SHE JUST WANTED TO BE 22 AGAIN

When a young victim of domestic violence showed up in a small town in Missouri, the residents took her in. But she wasn't who she said she was.

- SARAH TRELEAVEN

In early 2016, a blonde stranger with round cheeks arrived at a domestic violence shelter near the small town of West Plains, Missouri, visibly shaken. She said her name was Lauren Ashleigh Hays and that she was 22 years old.

The story Lauren told was both familiar and sad: She was running from a boyfriend who beat her. She needed help starting over. A woman affiliated with the shelter had friends nearby named Wendy and Avery Parker, who offered to take Lauren in. The Parkers, an older married couple, found Lauren an old truck to drive and a place to live in their town of Willow Springs, a quaint community with 2,160 residents and a main street lined with red brick buildings. They helped her enroll at a satellite campus of Southwest Baptist University in another small town called Mountain View, 17 miles east. Lauren expressed interest in becoming a child psychologist.

For the next two and a half years, Lauren thrived. She led story time for the kids at a local library, appeared in a production of a Jesus-centered domestic violence play, and gleefully kissed her fair share of the town's young men. She went to water aerobics and made friends with an excitable mob of young women, who wore a uniform of short summer dresses with tennis shoes in the sticky Missouri heat. But the persona she was building would turn out to be an outrageous lie. And then she was gone, leaving residents to wonder who she really was, and if any of the love and care they had invested in her ever meant a thing.