Jun 17, 2016

CrimeMagazine.com - The bizarre life and grisly death of an Irish conwoman, JULIA HOLMES - June 2016 by Siobhan Pat Mulcahy

JULIA HOLMES, the three-times married but never divorced Irish grifter was wanted on both sides
Holmes with her third husband Tom Ruttle
of the Atlantic and spent many years on the run from the FBI, the PSNI (Police Service of Northern Ireland) and an Garda Siochana (Police in the Irish Republic).  She became a confidence trickster at a young age and began using up to 20 different aliases to help her ply her fraudulent trade.  In the early 1980s, she crossed the Canadian border into the USA and made her way down south to Texas. Once there, she and her new husband schmoozed with Republic Party officials including then Vice President, Dan Quayle while she ran a real estate racket selling non-existent land in Ireland and conned her Texan friends out of more than half a million dollars.
Holmes spent 27 months in a Texan prison before being deported back to Northern Ireland where she set herself up as a “sports guru” and psychologist and tried to befriend members of both the Irish and English national rugby teams.
When she was charged with defrauding a man in Northern Ireland out of £18,000 and involvement in a property scam worth one million pounds, she fled south to the Irish Republic. As soon as she settled in County Limerick, she established a new identity and found a new husband. In Limerick, even as the police net closed in around her, she made a fortune selling “fake honey” to gullible supermarkets and upmarket shop owners. Knowing that she would soon be captured, she went into hiding. She was last seen in Askeaton, Co. Limerick on March 14, 2015. One month later, her badly decomposing body was found by burglars attempting to rob the isolated farmhouse she shared with her third husband.  You can read her tragic story on CrimeMagazine.com here.