Laid to rest in the "Field of Honor" under an alias
...We don't even know his real name. The central figure in this stranger-than-fiction story is as much a mystery as the events surrounding him. A man who wove his way all across North America over many decades, leaving a long trail of stories, identities and broken hearts in his wake. A charismatic and magnetic man who could command every room, who could inspire the imagination and capture the love of so many. Until the illusion was shattered. |
Dr. Robert Vernon Spears was only one of his aliases. But it was his longest and arguably the most successful. For 10 years he masqueraded as a physician—advertizing in his local yellow pages as an MD, a medical doctor. During this era of his life, he became one of the best-known minds in mid-century American alternative medicine, rising to become the president of the Texas Association of Naturopathic Physicians and a Trustee of the American Association of Naturopathic Physicians.
Yet before that he had a far more extensive resume of names and identities, including a journalist in Minneapolis, a WWI Aviator and war hero, a real estate mogul in Los Angeles, an engineer, a salesman, a leading hypnotist, and a master forger. Decades ahead of his time, he even posed as a new age guru. In the 1920's he took on the "real-life Gatsby" persona of Oscar L.A. Delano, one of America's richest playboys. The "roaring twenties" was an era when crime was rampant and even glamorised by a growing anti-establishment gangster culture. But Spears was not a gangster. Or violent. Instead he joined the ranks of the more sophisticated, suave "professional" criminals — the confidence men.
He had a cat and mouse relationship with the law. And his criminal resume was far from ordinary. He was proud of his craft — the genteel, nonviolent and sophisticated nature of the confidence game. Posing as a Canadian using forged paperwork he had himself deported to Canada on multiple occasions in an attempt to evade authorities. |
"The world is what
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