John Fairbanks

BA, Dartmouth College

Perhaps, after growing up a high-achieving child of a respected family in a respectable small town in New England, serving in the army in World War II, graduating from an Ivy League college, becoming an attorney (Boston University Law) and a part-time district court judge, and living what appeared to be an exemplary, small-town New England life with a wife and four children, John Fairbanks was finally rebelling. Or maybe he was just a bad human being with a stunted imagination, so it took him a long time to figure out how to let his bad-flag fly, and then the only transgressive thing he could think of was to steal money from people who trusted him.

Fairbanks graduated from Dartmouth in 1946, got his law degree in 1950, commenced the practice of probate and estate-planning law, and became a player in the New Hampshire Republican Party. Snore…But sometime during his decades of legal work, he made his life exciting. How? By stealing from his clients or their estates!

He was no Robin Hood. One victim was a blind retired farmer; another was an old woman on her deathbed. And there were insurance companies, a small bank, the town of Washington, New Hampshire, and three of his own sisters. In all, he stole as much as $10 million.^*

Local Democrats said there was plenty of evidence of his shenanigans* but claimed they couldn’t act because the GOP old-boy network was shielding him. In 1989, however, the floodgates burst as more than twenty-five of his former clients (including his sisters!) filed more than $6 million worth of claims against him. Fairbanks resigned from the bench in June of that year. In August the New Hampshire Supreme Court suspended him from practicing law. Then, on December 27, he was indicted for his crimes.

The following day police arrived at his family’s vacation place in Ogunquit, Maine, where Fairbanks had been holed up. But he had vanished. His wife said she had last seen him that morning when he’d gone downstairs for coffee. His story soon became a staple on TV crime shows like America’s Most Wanted, and, predictably, people started phoning in tips, but none panned out. The man was off the radar and living on cash. Quite a bit of cash.

And then, on March 26, 1994, he turned up dead in a Las Vegas hotel room with a plastic bag over his head and a suicide note taped to the mirror.

The money never turned up: he presumably spent it all, then cashed himself in.