The Puppeteer — inside the fantasy world of a woman who has catfished for 23 years

Catfisher Natalia Burgess (left) and one of the women she has used to build false profiles online. Photo / Graphic montage
Thirteen years ago, Natalia Burgess was exposed as “the Facebook predator” who was targeting teenage boys.
Burgess went to jail after the Herald revealed she was the woman police were seeking for her online contact with dozens of schoolboys.
Now we can reveal that she got out — and went straight back to catfishing.
In 2011, we didn’t use the term “catfishing”. It was a new phrase coined in the United States after a documentary about a woman who used other people’s photographs to create false identities online.
Here in New Zealand, Burgess has been doing the same for as long as social media existed.
A new podcast — Chasing Ghosts: The Puppeteer — tells the story of my investigation into Burgess, 40, as I seek to discover why she has spent more than half her life living a lie.
It’s an extraordinary period of time, particularly considering the pace at which technology has moved since Burgess initially tried out her masquerade as a 17-year-old using the name “Chickadee” in UseNet forums.
From there, the investigation traces Burgess through the creation of her first true false identity on Bebo a few years later, all the way through to the present day.
The prompt to return to the investigation was a New Zealander, Crystal Jenner, who is living in Surfers Paradise in Australia.
Jenner wrote to me almost two years ago saying: “Natalia Burgess has been using my images since 2014 till current to catfish multiple people both men and women. I’ve had four men and one woman contact me in the last four months.”
In the time since, I’ve tracked down several women who Burgess has used as the faces for characters and those who she tricked into believing those characters were real.
Along the way, the investigation revealed the remarkable degree to which Burgess executes her masquerades — and her motives for doing so.
Some of that has meant revisiting the 2011 investigation, and discovering the wounds created by her deceit then continue to cause pain today.
Back then, Burgess created a cast of characters centred on the false identity of Laura Jane West.
The Herald has learned it was a real-world encounter that led Burgess to the person whose photographs she used for the identity of Laura West.
That encounter happened when a 17-year-old called Natalie was out with work friends and met Natalia at a pub. Natalia bought her a drink, which was a delight because Natalie was under age — and they had a photograph taken together.
After that, Natalia began showing up at Natalie’s work and bringing gifts until she was told to stay away.
At that point, Laura West was born. Natalia stripped a string of photographs from Natalie’s page, scanned her friends’ pages and also lifted photographs from those pages to expand Laura West’s social circle.
From time to time, she would use that photograph from the pub to show those she had catfished with the Laura West persona that the real-life Burgess was friends with the pretty teenager.
From that point, Laura West and a coterie of friends set forth on Facebook to form relationships with young men and women — and boys and girls.
And Burgess didn’t limit herself to online contact. Her victims told me of long phone conversations with Laura, her (fictitious) sisters — and even with Laura’s invented daughter Kaylee, usually aged 3-5.
One victim I spoke to was Sam Baker — 13 when he met Laura’s sister Rachel online and struck up a relationship. He told me how the other sisters — all Burgess — got on the telephone to quiz him as to his intentions towards their sister, counselling him to be a good boyfriend.
This masquerade stretched across the years that followed, reaching a peak in 2010 and 2011 as the real-world consequences of her actions began to be revealed.
Raewyn Ford spoke to me about the death of her son, Peter Russell, in an interview that was gut-wrenching.
Russell, 21, was older than many of those with who Natalia sought romantic entanglement. And he was smitten — so much so that he proposed to her.
Ford talks about the “games” Burgess played in which Laura dumped Russell, then married someone else, then left the country with her new husband and took up with Russell only to dump him again. There was no new husband or overseas travel or any divorce — all these things were a fiction that put Russell through the wringer.
And then she dumped him again — and he took his life not long after.
Years of reporting and covering suicide have taught me there is rarely a single reason for someone taking their life.
But Ford’s loss of her son is an event she lays at the feet of Burgess.
