“Oh what a tangled web we weave, when first we practise to deceive” ~ Sir Walter Scott.

Thursday, January 01, 2009

Red-naped sapsucker ~Sphyrapicus!

The trip I had planned trip in fall of 2007 to California in order to confront "Doug" was postponed as I tended to other more immediate professional matters. I was in the midst of launching several pressing projects that WILL naturally ensure our paths will cross, if not in the near future, then certainly in the next few years. And not necessarily in California, either. So there was and is no hurry. By Christmas 2007, I had solved the puzzle of who had called himself, Doug Reynolds, and taken me on what had amounted to a three year goose-chase.

I KNEW the true identity of the man, or should I say the coward, that had engaged in what was a systematic scheme to deceive me once again, while he professed to his wife that he was busy at Florida State University in Tallahasee for the oral review of his dissertation on
Red-headed Woodpeckers in late February 2004. I was in the process of removing and disposing of company records after the wind up that was precipitated by a dispute with the local freight railroad in 2005. Before sending our computer equipment to the local Goodwill, I had engaged a computer technician to remove any proprietary or pertinent data and was presented with a stack of CDs. I was rather surpised to thumb through them and stumble upon 4 that were labelled "chat logs, Yahoo" between "Doug" and me dating back to our first encounter on January 2004 and until our last chat before he disappeare.
This was the first opportunity I had had to review the more than 600 hours of discourse between us, as "Doug" had asked me early in our relationship not to save our chats. He used his position and wealth as a reason, and naturally I was willing to honor that. Now, some 3 years later I waded through each line of text looking for clues as to his identity. Serendipty or fate? For me the "gift" of chat logs was serendipty. For him, well perhaps it will turn out to be a well-deserved fate.


Yes, the individual that I had honoured, respected and protected and who had proclaimed was my friend, was now holed away at Hastings Biological Field Station, pursuing his research on woodpeckers, and naturally with an unlisted phone, presumably to avoid confrontation from me, and who knows how many others. Safely retreated within a cavity-nest, like the creatures he studies, and confident that he had escaped any public humiliation that he had so obviously enjoyed watching me endure.


He wasn't a successful self-made professional, nor a millionaire's son. He wasn't a single bachelor who'd waited years to meet an honest, hard-working woman with similar interests and goals, as he had so often declared. Although the photographs of the striking tall and lean man he had shared with me were indeed his, they had been taken when he was between 25 and 28, more than 15 years prior at various stages in his Post Doctoral research. He wasn't related to the Reynolds family of Reynolds, Smith & Hills in Tallahassee; nor was the photograph of the yacht he had named "Folie a Deux" his either. Snatched from the Internet, in another of his ploys to lure me to pack and be prepared for an unannounced sailing weekend in the Gulf Coast. He wasn't an America born man, who had lived in upstate New York, although that is the location where he married. He is a naturalised Canadian. He wasn't an engineer, working in the aerospace industry and being called to Department of Defense high-security locations in San Diego. No, he was a post doc fellow, doing research on woodpeckers and sapsuckers in the California chapparal. And he was MARRIED.
Below is the evolution of my online friend's identity!
Irritated ---> Clark Reynolds ---> "Doug Reynolds" ---> Sphyrapicus ---> Eric L. Walters.
Eric Walters, this prematurely aged, portly individual that lacked the conscience and the integrity to even acknowledge, let alone take ownership, of his wrong doings.
Woodpeckers ~ will hammer and drill through wood to find their prey!