The woman at the center of Hawai'i's biggest identity theft case had long ago given up on God but found herself asking for a sign from above as she sat in the main police station on Beretania Street.

Just then, the door to Susan Shaw's cell opened. A police officer said she had a visitor.

It was Shaw's mother — the woman who gave birth to her near the end of the Vietnam War, later relinquished her parental rights and now admits she abandoned her daughter as Shaw suffered through years of sexual abuse and neglect.

On Mother's Day, of all days, Shaw's mother wanted to reconnect as her daughter faced 122 counts of ID theft and fraud, and a possible life sentence with the possibility of parole.

"Since age 10, I have seen my mother on five different occasions, and here she was," Shaw, now 35, told The Advertiser from O'ahu Community Correctional Center, where she is being held without bail.

Was her mother's unexpected appearance the signal from God she asked for?

"That's a very, very hard question to answer," Shaw said.

Friends and family have plenty of difficult questions of their own for the former Miss Hawaii International beauty queen and Kailua mother of three children — ages 13, 7 and 6 — whom they know as a soft-spoken, kind and caring person.

Shaw's friends remember a 5-foot-11, half-Vietnamese, half-Caucasian single mother who fit in easily with a group of older professionals that included city councilmen, state legislators, lawyers and young movers and shakers in Honolulu business circles.

"Susan was always generous, kind and always concerned about your welfare," said former state Sen. Matt Matsunaga, a longtime friend who is now running for Honolulu City Council.

Friends remember her joining the Waikiki Rotary Club and the Mercury Business Association. In 2003, she started a small business called Sew Much Aloha that imported silk sheets from Asia with Hawaiian print designs that Shaw sold at Sam's Clubs on Ke'eaumoku Street and on the Mainland.

As she faces a criminal trial tentatively scheduled to begin on July 20, many of Shaw's friends and family say her history includes abandonment, ritual exorcism and sexual abuse that lasted for more than a decade, beginning as a toddler by the son of her baby sitter in Pearl City.

"If there's fault," said Shaw's father, Jim, "it's everybody's."

Deputy prosecuting attorney Christopher Van Marter — chief of the prosecutor's white-collar unit — would not speculate on what possible role Shaw's background might have on her legal proceedings.

"We have no information to substantiate those claims," Van Marter said. "I'm not saying they're not true. But it's hard to speculate on what impact, if any, that may have in this case."

The victims certainly know the impact that the biggest ID theft case in Hawai'i has had on them.

"It's just knowing that someone has taken over your name and gone on shopping sprees in your name," said Julian K. Nakanishi of Kalihi, who estimates that more than $20,000 in credit card charges were falsely linked to his name and credit rating.

"You feel so helpless," Nakanishi said. "You start thinking — your friends, your neighbors — who could have done this to you?"

LEARNING TO SURVIVE

In a series of interviews with The Advertiser from OCCC, Shaw would not discuss the criminal case against her. She also would not say directly whether the trauma her friends and family say she suffered as a child and teenager is related to her alleged crimes.

"When you're younger and you're repeatedly told how awful you are, you try to be a different person and fit different people's needs," Shaw said. "When there's trauma, you do things to survive. I learned at a very young age to take on different personalities as a survival instinct."

As an OCCC guard blared an announcement in the background and the sounds of prison life clanged around her, Shaw said in a quiet voice, "I don't want people saying, 'Here's another girl with a bad past or a bad childhood' and then twist it like so many other things have been twisted."

Police from Manhattan Beach, Calif., to Honolulu continue to investigate a series of crimes that so far have cost credit card companies more than $160,000 and caused financial headaches for dozens of O'ahu residents, like Nakanishi, whose identities were stolen.

Police and prosecutors also say Shaw maintained secret lives that included at least three residences and three simultaneous lovers in Southern California and O'ahu — which Shaw adamantly denied.

Of all of the allegations against her, it's the accusations of simultaneous lovers that anger Shaw the most.

"I was engaged to a doctor (in Southern California) and the relationship ended not because of my secrecy, but because of another relationship that he had with another man," she said. "I did not have another fiancee that left his wife because of me."

Asked repeatedly why the talk of multiple relationships bothers her, Shaw said, "I have a 13-year-old who's reading about me in the newspaper."

She hesitated to speak to The Advertiser, saying so many untruths have already been said about her in court files, court testimony and in the media.

"I can definitely say that a lot of lousy things have been said about me," she said.

Manhattan Beach fraud and forgery detective Joe Aiello acknowledged one mistake made by at least one news organization. When he served a search warrant in May on a room Shaw rented in Manhattan Beach, Aiello also was speaking to reporters about an unrelated counterfeit ring that allegedly was committing bank fraud. Aiello was photographed with evidence of driver's licenses, green cards and other false identities, which were erroneously linked in a Southern California newspaper to Shaw's case and spread across the Internet.

