My High School Girlfriend Became America’s Most Wanted Drug Queenpin

I lost my virginity to the baddest goth girl at theater camp. When I tracked her down fifteen years later I discovered just how dangerous Liz Barrer really was.

Illustrations by Anna Deflorian | Story edited by Lilly Dancyger

Nicole: boy i bet she is making her parents PROUD....not!
Steven: dam she is hot
Victoria: Shes pretty indeed...its a sham she choose to be a criminal insteed...
Shaun: DOES SHE SWALLOW?
Ron: I would be her partner any day what a hottie
Erik: She was killed

By the time I read these Facebook comments I was one-hundred percent obsessed with and embroiled in the story of Elizabeth Barrer — the girl I’d once cared for deeply, the girl I hadn’t seen for exactly half the time I’d been alive and yet thought more about than almost anything else.

I had just turned thirty and was doing what one does after a big birthday: lamenting my failures. My life felt like a solid C+ and to make it worse I started obsessively stalking old friends’ Facebook pages, finding nothing but achievements and milestones. I’d been hoping for failures and tribulations, for any excuse I could find to grade my life on a curve. I began to focus on people I knew from the sleepaway performing arts summer camp I went to when I was fourteen. The theater-focused program boasted famous alumni in film, on the stage and even in the music world: your Strokes drummers and Maroon Five singers, your Broke Girls, your baby Cosettes from the 28th revival of “Les Miserable,” they all attended.

Soon I realized that I was looking for someone in particular. She was one of the “goths.” At camp this meant two things: she wore black clothes and only ever signed up for Dungeons and Dragons. For two summers I signed up for multiple sessions of Dungeons and Dragons every day for eight weeks and never played a single game. Instead, I followed around Liz Barrer. She wore a pair of tight black jeans and a baggy white-v neck t-shirt meant for boys. Sometimes she wore a pair of electric blue bondage pants, a style choice that looked ridiculous on nearly every human being in history other than Liz. Her hazel/green eyes were like floodlights beaming out at you if she deigned to look your way. She had a pronounced smile that always seemed to hold shape on her face even when she wasn’t actually smiling. I was completely transparent about my feelings for Liz. It was almost a joke. I was the spiky-haired puppy that followed Liz around all day, despite that fact that she made it painfully clear that I didn’t stand a chance.

By the time fall came around, I’d almost accepted my disqualification from the race for Liz’s heart. I was back in the real world trying to establish my identity in a new high school but camp was always on the periphery. A marble notebook in my bedroom had the phone numbers of all my camp friends. I spent most nights in my room with the phone receiver to my ear, talking to Liz, although I’d given up on trying to change her mind about me. To this day I have no idea why she did.

We were on the phone when she told me that she wanted to “do it” sooner or later and she had decided she wanted it to be with me because she felt comfortable with me. Of course, this would be my first time too. I don’t know if she thought about what her matter-of-fact declaration would mean to me, but I can still remember the way I felt when she told me. I felt considered. I felt chosen. You don’t get a lot of moments like that as a kid. You don’t get a lot of moments like that period.

I don’t remember much about that weekend, which six or so of us spent in the basement of Elle Goldberg, another friend from camp who was close with Liz. I remember almost everything about the room and the bed Liz and I slept in. I remember waking up next to her the morning after, hugging her and then her groaning my name, “Reeeeissss,” annoyed that I’d woken her up. I don’t remember feeling any different having “done it,” only a kind of pride that she was the one it was with. She was beautiful and she was tough. She was elusive. Turns out I had no idea how much so.

When I searched for her fifteen years after that weekend, I discovered that Liz had no Facebook page. She had no MySpace account, Snapchat, Twitter, Google Plus, Pinterest… fucking Friendster! Maybe she just didn’t like social media. Maybe she’d turned luddite or anarchist, hippie or Christian. But searches brought back no results. There were no articles about her achievements or performances or arrests or DUI’s or business dealings. No candid party photos, no Livejournals, no senior thesis, nothing! Liz was a digital ghost, and this realization led me to assume that one of two things had happened to her: she was either immensely fulfilled or terribly miserable. She was either famous and successful living a quiet, untethered life, or something was wrong. Figuring out which was the truth would slowly overtake my life.

I started reaching out to old camp friends. Elle had kept in touch with Liz two or three years longer than I did. They’d hang out in Philadelphia. Liz would bring Molly, the tiny black and tan Chihuahua mix that she had since she was twelve. Elle has a memory of Liz that sticks with her: They were in Philly together, sitting on a curb eating McDonalds French fries. Liz was feeding Molly fries and talking about all the adventures they were going to have together.

