Check fraud charmer: Idaho veteran left trail of lies before American Legion allegations

The Idaho prison system delivered Charles Abrahamson for his parole hearing in summer 2010. He strode into the prison courtroom with the sole focus of convincing the review board that he had learned his lesson this time, and was no longer a threat to society.

At different points, including as a U.S. Marine in the Gulf War, he mostly went by Chuck or Abe. But today it was Mr. Abrahamson. He spent years in custody waiting to plead his case before the panel that had the power to set him free. Now it was showtime.

Abrahamson served almost seven years in prison for what amounted to repeat check fraud and was turned down before for parole. He sought to change the board members’ minds this time, and his talent for telling a story and knack for sales would prove handy.

Court records revealed that Abrahamson in the past touted a long list of distinctions that he fabricated to curry favor, including loyal husband, invested father, decorated war hero, CIA operative, Notre Dame graduate and cancer survivor. Those close to him told the Idaho Statesman they grew to wish they never trusted him.

The Idaho American Legion, where in recent years Abrahamson, 54, worked his way into a leadership position, also developed serious regrets about him after he allegedly walked away with at least $750,000 of the military veteran nonprofit’s money. State police are investigating Abrahamson on suspicion of several financial crimes against the organization, according to Legion leadership.

Back in front of the parole board on that day in June 2010, Abrahamson’s appearance in the role of rehabilitated prisoner was just the latest of his performances, his youngest daughter, Kate Abrahamson, told the Statesman. Her father possesses the ability to become whoever he needs to be in any situation, she said. As a result, she’s never been entirely sure what from her childhood was real.

“I don’t think he ever switches off,” Kate said in a phone interview. “He convinces himself of everything he’s telling you, even though it’s a lie. He really talks himself into it.”

The parole board members were familiar with Charles Abrahamson. They denied his parole just a year earlier. At the time, they called his attitude while incarcerated “disturbing” from consistent displays of “manipulative behavior” and a “sense of entitlement,” according to his parole records. Years earlier, the board declined to grant Abrahamson’s request for commutation after he provided life-saving measures to a fellow prisoner. Not even the commendation letter for his heroic act from the Idaho prisons director did the trick.

But this time was different. Abrahamson was backed at the hearing by his parents. His mother, Mary Abrahamson, told the parole board that his family had witnessed changes in their son, then 40 years old.

“He no longer lies, and is no longer selfish and self-centered,” Abrahamson’s mother said in her testimony.

His new fiancee, Robin, was present, too. After they initially met in 2002, Abrahamson had a child with a different woman named Stacey Stone the next year and also was courting another woman at the time who later became his second wife. None of that came up at the hearing. He had Robin’s support now, and she pledged to attend any required classes and handle the couple’s finances, if the parole board would just let him out.

Indeed, Abrahamson reinforced to the parole board, he took responsibility for his past criminal actions. He promised to prioritize paying off $31,000 in restitution for past thefts of a personal vehicle and money from an employer, and reiterated that he would uphold his commitments if granted parole. He understood it’s no longer all about him in his life, Abrahamson said.

He still wouldn’t be allowed to enter into any financial agreements — including having a credit card or even a checking account — without prior approval. And he couldn’t be around other known felons. No problem, Abrahamson told them then.

“He was a hell of a salesman,” Bob Skinner, Abrahamson’s longtime friend and confidante in the Legion, now confounded by the actions of the man he knew as Abe, told the Statesman.

Hearing what they wanted, the parole board decided to release Abrahamson in December 2010. And then he was back in the game.

History of financial crimes goes unnoticed

After nearly 11 years between the Marines and Idaho Army National Guard, Abrahamson became more involved in the Idaho American Legion. His father, a veteran himself, registered his son for membership while Abrahamson was still on active duty, Skinner said, and he eventually decided to pursue leadership in the nonprofit.

In 2017, Abrahamson attained the role of adjutant, the senior position that oversees the organization’s finances and reports directly to the statewide commander. He rose quickly within the Idaho Legion, and it wasn’t long before he was appointed to the one-year role of commander.

