He Swindled a Senior Citizen, Then Sold Pizza
(“Past Lives,” Forensic Files)
If Yelp existed back in the 1990s, maybe Brigitte Beck would have enjoyed the retirement she deserved.
Unfortunately, she had no way of knowing that Connecticut financial adviser Madison Rutherford was a con man born John Sankey.
Forgot to mention. He probably didn’t tell his clients about the six months he spent in prison for larceny in 1993, shortly before he persuaded Beck to let him take charge of her six-figure nest egg.
Rutherford ruined Beck’s finances as well as his own, then tried to fake his own death for $7 million in insurance payouts.
Like other Forensic Files fraudsters (Ari Squire, Molly Daniels) who thought they were smarter than the insurance companies and police, Rutherford was done in by the forensics.
“Past Lives,” the Forensic Files episode about Rutherford, first aired in 2004 while he was serving his second term in prison, so I looked around to find out what happened to him after he exited the federal lockup in 2006.
I also searched for an epilogue on Brigitte Beck, the mild-mannered German immigrant whose Forensic Files appearance always makes me teary.
So let’s get started on the recap of “Past Lives,” along with additional information from internet research:
Going for snob appeal. John Patrick Sankey was born circa 1964, the son of a New York City police officer, according to the Hartford Courant. He started to use the last name Rutherford at some point during his adulthood and filed for bankruptcy under that name in 1990.
After his first stretch in prison in 1993, John Sankey legally changed his name to Madison Rutherford and worked as a financial adviser in Connecticut.
He had a talent for making good investments for his clients, according to Forensic Files. His friend and neighbor Beck, in her late 60s and with no family in the U.S., named him as her executor and gave him power of attorney over all that she owned.
Rubbed the right way. Beck had moved to the U.S. at age 24 and worked as a nanny, then as a massage therapist at Graf Studio, a Stamford business owned by an older German couple who had taken a liking to her. When they died, they left her everything and she took over the business.
She got to know Rutherford through his wife, an attractive older woman named L. Rhynie Jefferson who was a client at Beck’s massage studio. The three became trusting friends.
Beck was also a neighbor of the couple, who reportedly delighted in spending their newfound riches on cars, travel, and their huge colonial farmhouse on five acres in Bethel, Connecticut.
Magic recedes. Multiple media sources list Rhynie Jefferson’s occupation as fortune teller.
If she had any premonitions about the stock market, she stopped sharing them with her husband.
His luck at picking winning stocks ran out in the late 1990s, and he eventually lost more of his own and his clients’ money than he could ever hope to recoup on Wall Street.
The 34-year-old Rutherford had also spent all of Beck’s savings and taken out a mortgage on her house.
South of the border. Instead of telling his clients the truth and starting over, he decided to chase after $7 million in payouts from CNA Insurance and Kemper Corp.
In 1998, police discovered his rental SUV ravaged by fire in a ditch near Monterrey, Mexico, where he traveled to either buy or sell (sources vary) an exotic dog.
At first, it looked as though the car had ignited after skidding off the road.
Inside the vehicle, first responders found a body reduced to charred bones. An inscribed wristwatch and a medical alert necklace enabled investigators to tentatively ID the victim as Madison Rutherford.
Pry before paying. Rhynie Jefferson gave police one of Madison’s teeth that she said was removed during a dental procedure. Its DNA matched that of the teeth from the burned-out Suburban.
Mexican authorities signed off on the case as an accidental death even though their forensic specialists had doubts.
One of Rutherford’s U.S. insurers decided to do some of its own sleuthing before forking over $4 million to the widow.
Kemper Corp. hired private detective Frank Rudewicz to search for an alive Madison Rutherford and engaged forensics expert William M. Bass to study the bones. Bass found that the teeth weren’t consistent with those of a caucasian person and the skull fragments came from someone older than 34.
Mess gets messier. Before authorities blew the lid off the fraud, Rhynie confided in Brigitte Beck that Rutherford was still alive. Soon after, he even showed up at Beck’s house with an outrageous story — that the FBI had staged his death because organized crime figures wanted to kill him.
The kind-hearted Beck allowed him to hide at her house for a couple of weeks. She had recently had a windfall of nearly $100,000, and handed it over to Rutherford to manage.
Then he disappeared again.
When the FBI showed up at her house, Beck at first denied seeing Rutherford. He and Jefferson had manipulated her into opening a checking account in the name B. Beck & Associates, which the con man used to launder money.
Lair discovered. The authorities soon found Rutherford by tracing a car he owned to a “Thomas Bey Hamilton” who worked as a comptroller for Double Decker Studios in Boston.
Management liked his work and was considering elevating him to CEO.
FBI agents ambushed him in his apartment in Boston on Nov. 7, 2000, and arrested him.
His fingerprints matched Rutherford’s. Thomas Bey Hamilton — who had books about how to change one’s identity in his Boston pad — was Madison Rutherford. The court kept him in jail pending legal action.
