Look, we all have bad days when everything seems hell-bent on going wrong.
Yes, there are days when it feels as though the entire cosmos has conspired against you. But then, there are days when a stranger calls you at work to inform you that your husband is, technically speaking, someone else’s husband. And that everything he’s ever told you has been a big, fat lie.
Enter Deb Proctor, an Oklahoma woman whose one irredeemable mistake in life was joining a dating site in 1998 and getting to know Jeff Walton.
Then, in 2014, having married Walton for more than a decade, a call from Canada turned her world upside down. The caller identified themselves as an investigator, delivering news that would have made a lesser person lose it entirely.
The man Deb had married was not who she thought he was.
Jeff Walton was actually Ronald Stan — a Canadian man who, back in September 1977, had faked his own death and staged a disappearance using a barn fire that, uh, killed several pigs. (Yes, that detail is very important to the story.) No human remains were ever found, but Stan was declared legally dead in 1986, allowing him to start a new life in America.
To summarize what took investigators many years to untangle, Stan had a life in Canada, with a wife and two children. But one day, in 1977, he simply decided he was done with it. A barn fire provided cover, and the absence of human remains provided just enough ambiguity for the courts to eventually declare him dead. He arrived in Oklahoma a new man, with a borrowed name, and married Deb Proctor.
Turns out, you can ghost an entire country
“I felt like I was in somebody’s movie,” Proctor told Fox News. “I thought, ‘Who am I? Who was I married to this entire time?’”
She went directly to the Cherokee Nation Marshals Service to verify the story. Every detail checked out. Jeff Walton was Ronald Stan. “Jeff Walton,” it later emerged, was a name assembled from his son’s first name and The Waltons, the television series about a large, loving, emphatically non-fraudulent family living in rural Virginia.
As if the identity theft and the phantom death weren’t enough texture for one marriage, Stan had also spent a year into their relationship telling Proctor — a nurse — that he was a Vietnam War veteran who had been captured, tortured, and escaped captivity by following a stream. If nothing, our barnyard Houdini certainly had imagination.
“Pathological liars, they’re a dime a dozen,” Proctor said. “They walk among us. Some people fall for them more than others, but it can happen to any one of us. If something doesn’t feel right, dig out the truth.”
The Ontario Provincial Police reopened Stan’s case in 2014 and, using modern investigative technology, located him living quietly in rural Oklahoma. He confessed to police. Proctor filed for divorce immediately. Stan, or Walton, died in 2019 of natural causes.
Some people really do get away with it like in the movies, eh? Well, almost.
