Woman Gets 10 Years for Fake Death Claims – Fugitive from Justice

Back in July we brought you the story of Bridgette Buckner, a woman who claimed that several family members had died. But of course, they were never actually deceased, and she was only trying to obtain the insurance money that came along with their “deaths.”

According to the Chicago Tribune, Bucker had worked for a health insurance administrator for six months. Within those months, Buckner’s daughter and mother died, with her FBI agent husband also being killed in the line of duty.  Did we mention that he was not even an FBI agent?

For anyone else, this would have been a devastating time in their lives; but when all those people are actually alive and well, you get thousands of dollars in death benefits instead.  If only it were that easy.  But it isn’t, and Buckner must have sensed a problem after her guilty plea this past June.

On September 7^th at her court hearing, Buckner did not show up, and was sentenced in her absence. DuPage County Judge John Kinsella gave her 10 years in the Illinois Department of Corrections for defrauding her employer by filing false death claims and collecting $25,000 in insurance.

After Buckner received $10,000 for the “death” of her daughter, she then put in another claim later on in September, stating that her husband, an FBI agent, had been killed in the line of duty. That, of course, aroused the suspicion of Tom Bourgeois, a corporate investigator and a retired FBI agent whose father was actually an FBI agent who was killed in the line of duty.

He said, “If anybody had been killed in the line of duty, we certainly would have known about it.”

Buckner was called in for an interview – she drove up in a Mercedes Benz, Bourgeois said – and was confronted with death certificates that Bourgeois and fellow investigator Diane Rivers described as obviously fraudulent. Buckner admitted faking the documents, they said.

This sentence came on the heels of testimony about Buckner, where it was noted that she pulled the same scam at a previous employer and was also involved with identity theft.

“It’s clear that Bridgette Buckner is a con artist, a fraud,” Assistant DuPage County State’s Atty. Helen Kapas told the judge. “She’s a thief.”

Rivers, who is also a retired FBI agent, said she contacted HSBC, which is a banking company where Buckner previously worked. Their records showed that she was paid $60,000 after submitting claims that two of her children and her husband had died.

Rivers noted that the same child has died three times.

After being terminated from Hallmark Services, which is part of the Blue Cross family, Buckner went to work for a temporary agency, a medical testing company. While there, authorities allege that she took confidential patient information and used it to commit identity theft.

In her recent absence from court, Buckner sent a letter to the judge, in which she asked for a second chance. She stated that she had been called to ministry.

“I know God has forgiven me and does not address this crime anymore,” she wrote. “But I have to live with this shame on myself and my family.”

Earlier this summer Buckner pled guilty to insurance fraud but failed to appear when she was scheduled to be sentenced in August. Some might notice a trend of absences when it comes to court dates.

Officials have issued a warrant for Buckner’s arrest because she still remains at large.