“Liz didn’t let many people in. She was one of the most confident people I have ever met, always unapologetically herself,” Elle remembers.

But it was around that time that Liz was attending an alternative school, the type, that according to one former student, had “movies” as a class, and beanbags instead of desks. A school for the kids everyone else had given up on. When problematic behavior at school and at home persisted, Liz was eventually sent to a stricter lockdown. One night Elle’s parents got a call from Liz’s parents. She’d escaped and they didn’t know where she was. After that, Elle lost touch with Liz too.

“I remember her family being that sort of American-pie-sweet that contrasted her dark side. Her mom – blonde and kind and welcoming – always at odds with their sweet daughter’s punk turn,” remembers fellow camp goth Matthew Siskin.

“Liz Barrer” became a daily Google search for me, a multi-tabbed, deep-Google search that would last hours, and take precedence over all else. When I was searching for Liz I wasn’t worrying about deadlines or where the next job would come from; I was lost in the few very simple memories I had of Liz, and I was happy in that place.

Eventually I found something, but not what I’d hoped.

The first article popped up a little less than a year after I first searched Liz’s name. I’m not certain whether I had missed the article or if the paper had just put their archives online, but it was 2013 when I found an article from 2008, in a local newspaper in Fredricksburg, Virginia.

The search warrants filed one Wednesday were for MySpace pages, e-mail messages and Internet service provider logs registered to Elizabeth Barrer. According to the warrant, she is wanted for drug charges that carry a potential sentence of life in prison. If caught, Barrer would join Alexander Lembersky and Richard Rizzi, already charged with drug kingpin and other drug counts, according to Spotsylvania Circuit Court records.

This wasn’t necessarily Liz, right? I thought. After all, Liz was from Philly, not Virginia. I emailed the reporter who wrote the article but got little information back. Weeks passed. I searched every day anticipating an update or a comment but nothing came up. I was desperate for more.

Then, on the website for “America’s Most Wanted,” I found an article titled “U.S. Marshals on the Hunt for Accused Drug Kingpin.”

The name of the “kingpin” in the article was “Elizabeth Michelle Barrer.”

I didn’t know she had a middle name. I would have known that, right? There were a lot of facts to contend with. Age: 31. That was about right. Hair: brown. Could go either way. “Likes to go to auctions and buy cars and homes.” That sure didn’t sound like her.

“Since 2007, cops say Elizabeth Barrer has been a pivotal force in the drug network. Authorities believe Barrer launders funds for drugs purchased across the US/Canada border and into Ukraine. Now U.S. Marshals are hoping to track down one of their biggest drug kingpins and need your help to capture her.”

It just couldn’t be Liz.

I couldn’t ignore the photograph. It looked like a mugshot. It showed her with dark, almost jet-black hair and pronounced bangs. Maybe I could have convinced myself it wasn’t her, if it weren’t for that smile. She wasn’t smiling in the photo, but Liz was always smiling a little bit. She was always beautiful. In the days that followed, more information came, and room for disbelief diminished. I showed the photo to Elle. “Yeah,” she wrote, “that’s definitely her.”

Queenpin. That was the word they kept using. Liz was wanted by the Spotsylvania Sheriffs Department, and by the U.S. Marshals for trafficking large amounts of marijuana through the United States/Canadian border.

Deputy Haney of the Spotsylvania Sherriff’s Department was the lead detective on Liz’s case. According to Haney it began when Liz started dating a man named Artem Avdzhyam in high school in the early 2000s. Avdzhyam was involved with a local organized crime group known in Philadelphia as the KGB, as they were mostly of Russian origin. The KGB trafficked mainly ecstasy. Through Avdzhyam, Liz began spending time with Alex Lembersky and there began a long, complex and intense relationship. Lembersky was a marine, which he used to his full advantage when he embarked on a career as a drug trafficker, making sure his couriers’ cars were adorned with military uniforms, trinkets or bumper stickers at all times to curry favor with police in case of a traffic stop.

There’s no indication Liz was involved with the activities of the KGB, only that Avdzhyam was the one who connected her to Lembersky. When Avdzhyam got caught, testified against the KGB and fled the country, Liz grew closer to Lembersky, whose organization was about to grow at a wild pace. What neither Liz nor Lembersky knew was that Spotsylvania Police already had eyes on who they’d come to refer to as “The Lembersky Drug Organization.”

