The Woman Who Wasn’t There Read online

  Advance praise for

  THE WOMAN WHO WASN’T THERE

  “I finished reading this book weeks ago, but I can’t put it down. It continues to haunt me, and it will you as well. A story impossible to believe . . . except it’s all true.”

  —MEREDITH VIEIRA

  “Alternately heartbreaking and horrifying, The Woman Who Wasn’t There is a compelling real-life mystery as disturbing as a psychological thriller. The depths of Tania Head’s deception hit me like a punch in the gut.”

  —TERENCE WINTER, creator and executive producer of Boardwalk Empire

  “Thought provoking, heart wrenching, and unbelievable. . . . Even knowing the outcome, I could not put the book down, awed by the stunning impact of one woman on so many lives.”

  —MARIAN FONTANA, author of the New York Times bestseller A Widow’s Walk

  “Not since Professor Harold Hill in The Music Man has a con been portrayed in such an empathetic and yet unsparing manner. At the end of Fisher and Guglielmo’s masterfully nuanced portrait, Tania Head’s deception of the survivors becomes understandable—even as it remains unforgivable—as a remarkable outgrowth of the capacity of the human psyche to deceive others by deceiving itself first.”

  —JOHN J. FARMER, JR., dean of Rutgers Law School–Newark and author of The Ground Truth: The Untold Story of America Under Attack on 9/11

  “Taut and riveting as a mystery novel, except that it’s all true. The tale of Tania Head, the ‘celebrity survivor,’ is a fascinating psychological study of the best and worst of human nature. In their deft, compelling narrative, Robin Gaby Fisher and Angelo J. Guglielmo, Jr., slowly but inexorably lift the curtain on one of the saddest, most senseless, and yet most spectacular frauds in recent history. You will not be able to put this book down until you finish the last sentence, and when you do, you will shake your head in wonder.”

  —AMY ELLIS NUTT, author of Shadows Bright as Glass and Pulitzer Prize–winning writer for the Star-Ledger

  “To behold (Tania) Head’s smile is to know the terrorists did not come even close to winning. To see that smile is also to be challenged to be as decent and positive as this true survivor.”

  —New York Daily News, September 7, 2006

  It was a tale of loss and recovery, of courage and sorrow, of horror and inspiration. Tania Head’s astonishing account of her experience on September 11, 2001—from crawling through the carnage and chaos to escaping the seventy-eighth-floor sky lobby of the burning south tower to losing her fiancé in the collapsed north tower—transformed her into one of the great victims and heroes of that tragic day.

  Tania selflessly took on the responsibility of giving a voice and a direction to the burgeoning World Trade Center Survivors’ Network, helping save the “Survivors’ Stairway” and leading tours at Ground Zero, including taking then-governor Pataki, Mayor Bloomberg, and former mayor Giuliani on the inaugural tour of the WTC site. She even used her own assets to fund charitable events to help survivors heal. But there was something very wrong with Tania’s story—a terrible secret that would break the hearts and challenge the faith of all those she claimed to champion.

  Told with the unique insider perspective and authority of Angelo J. Guglielmo, Jr., a filmmaker shooting a documentary on the efforts of the Survivors’ Network, and previously one of Tania’s closest friends, The Woman Who Wasn’t There is the story of one of the most audacious and bewildering quests for acclaim in recent memory—one that poses fascinating questions about the essence of morality and the human need for connection at any cost.

  ROBIN GABY FISHER is the author of the New York Times bestseller After the Fire. She is a two-time finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in Feature Writing and a member of a Pulitzer Prize–winning team. She teaches narrative journalism at Rutgers University.

  ANGELO J. GUGLIELMO, JR., is the award-winning director of the documentary The Woman Who Wasn’t There, produced by Meredith Vieira Productions. He has made the acclaimed films Idling Brando and The Heart of Steel and has written the screenplays Days of Grace and Sleeping Dogs Lie. He lives in New York City.

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  COPYRIGHT © 2012 SIMON & SCHUSTER

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  Copyright © 2012 by Robin Gaby Fisher and Angelo J. Guglielmo, Jr.

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  First Touchstone hardcover edition April 2012

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  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Fisher, Robin Gaby.

  The woman who wasn’t there : the true story of an incredible deception / Robin

  Gaby Fisher and Angelo J. Guglielmo.

  p.cm.

  “A Touchstone Book.”

