On his docket for the day: a woman asking for a murder charge in which no one had been killed to be expunged from her record so she might be able to get her job at a bank back (granted); a guy who was accused of attempted murder for stabbing his girlfriend dozens of times trying to get his bail reduced (denied); and a man who denied having been driving too close to a police car one night in North Philadelphia. (It didn’t help his case that he said the officers had been driving an unmarked van when in fact they had been in the Philadelphia Police Department’s standard-issue Chevy Impala.)

An hour or so later, the court officer motioned to the four reporters in the room—an intern from the online news desk at The Philadelphia Inquirer, a gossip columnist from the Philadelphia Daily News, a reporter from KYW News Radio 1060 and this reporter, from The Observer—to come out of the galley and into the court itself, where they might be able to have a better view of a closed-circuit television that had been set up on the other side of the room. “Case 37, Ferrell,” intoned the court officer, a friendly man named Tony who seemed to have taken a shine to the Inquirer intern, a tall blonde named Brittany wearing platform sandals and her Inquirer ID card on a lanyard around her neck.

On the screen appeared a short-haired Asian woman in a bright orange jumpsuit. Her large chest tattoo of a phoenix was covered up. She did not appear to be wearing any makeup.

A young lawyer from the district attorney’s office named John Murray sat in front of the television questioning her. He asked her to state her name and home address.

“Kari Ferrell,” she said, and mumbled an address in Brooklyn, though for the last couple of weeks, since being picked up by the Philadelphia Police after alighting from a bus from New York, Ms. Ferrell has been residing at the Riverside Correction Facility in Northeast Philadelphia, a women’s-only prison built in 2004. She said she was 22 years old and said she had a bachelor’s degree in music from the University of Utah. (Several sources had previously told The Observer that Ms. Ferrell does not in fact have a degree. After her hearing, The Observer called the University of Utah’s transcripts department, which told us that no one by the name of Kari Ferrell or Farrell had ever been enrolled.)

Had she ever been diagnosed with any mental health issues, Mr. Murray asked? “No,” she responded. Was she under the influence of drugs or alcohol? “No.” Did she understand the charges against her for bad checks and forgery in Salt Lake City? “Yes.” Was she electing to waive extradition? “Yes.” Had she had a chance to discuss the extradition with her attorney? “Yes.”

And with that, her hearing was over. Her public defender, a young woman with reddish-brown hair wearing a gray skirt suit, said that Utah now has 30 days to come pick up Ms. Ferrell, but the governor of Utah, Jon Huntsman, must first sign the extradition order. If no one from Utah comes to get her within 30 days, she has the right to habeas corpus, meaning that the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania could decide it no longer wishes to keep her, and let her go.

“She’s been arrested,” a spokeswoman for the Philadelphia Police confirmed to The Observer this morning.

We asked whether the Philly police had been in touch with the cops in Salt Lake City, where Ms. Ferrell  is wanted on various warrants.

“We’re in touch. It’s up to them to come get her,” said the spokeswoman.

We called up the ever-friendly Sergeant Fred Ross, a spokesperson for the Salt Lake City Police Department, and asked him what the story was. “Our watch commander was in contact with them last evening,” he said. “The whole extradition process has to flow. She has to agree to the extradition—it could be a period of time.”

Like, months?

“That’s highly unlikely. If she turned herself in, then the extradition process will go fairly quickly,” he said.

Mr. Ross detailed the outstanding warrants against Ms. Ferrell (because the warrants are open, he was unable to go into more detail). She has three outstanding warrants in the Salt Lake City jurisdiction: two for Forgery Felony Three, and another for Felony Three for issuing a bad check. She has an open warrant out of Sandy Justice Court, in a suburb of Salt Lake City, for failure to appear, and a warrant out of the Second District Court in Layton, Utah, about 20 miles north of Salt Lake City, for issuing a bad check. Her final warrant is a retail theft warrant in Taylorsville, another suburb of Salt Lake City; that warrant is for $100,005. (It seems that the judge really wants her back.)

This morning The Observer also spoke to Ms. Ferrell’s bail bond agent in Salt Lake City. “I am going to file my paperwork with the court today, and see if I can get that kid his money,” the agent told us. “That kid,” is Brian MaWhinney; when Ms. Ferrell skipped town last summer, she left Mr. MaWhinney, a former boyfriend, holding the bag for her $5,000 bail, which he had to pay on his credit card when she failed to show up for a December court date. “Hopefully at least one person can get his money back.”

