Advertisement His lilting brogue and gift for storytelling made Derr a picture perfect Irishman. As he mixed drinks and pulled pints at the Claddagh pub, he made friends. Close friends such as waiter Matty O'Dea, who liked him so much he made Derr best man at his wedding.
Derr's richly detailed and often funny stories depicted his life growing up in troubled Northern Ireland and traveling the world. He wanted to be called "Sinjin," a contraction of St. John that his Irish grandmother favored.
There was nary a hint of anything amiss.
Except that his colorful tales sometimes pushed the bounds of credulity, said Steve Wunsch, Middleton emergency medical director, who signed him on as an EMT trainee.
"From what I know now, he was very skilled at putting together stories that, you know, all made sense," Wunsch said.
And Derr endeared himself to people. When he grew fond of a local Irish traditional and rock band, The Pints, he helped them get gigs.
"He really helped us out," said Ray Murphy, the band's "captain." "We were even wondering about asking him to be our manager because he seemed so professional."
Adds band member Jerry Schulz: "What better for an Irish band than to have a guy from Belfast as your manager?"
At O'Dea's wedding on June 2, 2007, Derr even convinced the groom's father, a Belfast native, that he was the real deal.
"My dad was like, I'd recognize that accent anywhere.'" O'Dea said.
But a rift opened late last summer between Derr and O'Dea, over Derr's strange insistence -- and outrage -- that O'Dea had himself claimed to be from Belfast. O'Dea is adamant he never said that.
After the dispute, O'Dea didn't see Derr again until January.
That was when O'Dea went to court to see Richard Glen Outhier, the man everyone had known as Jonathan "Sinjin" Derr, arraigned on federal identity theft charges.
Identity theft
Outhier, 37, was arrested by federal authorities on Dec. 26 for stealing the identity of the real Jonathan Derr, a Massachusetts man with Down syndrome. He used nearly $26,000 in credit in Derr's name to buy a car and other goods.
Outhier had then been in Madison for about a year, working as a bartender and as a trainee with two emergency medical services. As Derr, he had also attended EMT classes at MATC and UW Hospital.
Outhier was sentenced in July to 4-1/2 years in federal prison for combined identity theft cases from Wisconsin and Texas. Now at Duluth Federal Prison Camp in Minnesota, he faces more identity theft charges in Wyoming and he's wanted in Colorado for walking away from a halfway house about 10 years ago.
Interviews with more than two dozen people -- who knew Outhier as a performing magician, Navy SEAL, EMS trainee, and Irish bartender -- show him to be a charming, friendly and genuine person.
The interviews, along with court, police and military records from across the country, show a young man adept at assuming and shedding identities and developing kinships with people he met along the way.
Outhier stole thousands of dollars, mostly from perfect strangers whose vital information he had appropriated.
It's not clear that anyone really understood him.
His mother, Nannette Outhier, a Navy retiree in Florida whose bank account was cleaned out by her son, said she no longer knows the son she raised as a single mom and hasn't spoken to him in years.
"He's a crook," she said. "I'm sorry I brought him into the world, quite frankly. If I had a chance to put him back where he came from, I would."
Outhier doesn't seem to have gotten rich from his schemes.
In a short telephone conversation with a Wisconsin State Journal reporter in March, Outhier said there was a reason that he seemed to be running from his own identity, but wouldn't say what that was. He said it would take a book to tell his story, but he hasn't responded to further questions or interview requests.
The important thing, he said, was that he'd met good people in Madison who have made him want to change and own up to everything he has done.
Unusual case
Assistant U.S. Attorney David Reinhard, who prosecuted Outhier, said this case was far from the run-of-the-mill identity theft cases that cross his desk.
What was unusual, he said, was how often Outhier moved from one place to another, from name to name. Also unusual was his diligence and ingenuity. To become Derr, he posed as a reporter from the British Broadcasting Corporation to interview the real Derr's mother and glean from her the details he would need to steal Derr's identity.
"This took on a whole new level of identity theft," Reinhard said.
Psychopathic behavior
Jack Leskovar, the Madison-based Secret Service agent who arrested Outhier, has compared him to Frank Abagnale Jr., the real-life check forger portrayed by Leonardo DiCaprio in the film "Catch Me If You Can."
One expert said Outhier's behavior over the years, as documented by the State Journal, "fits the classic profile of psychopathy."
Joseph Newman, chairman of the UW-Madison psychology department and an expert on behavior disorders, said psychopaths differ from common criminals in that they are intelligent and are not neurotic or anxious. Despite being endowed with intelligence and sophisticated social skills, they live detached, exploitative lives.
"People have trouble suspecting them because everything about their demeanor is disarming," Newman said.
Psychopaths, at least in past decades, demonstrated confidence in their assumed personas by impersonating doctors or airline pilots and performing surgery or flying airliners.
