Husband's 'leaving' becomes movie plot

NEWARK, Ohio - A stern warning whispered through a jailhouse telephone is more than a movie moment for Elizabeth Welsh.

In the scene drawn from her life, the sons she was left to raise alone are going to visit their imprisoned father, who had faked his death 15 years earlier.

"Don’t sit there and play with their feelings. Don’t you dare," Mrs. Welsh (Margaret Colin) tells her ex-husband, Patrick (Jay O. Sanders) in "The Familiar Stranger," which airs Monday on Lifetime.

Looking back now from this central Ohio city where she’s president of the Chamber of Commerce, Welsh concedes her experience had the makings for a movie.

"It’s such an elemental theme. There was the tragedy and the sadness of the fact that Pat disappeared and the mystery surrounding whatever happened to him in the intervening years without any sort of sign that he was alive," she said.

Pat Welsh, now 53, left his home in Lancaster on Jan. 21, 1983, and sent his wife a suicide note a few days later. A second letter soon followed, providing instructions on what to do with his body when found and promising to look down on his sons, 10-year-old Ted and 8-year-old Chris, from heaven.

"The hope was always that, somewhere out there, there was Pat Welsh and he would in due course let us know that he was alive," Mrs. Welsh, 53, said.

His mother died. His sons graduated from high school.

Still, no word.

Welsh had been convicted in 1980 for embezzling $23,000 from Ohio State University, where he worked as a fund-raiser. He still owed restitution when he disappeared.

Mrs. Welsh divorced her husband for legal purposes after he disappeared. After five years with no contact, she had him declared dead, entitling her to collect benefits for her sons.

Her ex-husband, meanwhile, was living as Tim Kingsbury in Galveston, Texas, where he was a civic leader and general manager of a radio station, where humanitarian awards covered his office wall. (In the movie, some details differ from the true story, including Welsh moving to Kennebunkport, Maine, which was easier to replicate during filming in Toronto last November.)

Mrs. Welsh learned her ex-husband might be alive when she received a letter from Social Security demanding she repay about $60,000 in survivor benefits paid to her sons.

The reason: Her husband was not dead. Privacy laws prevented the agency from disclosing his whereabouts.

She first suspected someone else was using his Social Security number.

Mrs. Welsh later located her ex-husband through the Internet, sent him an e-mail and signed it "Peachie," her childhood nickname. She went to Texas after he ignored the e-mail.

She took legal action after he didn’t meet her demands to contact his family, as well as Social Security and the insurance company that paid benefits. Welsh later was sentenced to four years in prison for nonsupport and conspiracy to commit theft, serving eight months before his sentence was suspended. He did not return telephone messages seeking comment.

Mrs. Welsh said she asked the movie’s producers not to "demonize" Welsh. "I’m not mad at him. I don’t hate him. I obviously don’t understand him. I’ll never be able to understand what he did."

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