Chapter 5 - What Happened After Rachel Died
Rachel Mercer died ten months after disappearing.
Investigators eventually found the death certificate.
Not under Rachel Mercer.
Under:
Rachel Marshall.
Ovarian cancer.
A hospice facility in Cheyenne.
Victor was listed as her brother.
The girls had been staying with a trusted older couple outside town during Rachel’s final week.
Victor attended the burial.
The twins did not.
He told them their mother had gone away.
“Why?” Denise asked him.
“They were five.”
“That isn’t an answer.”
Victor looked down.
“I couldn’t tell them.”
That sentence would become the beginning of almost every bad decision he made afterward.
He couldn’t tell them Rachel had died.
Couldn’t explain why police might arrest him.
Couldn’t reopen the forged case.
Couldn’t return to Colorado.
Couldn’t risk Grant’s family discovering them.
Couldn’t put them in school under their real names.
Each couldn’t created another lie.
At first, Victor appeared to have cared for them reasonably well.
Records from the first year showed pediatric visits under aliases.
Library cards.
Homeschool curriculum purchases.
Photographs at parks and museums.
Then Grant went to prison.
The immediate danger decreased.
Victor still did not come forward.
Instead, they moved again.
And again.
Why?
Money was part of the answer.
After Rachel died, Ava and Amelia became beneficiaries of two legitimate sources:
Social Security survivor benefits from Rachel’s work history.
And a modest education trust their maternal grandfather had established years earlier.
Not millions.
Enough to matter.
Roughly $2,700 per month combined in survivor benefits at the time, plus controlled education and medical distributions.
Victor became representative payee under the girls’ alias documentation and presented himself to the family trustee as their authorized caregiver.
For a while, most spending looked plausible.
Housing.
Food.
School materials.
Medical bills.
Then cash withdrawals increased.
Hotels.
Victor’s vehicle.
Credit-card debt.
A failed online trading business.
The girls’ money slowly became part of Victor’s life.
The secrecy that began as protection had become financially useful.
Then investigators found the worst financial detail.
The education trustee had requested an annual proof-of-schooling review three months before Christmas.
Victor never supplied it.
Instead, he moved the twins from Utah to Colorado.
The request followed.
So did a case inquiry.
That explained why he was relocating them again on Christmas Eve.
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Someone had finally started asking ordinary administrative questions.
Ordinary questions were the one thing Victor’s secret life could no longer survive.
