For more than 30 years, a man known as Roger A. Pearce Jr. worked as a prosperous land-use and zoning attorney in Oregon and Washington.
He represented some of the Pacific Northwest’s most prominent people and businesses and took on high-profile projects.
He served on planning commissions, nonprofit boards and racked up hours doing pro bono legal work. He and his wife retired to a $1.4 million condo on Seattle’s Lake Washington.
By all accounts, the now-77-year-old had made a good name for himself.
Except one thing: Roger Pearce wasn’t actually his name.
It belonged to a baby who died in Vermont in 1952. Pearce stole the identity when he was in his early 20s and looking to leave his troubles behind — college dropout, check fraud, a failed marriage.
The State Department unmasked him only in 2022 during a review of one of his applications for a new passport. Federal workers detected that he had applied for a new Social Security number as an adult — a red flag.
But they still couldn’t figure out who he truly was.
So prosecutors last year indicted the man in federal court in Oregon as “John Doe,” charging him with making a false statement in an application for a passport, a felony. He was arrested last year on a warrant in Washington.
When he pleaded guilty three months ago to an identity fraud misdemeanor, the courtroom deputy, at the judge’s behest, asked him to state his name for the record.
“My birth name was Willie Ragan Casper Jr.,” he said, marking the first time since his arrest that he gave his real name under oath. “The name I’ve gone under and been known as for the last over 50 years is Roger Alfred Pearce Jr.”
When he stood Wednesday in Portland to receive his sentence, he offered an explanation for his decades of duplicity.
“I really wanted to start over,” he said.
‘I felt the failure’
Casper was born in Jackson, Mississippi, in December 1946, the older of two boys.
He seized an opportunity to leave his hometown to attend Rice University in Texas but wasn’t prepared for the rigor of the classes and dropped out. An early marriage ended around the same time.
Then Casper got involved in fraud, writing checks on a bank account with no money in what he called a “fairly naive” anti-war protest against banks during the Vietnam War era, he said.
“I was a young person, confused, depressed. I felt the failure,” he said in court, reading in a steady voice from an open binder resting on the defense table in front of him.
Casper, tall, slim and white-haired, sat upright beside his lawyer. He wore a black blazer and gray slacks, a white shirt and a black tie that he adjusted just before the judge arrived on the bench. He looked every bit the experienced lawyer he typically portrayed in court during his three-decade-long career, even engaging in small talk with the prosecutor before the hearing began.
“I was ashamed that I had wasted a lot of my parents’ money supporting me in a distant city they couldn’t really afford,” Casper said. “My marriage had fallen apart. I had no real career prospects.”
He said he also was worried about getting arrested for his check-kiting. A friend had been caught renting a car with a false ID and police had come to the house they shared. He wasn’t home at the time but feared police would return, looking for him.
He spoke for about six minutes as his wife sat in the front row behind him in the public gallery. A psychologist who evaluated Casper and submitted a sealed report to the judge was present by video but didn’t speak.
Casper said he stayed another six weeks in Houston and then fled.
He also changed his identity.
“I wanted to start over with a clean slate,” he said. “I felt like everything was at a dead end for me there in Texas.”
In 1971, he stole the name of a dead child using the baby’s birth certificate. It’s unclear who gave him the certificate or if he paid for it, but his lawyer said birth certificates were apparently easy to come by during the anti-Vietnam era as others used them to try to evade the draft.
Two years later, when he was in his late 20s, he applied for a Social Security number in the name of Roger Alfred Pearce Jr., using the dead baby’s birth certificate.
Casper first went to Montana, then to Oregon, where he had some friends in Eugene.
“The decision to change my name at that time was foolish, of course. At the time, I viewed it as a clean break from the past,” he said. I was also naive and in love with grand gestures, like some young people are.”
He found work and took classes at Lane Community College in the early 1970s, records show. He made new friends, he said.
“I crawled out of being depressed and within a few years, that new name was absolutely normal to me,” he told the judge.
“After that, I have never thought of myself as other than Roger Pearce.”
He did a stint as a dancer and singer in New York before ending up in Seattle, working for a bakery and then got the idea to go to law school, according to his lawyer. He enrolled in what was then the University of Puget Sound law school in Tacoma without a college degree, graduating in his mid-40s as the first in his class, summa cum laude in May 1991, according to his lawyer.
He went on to a successful career with the Seattle-based firm Foster Pepper LLC, representing Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen’s Vulcan development company and serving as a lawyer for the Seattle Monorail Popular Authority.
In 2014, he was admitted to the Oregon State Bar, later moved back to Oregon and opened Pearce Law in Ashland.
He served as chair of Ashland’s planning commission and as a Jackson County hearings officer. He also was secretary of the Rotary Club of Ashland and secretary of the Ashland New Plays Association.
‘False pretenses’
His façade cracked in 2022 when the State Department discovered an unresolved irregularity in his Social Security number.
When Casper had gotten his fraudulent number, technology wasn’t available to track the birth certificate he submitted back to a dead child.
But the federal government now has fraud detection that screens passport applications of people who received Social Security numbers as adults.
Late-issued Social Security numbers strongly correlate to fraud, Assistant U.S. Attorney Ethan D. Knight wrote in his sentencing memo. The State Department’s screening has caught members of the mafia and other criminals trying to avoid detection.
This time, it caught Casper.
He had applied for a U.S. passport in 1991 and then renewed it twice more — in 2003 and May 2013 in Ashland. His applications got flagged as suspicious.
State Department investigators then confirmed the Pearce name he was using was of someone who had died and had been submitted illegally to get a passport.
But they couldn’t figure out his true name — only that the man claiming to be Pearce lived in Oregon and Washington and had been practicing law since 1991.
“This is a case, from a criminal perspective, more about who the defendant is not, than who he is,” Knight said.
