Tania Head became America’s most shameless faker after the truth about her 9/11 escape – and the scars on her body – was exposed: TOM LEONARD reveals every outrageous detail

On September 11, 2001, Tania Head came stumbling, badly burned, out of the crippled south tower of the World Trade Center (WTC) just before it collapsed and entered into the mythology of that terrible day.

Her tale of tragedy, bravery and survival seared itself into the collective memory, leaving so many other accounts of that terrible day pale by comparison.

As she would later recall in jaw-droppingly dramatic detail, the high-flying 26-year-old manager at the Merrill Lynch investment bank had been chairing a meeting in its 96th floor conference room in the WTC’s south tower when at 8.46am, it was rocked by what felt like an earthquake.

The walls shook, lights flickered on and off and she heard screaming from the corridor outside.

Looking out of the huge, reinforced glass windows, she and her colleagues could see black smoke billowing from the building opposite, the WTC’s north tower. She watched as a terrifying ball of flame spread up the north tower from the floors below.

Some of the workers rushed to the doors in panic, others tried to phone friends and family to break the terrible news and urge them to switch on their TV. But Tania’s attention was caught by the sight of small objects falling from a north tower window. At first she thought they were pieces of furniture but then she saw one of them flapping its arms and realized it was a human being.

Hers was a story – endlessly repeated in media interviews, to visitors to Ground Zero where she became a volunteer tour guide and as president of the WTC Survivors’ Network – that tended to linger in the consciousness of those who heard it.

Until the day when it became unforgettable for entirely different reasons and Head was unmasked as a shameless liar and fantasist who’d been nearly four thousand miles away when the Twin Towers came down.

As she told it, the talented young Spanish banker had her own reasons to be particularly appalled by the discovery that people were so desperate they were throwing themselves to their deaths – her fiancé worked in the north tower.

Her fiancé, known to everyone as ‘Big Dave’ – was a consultant at the financial services company, Deloitte. He worked on the 100th floor.

Having met in February 1999, soon after she’d moved to New York from her native Barcelona, they lived together with a golden retriever puppy named Elvis and planned to marry the following month.

But first, she had to save herself just as scores of others had the same thought, ignoring the entreaties of bank security staff urging them to stay in their offices.

Her assistant Christine close behind, Tania used the stairs to reach the open ‘sky lobby’ on the 78th floor. There they waited in a huge throng of panicking, shoving people for the ‘express elevator’ to take them down to the 44th floor where they could switch to another elevator.

She tried to ring her fiancé on her Blackberry phone, her anxiety heightened by her knowledge that they parted that morning on a sour note after arguing over whether to give his mother a small birthday gift or take her out for dinner. She wanted to tell him it didn’t matter but at the back of her mind was the fear that might have been their last conversation.

As it transpired, of course, they would indeed never speak again – not because, as she explained, he died on 9/11 but because he never existed.

But that sickening discovery would only come years later for the thousands of people enthralled by her story.

She recalled trying to concentrate on controlling her breathing as they waited for the 78th floor elevator when a woman across the sky lobby shouted: ‘Another plane!’

Tania said she saw the wing of United Airlines Flight 175 crash into the building just above them. As flying glass and debris filled the air, her assistant Christine was decapitated by her side.

The shock of the impact hurled Tania into a marble slab as the tower was enveloped in flames – burning her badly on her right arm and convincing her she was going to die.

However, she regained consciousness to find a man with a red bandana tied over his face beating her with a jacket as he tried to put out the flames on her badly burned arm – now only connected to her torso by sinews. That man was Welles Crowther, a 24-year-old equities trader and volunteer firefighter. He died when the south tower collapsed.

As Head – singing Sting songs to keep up her spirits – and the heroic Crowther struggled together through the smoke-filled dust and debris, a dying man crawled towards her, holding out a hand towards her. It was a wedding ring. ‘Please give this to my wife,’ he implored her. She promised she would even though she didn’t know his name.

A stairwell was still intact and they struggled down, bandana man urging her onward when she lost courage.

She managed to get down more than 50 flights until, weakened by blood loss, she passed out. When she came to this time, a firefighter was standing over her.

He carried her down the final 20 floors, and they emerged on to the street just as the tower started to collapse.

Her rescuer passed her to another firefighter who threw her into a fire truck, shielding her body with his own as tons of steel and concrete came crashing down on her. As she gasped for air in the hot black dust that enveloped them, he put his oxygen mask to her face.

She could remember nothing more before waking up in a hospital five days later to learn from her parents, who’d rushed out from Spain, that Big Dave was dead.

For Head, though, the horror of 9/11 gave her a new lease on life as the big, bubbly lady with the brave smile and the tragic yet inspiring story.