“People are drawn to this guy,” Kathy Brown, his first wife, told the Statesman. “They just are, and blinded by what he says, or by his charisma. … He just charmed everybody.”

In the Idaho Legion’s top position, Abrahamson helped launch the first of the nonprofit’s chapters in the prison system, at the Idaho State Correctional Center south of Boise. He never revealed to the post’s members that he had served time at the same prison complex, former ISCC warden Jay Christensen told the Statesman. The national American Legion named Abrahamson its recruiter of the year for 2019.

In recent months, members of the Legion’s executive committee found the charter for its newest prison post buried in Abrahamson’s desk at its headquarters in Boise, next to years of unpaid bills, Skinner said. The chapter, the Idaho Legion’s third in the corrections system, was established at the state prison in Orofino in October 2023, but Abrahamson hadn’t gotten around to delivering the charter to its members, Skinner said.

Christensen said he got a bad feeling about Abrahamson from their interactions at the prison post meetings. He found him to be self-serving and “narcissistic.”

“Each time Abe got up to speak, it was more about him and what he’s accomplished,” Christensen said in a phone interview. “He would take time to thank the post for the good work they were doing, but it was more an update on him when he was there.”

Abrahamson didn’t disclose his incarceration to the American Legion’s executive committee members either, Skinner said. The Legion doesn’t bar veterans with criminal convictions, but a history of financial crimes would disqualify someone from the full-time job handling the organization’s money, he said.

Late last year, when irregularities surfaced in the Legion’s finances, the executive team started to ask more questions about its books. The members soon learned Abrahamson didn’t undergo a deep review of his background ahead of his ascension. They didn’t know, for example, that court records disclosed Abrahamson declared personal bankruptcy in 2008, said Skinner, an Idaho American Legion senior executive and its designated spokesperson.

“There’s lots of things that we should have looked into more than we did,” he told the Statesman.

From 1993 to 1999, Abrahamson was named in two dozen small claims cases across four counties totaling thousands of dollars. He had a taste for flashy vehicles and motorcycles he and his wife couldn’t afford, Brown said. His creditors included banks, car dealers, service shops and payday loan companies, according to court records.

“It’s all about the show for him: ‘Look how great I am, look at all that I have,’ ” said Brown, who met Abrahamson in high school.

Abrahamson’s habit of writing bad checks caught up with him in 2000, when he was convicted in Ada County of felony theft by deception. He had bounced two checks totaling $7,500 as the down payment on a new Dodge pickup truck priced at $29,000. His checking account already was overdrawn by about $4,000 at the time, and he closed the account days after he bought the truck, according to court records.

In exchange for Abrahamson’s guilty plea, three other felony charges were dismissed in another case for bad checks he’d allegedly written earlier in the year — to a bicycle shop, jeweler and golf retailer.

A judge sentenced Abrahamson to a seven-year prison term for the deception felony but suspended it in place of a decade of probation, one year in jail and thousands of dollars in restitution. As a convicted felon, the former Marine sniper would be unable to possess a firearm. He also had to agree not to open a checking account, obtain a credit card or incur any debt without his probation officer’s consent.

As Abrahamson awaited the conclusion of his case for the truck purchase, he worked as a leasing manager at a Ford dealership in Twin Falls. The dealership later fired Abrahamson for misuse of company vehicles, according to court records, and called Twin Falls police after the dealership cleaned out Abrahamson’s desk and found canceled company checks.

Abrahamson was charged in August 2000 with four felonies for allegedly issuing company checks totaling more than $27,000 for personal benefit, court records showed. He took another plea deal for a single count of felony grand theft, which knocked off the other three charges. He was sentenced to probation and restitution with a suspended prison term of up to 10 years.

After five years in the Idaho National Guard, Abrahamson received a general discharge under honorable conditions — a step below an honorable discharge. His military separation document, which the Statesman obtained from court records, reflected a civilian conviction.

Years later, Legion executive committee members asked Abrahamson about the grand theft felony on his record in Twin Falls. He claimed he quit his job at a car dealership and mistakenly ended up with checks for leases that were supposed to be returned to the company, but he shredded instead, Skinner said.

Initially, the Legion took Abrahamson’s word for it.

