Mystery of apparent amnesia victim solved

For now, he'd still like to be called Jon Doe.

His real name is Edward Lighthart, and he indeed has traveled the world. It's true he studied art and history at some of the best schools in the country. It's true he was a chef, whipping up crepes, souffles and lamb with mint sauce even as a teenager.

But the man who walked out of Discovery Park three weeks ago with apparent amnesia says none of the truth about the real Edward Lighthart yet rings a bell. It's not that he doesn't believe that's really him. He said he just doesn't completely remember inhabiting Lighthart's life.

Still, even before the mystery began to unwind, he suspected parts of his life might prove uncomfortable, even painful, to learn.

That turns out to be true, too.

"I guess there's a little bit of relief and at the same time a lot of anxiety," Lighthart said Thursday, a few hours after learning his real name.

"I'm still not sure quite what to make of it all."

Three hours after The Seattle Times published a story Thursday morning about Jon Doe's struggle to find his identity, a reader in China recognized him as Lighthart, an educated business consultant who had taught English in Shanghai.

With a name to attach to the face, interviews with friends, family and authorities have confirmed Lighthart's identity and background, and helped stitch together fractured pieces of his past.

Shortly before Lighthart, 53, ended up in Seattle, he had a falling-out with a sister in Las Vegas, at whose home he had been staying for the past year and a half. The sister said Lighthart had a history of emotional problems. In May, she told him he needed to leave because he hadn't been paying rent or working.

He left all of his belongings behind. It's not clear how he came to Seattle, or why.

"He just disappeared," said his sister, who asked not to be identified for personal reasons. "We never got along very well. He would disappear for eight or 10 years at a time and then pop back up. It's obvious he's got issues."

She added, "But I was glad to see he was OK. I feared he might have wandered off into the desert or something."

In a manner of speaking, he did.

On July 30, Lighthart flagged down a bus driver outside Discovery Park. He was dehydrated, had no ID but was carrying $600 in his sock. He was admitted to Swedish Medical Center's Cherry Hill campus, where he tried to organize the snippets of memories into clues.

Lived abroad

He said he knew he went to college in Wisconsin, Chicago and New York, and had lived in Paris, Vienna and Shanghai. He seemed to remember being married in the mid-1980s to a woman named Tina who died. And he clearly had an encyclopedic knowledge of European cultural history.

In Asia on Thursday morning, David Akast came across a link to The Times story on a Shanghai news Web site and recognized Lighthart. Akast, a British citizen, had worked for an American company that opened language schools in China. Lighthart had arrived in 2005 to teach English.

"As soon as I saw the photo that triggered something," Akast said by phone from Shanghai. "He's not the kind of person you forget. Everybody who met him noticed him."

Lighthart was older than most of the new teachers, and the two men had coffee at Starbucks, where he spoke fluently about European history.

"I remember being blown away," Akast said. "He has this theatrical manner. He has this big voice. I thought he was eccentric, a character."

Lighthart had posted his résumé online listing all the schools and subject areas that Jon Doe had recalled. Lighthart has a Web site, with his portrait, advertising a business-consulting and public-relations firm he apparently operated in Vienna.

Lighthart grew up in Tucson, Ariz., where his parents ran a nursing home.

He was a chubby, awkward kid with few friends, recalled childhood playmate Karen Healy, nee Hill, now of Tustin, Calif., who befriended him in elementary school because she was awkward, too.

"This is no one to be afraid of," Healy said. "He is a sweet, caring, kind person with a side of him that's very light-hearted."

"He needs to know that not all of his memories would be bad ones."

In 1976, the now-defunct Tucson Citizen ran a story about Lighthart, who was then attending the Culinary Institute of America in upstate New York.

It said he was hoping to study cooking in Paris, but come home to Tucson to open a French catering business. It also said that Lighthart had taught himself French cookery in the seventh grade and had been collecting crystal, china and cookware since childhood.

Randall Snyder of Columbus, Ohio, a friend of Lighthart's since the 1990s, said Lighthart was a high-caliber chef in New York for a time, but gave up the profession after some kind of accident.

In 1980, he enrolled at the University of Wisconsin at Madison, according to a spokesman there. Records say he also attended the University of Arizona and a community college in Tucson.

Lighthart got a bachelor's degree in French in 1984.

His online résumé says he got a master's degree from the University of Chicago, but that couldn't be confirmed Thursday.

Jon Doe recounted vivid memories of being married — at least informally — to a woman named Tina who died in 1985. So far, no records have emerged to confirm that, and friends and relatives said they are fairly certain Lighthart never married.

One professor Lighthart actually remembers, Istvan Deak at Columbia University, said Thursday that Lighthart was a student at Columbia in about 1989 and took a single class with Deak called "History of the Habsburg Monarchy, 1815-1918."

Lighthart said he believes he spent part of the 1990s in Paris, and his online business Web site places him in Vienna and Bratislava, Slovakia, within the past few years. The site says Lighthart was "delivering public-relations-consultancy services to international businesses in Europe, the Middle East and the Far East."

His friend Snyder said Lighthart had a huge art collection. "He is a very, very brilliant man and knows art like nobody I know."

About two years ago, Lighthart posted a listing on a Web site in China, offering his services as an English teacher. He said he had a doctorate in analytical psychology and cultural anthropology from the Union Institute for Advanced Graduate Studies in Cincinnati. According to that school, Lighthart attended a doctoral program there between March 1993 and June 1994 but never completed his degree.

In China, Akast said he believes Lighthart had a falling-out or a personality conflict with an employer. He moved from schools in Xi'an to Jinan and then to Shanghai in just a few months, and they lost touch.

But it's not clear why Lighthart left China. According to the Seattle police, he last entered the U.S. in March 2008 from Calgary. About that time his sister got a call saying Lighthart needed a place to stay. She agreed to put him up for a few months, but she says his stay stretched to well over a year.

One day he was gone

Lighthart, who speaks fluent French and German, really wanted to find work overseas, but his sister grew frustrated that he didn't just get a job.

"He was looking for something very specific," she said. "It's just how he was. He loved Europe. He loved the history and the culture. ... But I couldn't afford to take care of him."

Lighthart spent much of his time in his room. Then one day in late July, his sister opened his bedroom door and he was gone.

Back at Swedish Medical Center, Jon Doe, dressed in a navy sweat shirt and sweatpants, found all this new information interesting and a little "shocking," he said.

But he said none of it clicked in an emotional sense. And none of it will really help him regain his life. He still has no official identification documents, no job and no place to stay.

Swedish officials have said he can stay there for now. But Lighthart knows that option won't last much longer.

"It's feeling like I'm starting to come out of a fog, but it's still there," he said.

Ian Ith: 206-464-2109 or iith@seattletimes.com. Craig Welch: 206-464-2093. Times news researchers David Turim and Miyoko Wolf contributed.