For those looking for a symbol of optimism and strength to emerge phoenix-like from the ashes of September 11, Head seemed to provide it.

After her arm was surgically reattached, she said she spent months tracking down the widow of the man who gave her his wedding ring, a ring inscribed with the word ‘Forever.’ She never divulged his name at the time because, she said, she didn’t want to cause a media fuss.

Strangely, however, while she may have been coy about the man with the ring (because, of course, it was a detail that could easily be checked) she started to tell the rest of her story in 2003 when a man named Gerry Bogacz invited her to join his group, the WTC Survivors’ Network.

She first started telling her story on a survivors’ internet forum, then set up a writing workshop where she could draw inspiration and useful information from those who really had been in the WTC.

It turned out she was very special, one of the 20 or so people who had been on the highest floors that were above where the planes had hit the towers and still managed to survive.

She was later elected as the network’s president and she started to reform it, setting up, outrageously in the circumstances, a code of conduct to prevent hoaxers from tricking well-wishers into giving them money. Head, who spent much of her own money on the group’s work, became the public face of the survivors.

‘People cannot understand. We saw things,’ she told Time magazine in 2004, by now reportedly having plucked up the confidence to talk to a wide audience. ‘What I witnessed there I will never forget,’ she told a memorial event two years later. ‘It was a lot of death and destruction, but I also saw hope.’

In 2006, an interviewer in the New York Daily News rhapsodized: ‘To behold Head’s smile is to know the terrorists did not even come close to winning. To see that smile is also to be challenged to be as decent and positive as this true survivor.’

At a memorial service for Welles Crowther in 2006, Tania was too overcome with emotion to speak.

But a friend read her statement: ‘Even after five years, I still bear the burden of being alive when so many other lives were taken from us… In my family, we have a tradition at Christmas. Each year, we tell the children stories drawn from our lives.

‘The story they want to hear, year after year, is the story of the man in the red bandana, whose courage stood taller than the Twin Towers themselves.’

When documentary maker Angelo Guglielmo wanted to make a film about them, he naturally wanted her to feature prominently. Yet she proved to be strangely uncooperative at times. Privately, the filmmaker was puzzled by her scarred arm. It had clearly been injured but, to him, didn’t look as if it had been reattached to her body.

Fellow survivors also grew suspicious about details of her story, such as why she initially claimed that she and Dave were only engaged but later started saying they had already wed in Hawaii.

She never showed other people photos of him and didn’t reveal his last name. When she finally enlightened a friend, although there was indeed a Dave who died in the north tower, his obituary made no mention of Tania. As for their pet dog, oddly, he was always being walked by Tania’s maid when visitors came to her home.

Consciously or unconsciously, disaster victims will sometimes confuse some details but those who knew her wondered why so many things about Head didn’t quite add up.

In September 2007, citing her ’emotional turmoil,’ Head cancelled three scheduled interviews with the New York Times where two reporters had been puzzled about why her extraordinary story never emerged in 2001.

Her refusal to talk – she told other survivors not to talk to them, too, and declined to provide them with further proof of her story – didn’t save her.

The reporters’ basic fact checking revealed that her story was entirely fabricated. It was telling that a statement she gave included her emphasizing she hadn’t filed any claims for compensation and so had ‘done nothing illegal.’

It was true in that sense as she turned down every benefit offered to her even as she fought for others to get the money.

The board of the Survivors’ Network voted to remove her as president and director of the organization. The Tribute WTC Visitor Centre near the site of the towers said Head would no longer be a volunteer tour guide.

It soon became clear that no one had ever bothered to verify the key details of Head’s remarkable WTC story or asked her to elaborate on others, such as the identity of the man who gave her his ring, the hospital where she was treated or the names of those she met on the morning of the attack.

With hindsight, her story was so packed with ridiculously improbable details, worthy of several Hollywood movies not just one – that observers might wonder why nobody questioned much earlier whether it was all too good to be true.

Head, for instance, said she met Dave when they were fighting over a taxi. She tore up his proffered business card in fury but, a month later, they ran into each other again at a business meeting and started to date.

Alison Crowther, mother of Welles Crowther, probably spoke for many involved with Head when she admitted she had not wanted to ‘probe’ in her discussions with her. ‘I felt it was too private and painful for her,’ she said.

So, who was the woman claiming to be Tania Head? She was not, as she’d claimed, a diplomat’s daughter and senior vice-president for strategic alliances for an investment think tank. She had never worked in Britain, Argentina, France, Singapore and the Netherlands – as she’d also claimed. Nor did her claims to have degrees from Harvard and Stanford stand up.

Not only had she never worked for Merrill Lynch, the New York Times discovered, but she wasn’t in its WTC offices and wasn’t even in New York on 9/11.

