This life-imitating-movie story is one for the books: in order to prevent his home from being foreclosed, Thomas Prusik Parkin decided that the only course of action was to impersonate his dead elderly mother and sue ... himself.
“I held my mother when she was dying and breathed in her last breath, so I am my mother,” Parkin told detectives.
In the trial now nearing conclusion in Brooklyn Supreme Court, 51-year-old Parkin is being presented by the prosecution as a kind of Norman Bates for our time, armed not with a knife, but a pen, seeking not blood, but money. Rather than terrorize a rundown motel, Parkin is accused of dressing up like his dead mom, Irene Prusik, to perpetuate an intricate series of frauds over a six-year period involving a $2.2 million Park Slope brownstone and a $990,000 mortgage, as well as $115,000 in Social Security and other government payments.
The evidence against him includes a film made not by Alfred Hitchcock, but by investigators with the Brooklyn D.A.’s office using a buttonhole camera. It was screened on Wednesday before jurors, who seemed greatly entertained as they watched a figure in a red top slumped at the end a sofa wearing an obvious blonde wig, lipstick, blackout sunglasses, and an oxygen mask.
Michael Daly of The Beast has the intriguing story: Link - via News of the Weird