Plot revealed. When authorities showed Rhynie Jefferson evidence that Rutherford was cheating on her with other women, she spilled the whole story: On July 11, 1998, he staged the accident with a body stolen from a tomb in Mexico and then pedaled away on a bike. He sneaked her a tooth from the pilfered corpse after returning from Mexico.
A year later, Rutherford had planted a bag of clothes stained with his own blood in Mexico as a back-up explanation for his “death.”
Finger-pointing. Once Rutherford was formally charged, Brigitte Beck revealed that, between spending her cash and mortgaging her house, he swindled her out of $782,000. She had virtually nothing left.
Meanwhile, Rutherford tried to blame everything on his wife.
Rhynie Jefferson, he claimed, had seduced him when he was a 16-year-old lifeguard and later “manipulated and pressured him to maintain a lavish lifestyle that included providing for all manner of pets and livestock, including scores of free-range chickens,” according to a Hartford Courant story from July 21, 2001. (A neighbor, who called the couple weird, said that Rutherford considered the birds to be his children.)
‘Pain and loss.‘ In a Bridgeport courtroom, Rutherford’s father, John Sankey Sr., pinned his son’s problems on Rhynie as well, according to a Connecticut Post story. The elder Sankey also mentioned that his other son had recently died of leukemia.
In the end, Rutherford pleaded guilty to fraud. Without going into detail, he apologized for his crimes and said his eight months in jail so far were “hell” and that he promised to make the rest of his life “worthwhile,” according to the Hartford Courant.
U.S. District Judge Stefan R. Underhill gave him five years in a federal prison for fraud and “leaving a lot of pain and loss in his wake.” The authorities couldn’t charge him with embezzling Beck’s money because she’d given him power of attorney.
Rhynie Jefferson got 18 months in prison and three years of supervised release for her part in the scheme.
Epilogue for the cast. So what contribution to society has Madison Rutherford made since exiting the penitentiary?
Well, he’s not incinerating skeletons anymore, but he’s left a trail of disgruntled diners thanks to his foray into the restaurant business.
Rutherford, who now goes by the first name “Bey,” owned a restaurant called Pop’s NY Pizza that opened in Columbia, South Carolina, in 2006. By 2011, the place had a Yelp rating of one star and scathing reviews:
“If you care about your health PLEASE DO NOT GO,” Sam V. urged in 2011. Julie R. offered, “There was a hole in the door of the restroom, the toilet looked like it had never been cleaned and the toilet paper was on the floor with flies buzzing around it.” And Richard C. demystifies that the “god awful place…survives on drunken college students.”
Rutherford also allegedly neglected to pay his bills from local ad agencies, according to a post by writer Paul Blake in a blog dedicated to the now-defunct Columbia City Paper.
Not on the ball. Pop’s closed in shame, but Rutherford bounced back with Bey’s Sports Bar, also in Columbia. His Yelp rating rose to 1.5 stars, but customers scorched him and the place:
“Picture yourself in the worst bar of your life X 10,” writes Michelle M. “No mixers or straws, just liquor and beer.” Keith K. concurs, “There are really only 3 types of bars in Columbia: decent, crappy, and Bey’s.” And Keith S. confirms that the man with a fondness for the names of founding fathers took his standards of hygiene from their era. “Bathrooms are disgusting. There’s never been soap in the guy’s when I’m there.”
DirecTV sued Rutherford for allegedly pirating its services in order to broadcast games at Bey’s Sports Bar, according to the Columbia City Paper blog. Even worse, Rutherford routinely stole his waiters’ tips, according to a reader comment imported from the newspaper’s archives.
According to Lex, a ForensicFilesNow.com reader who was a bartender at Bey’s, the establishment closed in 2013 amid tax woes.
The shuttering of the business didn’t stop the Yelp reviews — people who watched the episode wrote in:
“What a piece of garbage this guy is,” writes Andy C., “stealing $500,000 from a trusting old woman.“
More Epilogues. Regarding what happened to Rhynie Jefferson, the most interesting intelligence that came up was one of the reader comments also from Blake’s blog post (it’s a gold mine) from 2009. As of 2019, she lived in Oakville, Connecticut, was single and 75 years old. She died in May 2020, according to a reader who wrote in with a tip.
Finally, on to the emotional centerpiece of the story, Brigitte Beck. Once swindled out of everything and having had Chase Manhattan Bank foreclose on her house, she received some financial help from friends and continued to live in Connecticut, according to the Hartford Courant.
Beck died on January 18, 2008, at the age of 78. Two brothers and a sister, all living in Germany, survived her, according to her obituary. She’s buried in the East Norwalk Historical Cemetery.
At least she can rest in peace and be remembered. No one ever identified the deceased man whose grave Madison Rutherford desecrated.
That’s all for this post. Until next time, cheers. — RR
Watch the Forensic Files episode on YouTube
Also read a Q&A with a former Bey’s Sports Bar bartender