In January 2023, a federal grand jury in Oregon returned a one-count indictment charging “John Doe” with making a false statement on his passport application and he was arrested in Seattle.
In a plea deal in August, Casper pleaded guilty to the lesser charge of producing an identification document without lawful authority. The maximum penalty is a year in prison and a $1,000 fine.
Prosecutors had weighed his “sustained act of deception” with his “otherwise law-abiding existence” and “fundamental decency,” Knight said.
When defense lawyer Janet Lee Hoffman tried to explain at the plea hearing that Casper had pursued an illustrious legal career, the judge hastened to interject.
“Under false pretenses,” U.S. District Judge Michael H. Simon pointed out.
‘Choice that few receive’
At the start of sentencing Wednesday, Simon asked, “Do you want me to refer to your client as Mr. Pearce, Mr. Doe or Mr. Casper.”
Hoffman said Pearce.
She sought a year of probation for her client, but the prosecutor recommended two years.
“Every person is responsible for and owns their own history and really the shadow that that casts and the consequences that ultimately may bear out,” Knight said. “The defendant’s choice in this case really is an abdication of that basic principle.”
Many people come before the court who would have liked the option Casper took to start anew and leave their past behind, Knight said. “He availed himself of a choice that few receive, and that’s why we’re here today,” he said.
Hoffman said the defendant lived a model life under his new identity.
“Roger had a stellar career and enhanced each community that he lived in and the lives of everyone he touched,” she said.
The judge said he considered Casper’s statement, the psychologist’s evaluation and letters from his wife and from Elisabeth Ann Zinser, a retired Southern Oregon University president who had known him for 10 years.
Simon noted that Casper’s wife – Julie Benezet, a Seattle finance lawyer and author – hadn’t said in her letter if she knew of her husband’s long deception. He asked if Casper would say.
Casper demurred, replying, “I prefer not to answer,” while acknowledging that he didn’t expect the government to prosecute his wife for fraud. He also said they have a “really wonderful marriage.”
Simon said he was troubled that no one had delved into the real Roger Pearce Jr. Based on a photo in the court documents, he noted that the baby’s gravestone indicated he had lived six months and nine days.
“It must be tough for a parent to lose a baby after six months, and it would only be worse if they ever knew or learned that someone else falsely took that baby’s name,” Simon said.
Knight told the judge that the baby’s parents had both died.
Simon then adopted the prosecutor’s recommendation and sentenced Casper to two years of probation.
Casper must now relinquish his licenses to practice law in Oregon and Washington and never reapply to practice law. He also faces an Oregon State Bar disciplinary investigation.
He is barred from getting a new piece of identification, whether it’s a driver’s license or Social Security number, in any name other than his legal name.
But Casper said he intends to legally change his name to Roger Alfred Pearce Jr. soon, making the prohibition moot.
“He will always be Roger Pearce,” his lawyer said after court.
‘Still in shock’
The actual Roger Alfred Pearce Jr. was born in Montpellier, Vermont, in September 1951 and died March 11, 1952.
A younger sister, Dawn Hyttinen, now 51, said she believes her brother died of meningitis. He was the first born of seven children, she said. Their mother died in 2016 and father died in 2020, she said.
“I grew up hearing about him,” she said. She said her father didn’t talk about the baby, but her mother always did.
But she said no one in her family was told that someone had stolen her brother’s identity or was living under his name.
“This is just absolutely crazy,” she said. “I’m flabbergasted.”
Government investigators couldn’t find any living relatives of the boy, prosecutors said in court records, but an Oregonian/OregonLive reporter found Hyttinen in Arizona.
She said she’s very curious about Casper and how he ended up using her brother’s identity.
“I’m still in shock,’’ she said.
The same is true for the family that Casper left behind.
“He’s alive?!” a stunned Justin Casper blurted when contacted by The Oregonian/OregonLive. He’s the son of Casper’s younger brother, Dr. Robert Casper, now 72.
“This is the first I’ve heard anything about him,” said Justin Casper, who lives in Arkansas. “We didn’t have a good answer as to what really happened to him. He’s my dad’s long lost brother.”
He said he had heard his uncle had some problem with credit card fraud.
“He just kind of left. He took off and never said where he was going. He never had any contact with his family again,” Justin Casper said. “I thought he was dead.”
In a coincidence, Justin Casper had tried about six months ago to track down his uncle for his dad but couldn’t find anything online about him and was thinking of hiring a private investigator.
He said his father hasn’t talked much about his older brother through the years. “I think it hurt him too much,” Justin Casper said.
Now, the nephew is eager to learn what happened. “Why? What in the world? I’m happy that he’s alive,” he said. “Maybe we can reconnect with him, though it’ll be an awkward conversation.”
Another chance
In the months since his arrest, Willie Casper said he has had to face his past.
He’s had difficult and emotional conversations with colleagues and friends about what he did but said they’ve been supportive.
“I didn’t forget my birth name. I didn’t forget my early history,” he said in court. “I think I just literally compartmentalized it because it wasn’t relevant to my day-to-day life.”
He added matter of factly: “I was Roger Pearce.”
As he’s reflected on his identity, he said he feels good about what he’s accomplished: “I contributed to my community. I think I’ve helped raise a wonderful daughter.”
At the same time, he can’t shake his true past.
“I’ve also had an opportunity to think about what I’ve walked away from and lost,” he said.
At the time he changed his name, he said he was “disengaged and estranged” from his birth family. His parents didn’t understand his anti-war sentiment, his lawyer said.
“I really never got back in touch with them,” Casper said.
But now, he said, he would be willing to contact his younger brother. He hasn’t seen him in over 50 years.
“Perhaps paradoxically,” he said, “this prosecution may give me the chance to recover some of what I’ve lost.”