Psychopaths also have emotional deficits, including lack of fear or remorse and may not learn from being hurt or imprisoned. They also take advantage of people physically, financially or sexually and feel no guilt because of it, Newman said.
Madison arrest
Leskovar wasn't certain how Outhier wound up in Madison. But police records reveal he was arrested during his first visit here in July 1993, when he came to Madison from Colorado with a friend.
The friend, Doug Sides, knew him as John Vincent Sinclair. They'd met as coworkers at Executive Security International, a bodyguard service in Aspen, Colo. Outhier got the job in 1993 by claiming he was an ex-Navy SEAL.
"I'd only met him through ESI," Sides recalled. "I had no idea about his background or anything like that."
But by then, Aspen police were looking for Outhier for cashing stolen ESI checks at local banks. They knew his real name, that he was a Marine Corps deserter and that there was a warrant for his arrest.
Following a tip from Aspen police, Madison Police Detective Bruce Becker went to Sides' girlfriend's apartment in Madison and quickly identified the man who answered the door as Outhier.
In one of his pockets, Outhier was already carrying a trumped-up birth certificate, created using Sides' girlfriend's birth certificate as a template, for what would have been his next alias -- John Alexander Capone.
'Wanted to fit in'
So who is this guy?
Richard Glen Outhier, sometimes called J. Richard Outhier, was born on June 18, 1971, in Englewood, N.J. An only child, his parents married on a Navy base in California when he was nearly 4 years old. They divorced when he was about 12.
Outhier and his mother later moved to Leonardtown, Md., not far from Patuxent Naval Air Test Station. High school classmates at Leonardtown remember Outhier as a nice guy, but given to exaggeration.
Chris Crager, now a Boston police officer, said Outhier wanted to impress people, and had claimed that he did drug raids with the local sheriff.
"He never struck me as a harmful person," Crager said, "but definitely one who wanted to fit in as best he could."
Crager and other classmates remembered Outhier riding to school on a small European motorcycle, and some jokingly theorized that he was an undercover drug officer in school, like Johnny Depp on "21 Jump Street."
But generally, classmate Amy Saye said, he tried but couldn't fit into any school cliques.
"I remember thinking that he was a pretty smart guy who was maybe just too shy to jump in and be a participant in the usual high school activities," Saye said.
Outhier joined the Marines after high school, in June 1990. His last assignment was aboard the USS Ogden in May 1992, where it appears his trouble started.
According to a Madison police report, Outhier told Detective Bruce Becker after his 1993 arrest that he was having unspecified financial difficulties, and was restricted to his ship after he told his commanding officer of his problems. On Jan. 4, 1993, he went AWOL.
Madison police sent Outhier back to Camp Pendleton in California, where on Sept. 17, 1993, the Marines sentenced him to 74 days in the brig for desertion, but was freed because he received credit for 74 days already detained.
Desertion sentence
Within three days, Outhier vanished from Camp Pendleton.
"I realized that I still needed to settle some personal affairs outside Camp Pendleton," Outhier wrote later in a court-martial sentencing statement.
Improbably, Outhier's destination was the U.S. Naval Academy in Annapolis, Md. He pretended for two weeks, before the ruse was discovered, to be a SEAL corpsman named Jonathan Vincent Valjean, who had recently served overseas.
"He fooled everybody," Navy Lt. Matthew Hickey testified later at Outhier's court-martial.
Most shook up by the deception was Anthony Avila, a SEAL candidate who came to trust Outhier as a friend. Avila had even let Outhier instruct him in a "drownproof" exercise, to learn not to panic under water. It was conducted in a swimming pool with Avila's hands and feet bound.
After learning Outhier was actually a Marine deserter, Avila testified, "I felt very sick because I had trusted my life to this person. I was very hurt. I thought that we were friends."
Outhier received two years of confinement and a dishonorable discharge, but the sentence was stayed during automatic appeals lasting more than three years. It was eventually reduced to six months of confinement and a bad-conduct discharge.
In the meantime, Outhier was extradited to Colorado, where he was sentenced to 18 months in community corrections for forging ESI's checks. But he disappeared in October 1994 after serving only part of his sentence.
Within days, Outhier had fled east and was writing worthless checks at the Norfolk Naval Base and the Little Creek Amphibious Base in Norfolk, Va., according to a federal indictment.
Magic tricks
Outhier eluded police for the next two years, living in the Washington, D.C. area under the name Patrick Adams. Richard Kaufman, publisher of Genii magicians magazine in Washington, said Outhier worked as a magic trick demonstrator at Magic Masters, a store in downtown Washington.
"He was a very personable guy, charming and not a bad magician," Kaufman said. "But he was a bull (expletive) artist. Whenever he talked to me my bull (expletive) detector went off right away."
Former Magic Masters manager Karen Beriss said customers liked Outhier but he had a penchant for tall tales.