“I felt like he’d exercised bad judgment in shredding those checks and he wasn’t stealing money from anybody. It was a check issue,” Skinner said in a phone interview. “That should have caught our eye, but it didn’t.”

The two cases that put Abrahamson on years of probation weren’t his last financial improprieties. Repeat probation violations that included fraud allegations wound up costing him years of his freedom.

Abrahamson didn’t respond to several requests from the Statesman for comment by email, phone and text.

In total, he was accused of defrauding companies for tens of thousands of dollars over the course of decades. The same man was welcomed by the Idaho American Legion with open arms and soon given unfettered access to the nonprofit’s savings accounts and checkbook.

Legion suspects embezzlement of bank accounts, loans

Today, police are investigating the Legion’s allegations that Abrahamson stole at least $750,000 from the organization. The nonprofit’s long-term investments totaling about $370,000 were among the losses and included the Legion’s general fund, emergency savings and account for its annual summer baseball program, Skinner said.

Idaho Legion leadership also accused Abrahamson of taking a $20,000 loan he obtained from a local chapter to help other posts across the state weather the COVID-19 pandemic. In addition, he took all of a fellow Legion member’s $100,000 donation to establish an endowed scholarship fund intended for needy students, Commander Doug Huffman, who leads the Idaho American Legion, told statewide membership in a May email obtained by the Statesman.

When the nonprofit’s other senior executive members asked Abrahamson questions about the money, he gave them a pair of bank statements accounting for the funds, Huffman wrote. But the copies of statements Abrahamson provided to them were later found to be fake, Skinner told the Statesman.

“We thought everything was cool because we had those documents,” Skinner said. “Those documents that he showed us — that we thought showed us where this investment money was at — were both forged.”

The Idaho American Legion turned over all of its records on its allegations against Abrahamson to Idaho State Police, Skinner said.

Through its investigation, the Statesman previously reported that Abrahamson sold the Legion’s defunct Hailey post’s headquarters in March 2023. He did so without the nonprofit executive team’s knowledge, Skinner said. At the time, the county assessor’s office valued the two-story downtown property at $718,000. The sale price was $92,000, the real estate agent who oversaw the transaction said.

Abrahamson also emptied the Legion’s checking account, Huffman wrote to members. That account typically carried a balance of $90,000, Skinner said. Bank statements the Legion reviewed and provided to police showed that Abrahamson pulled hundreds of dollars at a time from ATMs at casinos, Skinner told the Statesman.

Abrahamson frequented Cactus Petes Resort Casino in Jackpot, Nevada, and had a top-tier gambling loyalty card that offered free perks, Skinner said.

Skinner and Abrahamson’s family both recalled him having several expensive vehicles. Those included decked-out trucks, two high-end snowmobiles with a heated trailer, and a recreational vehicle that friends dubbed “the Taj Mahal,” Skinner told the Statesman.

“I don’t know where that money came from,” Skinner said. “He said his business.”

In July 2013, Abrahamson and his third wife, Robin Abrahamson, opened A & J Auto Repair in Twin Falls. A couple who were listed as their two business partners on an initial secretary of state filing had prior felony convictions, which would appear to have violated his parole, the Statesman found. Yet Abrahamson was released early from his parole in July 2014, Ashley Dowell, executive director of the Idaho Commissions of Pardons and Parole, told the Statesman. He did not have any record of parole violations for unapproved associations with known felons, according to the Idaho Department of Correction.

In 2018, the state filed a $58,000 tax lien against the Abrahamsons’ business. It was resolved a year and a half later, according to public records. They sold the auto repair shop in May of this year.

Robin Abrahamson also was involved in the Idaho American Legion, Skinner said. Charles Abrahamson was president and treasurer of the nonprofit’s summer baseball program and appointed his wife as its secretary. The Statesman’s attempts to reach Robin were unsuccessful.

In the past two years, Charles Abrahamson leveraged the Legion to secure at least two short-term cash advance loans from a pair of financial firms in New York City, court and financial records showed. The proceeds from the high-interest loans amounted to tens of thousands of dollars.

