ID scam suspects face more charges, parents

For Jocelyn Kirsch and Everett native Edward Anderton, it was the morning after.

The young Center City couple with the jet-setting tale that has captivated an international audience and undammed a stream of celebrity-like shots — most starring Kirsch — faced more charges yesterday in what police say was a conspiracy to reap cash by stealing identities.

They also faced their parents, who were forced to face the media after flying in from points south and west to bail them out and take them home.

"No comment," Anderton's mother, Lori, said softly, pressing close to her husband, Kyle, in the lobby of the Criminal Justice Center yesterday morning. The couple, also from Everett, had just endured two hearings for their 25-year-old son in which his charges mounted — as did his bail, to a total of $130,000. They had arranged to pay 10 percent of that, needed for his release, and now must arrange to take him home.

"We really have no comment," Kyle Anderton said. He wrapped his arm around his wife, pulled her close, and the two turned as one. They left the building, only to find themselves in a tight circle of TV cameras. Huddled together, they took small steps as the circle moved with them, across the street toward a cab.

Kirsch's parents also said little, as her father, Lee, of Winston-Salem, N.C., politely accepted business cards and scrap paper with scribbled phone numbers from reporters.

Her mother, Jessica, who lives in California, sat beside her former husband during the hearings. And the two arrived together, with attorney Ronald Greenblatt, to pick up their daughter, 22, when she was released about 1:40 p.m. from Police Headquarters. The daughter was expected to return home with her father.

Kirsch and Anderton are expected to return to Philadelphia no later than February for a preliminary hearing. Greenblatt indicated that his client would reach a plea agreement.

"We're going to come to a fair resolution on these charges," he said.

Investigators say the pair paid for exotic trips and luxury items by stealing identities, some of them from neighbors in their Center City condo complex. They had been free on bail — Kirsch on $25,000 and Anderton on $50,000 — after being arrested last Friday on charges including forgery, identity theft, and unlawful use of a computer.

Additional charges of burglary, criminal trespass and criminal conspiracy to commit burglary were later added, however, and the couple spent Wednesday night in jail. Yesterday, each received bail increases totaling $80,000. To be released, they had to come up with 10 percent of their bail amounts.

"To his parents, this is a lot of money," Anderton's attorney, Larry Krasner, told Municipal Court Judge Thomas Gehret yesterday. Krasner, who had few words for reporters, griped to Gehret that their reports had made it look like Anderton "is somehow privileged and he is wealthy."

Facing Bail Commissioner Dwain Hill at a later hearing, Krasner said: "His father works for a newspaper, and he goes to work in a baseball cap and blue jeans."

Anderton's mother is a medical technician.

Kirsch's father is a plastic surgeon, and her mother has worked as a nurse.

Their daughter was a senior at Drexel University but was suspended after her arrest. Anderton is a 2005 graduate of the University of Pennsylvania. Police said he recently lost his job at Lubert-Adler, which developed the Belgravia condos where the couple lived.

The case has captured international attention as photographs of a glamourous couple — now dubbed the Bonnie and Clyde of identity theft — in such locales as Hawaii, Paris, and the Turks and Caicos Islands sped across the Internet.

Kirsch, a busty yet slender young woman who obviously enjoyed playing to the camera, has particularly beguiled the public. The comment "knockout" was heard more than once in the halls of the Criminal Justice Center.

But yesterday, attorney Greenblatt described her and her boyfriend as "scared, exhausted" and remorseful.

She also had no time for cameras. She left Police Headquarters bent forward, the hood of a gray sweatshirt pulled as far down as her nose. As cameras all but touched her, reporters hollered questions:

"Jocelyn, do you have anything to say?"

"Are you sorry?"

Kirsch never said a word, slipping silently from the media phalanx into a car with her parents and attorney.

Anderton, the less visible of the two, managed an undetected release from the Central Detective Division, where he had been held overnight. Detectives poked their heads outside just after 2 p.m. and told the camera crews that he had gone out the back way about 15 minutes earlier.

Contact staff writer Lea Sitton Stanley at 215-854-2796 or lstanley@phillynews.com.

Distributed by McClatchy-Tribune Information Services.