'We thought we knew him': The web of lies that $21m banking fraudster who faked his own suicide told new friends during his 18 months on the run

The outlawed Georgia banker who defrauded $21m and abandoned his wife and four children by faking his own suicide lived a secret life of lies while on the lam, MailOnline has learned.
Aubrey Lee Price, 47, became an unkempt drifter named Jason to many of his new friends and neighbors on the outskirts of the rural Florida town of Citra.
The banker was picked up on New Year's Eve during a routine traffic stop in Brunswick, Georgia - about 100 miles from where had once lived with his wife and four children in Valdosta - after cops cited him because the windows of his 2001 Dodge Ram truck were tinted too darkly. 

'He's a good talker': Janie McManus lived next door to Aubrey Lee Price for the past 18 months. She knew him as Jason and told MailOnline that he lied to her about how he struggled with alcohol and had become estranged from his wife and teenage daughter in South Carolina

Aubrey Lee Price appeared in court in Brunswick, Georgia, on Thursday for the first time since his arrested

Hours later, the FBI had in their custody one of the most reputed white collar criminals on its Most Wanted List. Prior to his capture, they had been offering a $20,000 bounty for tips leading to his capture.
The banker faced decades behind bars after being indicted for sinking the almost century old banking institution he led.

After allegedly burning through as much as $40 million of investments and despite being ruled legally dead, his assets were frozen by skeptical feds.
An appointed receiver seized riches included millions in life insurance policies and farms in Venzuela and Guatemala and homes and business properties in Georgia and Florida as well as gold bullion and rare coins.

Mark Abney, a friend and neighbor of Price, told MailOnline that he suspected that his friend 'Jay' was supplementing his legitimate palm tree and melon nursery by selling marijuana

Now authorities and people who befriended Price while he was on the run have revealed how Price metamorphosed into a ruffian farmer who was learning to speak Spanish and who boasted about his agriculture skills while still turning illicit, albeit much smaller-time, profits as a drug dealer.
Price, who was known around his Citra nook as Jason, cultivated palm trees and watermelons on two acres where he lived rent-free for almost a year.
The enterprising banker began growing marijuana out of his shanty trailer set on the corner of a unkempt stretch of highway.
Friends told MailOnline that Price started selling it in Jacksonville and Orlando.
At the same time Price also sunk into addiction by popping prescription pills, inventing a sick uncle that he claimed to be nursing in his grow house, feigning alcohol issues, boasting about losing his family after being convicted for selling cocaine, and even falling into the arms of a young ‘trashy’ brunette. 
‘He had one girl who came up here one day and he said that she was his girlfriend,’ said Mark Abney, 48, a friend and neighbor of Price.

‘She had a good looking body but her face had craters on it,’ he said, suggesting the woman suffered scarring from a severe case of acne. ‘She was a trashy girl.’
Abney said Price was affectionate in public with his young, curvaceous girlfriend.

The woman claimed to be from Jacksonville and was nearly half the fugitive’s age.
‘She was 25 or 30 at most,’ said Abney, an air conditioner repairman and freelance car mechanic.
A couple of months prior, Price's next door neighbor Janie McManus had noticed a woman was around Jason's home a lot and asked about her.
'Oh, that's my niece,' Price said.
Before faking his death, Price and his wife Rebekah Price were raising a family of four with two daughters and two sons with ages ranging from teens to twenties.
And instead of pit bulls the family cared for golden retrievers and dachshunds.
MailOnline was the first to report how on Price’s broken-hearted widow Rebekah Price has been living a ‘nightmare’ and was in the dark about her husband's double life.
In June 2012, just before Price vanished, the swindling executive emailed a suicide note to his family and acquaintances, which authorities interpreted as a confession letter.
'My depression and discouragement have driven me to deep anxiety, fear and shame,' the note read. 'I am emotionally overwhelmed and incapable of continuing in this life.'
But Price may have already been straying from his commitments to his wife long before he disappeared.
Sources told MailOnline about allegations that Price was unfaithful before he faked his own suicide.
‘There were stories about how he had a girlfriend,’ the source said. ‘[Rebekah] heard the same stories and he certainly had a strong credibility issue.’
MailOnline asked Rebekah Price’s lawyer John Holt about the cheating claims.
‘She’s got to talk to him,’ he said.