She’d been in Barcelona, her hometown, studying at a business school.

Alicia Esteve Head – her real name – was the fifth child and only daughter of a wealthy Spanish family.

She’d been an attention-seeker since childhood who was always ready to embroider her life with false details. The scars on her arm came from a car accident in her teens – Head would lie to people in Barcelona that she’d been in a Ferrari driven by her fiancé.

As for her other fictitious fiancé, Dave’s family had never heard of her, and he had never even met her.

His identity was just one detail she gleaned from media reports about 9/11 and then woven into her story.

She’d been particularly inspired by the account of Ling Young, who worked in the New York tax department on the 86th floor of the south tower, and who was in the sky lobby when the second plane struck.

Given the weight of evidence against her, it’s surely no surprise that Head didn’t try to stick to her guns or try to defend the worst lies she’d ever told.

Instead, she simply disappeared without explanation. Head was never prosecuted because, having never taken money from the survivor group, she had committed no criminal fraud.

Rumors swirled about where she went although it was known that she was estranged from her parents.

Yet according to Spanish media reports, she returned to her home country and settled down quietly – and anonymously – with her mother in the Catalonian city of Terrassa. She reportedly opened a small business renovating houses.

In 2011, she reportedly took a job at Barcelona insurance firm, dealing with English-speaking clients. However, the following year and around the time that a documentary came out about her, she was fired after her bosses realized who she was.

Since then, there has been little sign of her – she could easily have changed her name and even her appearance – although company records reportedly showed an Alicia Esteve Head registering a Barcelona business, Zofrenia SL, in 2021.

It was also claimed she killed herself in 2008, unable to live with the shame of what she had done.

Some believe Head committed her monstrous fraud for emotional reasons – the desire for love, affection, belonging and recognition. The makers of a new Spanish documentary, La Superviviente (The Survivor) – which portrays her as a ‘strangely heroic figure’ – said last month that they are ‘absolutely convinced that even if Alicia had not been financially comfortable at the time, she still would not have taken money as the supposed victim of a terrorist attack.’

The documentary also highlights similarities between her case and that of a Spanish trade unionist named Enric Marco Batlle, who was found in 2005 to have fabricated claims that he’d survived Nazi concentration camps. Batlle, who also became a revered national celebrity and died in 2022, was exposed by a historian who noted inconsistencies in his various accounts of his experience.

Unlike Head, however, he admitted to being an imposter but never apologized, justifying his lies on the grounds he was helping to preserve the collective memory of the Holocaust.

In 1995, Binjamin Wilkomirski published a critically acclaimed memoir of his childhood in Auschwitz although it later emerged he wasn’t Jewish, as he’d claimed, and had spent World War II in neutral Switzerland.

Disgraced ex-Republican politician and serial liar George Santos falsely claimed links to both the 9/11 attacks and the Holocaust.

He said he was the grandson of Ukrainian Jews who fled the Holocaust, escaping first Ukraine and later Belgium.

Santos said his mother was in the South Tower of the WTC on 9/11. She survived but later died from cancer as a result of the carnage, he said. She was actually in Brazil that day.

Falsely claiming a connection to major tragedies appears to be far more widespread than many may imagine.

Manhattan psychiatrist Jean Kim revealed in a 2015 article for the Washington Post that she wasn’t surprised to hear the recent news that comedian and actor Steve Rannazzisi had admitted lying about escaping the Twin Towers on 9/11. ‘I also wasn’t shocked by the otherwise outrageous tale of Tania (Alicia Esteve) Head,’ she added.

She said psychiatrists divide so-called ‘pathological lying’ into conscious and unconscious motivations. The former is known as ‘conman’ behavior and is done for obvious gain, usually monetary. Rannazzisi fell into this category because his 9/11 claims drew attention that benefited his career.

But Head, who didn’t need the money, appeared to fall into the second category – ‘unconscious’ motivation – which ‘usually is related to strong unmet needs during childhood development, such as neglect or abuse, leading to an ongoing drive to seek forms of care and affection even in self-destructive or manipulative ways.’

Kim also noted that the 9/11 tragedy was particularly significant in the huge amount of sympathy it drew to survivors.

‘No other event has inspired so many false claims among my patients. And people of all stripes and socioeconomic classes seemed to sense the power lurking behind that type of attention, that kind of historic relevancy,’ said Kim.

Referring to Head and other 9/11 liars, she wrote: ‘We shouldn’t necessarily just feel enraged by these individuals (although it certainly is tempting.) These are usually ultimately sad, lonely, empty people who capitalize on this unprecedented capacity for charity.’

That’s certainly a charitable view of a woman for whom those who really did suffer terribly on 9/11 may find it difficult, even 25 years later, to extend much sympathy or understanding.