Spotsylvania is a small Virginia town located an hour south of Washington, D.C. and an hour north of Richmond Virginia, two major hubs for the east coast drug trade. Because Spotsylvania has Interstate 95 running through the middle, it’s a perfect way station. Lembersky was sent to Spotsylvania as an active member of the Marine Corps.

Stories of the group’s trafficking operations sound made up by someone in the “Breaking Bad” writers room. Even the police thought the stories were just stories; they involved boats bringing shipments across the St. Lawrence river to the Akwesasne Indian Reservation on The New York/Canadian border, and hockey bags full of premium pot being shuttled by snowmobiles to cars with retrofitted stash compartments.

“Liz was probably just below Lembersky,” Haney wrote to me in an email about the case. “She would transport 100s of pounds of marijuana at a time.” Haney says there are now numerous vehicles in tow that were registered under Liz’s name with specialized stash compartments. The seizure of these vehicles is what tipped off police to Liz’s involvement. Other reports put Liz in charge of laundering money for the organization. Some claim Liz was the one in charge.

Perhaps because of this, law enforcement remained tight-lipped and coverage of the story was limited and often incorrect. For instance, numerous reports stated that the organization relied on MySpace to plan out operations. This, Haney says, was inaccurate. Instead, Liz’s MySpace account (which was inactive and likely deleted by the time I searched for it) was included in search warrants issued in connection to the case to locate Liz after she fled. Haney says the articles actually served to tip her off and she never signed back on. Liz had become the real-world equivalent of Nancy Botwin from the TV show “Weeds,” as sexy, bold and badass as any character Hollywood could dream up.

But the media portrayal of Liz gave her no such credit. The articles about her always describe her “love of money” and her desire for attention as the ethos of her existence. Even in my discussions with law enforcement Liz is painted as this one-dimensional, greedy queenpin.

At this point I’d been researching Liz for the better part of a year and the obsession was eating into my real life. I was totally preoccupied, blowing off deadlines left and right. When I went to my parents’ house for Passover, the first thing I did was scrounge through the boxes in my childhood bedroom. I found photos of Liz and the marble notebook with her phone number in it. It occurred to me that this was probably the landline in the house she grew up in, and that I could call that number and settle the mystery, end the obsession. I took out my cellphone and entered the numbers, but before I pressed send I felt a deep, twisting pain in my gut, which finally released and left me with a sense that I could never call that number. The Barrer family was going through enough.

I began seeing Liz throughout New York City. “America’s Most Wanted” said she was most likely in Canada or New York. Liz would spot me amongst the crowd and know that I was there to help, I imagined. I’d take her to my basement apartment in Brooklyn and help her hide out. I had to help her. This was life or death. According to every article on the case, the “kingpin” charge that had been levied against her carried with it a sentence of life.

Comments on the “America’s Most Wanted” page included crude sexual remarks, along with the requisite, “I’d be her partner in crime any day” and numerous comments about Liz’s resemblance to Canadian singer Carly Rae Jepsen.

Things unraveled for the Lembersky network the way they do for most mid-level drug organizations. In 2007, a Spotsylvania Sherriff’s Department informant floated them a tip about a small-time pot dealer named C.J. Hall. Officers seized forty pounds in the bust and flipped Hall, convincing him to set up a sting. Richard Rizzi (a.k.a. “Itchy Balls,” according to Haney) showed up to collect payment. Rizzi was high up in the organization’s food chain, the perfect block to remove and make the Jenga tower come tumbling down. The green Ford Taurus that Rizzi drove to the meeting had $55,000 in cash packed into an electronically controlled compartment in the dash. Rizzi’s arrest led to the subsequent arrest of not just Lembersky and twelve other members of the organization, but also two New York City cops who would drive ahead of the shipments and alert the couriers to any police presence.

The kingpin charge had never been used in Virginia in connection to a marijuana case, but they’d also never seen a marijuana operation of this magnitude. However, a team of high-powered lawyers helped Lembersky get the kingpin charge dropped. Lembersky pleaded guilty to three charges of possession with intent to distribute marijuana and one drug racketeering charge. He was given a $100,000 fine and served nineteen months in prison.

“We did not expect him to get such a light sentence.” Haney said.

I dreamt of Liz, of seeing her face. She no longer had the bleached blonde hair I remembered but the jet black hair with the bangs from the photo of her featured on the America’s Most Wanted website. The look on her face said, “You can help me.” I’d wake up and scold myself until I fell back asleep. Why are you being so fucking delusional? What kind of loser obsesses about the girlfriend he had at fifteen?

