australian-born career criminal who had left behind a heartbroken family in the US and was fraudulently collecting a benefit under the Strauss name.
More details about Farquer’s life have come to light after the Sunday Star-Times reported this month that an American woman, Bonnie Metzger, believed Farquer was her mother, who abandoned her and her siblings in 1952 when they were toddlers.
Farquer travelled the world and at one point was wanted by the FBI for stealing stock certificates and jumping bail.
Metzger and her friend, Kim MacIsaac, traced her using the ancestry.com website and found a Star-Times article from 2013 about how Farquer had been collecting a benefit under the Strauss name since 1987.
The latest article prompted people who knew ‘‘Strauss’’ from the Rotorua area to come forward with more wild tales.
Her story was actually full of holes – Levi Strauss had no children and passed his business to relatives with a different surname.
Lester Smith was a Hamiltonbased sales rep in the early 1980s when he encountered ‘‘Lee J’’ on a night out in Rotorua.
She was with a raucous group of about 15 people going to dinner to celebrate her birthday and they invited Smith along.
Over dinner, Strauss regaled Smith with the story of her supposed connection to the American Strauss family.
‘‘She said she . . . was always the black sheep getting in trouble.
‘‘The family had apparently ostracised her . . . she said the arrangement was she was to live as far away as possible from her family and not cause them any embarrassment.
‘‘So she lived in New Zealand and got a monthly allowance.’’
She claimed not to care about money and spent freely, insisting on paying for everyone’s dinner, Smith says. On other occasions she was broke.
Smith says Strauss would wear a large brooch and scarf and loved jazz.
‘‘She certainly looked a bit different for Rotorua in the ’80s. She looked like what she said she was – old-school money.’’
Artist and gallery owner Bryan Schofield first met Strauss when she arrived in the Bay of Plenty in 1977.
She showed her photos of herself as a young woman, crewing on the classic American yacht Ticonderoga.
They would drink wine at her rented pole house at Lake Rotoiti, pick kiwifruit together and sell goods at local markets.
‘‘She used to sell Levi jeans . . . she used to get them at a really good price – whether they were legit or not, who knows?’’
Her neighbours at Lake Rotoiti gave Strauss a brown German pointer dog called Lara, which gave her the idea for another alias, Lara Brown, which she still uses.
It was under that name that she was known around Little Waihi near Maketu, where she initially lived in a caravan park before renting a bach.
Her landlady, Pam Young, says Brown’s lawyer made her tell them about her court charges for benefit fraud.
‘‘How do you put an old lady out on the street? If she didn’t have an abode she would have gone to jail . . . so we gave her a home here.’’
Things eventually turned sour over unpaid rent.
‘‘She tore strips off me in front of everybody, told everybody I was trying to kill her.’’
She started living next door with Noel Hamon, who describes her as a ‘‘dear old soul’’.
He researched her family ancestry.com, after she said real name was Farquer.
‘‘She didn’t know her parents or much about her family. I found out she was from Aussie and I found on her her father and mother, gave her the genealogy papers – she had a bit of a cry.’’
Through these investigations he made contact with Metzger and her friend Kim MacIsaac, who had been conducting parallel research.
Farquer is now in a home in Tauranga with dementia.
Smith, the former sales rep who socialised with her in the ’80s, says she was hilarious and entertaining, but there was a sadness about her.
‘‘I’d love to know what happened to her in Australia with her parents to make her such a wandering spirit.
‘‘It’s a pity she’s lost her memory because a warts-and-all true story from her would be something else.’’
Metzger says she would love to meet her mother, but fears being rebuffed.
Farquer’s social worker suggested writing a letter.
‘‘I’m finding it difficult to start – the fact that she denies or does not remember having children is part of the difficulty.’’
Metzger says it’s been wonderful to learn more about such an enigmatic woman, and she feels the stories have helped bring her ‘‘from the depths of my imagination to the depths of my heart’’. has