“All I knew at that time was Peter was talking to a young, sexy girl on Facebook and that’s all I knew. He was talking to her a lot. He was talking to me about her and her child and how he was going to marry her.”
Ford said the “games” that followed “put him in a bad place to the point where he couldn’t deal with life and he went and committed suicide over her”.
Burgess wound up charged in relation to her catfishing — not for lying or for relationships with teenagers or in relation to Russell.
Instead, in 2013 she pleaded guilty on three charges — one of fraud, one of co-opting a teen’s Facebook page with his password and humiliating him with his friends, and another of borrowing and not repaying money while using the guise of Laura West.
She was sentenced to two years and two months’ imprisonment, with the judge saying of one victim, “this young man would have taken his own life as a result of your deceptions against him”.
Before she went to prison, I met with Burgess on several occasions to interview her. I could see how she enjoyed success online — she has a bubbly and engaging personality and holds a bright and light conversation.
For all I found her very likeable, Burgess could never get past the massive issues she has in presenting to the world as herself.
And that hasn’t changed. When I met with Burgess again for this new investigation, she told me the photographs she had used and personas she created were how she wanted the world to see her.
That’s probably why Crystal Jenner’s images were so appealing. Crystal is living “her best life”, as she calls it, in Surfers Paradise. There, the New Zealander has a cleaning business and a fashion boutique — she’s a hard-working and successful woman who her mum, Lucille, quite rightly describes as “beautiful”.

The impact on Jenner has been huge. Her fashion boutique needs her social media reach to sell new designs, but every time a new image goes up it gets recycled into a new profile.
With those images, Burgess has created a new character known as “Kaylee” — the name she had used for Laura’s daughter — and she has set forth across the internet to build relationships, intimate and otherwise, with anyone prepared to believe her false persona is real.
There are some changes. As I investigated I found the age range of people targeted by Burgess had risen. No longer was she talking to boys aged 13-15. I also discovered a real lean towards Australia. That’s where many of her victims live — including two who maintained a six-year platonic relationship that they believed was real.
When I asked Natalia about the shift in age and location, she confirmed to me it was a deliberate step to try to avoid attracting police attention again.
And yet, Jenner did get police involved and when a detective did knock on Natalia’s door, nothing happened. In fact, the detective told Jenner no crime had been committed.
Not so, says criminal barrister Chris Patterson. He explained that police in 2013 used a “spanner as a screwdriver” because the laws then were clunky.
Not so now, with the Harmful Digital Communications Act providing several pathways to deal with behaviour such as that shown by Burgess.
“The act sets out, in essence, that it’s there to protect people from harm … caused to them through their online presence,” said Patterson. Anyone listening to Jenner’s story will know she has suffered immense harm.
The question posed, though, is whether more jail is the answer. Burgess has been honest and frank about her mental health challenges. She assures me she is working hard to address those, and promises she is no longer catfishing.
By my measure, if she stopped when she claimed, it was about the time she found out I was investigating her again.
But has she stopped? She told me in 2011 that she had stopped. She told a judge in 2013 that she had stopped. And she promised Lucille Jenner in 2019 that she had stopped.
For a woman who has lived half her life as a lie, it’s often hard to know what — if anything — is real.
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Listen to Chasing Ghosts — The Puppeteer for more on the case of Natalia Burgess, and how the ‘death’ of one of her personas is still haunting people over a decade later.
Follow Chasing Ghosts on iHeartRadio, Apple Podcasts, Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts. Remaining episodes will follow on Tuesdays throughout October.
David Fisher is based in Northland and has worked as a journalist for more than 30 years, winning multiple journalism awards including being twice named Reporter of the Year and being selected as one of a small number of Wolfson Press Fellows to Wolfson College, Cambridge. He joined the Herald in 2004.
The podcast is produced by Ethan Sills, winner of Best Podcast Producer at the Radio and Podcast Awards 2024.
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