Last time we checked in on the saga of Melanie Mills, a.k.a. Lisa Hackney, a.k.a. Elisabeth von Hullessem, now calling herself Raswitha Elisabeth Melanie Mills, this outrageously bizarre literary scammer and alleged mother-murder attempter had been extradited to the USA from Canada, and was sitting in an Arkansas jail awaiting sentencing on six charges of failure to appear (jumping bail back in 1999), first-degree battery (pinning her mother to a picnic table with a car), aggravated assault (ditto), and theft of property (embezzling part of her mother’s estate and kiting bad checks).
On February 10, 2006, she pleaded guilty to all six charges, and was sentenced to two prison terms in the Arkansas Department of Correction, one of 15 years and one of 10 years, to run concurrently.
However, she won’t do any jail time.
Say what?
Well, according to this article in the Northwest Arkansas Times, all but 23 months of the 15-year sentence was suspended, and all but 22 months of the 10-year sentence was suspended, and she was credited with the 23 months she served in Canadian jails awaiting extradition. I can’t speak to the logic behind this; I assume that Arkansas was not eager to house and feed another prisoner, and since Hackney has Canadian citizenship, was just as happy to bundle her off to the Great White North and let the Mounties deal with her. So, having been returned to the US by means of much paperwork and, presumably, expense, she has been deported back to Canada.
Have we heard the last of our favorite wacky scammer? I don’t think so.
For one thing, scammers don’t generally change their stripes. Hackney has repeatedly attempted the same kinds of scams; she has even used the same aliases. I’m confident she’ll show up on the Writer Beware scamdar again at some point (and you can bet that we’ll be watching.)
For another thing, Hackney still has literary aspirations. That’s right, folks–she has written a book (or, if you want to get technical, another book, if we count the vanity-published Sins). And she’s trying to sell it.
Several (reputable) literary agents have received a (poorly written) book proposal from one Raswitha Elisabeth Melanie Mills for something called The MM Journal. It’s the tale of “Melanie Mills (Literary Agent); Elisabeth von Hullessem (Banff Writer’s Conference); Lisa Hackney (fugitive); L.R. Thomas (author of the novel ‘Sins’).
Based on her life story, ‘The MM Journal’ is about a German aristocratic family with its torrid, dirty little secrets.” Its heroine is “a woman who desperately attempted to live the so called ‘American dream life’…[but was] unable to escape fate no matter how hard she tried.”
Among other things, the book proposes to explain the events of MM’s life, such as the attempted mother-squashing (“One fateful night after a bizarre chain of events, her mother, the Countess von Hullessem, who ultimately grew to hate her daughter so much through no fault of her own, and MM have a horrible confrontation in November of 1 999, resulting in the Countess partially pinned beneath MM’s car”), and MM’s many failed ventures, such as the Melanie Mills Literary Agency (“…the economy bottomed out due to the Iraqui [sic]war. Suddenly, publishers were not interested, let alone buying, manuscripts from new, un-established writers”) and the writers’ conference in North Carolina (“people were not vacationing due to a deadly Asian flu outbreak and Mad Cow’s Disease by now and the failing economy”).
I swear I am not making this up. One of the agents kindly shared the proposal with me. Here it is, for your reading…pleasure.
UPDATE: Apparently unable to interest either agents or publishers in her masterwork, Hackney has self-published it.
The scandal, international intrigue, betrayal, the adventure, the sensual moments, the ecstasy, this sinfully hot autobiography based on Ms. von Hullessem’s life story, “The MM Journal”, is about a ‘German aristocratic family’ with its torrid, dirty little secrets and the attempt to live the ‘American Dream’, then wind up later living as a ‘fugitive’ on the run from the law while working with the literary world; New York City publishing houses.
Juicy!
So the Hackney saga continues. I'd better keep reading. But that woman is chilling, I must say that.
http://profile.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=user.viewprofile&friendID=81394211
her Myspace profile with a link to her website business and her fictional resume’ LOL
This is just brilliant. I read every post with delight! I must get our own resident Shark Hunter to update our Writer’s Scam pages to link to this wonderful blog at once!!
🙂
Lee
Mad Cow’s Disease, huh? That one actually made me laugh out loud.
(Reuters) Dallas, TX. The Mad Cow has struck again, spreading disease and ruin in yet another city. This makes five so far, including Boston, Chicago, Portland, Maine, and Los Angeles. A White House source, speaking on condition of anonymity, said the Mad Cow was said to have spoken those fateful words, “Baaaaah,” that has so terrorized the land.
Just wanted to say your blog is extensive and very informative. You provide a wonderful service. Thank you!
~Jahaka
OMG. This made me gaga almost as hard as reading Lyn Cheney declared over 250,000 dollars in royalties.
Or maybe I read that wrong and she deducted it as a 250,000$ loss?
One can only hope so.
And I’m not holding my breath to see if scammer’s book is a best seller, lol.
Dear goddess, I can’t believe this! That weoman never goes away!
Thank you for this. I hope that many, many writers will discover the value of this blog.
(“One fateful night after a bizarre chain of events, her mother, the Countess von Hullessem, who ultimately grew to hate her daughter so much through no fault of her own, and MM have a horrible confrontation in November of 1999, resulting in the Countess partially pinned beneath MM’s car”)
This is one of the best examples of passive voice I’ve ever read. And pronoun confusion. Whose fault wasn’t it that the Countess hated her daughter? The Countess’s, or the daughter’s?
My money is on the Countess.
Oh, dear…another scam agent who has little to no command of written language. Is that the biggest red flag, or what?
Thanks! I’ll get P&E’s listing on her updated.
This is such a bad precedent to set. The main reason why white-collar scam crime is so rampant in the US is because virtually no one goes to jail for it. We should all bombard the district attorney who let her go with nasty letters. And MM isn’t just a scam artist, she’s a violent criminal. The woman tried to kill her mother, for God’s sake!
As one of my buds has been known to say, “Oh my dear frelling goddess.”
That ain’t just purple prose; it has drifted over into the ultraviolet range. I’m looking for my radiation badge in a minute.
Yanno–one of us aspiring scriptwriters could adapt the actual incidents into a Law and Order script.
Only you can bet that on the TV show she would actually serve time.
Sheesh.
~gags~
BWAH! Is it wrong that I really want to read that book?
For free, of course…
Yup–all excerpts are from the actual proposal, complete with errors and grammatical infelicities.
Believe it or not, she’s a PA alum already–her “autobiographical” novel Sins was pubbed by PA.
Dear…ghod…
BWAHahahhahahaha!!!
OMG. If ever someone deserved it I’d say tell her to try PublishAmerica. I’m presuming the excerpts, misspellings and all, are straight from her proposals?