"For some reason," Aiello said, "those photos got into Susan Shaw's story. It was horrible."

ESTRANGEMENT

When she was arrested outside Honolulu International Airport on May 7, Shaw was living in Kailua with a 37-year-old man she has known for 10 years and is the father of two of her children.

But their romantic relationship had ended, both of them say.

The ex-boyfriend was not arrested in the case and asked not to be identified out of concern for their children.

He also spoke several times to The Advertiser and has as many questions as answers about the woman he loved.

"At this point, everything is cloudy," he said. "Some things I thought were facts were not necessarily facts."

He continues to bring their two children to visit Shaw in OCCC "for the sake of the kids."

"I want the kids to know that she's safe," he said.

Asked about his own feelings toward Shaw, the ex-boyfriend paused for several moments and then finally said: "I hope that that person who was there is still in there somewhere — and can find her way back."

BORN IN VIETNAM

Susan Elizabeth Shaw was born in Saigon on Jan. 5, 1974 — 15 months before the last American helicopter lifted off from the U.S. Embassy. Her mother, Jane, was 18 when she met a U.S. Army sergeant named Jim Shaw in Saigon in 1969.

"She was a good-looking kid back then, and we were both awfully young in an exciting place during an exciting time — just two young people," Jim Shaw said.

"When Vietnam fell, (Jim Shaw) tell me all American citizens have to get out," Jane said.

She returned to Honolulu with Susan, then joined her husband in Philadelphia and Okinawa before returning to Pearl City in 1975 by herself, raising Susan alone.

In the mid- to late-1970s, as Jane worked as a waitress, she said, the son of Susan's baby sitter sexually assaulted her young daughter — an allegation Jane only recently heard from her daughter.

By 1978, Jane and Jim were divorced and Jane had married her present husband, whose job took him to Virginia, Missouri, Georgia and South Korea. Susan started to balk at the travel, and her relationship with her mother deteriorated, Jane said.

"I say black, she say white," Jane said.

So in 1985, Jane sent Susan to Texas to live with a friend. Recently, Jane said that Susan told her the friend's husband also sexually abused her.

Susan kept running away, and the friend began looking for boarding schools, eventually sending the 11-year-old to a start-up, all-girls school in the tiny Texas town of New Boston, between Mount Pleasant and Texarkana. The school had only eight students and promised a Christian education.

Four of Shaw's schoolmates said the experience at what they call "The Farm" scarred them, and many have been in therapy as a result.

"If anyone spoke out or acted a little bit different, it was always because they had the devil in them and, so, there had to be an exorcism," said Mirah Terrell, who is four years older but roomed with Shaw and treated her like a kid sister. "It was very strange. You never forget it."

After three years, when Susan was about 15, Jane said, school officials could no longer handle her behavior. They sent her to another private, religious school in Blanco, Texas, where Jane said she later learned Susan had been sexually assaulted by the head administrator, who was a priest.

Jane gave Jim Shaw full custody of Susan when she was 16, and he brought her back to 'Aiea, where she finished her schooling at 'Aiea High School.

"It was tough," Jim Shaw said. "She was growing up fast, and it was new for me, definitely, being a parent. She spoke to me about the schools being abusive, but she never mentioned more than that. She didn't want to talk."

The most important thing at the time, Susan said, was that "it was physically safe to be back with my dad. I just didn't have the emotional tools to share with him. I mostly wanted to be alone at that point."

A NEW PERSONALITY

Jim Shaw encouraged his daughter to try modeling, and some of her photos appeared at Pearlridge Center.

She was 17 and "I didn't even know how to put on makeup," Susan said. "No one ever showed me. I studied pageants and videotapes and watched women put on makeup. It was a personality that I took on, and it worked."

Shaw was first runner-up in the 1992 Miss Hawaii International pageant, then took over the crown when the winner quit to try out as a cheerleader for the then-Los Angeles Raiders football team, said Ron Nishiki, Hawai'i director for the Miss International pageant.

While representing Hawai'i in Japan for the two-week Miss International pageant, Shaw was named Miss Photogenic on the first day and was considered one of the early favorites to win the international crown, Nishiki said.

But Shaw's pageant roommate kept needling Shaw that she did not deserve to represent Hawai'i because she was merely the runner-up, Nishiki said.

"They got into a physical fight," Nishiki said. "If she had behaved, she could have been Miss International."

After the pageant in Japan, Shaw returned to Honolulu and later began a relationship with a Honolulu firefighter that produced a son.

"Around the time, she had her first child," Jim Shaw said, "she spoke to me about the school (in Texas) being abusive. She mentioned sexual abuse, and I wanted to know more about it, but she didn't want to talk. She did say that she didn't want her child to be exposed to what she thought was sexual abuse."

The relationship with the firefighter ended, and in 1999, Shaw met another man at a gathering at a Downtown restaurant.

Their romance went well over the next year as Shaw cautiously introduced her new boyfriend to her son — a protective, motherly instinct that he admired.