A few months passed. Seasons changed. The sun resurfaced and so did I, spending less time in the rabbit hole of Liz’s story. I started work on a second book and received promising news about the first book. I moved into a new apartment, made some strides to pushing up my life grade. I still thought about Liz sometimes, just less. She went from an everyday Google to a weekly Google, to every now and then. Eventually, months went by without me typing Liz’s name.

I can’t really explain what happened next. I’d moved on. I hadn’t searched her name or spoken about her. There hadn’t been any dreams. Then, one day I woke up and walked out of my apartment and directly to the coffee shop. I had a sick feeling the whole way. Once again, Liz was the only thing I could think about. I sat down and opened my laptop. I typed out the familiar pattern of letters. Then…

“Woman Shot Dead In Montreal Was Elizabeth Barrer, A Fugitive ‘Queenpin’ Wanted in US on Drug Charges”

The article featured a photograph of an SUV with a tarp surrounding it, apparently the Canadian equivalent of police tape. I sat there all day in that coffee shop reading the same two articles over and over again. Both came from Canadian news outlets and said the same thing: Liz had been shot at least once in the head. She was found slumped in the front seat of the SUV. “Slumped.” Both articles used that word and it repeated in my head – a non-stop taunt. All of Liz’s documents had been fake, and it took authorities over a week to confirm her identity. I sat there for hours, my face pale, my eyes glazed, often yanking at the hair on my head or clenching my eyelids tight. I hadn’t seen Liz in so long that she could hardly even be called a memory. Chances were I never would have seen her again anyway, but still the sadness, guilt and pain persisted.

The little that’s known about Liz’s life in Montreal comes from a series of articles written by a reporter for Le Journal de Montreal named Claudia Berthiaume. In Montreal, Liz went by the name Nikki. She’d taken to healthy living and ate solely organic food. She learned to knit and spent a lot of time reading books. The one lovely detail in all the articles written by Berthiaume is the presence of her dog Molly. Somehow, Liz had managed to bring Molly with her. After Molly got in a fight with a cat and lost an eye, Liz pushed her around in a stroller. Liz and Molly got to have their adventures after all. The Liz (Nikki) that Berthiaume writes about sounds fearless. She won awards in Montreal for horseback riding. She took flying lessons.

However, in the year before her murder, anxiety began to overtake her life. It seems Liz was still connected to Jeffrey Colegrove, the man who supplied the marijuana trafficked by the Lembersky gang in Virginia. She was by all accounts loyal to him but he was, according to Haney, “unhinged.” Colegrove was re-arrested last year after escaping prison on a ten-year-cocaine trafficking conviction, but he was behind bars the night Liz was found. Via email, Berthiaume wrote, “She was living an undercover life in Montreal, with three different IDs. She had a few friends, but not many. She had a trust issue with people from what I know. At the end of her life, she became more cautious. She wasn’t going out much anymore.”

Kevin Connolly is a supervisor with the U.S. Marshals Fugitive Task Force in Richmond, Virginia. During a phone interview he told me that they suspected she was in Canada. “We got ahold of our counterparts in Canada, the RCMP, and said, ‘We know she’s traveled and we think she’s in Canada.’ But Canada is a big place. We just didn’t know where. We didn’t come up with a location until she was killed. She obviously did a good job of staying under the radar because our best methods didn’t really come up with anything.”

In the article by Berthiaume, it’s revealed that the Barrer family considered hiring a private detective to track her down, but when the detective told them that if he found out where she was and the cops asked, he’d have to tell them, they decided against it.

Liz’s murder case currently remains unsolved. “My theory is that the homicide was drug-related. This is a billion-dollar business we’re talking about,” says Haney.

Like an addiction, my obsession picked up where it left off and got much, much worse. A Canadian true crime blog called Coolopolis posted a story called “Drug Queenpin Elizabeth Barrer’s Life in Montreal.” But it was full of inaccuracies, ranging from benign ones, like the claim that she had bad skin, to claims of her being a stripper and escort and a credit card scammer. Before I knew it, I was emailing with the owner of the blog telling him all the things that were wrong with his post. He was kind and said he’d consider my comments. Before ending the conversation, I made a request that he forward my address to anyone who’d known Liz in Montreal.

