Inside the search for the Puppeteer - NZ’s most prolific catfisher - The Front Page

Facebook predator Natalia Burgess who stole identities to create the life she wanted to have. Photo / Dean Purcell

In 2011, an NZ Herald senior journalist revealed a prolific catfisher’s real identity to the world, which ended with her behind bars.

David Fisher thought that was the end of the saga – until an email arrived in his inbox 11 years later.

Natalia Burgess was at it again.

The term ‘catfishing’ is used for people who use stolen photos to pretend to be someone else online, usually to form relationships with real people on social media.

Fisher navigates the intricate web of false identities, mismatched storylines, and the trail of victims Burgess left behind in the new true-crime podcast – Chasing Ghosts: The Puppeteer.

He told The Front Page the story of the Facebook predator he uncovered so long ago wasn’t one he thought would come back to him.

“It’s perhaps the naive side of me that thought she’d learn a lesson and move on with life and that will be that.

“I’d read Crystal’s email and I thought, ‘Is she really still doing that?’ She seemed to be banging the same drum. It was intriguing, but mainly I felt deflated,” he said.

As part of his most recent investigation, Fisher contacted a range of victims – some of whom agreed to appear on the podcast. Others were too traumatised by their experiences.

“Since she had come out of prison, she wasn’t targeting teenage boys quite so much. There was the discovery of another pool of victims that she deliberately and relentlessly targeted. There were teenage girls and their mums who she went on to form very long and very meaningful relationships with through her false characters.

“As I came across these people and spoke to them, the trauma was plain to see... When it came to those more familial, less romantic relationships, they would stretch on for years,” he said.

While reexamining Burgess’ online web, Fisher navigated the damage to her victims – but, also her own mental health struggles.

“It would have been very easy to have listened only to the victims who had such compelling stories, whose pain was so close to the surface that it was impossible to miss.

“But, you can’t do that in journalism. It’s all sides of the story there for investigating and we have an obligation to approach all sides of those stories in the same, evenhanded, empathetic way. So the more that was learned about Natalia, a better picture developed of how she saw the world and how she interacted with it.

“It doesn’t invalidate any of the victims’ stories. What it does is it informs our understanding of how that crime happened in the first place and I would hope provides our communities, and wider society, the tools that they need to stop that kind of offending from happening again. Or, at least finding a way to deal with it better than we have before,” he said.

Listen to the full episode to hear more from David Fisher about investigating Natalia Burgess’ crimes – and what we can learn from it.

Chasing Ghosts – The Puppeteer is a five-episode true crime investigation. Follow Chasing Ghosts on iHeartRadio, Apple Podcasts, Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts.

The Front Page is a daily news podcast from the New Zealand Herald, available to listen to every weekday from 5am. The podcast is presented by Chelsea Daniels, an Auckland-based journalist with a background in world news and crime/justice reporting who joined NZME in 2016.

You can follow the podcast at iHeartRadio, Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts.