In March, Carloyn Naussany posted to Facebook a call for people in Branson West and Kimberling City to come to the King Food Saver grocery store for photos with the Easter Bunny. The posts included photos of an adult dressed as the Easter Bunny and baskets for sale. Later, Lisa posted the same photos to the Branson Buzz Facebook group from her personal account and included her phone number.
Reached by phone, Lisa’s live-in partner Maria Tazbaz said she sold the Easter baskets at her hardware store. “I don’t know who Carolyn is, but those are my Easter baskets,” Tazbaz said. On Google, Tazbaz’s store, Mr Riobe Discount Tools and More, received a glowing Google Review from “WelderGirl46.”
Welder Girl’s only previous reviews were for NV nail salon, and Oakley Auto World, which included a photo of Lisa posing beside a salesman and her new silver Chrysler. The same car was parked outside Lisa’s Kimberling City home last week, a trailer park community on the edge of Table Rock Lake where she lives with Tazbaz and her sister, Linda. It’s just a four-minute drive from P.O. Box 514, where Naussany Investments is supposedly based.
“Do you remember when the movie came out, ‘Catch Me If You Can’?” Lisa’s ex-husband Steven Sullins asked last week in a phone interview with NBC News, recalling the 2002 Leonardo DiCaprio film about a professional forger and conman. “That’s her. That’s what she does.”
Sullins and Lisa divorced in 2002 after about eight years of marriage. After the divorce, Sullins said he would hear news that Lisa had been arrested for bad checks and fraud. Sometimes he said victims would contact him and tell him stories. Sullins said Lisa had been certified as a nursing assistant (Oklahoma State Department of Health records do include a 1992 long-term-care aide certification for a Lisa Sullins), but she was passing herself off as other things: an EMT, a hairdresser and an underwater welder.
“She walked into a bar one night and had a doctor’s coat on, had like three pagers on her, two cellphones, and she’d be like, ‘Oh, I need to go outside and take a call,’” Sullins said. “But I turned around and looked at people and was like, ‘She ain’t no damn doctor.’”
Lisa and Sullins had one child together, a boy also named Steve, who lived with his dad. Lisa wasn’t a reliable parent, her son said in a phone interview, but they keep in touch. Last summer, he said Lisa traded in her car and bought him a truck from South Pointe Chrysler Jeep Dodge Ram in Tulsa. Shortly afterward, Kurt Naussany left a review for the same dealership alleging that the business accepted trade-in cars that had been stolen.
Steve said the truck was Lisa making good on an old offer to “take care of him,” a promise that had been made and delayed for years. He said Lisa talked about having a trust, with the money coming from a marriage six or seven years ago to a Kurt Howell in Las Vegas, who owned a pipeline company, and for whom she worked as a welder. Public records databases don’t show any records for him in Nevada, and there are no records of marriages for either Lisa or Kurt Howell in Clark County.
“I’ve never seen the guy. I’ve never met him,” Steve said of Howell. “I have no idea who he is, where he’s from, if he’s even real, or if any of this trust is real or anything like that.”
Lisa was born in California in 1971 and moved with her family to Cleveland, Oklahoma, when she was around 6. She was the middle child of three; her older sister would describe their upbringing in a court filing as “dysfunctional.” Her parents owned a bail bonds business for which her dad, a Vietnam vet, was a bounty hunter; he also worked as a correctional officer at a state prison in Osage County. Her mother died at 44 from a brain aneurysm.
Lisa’s first reported brush with the law was in 1997, when she was 26 and arrested in Sapulpa, Oklahoma, for writing a bogus check. For the next 20 years Lisa would be in and out of jails, courts and prisons, charged with various crimes, including stealing checks and credit cards, committing fraud, running con games, intimidating witnesses and obstructing investigations. Her cases took years to wind through the courts, in part because she was often tangled up in other cases or incarcerated in other jurisdictions. But in 2005, she was hit with federal charges. Prosecutors claimed she used fake Social Security numbers to obtain more than $180,000 in loans from Tulsa banks. Lisa pleaded guilty to one count of making a false statement in an application for a loan and was sentenced to 20 months and restitution.
By 2009 Lisa was on supervised parole, but couldn’t stop committing crimes, according to her parole officer, who asked a judge to consider putting her back in prison. In a letter to the judge, the parole officer outlined Lisa’s infractions: She faked cancer to get sympathy from a court on a charge for bogus checks. She stole a check while working as a cashier at a Sand Springs KMart, admitting the theft when confronted by store security. And on a trip to Springfield, Missouri, Lisa stayed in a business king suite at the Ramada Oasis Convention Center and left without paying for her room. During the stay, Lisa posed as an employee planning a convention for KMart’s parent company, reserving 48 guest rooms as “part of a scheme to defraud the hotel,” the parole officer said.
After spending much of 2010 and 2011 imprisoned in Oklahoma, Lisa was released. Over the next three years, she moved 11 times, mostly following a trail of lovers whom she met on internet dating sites and repeatedly scammed, according to her probation officer’s report. One man was out thousands of dollars after Lisa convinced him to loan her money to unlock a gold inheritance. At a hearing for the revocation of her release, the parole officer testified she had “noticed, and attempted to stop, a pattern by the defendant of defrauding her boyfriends.” A judge locked her back up.
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