Over that same period, the state of Idaho filed two tax liens against Abrahamson totaling more than $116,000. Both were resolved within six months, public records showed.

When cash advance loan payments stopped, the Legion heard from the New York firms and passed the inquiries along to Abrahamson, its adjutant, Skinner said.

“Abe said it was a scam, and that he would talk to the lawyer and get it taken care of,” he said. “You know, he told us a couple of lies. Boy, that’s an understatement.”

In August 2022, Abrahamson signed a contract with Mantis Funding LLC, which required he pay back the loan with interest at a total of more than $59,000, the company said in a civil lawsuit against Abrahamson. He paid roughly half that amount before stopping future payments, the court filing read. The company sued Abrahamson for the remainder, plus fees.

New York-based attorney Richard Cusid represented Abrahamson in the loan default case that Mantis Funding brought against him. In a phone call with the Statesman, Chusid declined to comment and wouldn’t say whether he still represents Abrahamson.

In January 2024, the two sides reached a negotiated agreement to end the lawsuit. That same month, Abrahamson obtained a similar cash advance loan from the Blackbridge Investment Group for $15,000, according to loan documents Skinner provided to the Statesman. The loan had a 20.5% interest rate and required a total repayment of almost $23,000.

It is unclear whether the Blackbridge loan was resolved. The firm did not return Statesman requests for comment.

Amid an internal investigation into his handling of the Legion’s finances, the executive committee in April suspended Abrahamson without pay from his adjutant role, which he regained in July 2019 after finishing his one year as commander. Three days after he was suspended, the Idaho State Police executed a search warrant on Abrahamson’s home in Mountain Home, according to Huffman’s email to members.

ISP denied a public records request from the Statesman for all investigation records from the search. The agency cited a pending court case related to the incident.

Including the two cash advance loans, the Statesman has accounted for more than $700,000 of the $750,000 that the Legion alleges Abrahamson embezzled.

‘Wreckage in his wake’

When the Statesman first reported on Abrahamson in June, Kate Abrahamson contacted a reporter to share more about her biological father. The latest allegations against him didn’t surprise her, she said.

“If he was born into more money, he would have made a good politician,” she said. “My God, he could sell water to the ocean.”

The man she’s long referred to as Chuck rather than Dad used her Social Security number when she was 5 years old to obtain lines of credit, Kate Abrahamson said. Now 26 and living in the Texas Panhandle, she has for years been saddled with proving who she is every time she needs even routine bank services after her father stole her identity.

Charles Abrahamson applied with his youngest daughter’s Social Security number for two bank loans, including to finance a snowmobile, according to Caldwell police reports from 2003. The bank would have denied him the loans because of his poor credit rating, the loan officer told police. In a court filing, Abrahamson denied responsibility and blamed the lender for entering the wrong Social Security number.

“He’s always been kind of a horrible guy,” Kate said in a phone interview with the Statesman. “He definitely has been just a cloud following us since I’ve been little.”

Abrahamson has been manipulative for as far back as she can remember, she said. He constantly wove a web of lies and left her family to deal with the consequences, Kate and her mother told the Statesman.

One of Kate’s first memories as a toddler was of several people she didn’t know showing up unexpectedly to the family home in a beat-up car looking for her dad and aggressively wanting money. She fed off her mother’s emotions in the moment and was scared, she said. She was told to go inside whenever people she didn’t know showed up to the property.

Kate and her two older siblings later learned that their father was serving time in jail. Her grandmother referred to it as “school,” so Abrahamson could better himself, she said.

Semper fi, the Marine motto, means “always faithful.” Abrahamson was not, and his infidelities were constant during their six-year marriage, Brown told the Statesman in a phone interview. Abrahamson told Brown that he had a daughter with another woman while Brown was pregnant with their second child, a son, she said.

Alexa Rittberger, 29, Abrahamson’s daughter with the other woman, told the Statesman she was raised by her mother and adopted dad. Rittberger wasn’t aware Abrahamson was her biological father until her teens, and she cut ties with him a few years back, she said.

“I was the result of an affair. He was running around with my mom pretending she was his wife at the time,” Rittberger said in an email to the Statesman. “I didn’t know about him until I was a teenager and never really talked to him. … He never sent my mom a dime as far as I know.”