I began getting messages from people who said they’d known her. Back to blowing off my responsibilities, I spent hours talking to these people. One day I got a message from a woman who said she had a friend who knew Liz, mentioning the dog and a few other things that made it sound like she was telling the truth. Some of the time, it even sounded like it wasn’t a friend she was referring to at all but herself. We spoke via Facebook message and one day she told her version of what happened to Liz. She said the man who killed Liz was simply a crazy person who had nothing to do with the drug trade. He was just a jealous, insane man who she’d come into contact with through mutual friends. She added, “And if he finds me he’s going to kill me too.”

I never got the woman’s real name. A few weeks after we started talking, the Facebook account disappeared, but not before we had one last conversation. She sounded frantic. She said she was leaving town to get away from the guy who had killed Liz. She wanted me to contact Liz’s parents for her, or to give her their phone number. She said they hadn’t claimed her body.

That’s when I stopped. I knew I couldn’t help this woman. I didn’t even know if she was real. Most of all, I couldn’t contact Liz’s parents. I may not have known them, but I felt like I knew enough to believe that they weren’t the type of people who would just let their daughter’s body languish. To me, reaching out to them based on a few Facebook messages was that final step too far. My life had been subsumed by messages and comments and articles, and if there was anything I should have been learning from the experience it was that life is precious.

About a year passed before I’d search Liz’s name again. Once I’d taken enough time away from the search for Liz, I was able to go back and look at it in a new light. Not all the comments I’d read on “America’s Most Wanted”’s Facebook and Fugitive.com were so bad. A lot of people remember beautiful things about Liz.

Jamie.Wilson said, She was a beautiful person kind soul and heart and an amazing friend she will be missed dearly.

Angel eyes said, …Her tough character was just a facade to hide her true loving, generous, and caring self… She contributed to many charitable organizations, such as animal rescue and battered women shelters... You were always there for your friends in good and bad times... I will truly cherish all the moments we spent together throughout these years... I know in my heart you're in a better place now. Rest in peace my dearest sweet Elizabeth.

People I talked to about Liz’s case put a lot of meaning in the fact that Liz came from a good, upper-middle-class family. I thought about it a lot too, or rather, I thought about them. Liz’s father is highly respected in the medical field. He helps people. I saw photos of her mother helping people in impoverished countries. Her parents only commented on the case once, to Claudia Berthiaume. She spoke about the day the police called looking for her daughter. “They wanted Elizabeth to go meet them. They told me they could put [her] in prison for life, but it would be less bad if she cooperated. It could have saved her life to do so. But I understand why she did not. She never betrayed a friend, it was her code of honor.”

Berthiaume would later learn that Liz’s parents did travel to Montreal to claim their daughter’s body. On a desk inside the empty apartment where Liz had been living there was a handwritten list of final wishes. It seemed that Liz knew she was going to die. She wanted her possessions to be sold and the money to be donated to animal shelters. She wanted to be buried in a Jewish cemetery along with Molly’s remains. There was only one request Liz’s parents did not honor: Liz wanted her tombstone to read simply, “Nikki.”

I thought about Liz’s parents a lot. I hope that Liz got the chance to come around. I’m pretty sure she did, because even though I haven’t seen her in a very long time, I know Liz better than most. I’m a lot more like Liz than I am most people. When I read the quote Liz’s mother gave to the Journal de Quebec I can feel that even if she didn’t approve of Liz’s choices, she was proud of who her daughter was as a person. Maybe it wasn’t until she became Nikki that Liz came around and got a chance to be proud too.

People are a lot more than just a collection of choices. Nobody gets a report card at the end of it all. Perhaps the closest you could come is to collect all the memories of the people they touched, all the ways they made them feel. For what it's worth, mine, although blurry, are lovely. I cherish them, and now, after all of this, they feel more real than they ever did before. I suppose that’s why I sought Liz out in the first place. I got a little piece of the simplicity and purity of being young and in love and in awe, and I doubt I’m the only one who felt that way about Liz Barrer. So if anybody reads this and it sharpens their memories of her, I’ll be glad that I spent the time searching.

Rest in peace, Elizabeth. I wish I could have told you how meaningful you were to me; it’s just that I never really knew until now.

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Jonathan Reiss is a Brooklyn-based writer and contributor to Complex, Tablet, Spin and The New York Observer. His first novel Getting Off is being published this winter by Instar/OR Books.

Anna Deflorian is an Italian freelance illustrator who lives in Budapest. She is passionate about horses and fashion.

Lilly Dancyger is a freelance writer with bylines in the Atlantic, the Washington Post, the Guardian, and others. Lilly teaches personal essay writing at Catapult, and is the editor of Burn It Down, an anthology of essays on women's anger, forthcoming from Seal Press. She is proud to have worked with the writers of these outstanding stories.