The agent explained how the bail bond process works when someone fails to appear. “When you fail to appear in court, us being the bail bond company have six months to bring her before the court. If we don’t do that, our bond goes into forfeiture and we have to pay the court $5,000 in cash. If she’s in custody somewhere, we should be able to have our attorney exonerate the bond.”

The agent added: “She has the option to waive extradition. If she does that, then she’s saying, `Yeah, I have charges in another state.’ If she chooses to fight it and waive extradition, she’ll go through the Philadelphia process and it’s hell. She’ll just do extra time.”

Here's what the agent said: “I’d smack the shit out of Kari if she came by.”

“I bailed her out on June 8, 2008,” the agent told The Observer. “I get a call from her—she’s booked into the Salt Lake City jail on a third-degree felony forgery charge.”
This charge came a month after Ms. Ferrell had been released from jail on fraud charges.

“I asked her what the situation was. At first, she said she had nobody who could help her—typically people’s parents will help them.”

Ms. Ferrell explained to the bond agent that she owed her mother and stepfather quite a bit of money. The problem had arisen because, the agent said, in the process of paying back her parents, Ms. Ferrell had fabricated a form from Western Union saying that the money was lost. When her stepfather went to a Western Union with the form Ms. Ferrell had given him, he was informed that the form was a fake, and almost got arrested. At this point, said the bail agent, Ms. Ferrell ’fessed up.

“She’s placed under arrest for forgery, and she gives me the number of this kid Brian MaWhinney, who’s very responsible.” (Read Mr. MaWhinney’s account of his experiences with Ms. Ferrell.) “He put up the $500 and signed for her $5,000 bond. So I bail her out of jail.”

At this time, said the bond agent, Ms. Ferrell was working at a place called Professional Staffing—not, as she told nearly everyone she met, at the concert promotion company GoldenVoice. After a few weeks, the bond agent received a notice from the court that she had failed to appear, and the bond was going into forfeiture.

“I started to track her down. First I called Brian MaWhinney,” said the agent. “He told me she had been transferred with this staffing company to New York. I called the staffing company and they immediately tell me that not only do they not have an office in New York, but that she had never returned to work.” According to the bond agent, Ms. Ferrell had called the staffing agency and told them she’d just been released from jail. Not only that, her dad was sick. She called the staffing company the next day and told them that her dad had passed away. She also asked if the company provided any sort of funeral leave. And what did you know? They did! A week, fully paid, in fact. All she needed to do, they said, was give them some proof of her dad’s death.

“She got a funeral home to call her work and say her dad was dead,” said the bond agent. “Then the funeral home calls me a couple days later and says there’s no dead dad in any hospital in the city.” Ms. Ferrell had called the funeral home and informed them that her father had passed away, and as soon as the body was ready she would be using their services, and would they just mind calling her work and confirming her story?

“They called the work back and said, ain’t happening, no dead dad. I couldn’t find her at this point, so I called her dad. He said, I guess this is the second or third time I’ve died this year.”

The bond agent finally tracked Ms. Ferrell to Brooklyn. “She tells me, you’ll never believe this, I have lung cancer. I said, you sound great for a chick dying of lung cancer.” The bond agent called her mother, who is a nurse, and her stepfather. They informed the bond agent that it wasn’t Ms. Ferrell’s first go-round with cancer.

“The way her stepdad and her mom explained it to me was that they’d known since she was very young that she had some mental health issues. I’ve been doing this for 10 years, and she’s good. She gets these guys on the line and she’s good at what she does. But it is one lie after another.”

Meanwhile, Ms. Ferrell had called the court clerk in Salt Lake City, explained she had cancer, and managed to get her court date moved. She never showed up for that one, either.

She has also surfaced on the Internet. We were forwarded an email she sent at 3 this morning to a well-wisher:

Hello. I really appreciate the message that you sent. Surprisingly enough, all of the emails that I have received have been in the same vein. Makes me feel SLIGHTLY less of a terrible human being.

Yes, I made mistakes and yes, I hurt people who cared for me (and vice versa). However, I have made amends with most of those individuals, and have attempted to rectify my poor decisions by paying them back. I know that it is neither here nor there, but what the article didn't mention is that I haven't done anything of that nature for years. I understand that that, in no way, justifies what I did ... but I definitely recognize that what I did was really REALLY shitty, and like to think that I have learned from my mistakes.

