SKY FULL OF LIES
Heartbreaking tale fooled entire nation
How her fraud brought terror back
Tania Head surfaced two years after the 9/11 terror attacks with an astonishing tale of survival and loss. Her harrowing account of narrowly escaping death in the south tower, only to lose her husband in the north tower, inspired everyone who heard it. Head worked tirelessly to give a voice to 9/11 survivors, and she won the admiration of everyone she met. She cultivated friendships with fellow survivors and ultimately rose to become president of the influential World Trade Center Survivors’ Network. Survivor Linda Gormley became her closest friend. But Tania had a terrible secret — her story was full of lies — and when the truth came out it stunned and disturbed the brave people whom she claimed to champion.
LINDA STEPPED out of the taxi at West Fifty-fifth Street and Tenth Avenue and looked skyward toward Tania’s apartment. The living room lights were blazing in the corner unit on the eighteenth floor of the luxury highrise. Tania was waiting.
Entering the building, Linda nodded at the doorman and walked through the modern lobby to the bank of elevators at the other end, her high heels clicking on the marble floor. She pushed the up button and waited, fighting back waves of nervous nausea. Why had she agreed to do this, damn it? The elevator doors slid open, and she stepped inside and pushed the button for Tania’s floor. How easy would it be to just walk out of the building and go home? It really wasn’t an option, though, not if she wanted to stay in Tania’s good graces. The elevator glided upward.
Linda got out on the 18th floor and walked haltingly down the sterile hallway toward Tania’s apartment. Even before she could ring the buzzer, the door flew open. Tania stood in the doorway. Her brown eyes shone with excitement behind her dark-rimmed glasses.
For days, Linda had been listening to Tania talk about her new therapist and an intense form of treatment she was undergoing for posttraumatic stress called “flooding.” She had told Linda about a recording she’d made with her therapist, reliving all she had gone through on that terrible morning, and about her homework assignment, to listen to the recordings until her fears began to fade. She had tried a few times to listen alone, Tania said, but it was too scary. The therapist then suggested she recruit someone she trusted to be with her during the exercise. She had cho- sen Linda.
“Listen, Tania,” Linda said, jingling the coins in her pocket, “I have an idea. Why don’t we do this another night? I’m really not feeling up to it.”
Tania’s eyes darkened, and her lip curled in disappointment. Linda recognized the look. That was Tania when she wasn’t getting her way. She braced for the inevitable tongue-lashing. “You’re scared!” Tania said, mocking her. “Ha! Why should you be scared? I’m the one who went through hell. All you have to do is listen to a tape with me.”
It was times like this that Linda didn’t even feel worthy of calling herself a survivor. She’d seen people die, but she hadn’t been burned or nearly lost an arm or lost a loved one, the way Tania had. Who was she to refuse her friend who had endured so much and asked so little? How could she be so weak when Tania was so strong? Linda felt ashamed. “I’m sorry, sweetie,” she said, hugging Tania. “I don’t know what’s wrong with me. Come on now, let’s get started with your homework.”
Linda heard the door lock behind her as she walked into the apartment. It was a beautiful space, open and airy, with floorto-ceiling windows and dramatic skyline views. The living room was bare except for a flat screen TV, two beach chairs, and a couple of bookshelves, and the bedroom had air mattresses rather than a bed. The only item on the walls was a framed photograph of Welles Crowther, the young man who had saved Tania and others from the burning 78th floor sky lobby. Tania told Linda that the apartment was empty, with most of her belongings stored away at her beach house in Amagansett because she still couldn’t bear to be surrounded by constant reminders of Dave, her husband who had lost his life in the north tower.
While Tania boiled water for tea, Linda sat on a stool at the breakfast bar and made small talk. The night was clear, and Rockefeller Center twinkled in
the distance. Linda saw the tape recorder on a lamp table a few feet away. A shiver ran through her, but she was determined not to let Tania see her squirm.
“Ready?” Tania asked, her eyes wide.
The tape began with Tania talking about getting up that morning with Dave in their Madison Avenue loft. It is sunny outside, but the loft is still chilly from the cold nighttime air. She starts the coffee, and Dave pulls out his favorite frying pan and cooks eggs, two sunny-side up for her, three over easy for him. They share sections of the newspaper as they wipe up the last of their eggs with slices of toast and gulp down the last of their coffee. While she washes the breakfast dishes, he walks their golden retriever, Elvis. Dave returns and they shower and dress, then take the subway downtown to their World Trade Center offices, arriving at just after seven thirty. In a calm voice, Tania describes how, around an hour later, Dave calls her office to ask if she’ll join him for coffee in the concourse. It has become a sort of ritual for them, sneaking in a few more minutes together before launching into the rest of the workday. But she has a meeting and so she can’t make it.
Moments after they hang up, the first plane slashes through the north tower. She tries calling Dave but each time gets a fast busy signal and she realizes the phones must be out. From her office in the south tower, she sees bodies falling from Dave’s building across the way. The voice on the tape is quivering. People in the south tower are frightened and confused, Tania says. Should they remain in the building or go? The security staff announces that everyone should stay put; the south tower is secure and safer than the street. She tries to calm her staff, but people are frightened, so she orders them to follow her down the stairs to the seventy-eighth-floor sky lobby, where they can all catch an express elevator to the concourse.
Linda braced herself. She had heard Tania’s story before, but only in bits and pieces and never in so much detail. She wanted to stop the tape, but she didn’t dare take charge in that way. She looked over at Tania, who was rocking back and forth in her chair and sweating profusely.
After a short silence Tania is speaking again on the tape. Her voice is weak and small. “I’m afraid,” she whimpers. “I’m so afraid.” Tania says she sees a plane coming toward the windows in the sky lobby. Dozens of people in the lobby, and no one seems to know what to do. The building jerks violently, and the sky lobby is bathed in a blinding white light as the silver wing of a plane slices through it. A rolling fireball is followed by a riotous shock wave. Bodies are flying through the air.
Tania climbed out of her chair. Hunched over, almost as if she were trying to climb back into herself, she began pacing around the apartment. Tears and sweat poured off her face, like water from a sponge. Her hair and her shirt were drenched. She seemed to have trouble breathing. On the tape, she says she is looking at the lifeless body of her secretary, who is nearly decapitated. “She has no head!” she cries. “Oh my God! I can’t breathe! My skin is burning! They’re all dead. Everyone is dead!” As small fires smolder around her, she catches sight of a young man wearing a red bandanna, the young man whose name she will later learn is Welles Crowther. She pleads with him. “Please don’t leave me.” With that, the tape snapped off and Tania’s trance is broken. “What happened?” she asked, bewildered.
Linda went to the kitchen and made Tania a cup of tea. They sat together in silence for what seemed like a long while. Finally, Linda tucked her friend into bed and prepared to catch the last train home to Hoboken.
That night, for the first time in a long time, Linda dreamed of planes crashing into buildings and bodies falling out of the sky.
From The Woman Who Wasn’t There by Robin Gaby Fisher and Angelo J. Guglielmo, Jr. Copyright © 2012 by Robin Gaby Fisher and Angelo J. Guglielmo, Jr. Published by Touchstone Books, a division of Simon & Schuster, Inc. 9