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

In the hours before Election Day, as inevitable as winter, comes an onslaught of dirty tricks — confusing e-mails, disturbing phone calls and insinuating fliers left on doorsteps during the night.

The intent, almost always, is to keep folks from voting or to confuse them, usually through intimidation or misinformation. But in this presidential race, in which a black man leads most polls, some of the deceit has a decidedly racist bent.

Complaints have surfaced in predominantly African-American neighborhoods of Philadelphia where fliers have circulated, warning voters they could be arrested at the polls if they had unpaid parking tickets or if they had criminal convictions.

Over the weekend in Virginia, bogus fliers with an authentic-looking commonwealth seal said fears of high voter turnout had prompted election officials to hold two elections — one on Tuesday for Republicans and another on Wednesday for Democrats.

In New Mexico, two Hispanic women filed a lawsuit last week claiming they were harassed by a private investigator working for a Republican lawyer who came to their homes and threatened to call immigration authorities, even though they are U.S. citizens.

“He was questioning her status, saying that he needed to see her papers and documents to show that she was a U.S. citizen and was a legitimate voter,” said Guadalupe Bojorquez, speaking on behalf of her mother, Dora Escobedo, a 67-year-old Albuquerque resident who speaks only Spanish. “He totally, totally scared the heck out of her.”

In Pennsylvania, e-mails appeared linking Democrat Barack Obama to the Holocaust. “Jewish Americans cannot afford to make the wrong decision on Tuesday, Nov. 4,” said the electronic message, paid for by an entity calling itself the Republican Federal Committee. “Many of our ancestors ignored the warning signs in the 1930s and 1940s and made a tragic mistake.”

Laughlin McDonald, who leads the ACLU’s Voting Rights Project, said he has never seen “an election where there was more interest and more voter turnout, and more efforts to suppress registration and turnout. And that has a real impact on minorities.”

The Obama campaign and civil rights advocacy groups have signed up millions of new voters for this presidential race. In Ohio alone, some 600,000 have submitted new voter registration cards.

Across the country, many of these first-time voters are young and strong Obama supporters. Many are also black and Hispanic.

Activist groups say it is this fresh crop of ballot-minded citizens that makes some Republicans very nervous. And they say they expect the dirty tricks to get dirtier in final hours before Tuesday.

“Oh, there’s plenty of time for things to get ugly,” said Zachary Stalberg, president of The Committee of Seventy, a Philadelphia-based government watchdog group that is nonpartisan.

Other reports of intimidation efforts in the hotly contested state of Pennsylvania include leaflets taped to picnic benches at Drexel University, warning students that police would be at the polls on Tuesday to arrest would-be voters with prior criminal offenses.

In his Jewish neighborhood, Stalberg said, fliers were recently left claiming Obama was more sympathetic to Palestinians than to Israel, and showed a photograph of him speaking in Germany.

“It shows up between the screen door and the front door in the middle of the night,” Stalberg said. “Why couldn’t someone knock on the door and hand that to me in the middle of the day? In a sense, it’s very smartly done. The message gets through. It’s done carefully enough that people might read it.”

Such tactics are common, and are often impossible to trace. Robo-calls, in which automated, bogus phone messages are sent over and over, are very hard to trace to their source, say voting advocates. E-mails fall into the same category.

In Nevada, for example, Latino voters said they had received calls from people describing themselves as Obama volunteers, urging them to cast their ballot over the phone.

The calls were reported to Election Protection, a nonprofit advocacy group that runs a hot line for election troubles. The organization does not know who orchestrated them.

“The Voting Rights Act makes it a crime to misled and intimidate voters,” said McDonald. “If you can find out who’s doing it, those people should be prosecuted. But sometimes it’s just difficult to know who’s doing what. Some of it’s just anonymous.”

Trying to mislead voters is nothing new.

“We see this every year,” said Jonah Goldman of the advocacy group Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law. “It all happens around this time when there’s too much other stuff going on in the campaigns, and it doesn’t get investigated.”

In 2006, automated phone calls in the final days leading to the federal election wrongly warned voters they would not be allowed to vote without a photo ID. In Colorado and Virginia, people reported receiving calls that told them their registrations had expired and they would be arrested if they showed up to vote.

The White House contest of 2004 was marked by similar deceptions. In Milwaukee, fliers went up advising people “if you’ve already voted in any election this year, you can’t vote in the presidential election.” In Pennsylvania, a letter bearing what appeared to be the McCandless Township seal falsely proclaimed that in order to cut long voting lines, Republicans would cast ballots on Nov. 2 and Democrats would vote on Nov. 3.

E-mail assaults have become increasingly popular this year, keeping pace with the proliferation of blogging and Obama’s massive online campaign efforts, according to voting activists.

“It is newer and more furious than it ever has been before,” Goldman said.

And Republicans are not exempt. “Part of it is that election campaigns are more online than ever before,” said Goldman. “During the primaries, a lot of Web sites went up that seemed to be for (GOP candidate Rudy) Giuliani, but actually were attack sites.”

New York City’s former mayor and his high-profile colleagues Fred Thompson and Mitt Romney were also targeted in fake Internet sites that featured “quotes” from the candidates espousing support for extreme positions they never endorsed.

SOURCE: THE ASSOCIATED PRESS