Anyway, I didn't mean to barrage you with my...whatever the fuck those preceeding paragraphs are...my sincere apologies.

Thank you, again, for your kind words.

Without Wax,

Kari

We spoke to one of her former friends, 22-year-old Jodi Bullock, who yesterday posted an account on her blog of her experiences with Ms. Ferrell, for more details of their friendship.

Ms. Bullock said she was first contacted by Ms. Ferrell on MySpace sometime in 2005. The two emailed sporadically until 2008, when Ms. Ferrell told Ms. Bullock she was moving to New York. “She emailed and said, ‘Hey, I’m moving to New York, do you have any advice?’ I told her about neighborhoods and where she might look for a job. Then she told me she already had a job, which was why she was moving,” said Ms. Bullock.

According to Ms. Bullock, Ms. Ferrell told friends she had a job working for the West Coast concert promotion company GoldenVoice, in their New York office. Which, it should be said, does not exist.

“There was always confusion as to where the GoldenVoice office was. She would tell me it was in SoHo. Then she would say, it’s in Crown Heights. But I think that was just a plot to stay over at my friend’s house. She would stay there for days at a time and he wouldn’t have the balls to tell her to leave. She’d say, my office is close to here, can I stay over? Where her office was depended on what was convenient to her.”

Ms. Bullock continued: “She would be on g-chat all day and would invent all these errands she had to run. It kind of amazes me how detailed she was with it. One day she was like, I saw the cutest guy ever outside my work. He was riding on a skateboard, and he was holding a suitcase, and he was the hottest guy I’d ever seen.

“No one ever met her co-workers. Through me, she became friends with my friend Whitney. She told Whitney, 'I was on MySpace today and this guy I work with saw your profile and wants to meet you! We’re going to be at this show tonight, do you want to meet him tonight?' Whitney was like, yeah, sure, great. They get to the show and she points to this guy. She’s like, that’s him. Kari goes and talks to this guy and points at Whitney. The guy didn’t seem to know [Kari]. It seemed as if she was just going up to this random guy and saying, here’s my friend who likes you. The night goes on and the guy eventually talks to Whitney but he had no idea who Kari was. She was like, you work with Kari? And he was like, no. When Whitney confronted Kari later, she was like, he was just joking, that’s our joke, we work together.

“She was always promising someone something, or having something to offer.”

(Ms. Bullock also said that she witnessed Ms. Ferrell send another one of her infamous “I want to give you a handjob with my mouth” notes to a barback at Beauty Bar in early October.)

You'll recall yesterday we reported that in Salt Lake City, Ms. Ferrell repeatedly scammed friends and acquaintances through a rather simplistic check fraud scheme, in which she would tell her friends that her account, in which she had thousands of dollars, was frozen due to fraud, and would they mind depositing these checks for her in their account and giving her the money? We weren’t sure whether Ms. Ferrell had tried the same scam in New York, but Ms. Bullock assured us that she had.

“Pretty early on, after meeting her, she told us there had been some kind of fraud in her bank account in Salt Lake City. Someone had stolen her identity. She had all this money in this account but she couldn’t get it out because it was under investigation. At one point she logged into her account on my computer and she had all this money in her account, like $3,000, and it said, ‘Account frozen.’ I believed that someone had stolen her identity. From then on she’d always say, ‘I don’t have any money,’ and people would buy her dinner and things. Then she said, I have this tax rebate check I need the money from, but I can’t deposit it in my account because it’s frozen. Will you deposit it and just give me the money? I’ll wait until it clears, your bank will tell you if it’s fake, and you can just give me the money.”

Ms. Bullock said she immediately felt uncomfortable about Ms. Ferrell’s proposal. Ms. Bullock told Ms. Farrell that her bank would only allow her to take a large amount of money out right away if she had that amount of money in her account to begin with. So, Ms. Bullock said, Ms. Ferrell moved on to two of her friends. One of them told her no right away. The other eventually said he would do it, but on the day they were supposed to meet at the bank, got cold feet. “She kept bugging him to do it, and he finally said, I don’t feel comfortable doing it. She would whip out the check every now and then—at brunch she would rifle through her wallet and say, this is that check. I didn’t get a close look, but it just looked like a normal check”—not, Ms. Bullock clarified, one from the IRS.