  1. Head, Tania. 2. Impostors and imposture—New York (State)—New York.

  3. September 11 Terrorist Attacks, 2001 4. World Trade Center (New York, N.Y.)

  I. Guglielmo, Angelo J. II. Title.

  HV6760.H43F57 2012

  974.7'044092—dc23

  [B]

  2011042089

  ISBN 978-1-4516-5208-6

  ISBN 978-1-4516-5210-9 (ebook)

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  CONTENTS

  PROLOGUE

  PART 1: 2001

  AUGUST 14, 2001

  SEPTEMBER 11

  A LONG WAY DOWN

  PART 2: 2003

  A SURVIVOR EMERGES

  THE LIVING VICTIMS

  A MEETING OF THE MINDS

  PART 3: 2004

  A PRESENCE

  RETURN TO GROUND ZERO

  A FRIEND IN NEED

  DARKNESS ON THE EDGE OF TOWN

  PART 4: 2005

  A TRIP TO SRI LANKA

  THE SURVIVORS’ STAIRWAY

  TRIBUTE

  BEST FRIENDS FOREVER

  THE INAUGURAL TOUR

  I WILL NEVER STOP CRYING FOR YOU

  A STRANGER

  PART 5: 2006

  MEETING THE CROWTHERS

  BETRAYAL

  THROUGH THE LENS

  IN MEMORIAM

  THE BURNED JACKET

  PART 6: 2007

  EXPOSURE THERAPY

  CAPITOL HILL

  FLOODING

  SHADOW OF DOUBT

  SLAYING THE DRAGON

  A MELTDOWN AT THE ST. REGIS

  THE NEW YORK TIMES
<
br />   UNRAVELING

  THE TRUTH REVEALED

  THE AFTERMATH

  AN ENDING FOR THE MOVIE

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  PROLOGUE

  I used to think I was a filmmaker first, and getting the story was the only thing that mattered. And I then met Tania Head, and everything changed.

  —Angelo J. Guglielmo, Jr.

  THE

  WOMAN

  WHO

  WASN’T

  THERE

  PART 1

  2001

  AUGUST 14, 2001

  Tania dug her freshly painted toes into the gold-speckled sand and walked to the edge of the water where Dave was waiting. This was what she had imagined growing up. An American Prince Charming. The fairy-tale romance. A setting right out of her favorite movie. How could she be so lucky? Tania wondered. Was it possible this was all a dream? She blinked, wide awake. Dave was still there.

  It was mid-August, high season in Hawaii, and a gentle breeze blew in off the Pacific, caressing Tania’s bare shoulders like a warm shawl. The justice of the peace cleared his throat, a signal that the ceremony was about to begin. Just then a raucous wave crashed on shore, splashing Dave’s Irish linen trousers and the skirt of Tania’s white cotton beach dress. Tania and Dave looked at each other and nodded in solidarity. As the tropical sun melted on the Maui horizon, with only the local official, and two strangers from the hotel as witnesses, the beaming couple promised to love, cherish, and honor each other, through whatever came their way.

  “This is the best day of my life,” Tania said.

  Dave nodded and pulled her close. “Me too,” he said.

  Sometimes Tania thought her life was too good to be true. She had lived a privileged existence. Born into a wealthy family from Barcelona, Spain, Europe’s largest metropolis on the Mediterranean Sea. Growing up in the trendy l’Eixample district, the canvas for much of the early-twentieth-century masterworks of Art Nouveau architect Antoni Gaudi. Attending the best private schools money could buy. She could hardly wait to show Dave her homeland. The family residence was a short walk to the bustling Passeig de Gràcia, Spain’s richest avenue, with its million-dollar apartments and fussy storefronts bearing names like Chanel and Gucci and Cartier.

  Tania preferred the cobbled streets, medieval labyrinths, and rich, romantic history of the nearby Gothic Quarter, or Barri Gòtic, in the center of old Barcelona. It was in the Barri Gòtic that King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella welcomed Christopher Columbus back from his New World adventures in 1493, and Pablo Picasso abandoned traditionalism for his celebrated avant-garde style around the turn of the twentieth century. That was also where Gaudi presided over his magnum opus—construction of the Church of the Sagrada Familia—until his tragic death in 1926, when he was walking to confession and was struck by a tram. As a young girl, Tania would sit for hours in the Placa del Pi, the prettiest square in the Barri Gòtic, and watch the tourists, who came there from all over the world. The storied quarter was a fertile stage for a Catalonian schoolgirl with a prodigious imagination.

  Tania had wanted for nothing growing up. Her tennis and riding skills were honed in Spain’s most exclusive country clubs, and her friends hailed, as she did, from Catalonian aristocracy. Her parents spared no expense when it came to education. Tania attended prestigious Opus Dei schools—Orthodox Catholic academies with high-priced tuitions—where she studied American literature and mastered the English language at an early age.

  If Tania could have changed one thing about her providential existence, it would have been to be born in America. Indeed, her infatuation with the States began when she was in grade school, and the girl begged her father to buy her an American flag, which she displayed proudly on a prominent wall in her bedroom. Her ticket to the United States had been acceptance to Harvard University, and then to the Stanford University business school, and she had planned her life precisely, quickly climbing the corporate ladder at Merrill Lynch to become its senior vice president for strategic alliances. As her career flourished, Tania lost touch with her personal life, and she had decided that maybe work was enough, when she found the man she would call her soul mate.

  On the night that Dave and Tania met, in February 1999, a freezing rain was pelting downtown Manhattan. Tania, who lived in San Francisco then but often worked at Merrill Lynch’s New York headquarters, had put in a fifteen-hour day at the World Trade Center, hammering out the details of a merger between a California commodities company and a rival East Coast financial firm. It was nearly midnight when she left her office in the south tower, and she was bleary eyed and eager to get back to her midtown hotel for a hot shower and the soft bed. Dave had left his office at the consulting firm of Deloitte & Touche, in the neighboring north tower, at the same hour. Taxis are scarce after dark in the financial district, and Tania sighed with relief when she spotted one idling nearby at the corner of West and Vesey Streets.

