The Hipster Grifter

Ms. Ferrell became close friends with Joe’s roommate Erica Koch, 26, who works at the cafe Brooklyn Label in Greenpoint. “She told me she had cancer,” said Ms. Koch. “Then later she told me she was terminally ill with cancer. She said she had just been diagnosed when she got to New York and she was taking chemo pills. You can’t question someone who says she has cancer! One day she came out of my roommate’s room coughing, and she had blood on her hand.”

At Brooklyn Label one day in December, a friend of Erica’s, a 30-year-old librarian who lives in Greenpoint, was writing Christmas cards when Ms. Ferrell approached him. They talked for a while and ended up going to a movie. Later she told him she had cancer. “She seemed completely fine—she seemed healthy,” said the librarian. “I said, ‘That’s horrible,’ but I didn’t feel like it was a terminal thing. Two days later, she said she got a call from her doctors and had only a couple months to live.”

A few days later, the librarian recalled, Ms. Ferrell said she was tired and might want to go to the emergency room. “She had claimed she needed to go to Sloan-Kettering—she said that’s why she came to New York, to go to that hospital. But she said she couldn’t go to Sloan-Kettering when she had complications. At the emergency room, the doctors couldn’t find her information...She gave them her Social Security number and they couldn’t find any records at Sloan-Kettering. I figured this was one of these administrative things where they couldn’t find her information.”

Soon the librarian realized that something wasn’t right, and Googled her. “Finally I just sent her an email saying that I knew, and I wasn’t going to hang out with her anymore, and then I told all the friends I had met through her the same story. They basically cut off contact with her.”

In January at an HBO party, Ms. Ferrell met a 24-year-old writer who lives in Williamsburg. By this point, she had moved to Throop Avenue in Bedford-Stuyvesant because, she told him, the building she’d been living in previously got condemned. The writer felt immediately drawn into Ms. Ferrell’s orbit; they ended up hanging out about four times a week. “She acts very warm and super-interested in what people have to say,” he recalled. “And she has lots of offers for things. She’s really into music and knows a lot about music. She’ll say, ‘I work at GoldenVoice, I can get you into that show. Anything you want to go to, I can get you on the list.’ We’d go and would end up not being on the list, but somehow we’d end up getting in—she’d just wink at the door guy and we’d get inside. Almost everyone who’s a dude, she’s really super sexually aggressive with—I’ve seen her send text messages to these guys that are really, really explicit, just to lure these dudes in. I guess these guys see that and say, ‘She’s attractive, she’s really aggressive, I’m into that.’ Even with girls, she would meet my friends and be really nice and warm and say she could get them into places—we would go out dancing and have a great time. She always got everyone’s phone number and email and followed up with them.”

In March, Ms. Ferrell got offered the job at Vice. “We had these long conversations about whether she should leave GoldenVoice and go to Vice or not,” said the writer. “This is one of the things that disturbs me more than anything else—we talked for 30 minutes about whether she should change jobs or not. We had an engaging conversation about something that was completely a fantasy.”

On March 22—right after Ms. Ferrell had been fired from Vice, her cover having been blown thanks to the co-worker’s Googling—the  writer and Ms. Ferrell got dinner and were hanging out at his apartment with his roommates. “She goes to the bathroom and says, ‘I just coughed up some blood.’ She had told me she had lung cancer, but I just thought she was sort of irresponsible or quasi in remission. Or over-embellishing the story a bit and that’s why she wasn’t seeking treatment.” Later that night, she texted the writer to say she was at Bellevue—but texted his roommate to say she was at N.Y.U. Medical Center.

“I was like, ‘That’s weird, maybe she got transferred,’” said the writer. “Monday evening I go to see her and she’s at N.Y.U. in the ER, and it seems like she’s been there a long time. I go with her to neuro—she’s saying she can’t see out of her left eye and she has really intense lower-left-quadrant pain. She’s not saying anything about coughing up blood. She’s saying they did a gastroendoscopy, and maybe she has a tumor and it’s throwing clots and she’s bleeding. I almost went to medical school—it wasn’t the most ridiculous thing I’d ever heard.”

The next night he went over to the house of a girl who, he said, “was four degrees removed from Kari, and someone said something out loud about Kari being in the hospital. This girl wasn’t going to tell me—but I kind of had a suspicion. I relayed a bunch of stuff and the girl said, ‘Girl does not have cancer. Girl rips dudes off for six grand and flees bail.’ This girl’s roommate works for the company that owns GoldenVoice, and she was like, ‘There’s no GoldenVoice office in New York.’” (GoldenVoice’s parent company, AEG Live, has an office in New York that handles local shows; calls to AEG’s human resources department were not returned.)

A couple months later,meanwhile, the librarian got a call from Mount Sinai hospital; Ms. Ferrell had listed him as an emergency contact. “They said, ‘Do you have any information about her? Can you tell her she owes us money?’”

“I was in denial”

Four and a half years ago, Kari Ferrell was just another 17-year-old girl hanging out in Salt Lake City’s straight-edge scene. She lived with her dad—her parents were divorced, and her mom had remarried and moved to Arizona—and spent a lot of time on MySpace. That was where she met Casey Hansen, now 24. “She just kind of messaged me out of nowhere, commenting on my profile picture,” Mr. Hansen said. “It was of Santa Claus holding a sign that said, ‘I don’t exist.’” The two started dating.

She told Mr. Hansen she was 18 and had graduated from high school that year. Her driver’s license said she was 17, though, and Ms. Ferrell’s parents even told him how old she was. “She just said there was something weird with her birth certificate, since she’d been adopted from South Korea,” Mr. Hansen said. He believed her. “She held on to this thing about her age, for no real valid reason, for like two years. I feel like that was a harbinger of things to come.”

Around New Year’s 2005, she moved to Arizona to live with her mom, but moved back to Salt Lake City three months later. That April she moved in with some straight-edge kids in Salt Lake City. Within a week, Mr. Hansen said, she told him she was getting text messages from phone numbers she didn’t recognize. She told him they said things like, “I’m going to rape you to death.” She told her roommates she thought she knew who it was, a local kid. She told Mr. Hansen that she and her roommates went to the kid’s family’s house and slashed tires and broke windows.

“In retrospect, she was sending herself the text messages somehow,” Mr. Hansen said. “She wanted the validation that people cared about her, I’m assuming.”