After Ms. Ferrell told the group she had cancer, she would disappear periodically, telling them she was in the hospital. One day Ms. Bullock got a text saying Ms. Ferrell was in the hospital and was going to have surgery. Later that day, Ms. Bullock got another text from her that said, “Hey do you want to hang out later?”

“I was like, aren’t you having surgery today? And she said, oh no, it got canceled. So I was talking to my friend, and I was like what the hell, one minute she’s having surgery and the next it’s canceled, and then she wants to hang out? Then she told my other friend that she had had the surgery, and it was fine, and she was done for the day and she wanted to go dance.” Ms. Bullock soon confronted Ms. Ferrell, and she and her friends stopped hanging out with her.

Last month. Ms. Ferrell contacted Amanda Ferri, a blogger and production manager at CollegeHumor, out of the blue. Her first email read:

If you are looking for a girl that will let you throw your proverbial hot dog down her hallway, while simultaneously singing theme songs from nationally syndicated television programs of the late 70's and early 80's, then you're in luck!

Also, it helps if you like run-on sentences, because apparently I use them somewhat frequently.

I can haz friendship?

Love,

Korean Abdul-Jabbar

The two exchanged several more emails after that. On March 29, over a week after she’d been fired from Vice, Ms. Ferrell wrote to Ms. Ferri: “I work for Vice magazine, being an all-around bitch (events coordinator/assistant publisher)… When are you available? I took this next week off, so let me know if yer free.”

The day before, she’d told Ms. Ferri she’d gone to South by Southwest and was laid up in the hospital for a week afterwards with a gall bladder infection.

We also heard from someone who encountered Ms. Ferrell in Philadelphia:

“A few months ago, my then-BF told me this Asian girl named Kari with terminal cancer was hanging around his group house in South Philly. A few of the roommates are in this band that plays in Williamsburg a lot. I assume that's where they met her. He told me she lived in NY but had come to visit Philly a few times and stayed at the house (the house has many transient guests) and it appeared she was getting her kicks while she still had time. He thinks that she slept with a couple of his roommates. And she tried to sleep with him while we were still together- there was a party at the house, I wasn't there, and she attempted to stick her hand down his pants but they were too tight. He told me that he turned her down. (Let's hope so!) We had a few conversations about her sad situation, and wondered what would WE do if we were terminal? Would we be traveling between Philly and NYC in order to sleep with band guys? I wouldn't."

The email from our Philadelphia correspondent continues: "Then about a month ago his roommates told him that they found out she was lying about the cancer, and that she was wanted in Utah. We didn't know her last name at the time so we couldn't look it up.”

Her former roommate Alex Grubard did know her last name—but was unable to get the police to do anything. “We found her wanted poster the night of the Super Bowl,” Mr. Grubard wrote in an email to The Observer. “We called the SLCPD and they said they weren't going to do anything, but we should kick her out immediately. Tried to get ahold of her, but by that point she was sleeping in Greenpoint every night and hadn't slept at our apartment for weeks.”

That account dovetails with the account of a source at Vice, who told me that after the magazine staff found out who she was, they contacted police in Salt Lake City, who told them they were powerless to do anything about Ms. Ferrell without an extradition order. However, now that an extradition order has been approved, she can be arrested in any state and extradited back to Utah. Mr. Ross, of the Salt Lake City police, said that if anyone does see her—in New York or Philadelphia—they should contact their local precinct. Calling the Salt Lake City police is helpful, but, as Mr. Ross said, “We’re not going to come out there and just start chasing her around New York."

A few days later, one of Ms. Ferrell’s new colleagues came by her desk. “I said, ‘Excuse me, miss, is [her boss] downstairs?’” the 29-year-old told The Observer. “She thought that was very polite that I said, ‘Excuse me, miss,’ and after that she started talking to me, instant-messaging me. She asked if I was from the South. I told her no. It escalated from there.”

Within the space of a half-hour, Ms. Ferrell was peppering him with questions about his sexual history—how many women he’d slept with and so on. “She was coming on to me, and I was super into it for the first part of it,” he said. “I realized I could have fun after work—but then I was like, ‘Let me check this girl out.’”  He Googled her. Up popped a photo of his flirtatious new co-worker on the Salt Lake City Police Department’s Most Wanted list, wanted on five different warrants, including passing $60,000 in bad checks, forgery and retail theft.

