The Hero Had Two Faces

For fifteen years Tim Kingsbury lived an exemplary life as a Galveston civic leader. No one suspected that he was really a fugitive from Ohio who was thought to have killed himself—until his wife tracked him down.

by Paul Burka

May 1998

(Page 4 of 4)

I met her at the offices of the Newark— Licking County Chamber of Commerce, four blocks from the nineteenth-century courthouse where Patrick Welsh was scheduled to go on trial at the end of April. Her title is president. She has been recognized as one of the ten most in�uential women in her part-rural, part-suburban county of 165,000—not bad for a woman who dropped out of college to put her husband through school and was working in a dress shop when he deserted her. Connoisseurs of irony will note that Patrick and Elizabeth Welsh accomplished far greater things in their separate lives than, in all likelihood, they would have accomplished had they stayed together. Both reinvented themselves; he because he wanted to, she because she had to. Like her former husband, Elizabeth Welsh could also pass for at least ten years younger than her age of fifty. She was strikingly attractive in a grown-up way: the silky blond hair, now coiffed into a flip; no perceptible facial wrinkles; and an engrossing air that seemed to combine both strength and vulnerability. As she talked, what came through was neither anger nor bitterness but a bemused awe at the turns her life has taken. “The embezzlement, the desertion, it’s like it’s happening all over again,” she told me. “Once again I see people whispering wherever I go. Long-suffering Saint Elizabeth of Newark. I got hit by the same bus three times.”

For a long time she didn’t think he was really dead, despite the suicide letters. After phoning her throughout the day of his disappearance, Pat had been a no-show at her father’s house, where she was waiting for him. At midnight she went out to search the icy roads for an accident. The first letter (“I’m doing the best thing for you”), postmarked Lancaster on the day he disappeared, arrived four days later. A second one, postmarked San Francisco, followed in three weeks. “He said that he would look down on the boys and me from heaven and watch over us,” she said. “Unless he killed the devil within him, he would corrupt everyone around him, and he couldn’t do that to us, those he loved above himself.” But there were clues to suggest that the suicide was a false trail. An investigator found trash from a laminate-your-own ID card stuffed away in their garage. Pat had sold his car and taken most of the proceeds with him; of what use was money to a dead man? If, as was likely, he had just run away in shame and despair, then he would be caught, the investigating authorities assured her. For thirteen years, Pat’s Christmas stocking continued to be displayed when the huge Welsh clan gathered, including Elizabeth. His mother died of cancer, and Elizabeth inspected the church at the funeral for someone who might be Pat in disguise.

The break came early last November, eleven months after Tim Kingsbury had been ordered, as a condition of his probation, to use his real social security number. Elizabeth Welsh got a form letter from the Social Security Administration (SSA) demanding repayment of $54,000 in benefits she had received for her children and giving her thirty days to pay. The reason was: “Number holder not deceased.” By this time she was sure Pat was dead; someone was trying to use his old number as a false ID. All she had to do was find out who, and she would be off the hook. But when she tried to get more information, SSA officials in Newark said they could tell her nothing. They were silenced by the Privacy Act of 1974, which apparently protects the guilty and torments the innocent.

Even the intervention of her congressman, House Budget Committee chairman John Kasich, didn’t stop SSA from stonewalling. But Kasich’s office was able to pry two facts out of the bureaucracy: The cardholder was in the Southwest, perhaps Texas, and he had committed some sort of crime. “Are you sitting down?” Kasich’s senior aide said to Elizabeth. “I think this might be Pat.”

Elizabeth had told a few friends about her dilemma. One had suggested looking at a driver’s license database on the Internet. Now that she had a state to check out, she typed in “driver’s license information.” Sure enough, there was a company that had the information for Texas—for a price. At the bottom of the page was a phone number, and she called.

“My heart was beating so hard, I could see my blouse move,” she told me. “I told the person who answered I wanted just one name. He must have sensed my desperation. I gave him Pat’s social security number, and it took two seconds. ‘Patrick H. Welsh,’ he said. ‘Five feet, nine inches; one hundred fifty pounds; green eyes; brown hair; must wear glasses to drive; 6828 Driftwood Lane; Galveston, Texas.’ It was Pat.”