The Abrahamsons divorced in 1999. Court-mandated child support from her ex-husband was sparse, Brown said, and she worked multiple jobs while raising their three kids as a single parent.

Not long after their split, Abrahamson had some fatty lumps removed from his torso, Brown said. Her brother had died from a rare form of cancer called T-cell lymphoma, and suddenly Abrahamson claimed to his family, without the symptoms, that he had the same type of cancer, she said. Without any treatment, he seemingly recovered, and concerns over the life-threatening condition quietly faded away, Brown told the Statesman.

“The sheer amount of just wreckage in his wake is amazing,” she said.

Failed romance leads to prison sentence

Stacey Stone first ran across Chuck Abrahamson in December 2001 while perusing the Yahoo personals. He sounded amazing — almost too good to be true.

Abrahamson shared with her that he was a former Marine and worked as a manager at a Meineke auto shop in Caldwell. But he embellished his history much further, according to court records.

He told her that he had full custody of his three kids and held a business degree from the University of Notre Dame. He also told Stone that he worked part time for the CIA, which sent him on trips out of the country and was picked for a reconnaissance mission in Afghanistan following 9/11. All of those claims were false, Brown and Kate Abrahamson said and Stone wrote in court filings. Later on, Charles Abrahamson told Stone that he saved a woman from choking to death when stationed in Japan with the Marines, Stone said.

Within a month of first connecting, Stone flew to Boise to visit him from Utah, where she lived. The distance didn’t bother him “if there is respect and trust there,” he wrote in a Yahoo personals message that she later showed Abrahamson’s probation officer.

“We began talking daily, and I thought he was a really great guy,” Stone wrote in documents she submitted to his probation officer. “He said he was Catholic and took his kids to church every Sunday. Sometimes he would call on Sunday and say that they just got home from church.”

Soon Abrahamson told her that he was looking for investors, Stone reported in the documents she provided to Abrahamson’s probation officer. He told her he wanted to fund a so-called “hate and discontent” mission in South America, where he was part of a team that used CIA intelligence to break up large drug rings. Whatever money they found in the process, he said, they got to keep — and it was lucrative work. He needed to find $25,000 and offered double back within a month.

During a trip to visit Stone in Utah to help recruit her friends as investors, Abrahamson said he was assigned to guard former first lady Barbara Bush the last time he was in Salt Lake City, Stone wrote in the documents she gave to Abrahamson’s probation officer. He lifted his shirt to show her friends scars on his torso — two on his back and one on his stomach, which he claimed were from bullets during combat. A scar on his head came from a mortar round when he was in Saudi Arabia, she said Abrahamson added. Such military wounds would typically merit awarding of the Purple Heart.

Brown said her ex-husband had a scar on his temple from a rollover car accident in Idaho while they were married, but never was wounded in combat. Skinner said he reviewed Abrahamson’s discharge paperwork when he joined his American Legion post in Idaho Falls. “He had a lot of unit commendations. No Purple Heart or stuff like that,” Skinner said.

Stone pooled money with four friends to pull together the $25,000 and gave it to Abrahamson within a month and a half, with Stone providing $9,500, according to the court records. She and Abrahamson continued to date, but the return on the investments proved elusive. Her friends brought in an attorney to revise and extend the signed agreements in exchange for higher returns, and Abrahamson missed those deadlines, too. Almost a year later, each of them had a portion of their original investments back and not at all what they agreed to in the deal.

Over the ensuing months, Stone started to spot cracks in the foundation of Abrahamson’s claims, she later reported to his probation officer. She was spending more time around him after moving back to Idaho to be closer to her family and to him. Stone was pregnant at the time, and Abrahamson talked of his plans for a long-term relationship together, Stone wrote in the documents she gave to his probation officer. But his kids also started to talk more about another woman Abrahamson had been hanging around. She saw hints that he and the woman might be engaged, Stone wrote. Within months, that other woman became Abrahamson’s second wife.

