Faking Cancer: One Woman’s 5 Year Lie

CHATTANOOGA, Tenn. — For five years, Keele Maynor carried a walking cane, cropped her hair short and coaxed co-workers, neighbors and cancer survivor groups to be generous as she battled breast cancer. She accepted 194 days of paid leave donated by co-workers and blogged about protecting her children from the trauma of hospice care.

“I know God has a reason for me to be here,” she wrote in an Aug. 2 blog entry. “I just don’t always understand or like what I have to go through to stay here.”

It was all a lie. Physically healthy, she played the part of a terminally ill woman in need. When her deceit _ she later described it as a “charade” _ collapsed, she resigned suddenly from her government job as a $24,000-a-year senior assistant in the city’s land development office.

Maynor acknowledged in a Dec. 12 e-mail to her boss that she has been cancer-free since a scare in 2000.

“I started fabricating this story about cancer in 2003 and it has snowballed and finally came to a head,” she wrote. “I am relieved for two reasons. I don’t have to keep up the charade anymore and I am finally getting some help to figure out why I did this in the first place.”

On Thursday, authorities arrested the 38-year-old in Union City, Ga., on eight counts of theft and one count of forgery, charges leveled this week by a grand jury in Chattanooga. Each of the most serious allegations carries a penalty of up to 60 years in prison.

She had been staying just outside Atlanta since leaving Chattanooga after her ruse unraveled, said Bill Cox, a prosecutor in Hamilton County, Tenn.

An officer at the Georgia jail said Maynor was in custody there. Cox said she would be returned to Chattanooga but no court appearance was immediately scheduled.

Maynor has refused to talk to reporters. A young man who answered a knock on her apartment door recently declined comment and said she did not want to comment. A knock at the apartment door the next day was not answered, although her car was parked outside.

Maynor accepted money and $18,000 worth of paid leave from her co-workers, according to Richard Beeland, a spokesman for the mayor’s office. Her colleagues said they have been asked not to talk about the case.

The city’s Web site, in promoting a fund raiser for a breast cancer foundation, used to describe Maynor as a seven-year cancer survivor who “continues everyday fighting and surviving. Keele is very loved and admired by everyone and we are inspired by her faith, perseverance, and humor. She is a terrific mentor to fellow cancer patients and eagerly offers her assistance to them with a harmonious blend of kindness and ‘tough-love.’”

That posting has been removed.

The local cancer community was taken in, too, unwittingly offering her emotional support and a public forum. In a Sept. 13 blog entry for Hope Prevails, a nonprofit group that provides personal Web sites for cancer patients and their families, Maynor referred to herself as a struggling single mother and said her oncologist “would like for me to start talking hospice and of course I said I would not. I will not take my kids through that again. I did tell him at the end I would bring hospice in, but with the help of him I will be taking on my pain.

“Am I okay you ask? NO I am not I cry doing anything. I am so emotional and it is so aggravating, because I’m suppose to be the strong one. Mentally and emotionally I feel like I am going crazy, but at least I do realize I have a lot to take in. I do know one thing I want some happiness before I leave this world.”

In the resignation e-mail to her supervisor, Maynor said she was diagnosed with breast cancer in 2000 but in 2001 “my margins were clear after my first mammogram after the radiation treatment.”

Maynor’s e-mail also said she is now seeing a therapist.

Larry Stansell, a former neighbor who occasionally loaned Maynor his lawn mower and gave her a “little tiny bit” of money for groceries, said she has three well-behaved and well-mannered teenage children. He said they kept a neat yard before moving about three months ago when a tree fell on the house Maynor rented.

“You probably couldn’t ask for a better neighbor,” he said.

Stansell, 52, said Maynor sometimes walked with a cane and “had a lot of people coming out to help her with stuff.”

Cancer support group leaders who knew Maynor said they were shocked by her years of dishonesty. Stansell, who sells auto parts, also described her as “basically a good person.”

“I think Satan roams the world to steal and kill and tempt and he does it in different ways and she has fallen into temptation,” Stansell said. “She needs to pay for whatever crimes she did but she needs to be forgiven also.”

Maynor has not disclosed any motive for her actions.

Jeffrey Bishop, an associate professor of medicine and an ethicist at Vanderbilt Medical Center in Nashville, said people diagnosed with cancer and other diseases sometimes get caught up in the “secondary gain from an illness.” That can include emotional and psychological support from family, friends and the community.

“Cancer occupies a very socially sensitive place and people really want to reach out to people with breast cancer,” Bishop said. He said sometimes people get “drawn into getting kindness and concern.”

SOURCE: FOXNEWS