The rest was easy. A search of the address yielded the names Tim Kingsbury and Ann Anderson. She found his e-mail address, decided that was how she would contact him, and deliberated over what to say. The message she chose was: “I know. Call me to discuss this. Peachie.”

If Tim Kingsbury had responded, he might still be in Galveston today. But he didn’t. After two weeks went by, she called him at KGBC. “Let me change lines” he said, and then, “I knew this day would come. I just didn’t think it would be you who would find me.”

“You must do three things,” she told him: contact the SSA and his former insurance agent about repayment and—this was the test—come clean in Galveston about who he was. “It’s unfair for you to take another community down with you,” she said.

“I can’t do that,” he said. He had flunked.

Through a lawyer, he opened negotiations for repayment, but the one thing Elizabeth Welsh really wanted, some sign that Patrick Welsh was ready to face up to the past, was nonexistent. He hadn’t even asked about his children or his family. “He didn’t kill himself,” his younger son, now 23, told his mother. “He killed all of us.”

In January she decided to file felony charges against him for criminal abandonment. “I couldn’t say to my boys, ‘It was okay what he did,’” Elizabeth told me. “I didn’t want them to think that men could run away.”

But before the authorities brought him back to Ohio, she went to Galveston incognito. She drove past the house on Driftwood Lane and saw the amazing Tim Kingsbury leave for dinner with Ann Anderson. She saw the handsome nineteenth-century homes amid twentieth-century decay. And she went to see KGBC, on mostly undeveloped Pelican Island in Galveston Bay, and puzzled over the aging flat-roofed building that is half-obscured by shrubs and grasses. “It looked like a place for dumping bodies,” she said. “I had the inexplicable feeling that there were undercurrents here that I could never understand.”

“There are in fact real victims who have been inflicted with real harm, perhaps worse than can be inflicted with a knife.”

—Licking County Prosecutor Robert Becker, arguing against reducing bond for Patrick Welsh

THE FEBRUARY REUNION OF PAT AND Peachie was an anticlimax. She could not feel a scintilla of warmth pass between them. “He looked at me like I was a porcupine and he was a dog,” she told me.

I saw him before his bail reduction hearing the day after my meeting with Elizabeth. He was a solitary figure sitting on a bench in the near-empty courtroom, oblivious to the ornate decor that included stained-glass windows and a dome. He wore his jail garb of jeans, a T-shirt, and a blue denim jacket draped over his shoulders. I didn’t recognize him at first because he was so gaunt. His most prominent feature was his Adam’s apple. When I turned back to him, he said, “Hi, Paul.”

“Hi, Tim,” I said, forgetting who he was. “Can you talk?”

“My attorney says not to,” he said and shrugged. As he did, a clanking sound came out from beneath his jacket, and I realized that his wrists were shackled. I moved away. The man who had been Galveston’s civic leader shuffled up to the defense table, his movements restricted by ankle chains. Robert Becker, the chief prosecutor, took his seat to represent the State of Ohio. I took that as a bad sign for Pat Welsh. I had watched three other cases that morning, all handled by assistant prosecutors. Now the top man was after him. The odds are high that Patrick Welsh is headed for the penitentiary.

After the brief hearing, he shuffled out to see Ann Anderson. I wanted to feel sorry for him, but I couldn’t. He had conned my friends and my town, and whatever good he had done had been eclipsed by feelings of mistrust and betrayal. Only a few people, most of them friends I had known all my life, were standing by him. They were the ones who had suffered most, except for Elizabeth, of course, and the boys who had grown up without a father. Once again, Patrick Welsh had managed to hurt those who loved him most.

I thought of something the lawyer who had called Tim Kingsbury “a nonprofit kind of guy” had told me. “The news about Tim was coming out at the same time as the Karla Faye Tucker story,” he had said, “and I thought about her a lot. Here was somebody who had tried to redeem herself, but there was nothing she could do to bring back those two people she had killed. For three hundred and sixty-five days a year, for fifteen years, all Tim Kingsbury had to do to redeem himself was pick up the telephone and make one call. And he didn’t do it.”

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