Free The Best American Crime Reporting 2008 by Jonathan Kellerman

anthropology at the University of Pittsburgh, was riding the bus home from work when she got a call from Steelers security director Jack Kearney. “I hate to break it to you,” Kearney told her flatly. “But you’ve never met Jerame Tuman in your life.”
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    C ONSIDER HER SURPRISE. Or humiliation. Consider her anger, if nothing else. If you don’t live in Pittsburgh, the city at theconfluence of steel-black rivers, a town that embodies its football team, you might empathize with Kristin. If you don’t live where flags fly black and gold and the awnings of half the buildings bear the same industrial colors, where gift shops are stocked with candy and soda and Steelers commemorative hats, banners, shirts, baby clothes and not much else, you can probably understand, even as you find it hard to fathom. But if you’re from Pittsburgh, there’s a good chance you’re aware that Kristin was one of three women over two years who were fooled by a man named Brian Jackson, a 32-year-old former car salesman who moonlighted as Steelers tight end Jerame Tuman, third-string quarterback Brian St. Pierre, and most curiously, Ben Roethlisberger. And you might deride Kristin, and have a good laugh over a cold Iron City at her expense. Even if you didn’t know what Tuman looked like, you’d at least have been able to see that Jackson looked nothing like a football player. Pretty much, you’d have been smarter than she was.
    â€œThe Steelers are next to God here, so I don’t see how someone impersonating one of them got away with it,” says Anne Madarasz, director of the Western Pennsylvania Sports Museum.
    â€œOh god, the women were that gullible?” says a woman browsing Steelers towels at Mike Feinberg Co. store, “The Official Home of Steeler Nation.”
    â€œEveryone thinks it’s funny,” says Mike Katic, a bartender at the Buckhead Saloon at Station Square. “I guess as long as the guy had the build of a football player…”
    It wasn’t so funny for Tara,* a 24-year-old part-time model who thought she’d met Ben Roethlisberger at a local pizza shop. Two years ago, a big guy wearing a backward Steelers hat and khaki shorts had strolled up to the table where she and a friend were sitting and announced confidently that he thought she “was hot,” before explaining how famous he was and which famous friends he wanted her to meet. Tara and her friend ogled him over their slices, considering whether he was big or athletic enough to be a quarterback.
    Though she didn’t know it that day in July 2005, the guy she was staring at was really a middle-class man born and raised in Pittsburgh; a man who, Allegheny County courthouse records reveal, has a litany of traffic incidents, including one involving vehicular homicide, and who now has a July court date to face felony charges of identity theft and theft by deception for impersonating Tuman, and for stealing money from Kristin in the process.
    Two days after Tara met him, she spent a few very awkward, if memorable, hours on a date with “Big Ben”; hours she’d like to undo. Their activities included traveling to the Steelers’ training facility, where the security guard who never stops anyone waved at the faux quarterback, letting him through to attend to “some business” while Tara sat in the car; signing a Steelers jersey for Tara’s giddy neighbor and posing for a photo; telling her about his dog, Zeus, over a dinner she ended up paying for because he left his wallet somewhere; and an uncomfortable encounter in which he tried to touch her hand and lean in for a kiss, which freaked her out, because she wasn’t attracted to him anyway.
    Whispering recently from her bedroom because she’s afraid her fiancé might hear, Tara says Jackson talked so much about himself as Roethlisberger that she barely got a word in. “He said he just got back from