  Running in her heels through puddles of slush, she was about to reach for the car door when a blustery wind caught her umbrella, turning it inside out. Ice pellets lashed her face and stung her eyes. “Great,” she groaned through clenched teeth. As she wrestled the wind for the umbrella, trying not to think about her fingers, which were now numb from the cold, she almost missed the man slipping into the back of the taxi from the other side. “Hey!” she cried, yanking open her door. “You stole my cab!”

  Tania often described that fateful meeting with Dave as being like a scene from a romantic comedy. There she stood, drenched and windblown, with tousled hair and a scowl on her face, and staring back at her from inside the taxi was this handsome guy, about her age, with celadon eyes and a radiant grin. As she glared at him, still trying to get her point across, he reached into his pocket and pulled out his business card. “My name is Dave,” he said, seemingly amused. “You can have the cab. But you have to promise to call me.” Tania grabbed the card and pushed it into the pocket of her wet wool coat. “Yeah, sure,” she said, watching her runaway umbrella tumble down West Street.

  Tania returned to the West Coast the following day without giving the man in the taxi another thought. But two weeks later, she was back in New York, waiting for take-out sushi in the World Trade Center concourse, when someone tapped her on the shoulder. She turned around, and there he was again. At first she couldn’t place him, not until he said, “I never should have let you have that cab, because you never called.”

  “Oh my God,” she said, flustered and groping for words.

  “Can I buy you a cup of coffee?” he asked.

  “Okay,” she said in a faltering voice. “But I don’t have much time.”

  Tania and Dave spent three hours talking that afternoon. She would have spent all day with him, but there was a meeting upstairs that she couldn’t miss. Still, with what she had learned in that short time over coffee, Tania was smitten. Dave was twenty-four years old, two years younger than she was, and he was consulting on a long-term project for the insurance brokerage firm Marsh & McLennan. He lived uptown with two of his roommates from Penn State University, and his hope, he told Tania, was to pursue an MBA from Harvard once his project in the World Trade Center was finished. He expressed his love of the outdoors with a poem he recited for her:

  You are enveloped by nature’s beauty,

  for just a moment you abandon your incarcerated body

  What really struck Tania about Dave was not so much his good looks, or his broad range of interests and talents, or even the fact that he knew about La Diada de Sant Jordi (the annual celebration of the patron saint of Catalonia, when it is a tradition to give a rose and a book to a loved one), but that he volunteered in a soup kitchen on weekends and taught children to read for a local literacy organization. She had always considered herself a social activist.

  Tania, a discreet Catalonian woman, was normally reticent about opening up to strangers, but it felt right with Dave, talking about her family and her career and her dreams for the future. She trusted him ins
tinctively. She told him about her early life in Barcelona, about her mother being from a long line of diplomats, and that her father was a business tycoon whose work had often taken the family to the States when she was a girl. Although she had grown up in a great class system, attending the best schools and traveling with her parents to all parts of the world, she had been taught to be humble and compassionate to those who were less fortunate. Her family didn’t differentiate socially the way her status-minded counterparts did, which she considered a great gift. Social justice was in her blood, and when most of her peers were beginning to experience the tony singles bars along Las Ramblas, she was lighting candles for Miguel Angel Blanco, a member of Nuevas Generaciones, the youth arm of the People’s Party of Spain, who in 1997 was kidnapped by a group of armed Basque separatists and executed when the Spanish government ignored their demand for the return of all political prisoners.

  Tania shared with Dave her dreams of living in America and how, as a very young girl, she’d hung the flag on her bedroom wall. At the age of seventeen, she was recruited by Esade, then ranked by the Wall Street Journal as the number one international management school in the world. But when she was accepted into Harvard’s early admittance program, she seized the opportunity to come to the States. The ivy-covered campus in Cambridge, Massachusetts, was everything she had imagined it would be, and she fit right in, people watching on the banks of the Charles River and listening to jazz after dark in Harvard Square. After Boston, the new age culture and Spanish influence of Northern California took her to Stanford for graduate school, and she ended up settling in San Francisco.

  “I have to see you again,” Dave told Tania when they parted that day.

  “As long as you don’t steal another cab,” she said, trying to sound coy.

  After several months of exorbitant phone bills and bicoastal dating, they fell in love. Tania eventually moved to New York, and they bought an enormous apartment together in an exclusive building on the Upper East Side and a golden retriever puppy they named Elvis. Money was no object. They bought whatever they wanted and flew off for weekends on a whim. She was a rising star at Merrill Lynch, and he postponed his plans to attend Harvard when his consulting company promoted him to a senior management position. They had achieved the American Dream, and they weren’t even thirty years old. Although their meeting seemed coincidental, they both believed it was destiny. A wedding day was inevitable.