A sign from Marion County, Fla. Animal Control Services on the gate to Price's property giving notice that the one pitt bull left will be seized, the other had already been captured by authorities last week

Prior to his disappearance in June 2012, Price was indicted for embezzling more than $21m from a small bank in south Georgia where he worked

As recently as two months ago, Price's girlfriend was with him when he attended a massive monthly barbecue across the dirt road from where he lived.
The coupe also ran errands together at the local Walmart, his friend Mark Abney said.
Price moved to the Citra farm ten months ago after his landlords, Richard and Bonnie Sipe, met the homeless man and heard his sob story. 

Bonnie Sipe said that, like many others, she was drawn in by Jason's tale of woe. He told her that he was a recovering drunk who had lost his family. 
'We thought alcohol destroyed his life. We thought he was from South Carolina and had an ex-wife and a couple of kids,' Sipe said. 'None of that's true.'
He also made lofty promises to his neighbor Janie McManus about how he struggled with alcohol and had become estranged from his wife and teenage daughter in South Carolina.
‘He swindled people of all this money. He's a good talker. Jason had his story down,’ the 49-year-old single mother told MailOnline outside of her home where she has raised her two grown children and cares for two horses and dogs.
He said, 'I’m not going to drink anymore.'
‘And I remember I said something about how you can't hang out with people who are drinking. You need a new group of people.’

Price often came to help McManus, performing odd jobs like tilling her field and repairing her wooden fence.
When one of his pit bulls escaped and hassled her smaller dogs, Price gave her permission 'to shoot the dog.'

To her Jason, as he called himself, was trying to turn a new page by being a health nut.
Betrayal: Rebekah and her four children have had to deal with the shame of his crimes, abuse from those he conned but she can't help but admit the kids are happy that their father is alive after all
'Everyday he would be jogging and walk in the morning and be outside growing those melons and palm trees,' she said. 'He wasn't hiding.'
Despite Price's slimmed down stature and substance-free vows, MailOnline can confirm that he continued to smoke (his brand of cigarettes were Newport) and also carried on his drinking habit by making weekly beer runs to the Chevron gas station. 
‘He’d buy just beer about once a week,’ said a Chevron clerk called Mickey.
Price told McManus that he had his sights on making ‘millions’ by growing palm trees and watermelons and that he wanted to become a better father.
He claimed he was taking trips to South Carolina to spend weekends with his daughter and asked McManus to keep an eye on his home.
'He told me "I'm going to South Carolina to see my daughter, do you mind looking over my place?"'
McManus agreed, but said she never set foot inside his home more than a coupe times in the ten months that he was living there; both times Price was present.
‘He said “I’m thinking about getting a horse so when my daughter comes she can ride one.”

‘He was thinking of fencing his place and getting a horse for his daughter,’ she said.

Marion County Animal Control Services officer Amber Maha fills out the final notice for the abandoned pitt bull on the property the Aubrey 'Jason' Price used for a growing marijuana

Price told her that he wanted to impress his teenage daughter when she made her first visit to his home.
‘I said "Please don’t do that. Your horses would be pawing in my fence and trying to bother mine.'"
She offered one of her two horses to be adopted by Price’s daughter in South Carolina.
‘I told him, "When your daughter comes here she can brush my horses and fall in love with my horse and ride them here and if she wants to buy the horse you can pay some rent. But don’t buy a horse."
‘He said "Alright."'
Price told his other next-door neighbor, Tammie, that he was romantically involved with his landlord’s sister. 
'Jason said, "Yes I go with her," she said.
The only hitch was Jason said the sister had moved to Texas to care of her sick father.
But Price was confident his girlfriend was going to return to Florida and they would get back together.
'He said, "She'll be back."'
But Richard and Bonnie Sipe, who permitted Price to live rent-free at the farm in return for his promise to grow strawberries and melons, say the romance with her sister was fiction. 
'None of that's true,' Bonnie Sipe told MailOnline. 'She didn't leave to take care of our father.' 
Price, or Jason as he was known to them, pledged to the religious couple that he could restart his life after losing his family.

