For 18 months, Rebekah Price thought she was a widow and her four children were fatherless, her attorney says. Survivor benefits from Social Security helped the school teacher make ends meet.
Then on New Year’s Eve, a year to the day after a Florida court declared her missing husband dead at her request, fugitive South Georgia banker Aubrey Lee Price was captured the near Brunswick after a routine traffic stop, about a two-hour drive from her Valdosta home.
“(Rebekah Price) is glad to find out her husband is alive, but she’s still trying to sort things out,” John Holt, her attorney, told The Atlanta Journal-Constitution in an interview Monday. “She’s a good, honest, hardworking lady, and she’s going through a heck of a mess.”
Holt said his client was “shocked” by her husband’s reappearance.
Not only was Price alive, but he no longer looked like the clean-shaven, light-haired preacher and businessman everybody called Lee. He had long, dark hair and a goatee and drove a beater pickup when arrested. Authorities say they think he was involved with a marijuana grow house in rural Florida, where neighbors say they knew the man as a migrant named “Jason.”
Glynn County deputies have said the fugitive asked them to contact his family prior to making his arrest public, and that they did not know he was alive.
Rebekah Price has declined requests to be interviewed. In brief comments to reporters last week, following her husband’s initial appearance before a federal magistrate judge in Brunswick, she said only that the truth about her 47-year-old husband will eventually come out.
Price is accused of embezzling more than $21 million from a small Georgia bank he and investors in his businesses tried to save. He’s also accused of defrauding about 150 investor clients. In all, the convoluted fraud Price is alleged to have committed involved about $50 million between the bank and his investment companies.
He disappeared in June 2012 and left a purported “confession” note, and authorities said Price told others he planned to kill himself by jumping off a ferry out of Key West.
Holt declined to discuss allegations that Lee Price was living in Citra, Fla., about 130 miles south of Valdosta, where he is accused of growing more than 200 pot plants.
“She’s really in the dark and trying to live her life and she just doesn’t have any of the answers,” Holt said of Rebekah Price.
Holt said Rebekah Price had her husband declared legally dead because there were no signs he was alive. Under the law in Florida, where Price was last seen, Holt said, a missing person typically can’t be declared dead unless missing at least five years. But there is an exception if relatives can show evidence the subject is dead. Lee Price was missing about six months when deemed deceased.
Holt said the evidence included the purported suicide and confession note, video from a ferry terminal in Key West and the lack of any cell phone or credit card usage. Though the FBI continued to list Price among its most wanted suspects, Holt said, “Nobody had any evidence that he was alive.”
Now that he’s been found, Holt said he’s had interview requests for Rebekah Price from international media, including French television, the “Dr. Phil” show and the NBC’s “Today.” A neighbor of Rebekah Price’s said a man identifying himself as a New York Post reporter canvassed their gated Valdosta community.
“It’s been nonstop,” said Holt, who believes his client met briefly in recent days with her husband at a South Georgia jail.
The Florida court where Lee Price was declared dead and the Social Security Administration have been notified of his capture, Holt said, and his wife will no longer be eligible to receive benefits.
Separately, on Thursday an official said the FBI has taken over the marijuana probe. Marion County Sheriff’s Capt. James Pogue said the case will be rolled into the federal financial crimes investigation.
“This guy has got much bigger charges than growing marijuana,” Pogue said.
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