'Love Letters' by Con Man Leave Only Broken Hearts : Fraud: Lonely men thought they were writing to women. They got steamy notes--and requests for cash.

By JOHN M. GLIONNA

May 16, 1993 12 AM PT

TIMES STAFF WRITER

At the wise old age of 84, Glenn Buechly had become perhaps the oldest man ever to get stood up on a blind date.

There he was, standing at an airport lounge near his hometown in rural Ohio, waiting for the woman with whom he had corresponded for months--the beautiful Asian whose pictures he cherished, the would-be lover he had sent hundreds of dollars in cash.

Roses clenched in his hand, he eyed each passing face for the doe-eyed Myra Perez. She was supposed to be easy to recognize. Her last letter had described her “sinfully straight” black hair and the red dress she promised to wear.

But when she did not show, Buechly did what any jilted lover would do: He jumped on a plane and went after his Myra.

He flew to Los Angeles, took a room at the YMCA and searched for the address--6520 Selma Ave., No. 414--where he had sent all the gifts, airline tickets and notes expressing his undying love.

Instead of romance, what Glenn Buechly found was a run-down Hollywood mail service with more than 800 private boxes.

And it was then that he learned the truth: There was no Myra Perez. In fact, the scores of erotic letters had not even been written by a woman. They were penned by Christopher Eugene Barnes, a bodybuilder and con man running a get-rich-quick ruse.

“I think the old man’s heart broke right then and there,” postal inspector Frank Denham said of the 1988 incident. “He emptied his pockets of his letters. He didn’t want to believe that Myra didn’t exist.”

But Buechly’s shattered heart was not alone.

He was one of countless men throughout the United States and Canada victimized by numerous mail fraud schemes that afforded Barnes a flashy lifestyle and a home in the Hollywood Hills.

On Thursday, the 37-year-old East Orange, N.J., native will be sentenced in federal court in Los Angeles after pleading guilty to 10 counts of mail fraud involving Club East-West Intro, a purported social club that since 1989 funneled Barnes more than $275,000 from more than 400 victims.

Interviews with postal investigators and prosecutors indicate that the club was the most recent chapter of a seven-year saga of deception during which Barnes posed as imaginary Asian women with such exotic names as Jasmine Ortega, Velma Tang, April Go and Pearl Santana.

Using photographs of models copied from Playboy magazine, he employed direct mail and ads in singles publications to dupe men from 16 to 86. Barnes wrote long, amorous letters in which he promised the men sex, love, companionship and business opportunities.

Authorities do not know how many men fell prey because many victims--most of whom lost between $100 and $1,200--are too embarrassed to come forward.

But the scheme, they say, may indicate a chasm of coast-to-coast loneliness and sexual longing that has bred an easy market of vulnerable men willing to shower money and emotion on a love interest they have never met.

“I poured out my heart and soul, not to mention my cash, to a woman who turned out to be some hairy-chested bodybuilder--I feel like a fool,” said a 41-year-old electronics worker from Santa Barbara.

“This guy tapped into that yawning gap of lonely, horny men who don’t have easy access to fulfill their needs. I was sucked in like a vacuum cleaner.”

From file drawers in postal inspector Denham’s Burbank office, the love letters spill forth like spent emotions.

They carry postmarks from virtually every state and province across the United States and Canada.

There is one from the pimply teen-ager who pumped out his heart to a foreign girl in a faraway place. And the lonely man who had just lost his wife. And the down-and-outer who wrote about his obsession to be sexually dominated.

The letters, thousands in all, were confiscated during a 1992 search of Barnes’ Hollywood home--along with a mailing list investigators say he planned to use to launch his newest venture: a 900 telephone service.

Barnes, who is being held in the Metropolitan Detention Center while he awaits sentencing, could not be reached for an interview. His attorney, Ivan Klein, declined to comment on the case.

Investigators said Barnes was an articulate businessman who attended Delaware State College--one who saw a way to make an elegant killing through a simple sex scheme.

And they have pieced together details of scams dating to 1986 when the 6-foot, 2-inch Barnes placed ads for the Barne Club, which, for a membership fee, promised introductions to beautiful Asian women.

Using a series of post office boxes throughout Los Angeles, Barnes expanded the ruse to phony clubs such as Orient Express, Club Connections and The Club.

Respondents were asked to pay a processing fee and then were invited to join the club at an annual membership that eventually reached $495. Members were provided with pictures and addresses of supposedly consenting women and were invited to social functions to meet other contacts.

“But it was all a lie,” Denham said. “There were no women. There were no gatherings. Nothing happened. Zilch.”

Barnes also launched a letter-writing campaign.