"Long story short"

Soon after arriving in New York last August, Kari Ferrell moved into a tiny room on Bergen Street on the Crown Heights–Prospect Heights border. She made friends quickly—mostly guys, though there were always one or two girls in her orbit. (For this article, Ms. Ferrell did not respond to emails or a voice mail left on her last known cell phone number.) She met Bobby, a 23-year-old Rutgers student, at a GirlTalk concert in Manhattan in October. It seemed like the two of them were the only ones old enough to drink, Bobby recalled. They started talking, and, “long story short, I go home with her. The next morning we exchange emails. It turns out that night she stole my cell phone—but it was done in such a way that it wasn’t until months later that I realized: I didn’t lose my phone that night, she took it.”

Bobby started making the trip from New Brunswick, N.J., to Brooklyn every weekend. She told him she worked for GoldenVoice and gave him one of her business cards. She had an ATM card, Bobby recalled, but it never seemed to work; she could only get cash out of it, not use it as a debit card, and, she told him, it only worked at this one bodega near her apartment. So she would borrow money and promise to pay it back.

Soon she told him she was afraid she was pregnant. “She told me she took six tests—three were positive, three were negative,” Bobby said. “I told her to go to a gynecologist, get a real pregnancy test, and we’ll move forward from there.” She stopped bringing it up.

When Bobby had been seeing Ms. Ferrell for about six weeks, one of her friends told him that Ms. Ferrell was dying of cancer. When he confronted her, Bobby said she told him “the sob story—‘I’m estranged from my parents, I don’t know who my birth parents are, my adoptive parents are abusive.’ It never occurred to me that it would be odd that someone who’s dying of cancer, who has three months to live, would just move from Salt Lake City to Brooklyn.”

Bobby talked it over with some friends. “Basically, the consensus was to stick around because you like this girl, but don’t get too attached, because she’s going to be dead in three months,” Bobby said. Over the next several weeks, he said, they had “some very depressing conversations about how she didn't want to die. My parents are doctors, and I’ve seen patients come in who are in their last stage of life. She was saying, ‘I don’t want to go through that, I’m going to take my own life.’”

Ms. Ferrell seemed healthy outwardly, but one day Bobby got a text message saying that she’d coughed up blood and was in the hospital.

“The doctors were treating her as if something was going wrong,” he said. “I was thinking, ‘Oh, great, here it comes, this is going to be the beginning of the end.’ The doctors at Bellevue said, ‘There’s something wrong with your appendix, it’s a little inflamed. But, good news, we couldn’t find any cancer in your lungs!’”

According to Bobby, Ms. Ferrell dismissed this diagnosis, saying that her cancer was the kind of thing that could show up on a scan one day and disappear the next.

The weekend before Christmas, Bobby and Ms. Ferrell went to a party. “She was dancing, smoking pot. I thought it was really strange that if she was dying of lung cancer, she’d be smoking pot.” Bobby went back to Rutgers and the night before he left for winter break, Ms. Ferrell called, threatening to kill herself. The next day, she called while he was at dinner with his parents. “She’s really weak, doesn’t want to talk, says, ‘I’ll call you later,’ and hangs up,” he said. “I’m just thrilled she’s alive. A couple hours later, I talk to her and she’s really depressed—she says it’ll never end, there’s no point. She’s being really mysterious and vague.” Finally she told him she had a psychotic ex-boyfriend, a criminal mastermind who could break into any cell phone. He had been stalking her in Utah, she said; he broke into her house and stole money. She said when she logged into her instant messenger, it said she was already logged in; she was panicked it was the crazy ex.

Bobby told some friends of his the whole story and they seemed incredulous, so he Googled her and found the wanted poster. “After I realized the whole thing was bullshit, she continued to send me texts,” he said “She texted me on Christmas to tell me that she loved me. As soon as I realized who she really was, I stopped contacting her.”

But Bobby wasn’t Ms. Ferrell’s only prospect. A month earlier, at the end of November at a dance party at the bar Happy Ending on the Lower East Side, she met a 28-year-old named Joe, who was living in Greenpoint. He was celebrating his birthday and invited Ms. Ferrell to a party he was having the next night. “She told me she was working for the company that does Coachella—GoldenVoice,” Joe said. “She would furnish all these details about having to run errands, go to meetings. One night she said she was sleeping in the office because she had so much work.” She also told Joe and his friends that she was working on a book for Vice—a coffee table book of photographs of men with beards posing next to her “I Love Beards” tattoo.