'Jason made many promises,' Sipe said. 'He was going to grow strawberries.

'We wouldn't have a criminal in there. We've known him since August 2012. Well, we thought we knew him, let's say that.'
The rundown farm and greenhouse were in desperate need of attention and Price claimed he could repair them.
'What could he do? Tear up the place he was living in?,' Bonnie Sipe said. 'It's a very old trailer and he said he could just fix it up.'
The long-haired homeless man was offered the trailer rent-free in return for raising a strawberry nursery.
Price, reborn in Citra as Jason, made claims he was legitimate and said he was making daily trips to tend to farms in Jacksonville and a blueberry farm in nearby Waldo, Florida.
But his friend Abney suspected Price was selling pot. 
‘About three months ago he was coming back from Jacksonville on the interstate and he had a flat tire,’ Abney said. ‘When he got to the bottom of a bridge there were four state troopers sitting there.

‘He said "I was scared s***less.' 
‘I said, "Why?" 
‘And he said "I had a couple ounces of marijuana under the seat of my truck and I threw it out into the mud to get rid of it. I figured out that was how he was making his money."
It wasn’t his first close-call with cops. 
In fact when Marion County Sheriffs were on a widespread manhunt for a local drug dealer in the neighborhood they routinely questioned the FBI’s Most Wanted fugitive to see if he knew where the dealer was.

The banker was picked up on New Year's Eve during a routine traffic stop in Brunswick, Georgia, after cops cited him because the windows of his 2001 Dodge Ram truck were tinted too darkly

'He seemed nervous and stuff, saying "I don’t need the cops hanging out at my house and wanting to know if I had seen the kid," Abney said of Price, who he called ‘Jay’ for short.
Abney suspected that the accused embezzler was supplementing his legitimate palm tree and melon nursery by selling marijuana in Jacksonville.
‘I put two and two together,’ he said.
And when a package arrived one day and was filled with envelopes of seeds - Abney believed they weren’t to grow fruits and flowers but cannabis. 
‘I saw him one day and he was standing in the front checking his mail and he had a package come and there were seeds in the envelope.
‘He said they were for grapefruits and petunias, but I’m sure they were marijuana seeds.’
Besides doing some repair work on Price’s truck for bargain labor costs, Price asked his friend to update a small shed on the two-acre property where he claimed he was going to have his uncle move in. 
‘He said he was making a room for his sick uncle,’ said Abney, who noticed Price had added a new electrical panel box. 
‘I went inside and put in new wires and outlets and ran another on the top of the roof.’
Abney now realizes that the electrical work wasn't to help aid his friend's relative but was to prepare the shed for fluorescent lights to grow marijuana plants.
'I had no idea that that's where he was growing that stuff.'

Price kept adding to the story of his sick uncle who he said was recovering in the shed.
One time when Abney was changing the oil in Price's truck, Price abruptly left to attend to his uncle.
‘He said "I got to get home and change my uncle’s diaper. I got to go."
Abney complimented Price’s dedication to his sick relative.

‘I said, "It’s really great of you to take care of your uncle like that."
Price seemed to relish the praise, saying, 'Nobody else in the family would.'
And to instill fear of unwanted visitations, Price warned his friend to keep clear of his property.
‘He said his uncle was a crazy old man and that if anybody walked onto the yard he would shoot them.
‘I assumed he had a real uncle he was taking care off. I really was under the assumption there was someone living with him.'
But Abney never saw an uncle and after cops raided his property and impounded his pit bulls and carried away 225 pot plants – some towering over six-feet-tall – he knows the uncle was another one of his friend ‘Jay’s’ tall tales.
Abney also remembers the banker's whopper about being an ex-convict.
Price told Abney he served prison time for cocaine and in turn was saddled with paying child support after his family wouldn’t have anything to do with him.

One dog currently remains on the property where Aubrey Price was growing marijuana in rural Crista, Florida, prior to being arrested by the cops

‘He said “I got in trouble with some cocaine a few years ago and went to jail and my wife left me and I have a lot of child support to pay.
‘I guess dealing cocaine means faking your own death.’
And while he would routinely loan Abney small sums of cash, Price played off his claim that he wasn’t a deadbeat dad.
‘He always said he paid a lot of money in child support and alimony too and that he needed more money.’