Stone and Abrahamson’s son was born in April 2003. Stone let Abrahamson know the day before she was being induced, and he said he’d call her back. Abrahamson didn’t, and he also never showed up to the hospital. It would be a month before he ever held his son, Stone wrote. She later found Abrahamson’s new Yahoo personals ad, which he posted three days before their newborn arrived.

“Honesty and trust are very important to me,” read the ad, a copy of which the Statesman obtained from Abrahamson’s court records.

He fought her for years in court over child support and paid very little during their son’s upbringing, Stone told the Statesman by phone. She eventually agreed to release him from the debt in exchange for Abrahamson giving up any custody of their son so her husband could adopt him. Her son, now 21, has never known Abrahamson, she said.

In a signed affidavit from 2007, Abrahamson denied that he didn’t pay what he was required in child support. He also said he previously worked in a “counter drug unit” associated with the CIA while in the Marines, and called Stone “unstable” so the court should not give her any consideration.

“He has zero conscience,” Stone told the Statesman by phone. “He’s a snake and a con artist.” Stone changed her last name when she got married and asked the Statesman to identify her by her maiden name out of a desire to protect her son.

On several occasions, Abrahamson threatened Stone that she “would be dead” if she reported any of the money he owed her, she told the Statesman. Her allegation echoed comments in documents she submitted to Abrahamson’s probation officer in 2003.

After investigating the truth about Abrahamson, including the discovery at the time that he was on probation, Stone brought her findings to the Idaho probation office. He was arrested in September 2003 in Ada County and charged with nine violations of his probation. Those included opening checking accounts without approval, incurring debt for the investment he obtained from Stone and her friends, and firearm possession after Stone loaned him a rifle.

Judge: Defendant lacked ‘reasonable interpretation of reality’

In 2004, Abrahamson was finally unable to stave off prison time.

During her investigation, Abrahamson’s probation officer, Martina Breuer, told the court she found that he was back to scamming people, and also opened another checking account while out on bail in his first probation violation case.

Breuer also noted in her report to the court that Abrahamson had lied to land a job. He falsely claimed to the hiring manager that a prior felony conviction came after Abrahamson bought a computer in the newspaper that turned out to be stolen. In addition, the hiring manager said Abrahamson told him he worked for the CIA, Breuer told the court.

“Mr. Abrahamson needs to stop adding to this long list of victims, and it does not appear that he will do so on his own,” Breuer wrote in the report. Still working as a probation officer, she declined a Statesman request for an interview through the Idaho Department of Correction.

Abrahamson accepted a plea deal to admit he opened a checking account, and the prosecutor dropped pursuit of the other alleged violations. Abrahamson’s public defender asked the judge for a sentence that reinstated his probation. Abrahamson’s family, including his parents, brother, elder children with Brown and two of his stepchildren with his second wife, sent letters to the judge asking for his release. A letter from his then-wife pleaded for leniency, questioning how someone could be sent to prison over simply opening a checking account.

Judge Mike Wetherell imposed Abrahamson’s seven-year prison sentence for violating his probation. The judge wrote it was clear, including from the information in the support letters he read, that Abrahamson had told “half truths or perhaps outright lies” to his family in his efforts to continue to “manipulate the system” and avoid consequences for his actions.

“If this is what the defendant has told those who have written in support, it shows this court that the defendant’s description of his behavior while on probation is totally at odds with any reasonable interpretation of reality,” Wetherell wrote.

Two more civil lawsuits were filed against Abrahamson that year. One of the plaintiffs, a rent-to-own furniture store, said Abrahamson stopped making payments and didn’t return most of the furniture and appliances he bought. A judge ruled in favor of the store owners and ordered Abrahamson to pay back almost $14,000.

Caldwell police also investigated reports from Meineke that Abrahamson had stolen thousands of dollars from the auto shop, police reports showed. The shop’s owners told Caldwell police that over the course of the year he worked there, Abrahamson engaged in multiple financial schemes: taking commissions from coworkers; installing parts on his own vehicles that he didn’t pay for; keeping cash from work that he never entered into the shop’s system; and neglecting to make several company bank deposits.

