Insurance Fraud Hall of Shame

William Cunningham

The Georgia truck driver poisoned his kids with lighter fluid and antidepressants in a failed plot to shake down the Campbell Soup Co. for an insurance payout.

His kids were 18 months and three years old at the time. Cunningham laced young Billy's soup with hot peppers. The child's face and mouth burned and swelled so badly that he went to the hospital. About two weeks later, Cunningham laced Billy's and Miranda's bowl of SpaghettiO's with lighter fluid and antidepressants. He then forced more poisoned soup down their throats.

Another trip to the hospital ensued, and Cunningham threatened Campbell's with a lawsuit. But the company stood its ground and refused to pay up. Cunningham received 100 years in prison, but his kids may have suffered permanent lung damage from the lighter fluid, relatives say.

Michael Howell had stolen more than $150,000 in premiums from hundreds of clients, leaving them dangerously uncovered. Rohrbach was delving into the Dilworth Agency's files, in Charlotte. But she never returned home. Her state-owned car was found in a nearby parking lot. Investigators searched Howell's office and found blood on the carpet and computer cord.

Though Howell never admitted killing Rohrbach, his wife said he privately admitted that he had snapped and hit Rohrbach with a computer table. Howell finally led investigators to her body in the woods, and will serve up to 35 years in prison.

Juan Jose Luna

The Live Oak, Calif., man wanted to torch his house for an insurance payout. But the plot literally blew up in his face. It looked more like a drone missile attack than a home arson.

Luna sloshed gasoline around the home and lit the volatile brew. The gas exploded. Glass shards flew throughout the neighborhood. The walls buckled. Only earthquake strapping kept the house from collapsing into a charred heap of wreckage. Firefighters refused to go near the inferno for hours, fearing it would keep exploding.

Luna was found wandering in a fog two blocks away. Two fingers dangled by strips of flesh, other fingers were badly broken and his clothes smelled of gasoline. Luna couldn't exactly explain away his condition, and received nine months in jail.

Lewis Drayton

"I was just trying to help out," said Drayton after burning his grandmother alive while torching his family's Miami house for insurance money. Virginia Howard was a devout church piano player and family matriarch who died with burns covering more than 70 percent of her body.

The fiery trail of evidence soon led to the muddled Drayton. He insisted his uncle had set the fire, but there was one small problem: his uncle was in prison at the time. Drayton finally fessed up after his gas-soaked clothing was discovered. But he insisted he didn't realize Virginia was in the house when he lit the fire — even though he had just visited her and her car was parked out front.

This was Drayton's explanation for setting the blaze: His family was having financial trouble, and the insurance money from their homeowners' policy would give them a boost. Virginia also died because Drayton figured to earn a whopping $8,000 in life insurance money, prosecutors contended. His family members were not charged, but Drayton received life in prison.

Marvin Johnson

Confusion ran amok when the Rosedale, Miss. police officer — sworn to uphold the law — lied when explaining how someone stole his Toyota Avalon from in front of his home. His bogus theft claim with Progressive Insurance quickly fell apart. Why? The company noticed that Johnson never even tried to find the car. That seemed odd for a cop.

When asked to describe the Avalon, Johnson incredibly said it had both a manual and automatic transmission. The car also had an external keypad for entry, he said. Except that Toyota doesn't make cars with external keypads. To make matters worse, Johnson couldn't even remember the entry code to the imaginary entry system.

He then claimed he bought the Avalon from a Cadillac dealer, but later said some "dude" under a tree by the road sold it to him. In fact, Johnson never even owned the Avalon. The National Insurance Crime Bureau traced it to someone else in another state. Presumably, Johnson's sentence will be less muddled than his lies.

Michael Taris

A professional wrestler, Taris was hammer-locked when he tried to extort an insurance payout from a 7-Eleven in Levittown, Penn. Taris was a big, beefy guy who slammed his body around the ring for the National Wrestling Superstars. He filed an injury claim with 7-Eleven, lying that he'd injured his dainty back, neck, and legs when he slipped on a puddle of coffee.

Taris said he couldn't work, "rough-house" with his son, stand for long periods of time, or even mow the lawn. But all the while, Taris kept banging away in the ring, even working as a male escort and massage therapist.

Surveillance video caught Taris in the ring being thrown against ropes, hurled out of the ring, and jumping off ropes and landing on top of his opponents. The Pennsylvania Attorney General landed the conviction, and Taris received three years of probation and a fine.

Alan Michael Rubenstein

The New Orleans man murdered his stepson, his stepson's wife, and their four-year-old daughter to collect $250,000 in life insurance.

He bought the life policy for four-year-old Krystal and listed his wife Doris as the beneficiary. He drove the doomed family to his rural vacation cabin in Mississippi so the family could work out martial problems. Rubenstein then massacred them.

Weeks later, police found the badly decomposed bodies of his stepson, Darrell Perry, and wife Annie on the living-room floor beside a still-running television. They'd been repeatedly stabbed.

Young Krystal was on a bed, strangled. Rubenstein collected his insurance money and, as he described it, promptly "blew" all the money. The Mississippi Supreme Court re-sentenced Rubenstein to life in prison this year.