Aubrey Lee Price, a Georgia banker, was captured on December 31, 2013, after being on the run for over a year during which he had spent his time living on the outskirts of the Florida town of Citra

But he apparently had enough means to keep a supply of the prescription pills Aderall on hand.
‘He told me he loved to take Aderall,’ Abney said. ‘I was supposed to tune up his truck and he said he would be over by 10 in the morning. Twelve o’clock rolls by and he finally answers the phone and said he was up a couple of days and took a few Aderall.

The con artist who seemed to sleepwalk through his life and keep a low profile while peddling pot, got burned once when he attempted to deal his homegrown marijuana to a neighbor.
‘He sold one neighbor a lot of marijuana but he was never paid,’ Abney said. ‘It was thousands of dollars worth of marijuana.’
Whatever the setback, Price was planning for the future and he dedicated his free time to learning a new language.

Mark Abney told MailOnline that Price was planning for the future and had dedicated his free time to learning Spanish

'He was trying hard to learn Spanish so he could hire a bunch of Mexicans to work for him,' Abney said. 
'He had tapes and stuff and he was learning,' Abner said. 'He would talk to my girlfriend in Spanish.
'It was just a few words at first. But like two or three weeks ago I needed gas money to pick up my kids and when he came here his Spanish was a whole lot better. He was trying hard.'
On Saturday, an animal control officer summoned Price with another notice of abandoning his last pit bull. 
Authorities have already impounded two of his dogs; one of them 'so vicious'  it chased a deputy off the property.
If nobody claims the lone male pit bull by Monday, authorities told MailOnline they will enter the property with a warrant and collar the abandoned dog.
Should Price's dogs go unclaimed or fail to be adopted they could be euthanized.
Price started delivering $500 cash for rent, Bonnie Sipe said but when she and her husband discovered last week that he wasn't growing just melons and berries but cannabis and was also perpetually lying - their trust was broken.
They told MailOnline that they intend to take precautions to ward off future scam-artists. 
'What this has taught us is we will be checking IDs and going a little deeper than we did before we trust anybody again.'
The Sipes helped law enforcement authorities canvas the property and were with them when they found 225 plants in the shed. 
'All you could see were marijuana plants,' Sipe said.
According to police reports of the raid, there were various forms of fake identification in which Aubrey Lee Price's likeness was pictured next to inherited Hispanic surnames.
Price's neighbor Janie McManus is furious about the man's secret pot farm. 
'He and I had many conversations together talking about: "Why can't people do the right thing?" And he would agree with me saying "I know."'

McManus said there was an uptick in thefts around the neighborhood and Price's pot farm brought a double standard to a man who claimed to live by the Bible's teachings.
'It makes me mad that people around here are stealing and here he is doing this crap.
'Obviously what he did before was way worse than this.'
Price went before a judge in Glynn County criminal court on Thursday where he learned about the raft of federal charges he faces.
His family, including his victimized wife, were sitting in the gallery but didn't speak. 
On Friday, Price was moved to Bulloch County near Savannah, Georgia, U.S. Marshals said.
He is expected back in court on Monday, a representative from U.S. Attorney's Office told MailOnline. 
In the fallout of the man's capture, one neighbor claims he wasn't fooled by Price's double life. The farmer, who calls himself Mr. Pete, said he was suspicious of Price all along.
‘His hands have been dirty since he’s been there,’ the elderly man said. ‘He didn’t come to me and ask for help. I help the homeless,' adding that the Sipes have used the rundown property as a halfway house for homeless men for years.
But when Price moved in he was self-reliant and well-to-do.
‘He stayed away from me then there’s something wrong with him because a homeless man always needs a few dollars and some gas.’
Mr. Pete is confident Price stayed distant because he knew the old man could see through his lies from his thick spectacles.
‘I’m trying to live a righteous life and he was afraid of me,’ he said. ‘Light don’t like the dark and dark don’t like the light.’
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