Canadian in Winfield charged with assuming dead brother's identity

Wednesday

Sep 25, 2013 at 1:28 PM

Roxana Hegeman

WICHITA — A man accused of assuming his dead sibling’s identity lived out a life his younger brother never had the opportunity to enjoy, prosecutors say, migrating from Canada to the United States, buying a home in Kansas, even taking out three patents for inventions in his name. 

Decades after Wayne Bradly Camick’s death, federal prosecutors have charged his older brother, Leslie Lyle Camick, a 58-year-old telecommunications field engineer living in the southern Kansas town of Winfield, in a 10-count indictment in the identity theft case. 

Leslie Camick — two years older than the younger sibling who died at 3- months old in 1958 — faces trial in November for allegedly assuming his dead brother’s identity.  He was charged in March with mail fraud, aggravated identity theft, immigration document fraud, making a false statement to the U.S. Patent Office, making a false statement to a financial institution and bank fraud. 

A status hearing was held Wednesday before U.S. District Judge J. Thomas Marten as the parties prepare for the Nov. 19 trial in U.S. District Court in Wichita. 

Prosecutors say in court filings that Camick used his dead brother’s birth certificate to flee Canada in 2006 in order to avoid past-due child support, back taxes, a 10-year driver’s license suspension for drunken driving and other legal difficulties.  The deception unraveled, authorities said, when his former business partner and girlfriend, Lyn Wattley, discovered Camick had had been lying to her for years about his true identity. 

Camick has entered a not guilty plea, and his defense attorney declined to comment on the case after Wednesday’s hearing.  The defense contends in court documents that the use of his brother’s first name was not intended to cause harm to any other person, arguing there is no "Wayne Camick" to defraud. 

"The only possible party who would care would be the Canadian authorities if they were trying to find him and could not find him because he was using his brother’s name," defense attorney John Henderson wrote in one filing. " Otherwise, it is of no consequence.  From the time he stepped onto the soil of this country he was ‘Wayne’ and for all intents and purposes conducted his affairs using that first name.  No one relied upon it to their detriment and he gained no advantage from any person based upon use of the first name ‘Wayne.’" 

Assistant U.S. Attorney Brent Anderson wrote in one filing that the "mere fact that the defendant procured his deceased brother’s birth certificate 43 years after the brother’s death, then proceeded to use it three years later to initiate and maintain an unlawful presence in the United States, raises a reasonable inference the birth certificate was procured for a fraudulent purpose, as opposed to a lawful one." 

Prosecutors contend Camick unlawfully obtained official identification documents using his brother’s identity, including driver’s licenses in New Jersey, Arizona and the Cayman Islands.  He also opened bank accounts and took out patents under the false identity. 

The government argued that the use of his brother’s identity violates the Patriot Act and undermines its purpose — to ascertain the true identities of foreign nationals for the purpose of preventing terrorist acts like 9/11 or the Boston Marathon bombings. 

Camick filed in July a separate civil lawsuit in U.S. District Court against his former girlfriend and others in which he alleges that she gave immigration authorities evidence so she could acquire all his assets, including the company they founded and patents that he contends he developed alone. 

If deported, his civil lawsuit contends, he would lose substantial assets, including a patent with AT&T for a locking manhole cover, which he estimates is worth $5 billion.  He asserts in court filings that he is an industry innovator of fiber optics for several major telecom companies, including Google, AT&T and Comcast. 

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