“Except for being a thief, he made a good impression,” former Twin Falls Deputy Prosecutor Jill Sweesy said at Abrahamson’s June 2004 sentencing hearing, quoting a comment from Meineke’s owners in a report.

Abrahamson was never charged after the shop owners decided to simply move on, according to Caldwell police reports. He denied that he ever stole anything while he worked at Meineke, according to a court affidavit.

But that same month, Judge G. Richard Bevan, now chief justice of the Idaho Supreme Court, gave Abrahamson his full prison sentence of up to 10 years for the probation violations in his Twin Falls grand theft case. That time wouldn’t start until after the minimum two-year sentence he got in Ada County. Abrahamson would serve a total of at least seven years behind bars for what Bevan described as routinely defrauding members of the community.

“You’re very good at that, and you’re very well-spoken,” Bevan told Abrahamson at sentencing. “But underlying all of that is a desire, I believe, to do those people harm, to take their money, to not pay it back, to not pay back what you owe.”

Abrahamson ‘a bit of a conundrum’

In the wake of the new set of allegations brought by the Idaho American Legion, a number of people have been left wondering, who exactly is Charles Abrahamson?

“I’m skeptical of everything he’s told me,” Skinner told the Statesman.

Kate Abrahamson also is among that group and can’t help but try to reconcile aspects of her biological father’s past. Even with the passage of time, she’s still uncertain about many details of his life, including his time in prison, she said.

“I think a lot of us would like to know the truth, rather than halves and parts,” Kate told the Statesman.

After all, this was the man who she said started telling lies about her from the time she was young. Her parents weren’t yet divorced when she came along but had already separated, and he told friends and coworkers that his wife had been unfaithful and Kate wasn’t his child, she said. Her complexion takes after her mother’s Italian heritage and darkens in the summers, which only fed into her dad’s spin on the situation, Kate Abrahamson and her mother said.

“He claimed that all the time,” Brown said. “When she was a baby, he would tell people I had an affair, and that she was not his kid.”

Charles Abrahamson was remarried before Kate turned 6 and then in prison until she was 13. After that, her dad would sporadically show up to his children’s school awards ceremonies or sports events, but was not heavily involved in their lives, Kate said.

“He’d come to events and take pictures,” she said. “He just wanted to look good on Facebook.”

Her father always had some excuse for why he missed important moments, Kate said. Abrahamson was remarried again and usually away on one trip or another, she said, including to Jackpot, or for business with the American Legion. She would finally like to know what, if any, of the fantastical tales he told were rooted in fact.

“Everything was wrapped up in so many lies for so long, I’d like for him to be forced to face the truth for once,” Kate said.

In December 2023, while Charles Abrahamson was out of town in Arizona with his wife, Robin, he rescued a driver from a burning, overturned vehicle on the highway, KIVI-TV reported. An Arizona state police report obtained by the Statesman through a public records request supports the narrative that he saved the man.

“Your bravery and courage are a testament to your character and serve as an example for others to follow,” U.S. Sen. Jim Risch, R-Idaho, wrote in a letter to Abrahamson, which Abrahamson posted on Facebook. “Your commitment to protecting and serving others is truly remarkable and you are, without a doubt, one of America’s heroes.”

When his three children with Brown, with whom he is largely estranged today, didn’t acknowledge his Facebook post about it, he texted news stories about his life-saving accomplishment to each of them, Brown said.

“He is a bit of a conundrum, because he may save you, or he may steal everything you own,” Brown told the Statesman. “That’s the confusing part of who he is.”

Kate Abrahamson said she hasn’t talked with her father in more than a year and doesn’t foresee reconnecting with him at this point of her life. She’s trying to learn more about him in part to escape any further association with him, she said.

“I am so afraid of becoming my father,” Kate said. “It’s almost like knowing the truth, I’d know what not to do. And there’s a piece of me that is him, and I never want to be him.”

Likewise, Skinner said he hasn’t spoken to Abrahamson since the Legion removed him for his alleged financial transgressions against thousands of fellow military veterans in Idaho. He’s spent months working to clean up after the person who for years made him believe they were close friends.

“Even if he called, I probably wouldn’t talk to him,” Skinner said. “I don’t know what he’d try to convince me of.”