“She has this thing with guys where she talks about sex really upfront and kind of puts people off balance,” said Joe. (It was also around November that a guy named Troy was at Union Pool, the Williamsburg bar, when the bartender passed him a note from another customer. It read, “I want to give you a hand job with my mouth,” and was signed “Korean Abdul-Jabbar.” It was, according to Troy, from Ms. Ferrell. Another time, a patron at Fabiane’s, the café on Bedford Avenue in Williamsburg, said Ms. Ferrell passed him a note which read: “I want you to throw a hot dog down my hall.”)

Ms. Ferrell became close friends with Joe’s roommate Erica Koch, 26, who works at the cafe Brooklyn Label in Greenpoint. “She told me she had cancer,” said Ms. Koch. “Then later she told me she was terminally ill with cancer. She said she had just been diagnosed when she got to New York and she was taking chemo pills. You can’t question someone who says she has cancer! One day she came out of my roommate’s room coughing, and she had blood on her hand.”

At Brooklyn Label one day in December, a friend of Erica’s, a 30-year-old librarian who lives in Greenpoint, was writing Christmas cards when Ms. Ferrell approached him. They talked for a while and ended up going to a movie. Later she told him she had cancer. “She seemed completely fine—she seemed healthy,” said the librarian. “I said, ‘That’s horrible,’ but I didn’t feel like it was a terminal thing. Two days later, she said she got a call from her doctors and had only a couple months to live.”

A few days later, the librarian recalled, Ms. Ferrell said she was tired and might want to go to the emergency room. “She had claimed she needed to go to Sloan-Kettering—she said that’s why she came to New York, to go to that hospital. But she said she couldn’t go to Sloan-Kettering when she had complications. At the emergency room, the doctors couldn’t find her information...She gave them her Social Security number and they couldn’t find any records at Sloan-Kettering. I figured this was one of these administrative things where they couldn’t find her information.”

Soon the librarian realized that something wasn’t right, and Googled her. “Finally I just sent her an email saying that I knew, and I wasn’t going to hang out with her anymore, and then I told all the friends I had met through her the same story. They basically cut off contact with her.”

In January at an HBO party, Ms. Ferrell met a 24-year-old writer who lives in Williamsburg. By this point, she had moved to Throop Avenue in Bedford-Stuyvesant because, she told him, the building she’d been living in previously got condemned. The writer felt immediately drawn into Ms. Ferrell’s orbit; they ended up hanging out about four times a week. “She acts very warm and super-interested in what people have to say,” he recalled. “And she has lots of offers for things. She’s really into music and knows a lot about music. She’ll say, ‘I work at GoldenVoice, I can get you into that show. Anything you want to go to, I can get you on the list.’ We’d go and would end up not being on the list, but somehow we’d end up getting in—she’d just wink at the door guy and we’d get inside. Almost everyone who’s a dude, she’s really super sexually aggressive with—I’ve seen her send text messages to these guys that are really, really explicit, just to lure these dudes in. I guess these guys see that and say, ‘She’s attractive, she’s really aggressive, I’m into that.’ Even with girls, she would meet my friends and be really nice and warm and say she could get them into places—we would go out dancing and have a great time. She always got everyone’s phone number and email and followed up with them.”

In March, Ms. Ferrell got offered the job at Vice. “We had these long conversations about whether she should leave GoldenVoice and go to Vice or not,” said the writer. “This is one of the things that disturbs me more than anything else—we talked for 30 minutes about whether she should change jobs or not. We had an engaging conversation about something that was completely a fantasy.”

On March 22—right after Ms. Ferrell had been fired from Vice, her cover having been blown thanks to the co-worker’s Googling—the  writer and Ms. Ferrell got dinner and were hanging out at his apartment with his roommates. “She goes to the bathroom and says, ‘I just coughed up some blood.’ She had told me she had lung cancer, but I just thought she was sort of irresponsible or quasi in remission. Or over-embellishing the story a bit and that’s why she wasn’t seeking treatment.” Later that night, she texted the writer to say she was at Bellevue—but texted his roommate to say she was at N.Y.U. Medical Center.

“I was like, ‘That’s weird, maybe she got transferred,’” said the writer. “Monday evening I go to see her and she’s at N.Y.U. in the ER, and it seems like she’s been there a long time. I go with her to neuro—she’s saying she can’t see out of her left eye and she has really intense lower-left-quadrant pain. She’s not saying anything about coughing up blood. She’s saying they did a gastroendoscopy, and maybe she has a tumor and it’s throwing clots and she’s bleeding. I almost went to medical school—it wasn’t the most ridiculous thing I’d ever heard.”

