Elaine Parent

Elaine Antoinette Parent (August 4, 1942-April 6, 2002) was an American criminal known as "the world's most wanted woman" in the late nineties and early '00s. Parent was beautiful, cunning and highly dangerous.

Parent also earned the nickname of "Chameleon" for her ability to elude authorities with a variety of disguises, sometimes even posing as a man: her known aliases include Charlotte Rae Cowan, Sylvia Ann Hodgkinson, Ann Tremont, Elaine Haviland, Alex Hart, Alexis Marshal Hart, Antonio Hamilton Russell, Victoria Dark, and Bret Tremont. She has traveled the world of stolen identities on two continents and number of countries that include the United States, United Kingdom, Turkey, France, South Africa and Australia.

McGowan murder

Parent's criminal career officially began in Miami, Florida on July 16 1990. A bank employee named Beverly Ann McGowan had placed an ad looking for a roommate to share her Pompano Beach, Florida condominium. A woman calling herself 'Alice' answered the ad and befriended McGowan. Through their brief involvement, Parent got McGowan interested in numerology and was able to obtain Beverly's birth certificate, social security numbers, passport and other vital information. Shortly afterwards, McGowan had written goodbye letters to her family and friends saying she was leaving for a while. Her brother, Steve, knew something was wrong and he cancelled her credit cards thinking that Beverly could not travel without them, and he then traveled to search in her condo and it seemed as though she had just simply disappeared.

On July 19 1990, two days after McGowan wrote the letters and disappeared, the mutilated remains of a woman were found in the St. Lucie County, Florida canal. Police investigators said that the woman had been decapitated, only a part of the woman's lower jaw and five teeth remained; the victim's hands had been hacked off above the wrists; her throat had been slashed open and a part of her abdomen had been cut away, apparently to remove a tattoo. The killer worked hard to make identification impossible for police, but the killer had overlooked another tattoo that was found on the dead woman's ankle. The tattoo of a yellow rose, along with the victim's few teeth through dental records positively identified the woman as Beverly Ann McGowan.

Police were shocked by the brutality of such a vicious murder, and a day after the body was discovered, police found that McGowan's mysterious roommate 'Alice' had used Beverly's credit cards in shops around the area. Later, the same credit cards were used by what appeared to be a man dressed as a woman at a travel agency in Miami to book an airline flight to London, England. The man had stated that he had a reservation to fly to England on a British Airways flight on July 21. Police believed that the man was really 'Alice' disguising herself to elude authorities. While police investigated the airline manifests they were unable to trace any names of 'Alice' or Beverly McGowan, but nonetheless the following day in London, 'Alice' picked up a car at the London Heathrow Airport.

earch for Parent

Police investigators spent the next five years desperately trying to find a lead to the identity of 'Alice'. In 1996, police returned to the passenger manifest on the British Airlines flight that Alice took to London in 1990 after McGowan's death. One name was familiar to police investigators; the person listed as "Sylvia Ann Hodgkinson" was known to the State Department by a string of aliases and she was also a British citizen. The 'real' Sylvia Hodgkinson was deceased, but three identities that the fake 'Sylvia Hodgkinson' used were known: 'Charlotte Rae Cowan', 'Ann Tremont' and 'Elaine Antoinette Parent'. It was later discovered that 'Ann Tremont' had befriended a woman named Charlotte Rae Cowan in a bar in Orlando in 1989.

Ann Tremont also used numerology to get Cowan's vital information, and she eventually stole Cowan"s identity. In 1991, the fake Charlotte Rae Cowan was arrested in Miami for auto theft, placed in jail overnight, but was released on bail and never seen again. It wasn't until 1996 that police investigators discovered all of these different faces of 'Alice'. The police had one identity to investigate: Elaine Parent. As the investigators discovered the mysterious woman named 'Alice' who calls herself 'Sylvia Ann Hodgkinson', 'Ann Tremont', 'Charlotte Rae Cowan' was indeed Elaine Parent, who happened to be a known criminal.

Parent had actually been arrested during a jewelry theft scheme in the 1980s, but she always seemed to be one step ahead of investigators. Believed to be bisexual, in 1986, Parent had begun a relationship with a British female executive. After the relationship failed in 1990, Parent is believed to have sent threatening letters to her former lover, using the same type of paper that Beverly McGowan had used shortly before her disappearance and grisly murder. It is believed that after Parent murdered Beverly McGowan, she sent the threatening letters to her British lover and then went to London to confront her. The relationship once again failed, and Parent threatened to kill her lover, and then she was never seen again.

uicide

For another six years, Parent had seemed to disappear from sight, until April 2002 when she was finally tracked down at her residence in Panama City, Florida where she was living under a new identity of 'Darlene Higgins'. As police came to her house to arrest her, Parent committed suicide from a self-inflicted gunshot wound. By doing so, much of Elaine Parent's bizarre lifestyle and criminal career and her secrets died with her.

External links

* [http://www.wtparnell.com/parent1.htm Elaine Parent: The Chameleon] WTPARNELL.com