Fleeing Toward Scandal

Would you abandon your wealth and privilege to be with the person you loved? In late 1931, a tall, gaunt man named "Tom Palmer" stepped off the train in the border town of Brownsville, Texas. Weeks later, "Elizabeth McClinton Palmer" joined him. Each deserted prominent families who suppressed the reason for their disappearances to avoid scandal. His escape was an elaborate hoax that also defrauded his life insurance company. She simply walked away from her home. Betty and Tom then strove to build a secret identity together during the Great Depression. They had no idea how obscurity would change their lives. Ultimately, the Palmer's subterfuge could not escape New York Life's unrelenting search. A forensic accountant's death-bed confession and Tom's disfiguring head injury unraveled not only the pair's lives but also those of their six unsuspecting children. Further clues led a Nashville cub reporter to pen a worldwide exposé of Tom and Betty in 1953 that shocked a global audience. Veteran lawyer Leslie E. Barras vividly details the Palmer's "before" and "after" identities and the decades in which they lived. A trove of lawsuits were mined to tell Betty and Tom's enthralling story fully for the first time.