The next night he went over to the house of a girl who, he said, “was four degrees removed from Kari, and someone said something out loud about Kari being in the hospital. This girl wasn’t going to tell me—but I kind of had a suspicion. I relayed a bunch of stuff and the girl said, ‘Girl does not have cancer. Girl rips dudes off for six grand and flees bail.’ This girl’s roommate works for the company that owns GoldenVoice, and she was like, ‘There’s no GoldenVoice office in New York.’” (GoldenVoice’s parent company, AEG Live, has an office in New York that handles local shows; calls to AEG’s human resources department were not returned.)

A couple months later,meanwhile, the librarian got a call from Mount Sinai hospital; Ms. Ferrell had listed him as an emergency contact. “They said, ‘Do you have any information about her? Can you tell her she owes us money?’”

“I was in denial”

Four and a half years ago, Kari Ferrell was just another 17-year-old girl hanging out in Salt Lake City’s straight-edge scene. She lived with her dad—her parents were divorced, and her mom had remarried and moved to Arizona—and spent a lot of time on MySpace. That was where she met Casey Hansen, now 24. “She just kind of messaged me out of nowhere, commenting on my profile picture,” Mr. Hansen said. “It was of Santa Claus holding a sign that said, ‘I don’t exist.’” The two started dating.

She told Mr. Hansen she was 18 and had graduated from high school that year. Her driver’s license said she was 17, though, and Ms. Ferrell’s parents even told him how old she was. “She just said there was something weird with her birth certificate, since she’d been adopted from South Korea,” Mr. Hansen said. He believed her. “She held on to this thing about her age, for no real valid reason, for like two years. I feel like that was a harbinger of things to come.”

Around New Year’s 2005, she moved to Arizona to live with her mom, but moved back to Salt Lake City three months later. That April she moved in with some straight-edge kids in Salt Lake City. Within a week, Mr. Hansen said, she told him she was getting text messages from phone numbers she didn’t recognize. She told him they said things like, “I’m going to rape you to death.” She told her roommates she thought she knew who it was, a local kid. She told Mr. Hansen that she and her roommates went to the kid’s family’s house and slashed tires and broke windows.

“In retrospect, she was sending herself the text messages somehow,” Mr. Hansen said. “She wanted the validation that people cared about her, I’m assuming.”

That summer Ms. Ferrell moved in with Mr. Hansen because the kids in the straight-edge house weren’t paying rent and they all got evicted. She was working at a kennel that would later file a civil judgment against her for $1,201; she dropped her dog off at the kennel so she could live with Mr. Hansen. “She turned into my sugar momma in a way. She had all this mysterious money,” he said. “She didn’t really want me to go to work. It was a really pathetic time in my life.” She soon got a notice from a bank saying that someone had tried to cash a check of hers, and she called the fraud unit of the local police department and accused one of her former roommates of doing it.

One night after they’d had sex, she accused Mr. Hansen of cheating on her. “I came downstairs and she was sitting over her phone, crying,” he said. “She said someone had pictures of me with my ex-girlfriend. I never had had a girlfriend before, let alone, how did someone have pictures of me?” A couple weeks later, Mr. Hansen went to Los Angeles with his band; Ms. Ferrell and some of her friends tagged along. She accused a guy of hitting on her and Mr. Hansen said, he "almost knocked his teeth out."*

In the fall, she told Mr. Hansen that she was finally able to access the money that she hadn’t been able to get to because of the previous fraud on her checking account. “She started depositing all these checks into my account, literally depositing $300, $500, $1,100 at a time,” he said “They keep giving me money whenever I wanted to withdraw. She kept saying she couldn’t use her ATM card, telling me, ‘You cash these checks and give me the money.’ One day I hand them a check for $1,200 and I asked the teller, ‘Are these good? I assume they are, because you guys just keep giving me money and you’re a bank, but can you just check on this?’ And he tells me they’re good.” This went on for about a week and a half, for a total of $10,600, before the bank belatedly realized the checks were written from an account that wasn’t even open.

“I was in denial,” said Mr. Hansen. “She’d always make up something to prolong it.” Mr. Hansen tried to break up with her. She told him she had cancer. She told him she was being stalked again. “I go back to her house and bring a metal bat and I carry a knife and Mace, and I become a security agent,” he said. “She keeps getting these weird texts.” They started having sex again. He went on tour in February 2006, and the night of his 21st birthday, she texted him to say she was pregnant. A few nights later, she called to say she was going to commit suicide.