They were dating and living separately when Shaw became pregnant with a boy in 2001.

"The pregnancy seemed to change things," the ex-boyfriend said. "That's when I really saw red flags, a different side, a more insecure side."

They had a girl in 2003 and in December 2004 participated in a Las Vegas wedding ceremony. But a mix-up with the wedding coordinator meant they never got an actual wedding license.

For the next year or two, Shaw was torn between being a full-time mother and keeping Sew Much Aloha afloat as she and her then-boyfriend struggled with financial and relationship problems.

She always seemed to be flying back and forth to the Mainland on business, he said, and constantly calling home for thousands of dollars in emergency airfare — or to use for business emergencies.

And then her schoolmates at The Farm organized a reunion of three of them in Las Vegas in 2006 — followed by a slightly larger reunion of five in Arizona in 2007.

"I questioned whether this was a smart decision," the ex-boyfriend said. "Everything changed after that (last) reunion. They were all texting and e-mailing constantly. It seemed like they were all trying to grab onto something."

FREQUENT EXORCISMS

There are distinct interpretations of what life was like at The Farm. The various sides can't even agree on the name of the former operation, which some knew as Christian Gateways Academy and others as Christian Gateway Farms for Girls.

All agree their days were filled with hard work, such as digging ditches, tending to livestock and building barbed-wire fences.

Four of Shaw's schoolmates insist that adult leaders spoke in tongues and performed almost daily exorcisms on girls who misbehaved — always in front of the others, as a form of humiliation and discipline, they said.

At 11 years old, Susan was the youngest of the eight students. Her schoolmates remembered the adult leaders telling them that Susan was sexually active and had been sexually abused.

Stephanie Schlitzkus, who was known as Stephanie Bierden, also went through therapy, partly because of her time at The Farm, she said.

But Schlitzkus, now a minister with the Assemblies of God in Oregon, has a different interpretation of the experience.

"You have to understand this was the Bible belt," Schlitzkus said. "... Tongues is considered speaking in the Holy Spirit. Exorcisms? No, no, no, no, no. We were told that Satan had certain holds on us that allow us to do certain things. Satan attacks us in everything we do in our daily lives. We were all born sinful. That's why there was the laying of hands on all of us."

June Barnard Ashworth ran The Farm and now suffers from Alzheimer's disease, said her daughter, Jana King. King called the characterizations of Shaw's schoolmates "ridiculous" and "insane."

"My mother loved each and every one of them," King said. "They're saying things that just aren't true. It just makes me sick. ... This was a place that parents sent their girls to discipline them, I guess, to teach them. ... Today, my kids love to dig ditches and help their dad."

At both the Las Vegas and Arizona reunions of The Farm, Christy Bankston of New Mexico said the women struggled to deal with their school experiences — and the fallout as adults.

"It was a jarring experience for Susan," Bankston said. "Her defense mechanism was to become a different person. All of this stuff was coming up. All of a sudden, she would become so cold and changed her demeanor."

The reunion "provoked a lot of trauma," Shaw said. "It had been a lot easier to repress it. But reconnecting with the girls, it started to come out and spill into a lot of areas."

A STRANGE MAN CALLS

Back home in Kailua, Shaw's boyfriend began getting calls from a strange man from Southern California who seemed to be obsessing over her. The doctor, who was also from Southern California, sent flowers to Kailua and the boyfriend found a love note from the doctor that fell out of Shaw's suitcase after a trip to Los Angeles.

By June 2008, Shaw had finally acknowledged her relationship with the doctor to her Kailua boyfriend but said their engagement was over.

They essentially were living separate lives in the same home in Kailua, the ex-boyfriend said, but "I was hopeful things were turning around."

Jane blames herself, in many ways, for letting her daughter end up at the two schools in Texas that Jane and others now believe is the source of so many of her troubles.

"I sent her to those boarding schools because I thought it was the best for her," Jane said. "But that screwed up her mind."

Jane had last seen her daughter briefly seven years before. So Jane did not know what kind of reception to expect when she showed up at the Honolulu police station on Mother's Day.

Shaw remembers the moment precisely. She laughed through tears at the memory of how her request for a sign of God's existence ended in a visit from her distant mother.

"I just said, 'I might as well suck it up and get it over with,' " Shaw said. "As soon as I turned the corner there she was and she was crying, saying she was there for me."

Years of hurt and abandonment can be hard to overcome, however.

Shaw has been diagnosed with Sjogren's syndrome, a form of lupus that dries out her eyes and causes other minor irritations, her mother and ex-boyfriend said. At the end of Shaw's bail hearing last month, Jane yelled out in the courtroom to ask if Shaw had enough eye drops at OCCC.

Shaw did not respond and simply turned her back on her mother as she was escorted from the courtroom.

"She had a very, very tough life, a very difficult life," Jane said after the hearing. "I did my best."