The lengthy letters mixed innuendo with graphic sexual detail. Some were typewritten, others scrawled. Most were form letters that closed with a signature heart and a tailor-made postscript.

Eventually, the letters suggested that the women wanted to start a relationship with the men, even suggesting sexual threesomes with other girls. There were also some vague pitches for business opportunities the letters claimed could make both of them rich.

“Darling,” read one missive, sent under the pseudonym Velma Tang, “more than my limited use of words can express, I am overjoyed to have finally found someone as special as you. I sincerely believe you are a very special man. I also believe you are capable of filling the void in my life.

“And if you will give me that chance by sending me your enclosed membership form and dues, which is totally refundable, you may find that I am equally capable of filling the void in your life too, and in more ways than you might have previously imagined.”

Some suspicious members, however, found that love to be tainted. One said the pictures accompanying the ads looked too perfect. Others said they sometimes received two copies of the same letter.

But a 34-year-old engineer from Reading, Pa., went along for the ride: “When I saw the photograph, I went ‘Wow! Look at that girl!’ She was beautiful. The fact she came from a different country made things more intriguing.”

By 1987, postal inspectors had received more than 200 complaints about Barnes’ dating clubs--including one from Playboy Enterprises Inc., which alleged that Barnes illegally reproduced photographs of at least 10 models.

Authorities finally arrested Barnes at the Hollywood post office for passing bad checks. Denham visited him in jail and persuaded Barnes to sign his consent to a cease-and-desist order on Dec. 10, 1987.

Twenty days later, Barnes rented another Hollywood mailbox under the name of Myra Perez. Within a few weeks, the letters, checks, cash and gifts once again flooded in for a woman who did not exist.

In March, 1988, Barnes was again arrested and spent six months in jail for mail fraud. He then told Denham he had written more than 1,500 letters under the name Myra Perez. Weeks after his release in early 1989, he had several new mailboxes and a new scam: Club East-West Intro.

Finally, on July 9, 1992, investigators caught up with Barnes, who is married to a Filipina. In the 30-odd months since his last arrest, he had bilked $275,000 from 400 new victims, according to Duane Lyons, the assistant U.S. attorney prosecuting the case.

But a search of Barnes’ house and bank accounts revealed only $7,000 in cash. Everything was gone except the letters.

Thousands of letters.

Roses. Roses. Roses.

Every day, they awaited Pat O’Hara when she arrived at her Hollywood mail service, all addressed to a woman named Myra Perez.

But there was more: Cash. Checks. Candy. Groceries. Perfume. The 14-carat gold necklaces. Bottles of honey. Long-distance calls. And more roses.

Each day, the stacks of letters poured into the Selma Avenue address Christopher Barnes had used to run his scam. On some days, O’Hara said, the delivery box was not big enough to hold them.

Finally, Pat and her husband, Jack, began to smell a rat, not a rose.

“When the deliverymen came, I told them: ‘We don’t want these roses. Take them back.’ But they would say: ‘Can’t, lady, they’re already paid for.’ So I gave them away to customers and homeless people on the street.”

Then Pat O’Hara, a compact 45-year-old Thai woman, began to find something else each day at work: Men.

Dozens of anxious men who thought she was Myra Perez, the woman who had promised them the moon--which they had come to collect.

“This old man from New Jersey hobbled in here with a cane and told me he loved me,” she recalled. “I told him to go sit down and take a rest.”

In her letters, Myra Perez had written that she owed money to a landlord named Jack. If she could only get the $400 she owed him, she wrote, she would be free to join the man of her dreams.

“So when they saw me, they asked: ‘Are you Jack?’ And I’d say: ‘Yeah, I’m Jack,” said Jack O’Hara. “It finally dawned on me that they thought I was this evil landlord. They wanted to beat me up.”

“They just stood there dumbfounded,” O’Hara said. “Sometimes I’d ask them how they could fall madly in love with someone they’d never even met, send $400 and expect a woman to run to their side, live happily ever after?”

So the couple watched for the woman who would collect mail from Box 414.

Instead, they saw a well-built man who pulled up each day in a sports car. “He looked like a million bucks,” O’Hara said. “He just oozed money. And I told my wife: ‘Whatever, he’s up to, it’s not legal.’ ”

Victim Glenn Buechly will not be at Thursday’s sentencing.

The Bradford, Ohio, man, who ran an organic food store, died two years after his ill-fated trip to Hollywood, recalled his 99-year-old stepmother, Mabel Buechly.

“Glenn had been acting awfully squirrelly,” she said. “He went out there to Hollywood and came right back. After that, he was always kind of sad.

“But Glenn would never talk about what happened. That’s the way he was. He didn’t want people to know his business.”