In October she got a new roommate, a friend she’d known for several years, and, according to Mr. Hansen, scammed him out of $3,000. Later, Mr. Hansen somehow thought it would be a good idea for him to buy a used car, a Volkswagen Jetta, for Ms. Ferrell to make the payments on. It was a five-year loan at 20 percent interest. She made two payments on the car. Mr. Hansen ended up filing for bankruptcy.

The day after Ms. Ferrell turned 21, in February 2008, she went to jail in Salt Lake City for three months. When she got out, she started dating a guy named Brian MaWhinney; she’d met him because she’d dated his roommate.

I asked Mr. MaWhinney if he knew about Ms. Ferrell’s jail time and her propensity for check fraud. “I looked past it,” he said. “She said she was helping out her boyfriend and that she got out of jail early because he stepped in and said, ‘Here I am, this is my thing.’ I don’t think that was true.” Her mother and stepfather came to visit; she owed them thousands of dollars that, she told Mr. MaWhinney, she’d sent to them via Western Union. Hadn’t they gotten the money? (When contacted by The Observer, Ms. Ferrell’s stepfather refused to comment.) Western Union called in the cops, and Ms. Ferrell spent another 48 hours in jail; the bail was $5,000, and since she only had $500 in her wallet, Mr. MaWhinney posted the rest.

“When she was dating me,” Mr. MaWhinney said, “she said she worked for GoldenVoice and 24tix”—another concert organizing company. “Later, we found out she never worked for 24tix and I don’t think she worked for GoldenVoice. I don’t think she had a job the whole time I was dating her. She always used cash. I don’t think she had a bank account. She said she had these jobs because while she was at the University of Utah, she majored in music and started to intern at these jobs and then got hired on. I found out later she never even graduated from high school.”

 In July of last year, Ms. Ferrell told Mr. MaWhinney that she was going to take him and his friends to Chicago for the Pitchfork Music Festival. “We all got work off, and packed and got ready—we were going to leave on a Friday morning,” he said. “She called and said she got a call from her boss saying it had been delayed. She kept calling, saying it had kept being delayed, and then finally we didn’t go.”

In August 2008, Ms. Ferrell moved to New York, telling Mr. MaWhinney that GoldenVoice was letting her transfer to its New York office. She also told him she had a court date in Salt Lake City in December, at which point he would get back the money he’d posted for her bail. She never showed up.

The week that Ms. Ferrell was actually gainfully employed was a busy one, according to a Vice employee who worked somewhat directly with her: “We found out she had been calling up clubs saying she wanted to be on the list, was from Vice and was going to review the show. Weird, right? But not that insane for a young kid to do. Then we got a package from HBO with Flight of the Conchords DVDs that she had requested for review. O.K., so she’s kind of abusing her role to get swag and fucking with people we work with—not cool.” Then, the staffer said, Vice found out that she had “booked a table at The Box for ‘the surprise birthday party for the publisher of Vice.’ In the correspondence she had been all, ‘I’m emailing you from my personal email because we are having server issues, don’t contact the publisher, it’s a surprise.’”

The Salt Lake City Police Department remains very, very interested in finding Ms. Ferrell. According to a police spokesperson, if Ms. Ferrell is indeed in New York—or Philadelphia, where several of her friends told me she visited often and talked frequently of moving to—the police are powerless to extradite her without an extradition order from the Salt Lake City District Attorney’s office.

“I called over to the DA and spoke to my contact over there,” the police spokesperson, Sergeant Fred Ross, told me. “I’m just waiting for the prosecutor who’s actually assigned her cases.” If she’s picked up in New York, two officers from Salt Lake will fly out to pick her up and bring her back to face charges. (UPDATE: The Salt Lake City Police Department now has an extradition order for Ms. Ferrell. Anyone with information on her whereabouts can call Mr. Ross at 801-799-3366.) Sergeant Ross also drew my attention to his department’s use of YouTube in pursuit of Ms. Ferrell:

“What I find so strange is that she uses her real name,” Bobby, the 23-year-old Rutgers student, said. “I was thinking she’s just a really good liar. She goes after people who are very trusting, and exploits that. She really had me going—my first instinct is not to Google someone when I meet them.”

*This story has been modified from its original version.