"He would tell us stories about Ireland and the pub that his father owned being blown up by the British," Beriss said, "how he'd joined the French Foreign Legion and how he'd gone and wandered off a boat in the U.S. and was now living in this country. And that's where we all went, What?'"
As Patrick Adams, he even claimed to be the godson of Irish Republican Army leader Gerry Adams, Beriss said.
Later, Outhier opened his own magic kiosk, called "Sleight of Hand," at a Virginia shopping mall. Brian Kloske was 16 years old when he went to work for Outhier.
"I really liked working there. He was a great boss, a super charismatic guy," Kloske said.
After eight months, Kloske went to Florida with Outhier and Outhier's then-fiancee to help him set up his new magic shop at Disney World in Orlando. But on June 24, 1997, Kloske's first day on the job, the law caught up with Outhier at Disney.
"All of a sudden there was a group of guys around him," Kloske said. "The next thing I knew there was a big commotion and they're all holding him down and putting him in handcuffs and leg irons."
Outhier was arrested not only for kiting checks at the Virginia naval bases in 1994 but for writing worthless checks at magic stores in Daytona Beach in May and June 1997, according to police reports.
The Florida charges were later dropped, but Outhier was sent back to Virginia, where he was sentenced to a year in federal prison.
After prison, Kloske said, Outhier lived in Philadelphia and worked as a magician at clubs and casinos in Atlantic City. But in September 1999, while still on federal probation, Outhier vanished again.
Moved around
Outhier re-surfaced in Chicago on Aug. 31, 2001, when federal marshals arrested him. For about a month, he had worked in the emergency room at Evanston Hospital under the name Alvin Childress.
"I just remember being worried that he was going to get out of his handcuffs because he was a magician," supervisory U.S. Marshal John O'Malley said with a laugh. "We chained him up in the back seat and said, All right, Houdini.'"
Outhier received another year in federal prison for violating his probation. He was released in August 2002.
He lived for a time during 2003 in Berwick, La., near New Orleans, and later moved to Texas. In 2005, he told U.S. District Judge Barbara Crabb earlier this year, he worked as a commercial diver, but lost the job when his employer discovered that he had not been candid about his criminal past.
Outhier then took a job in the emergency room of Harris Methodist Hospital in Fort Worth, Texas. There, federal prosecutors said, he stole the names and Social Security numbers of ER patients and used them to get credit cards.
In Fort Worth, Outhier also hung around with magicians on Monday nights at the local Bennigan's restaurant, said Michael Squires, a magician and computer technician in Dallas. Though Outhier told wildly improbable stories of adventure and military exploits, Squires said, everyone liked the Irish guy they knew as Logan Devine.
"Devine" was to perform his mentalist act on Aug. 26, 2005, at Bass Hall in Fort Worth. A gig there was a big deal, Squires said. But the show was canceled, Outhier disappeared and none of the Texas magicians ever heard from him again, Squires said.
That was because Outhier was then calling himself Declan McManus and was in Jackson, Wyo.
Jonathan Rummel met Outhier when they worked together for about two months at the Jackson Hole Playhouse. Rummel thought they had become best friends.
"He was really good. He was very talented," Rummel said. "He could have been a professional, but it was all a front."
In October 2005, Rummel said, Outhier proposed a business, called Emerald Isle Excursions, to bring Irish tourists to Jackson Hole to ski. Rummel contributed startup money and Outhier was to line up ski resorts, bus rentals and hotels.
According to court documents filed in Teton County, Wyo., Outhier claimed to have lined up 300 Irish tourists through an uncle in Ireland. Rummel and Outhier charged $129,800 on the credit cards of 236 of these "tourists."
However, court documents state, there were no Irish tourists and no reservations. Outhier instead had allegedly stolen most of the credit card numbers from Jackson Hole Playhouse patrons.
Three days later, on Nov. 14, 2005, Outhier left Jackson. Rummel never heard from him again.
"He planned it out perfectly, and I guess I was at a time in my life where I was naive and maybe didn't catch all the signs," he said.
Relief work
With Wyoming behind him, Outhier told U.S. District Judge Barbara Crabb during a May court hearing in Madison, he thought he had "gotten to the point in life where I acquired all of those things materialistically that you think are going to make your life better and happy."
But repulsed by what he had done, Outhier said he decided to atone by doing relief work in Africa and retraining as a paramedic. He said that a contract job he had later in Montana, however, compelled him to return permanently to the U.S.
Through an identity broker, he said, he got the identity for Jonathan Derr, the Boston-area man with Down syndrome.
Outhier settled into a well-appointed apartment on Madison's West Side and into his role as Irish bartender and EMS trainee.
Middleton EMS chief Steve Wunsch met Outhier in March 2007 at Claddagh. After passing a background check with his stolen identity, Wunsch said, Outhier became an EMT trainee.
"It just goes to show that if someone is really intent on doing that sort of deception, there isn't really much you can do to prevent it," Wunsch said.
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