Man With Dual Identity Indicted on Federal Charge : Courts: Attorneys said they expect Gary Andres Elliott, who assumed a new name while living in Orange County, to plead guilty to a charge of falsifying passport information.

By JODI WILGOREN

March 13, 1993 12 AM PT

TIMES STAFF WRITER

LOS ANGELES — Gary Andres Elliott, the man who abandoned a wife and seven children in an Illinois farming town 14 years ago and assumed the name of a dead Simi Valley toddler while living in Orange County, was indicted Friday on a federal charge of making false statements in applying for a passport.

Though the maximum penalty for the offense is five years in jail and a $250,000 fine, attorneys said they expect Elliott, 49, to plead guilty to the charge and be free by the end of the month.

Elliott was being held without bail at the Metropolitan Detention Center here.

“What you’ve got is basically a law-abiding citizen who was a law-abiding citizen in Illinois, and he left there and came to California and was a law-abiding person here,” said Elliott’s lawyer, Frederick Anderson. “It was a major thing leaving his home, but in terms of criminal offenses, fortunately he didn’t commit any major offenses.”

Elliott’s dual identity was discovered earlier this year after his fiancee, Jennifer Bradford of Lake Forest, reported him missing. Investigators looking into the disappearance discovered that the identity Elliott had been using--Clifford (Jerry) Wraymond Leighton--belonged to a Simi Valley child who died in 1953. Investigators also found people in Illinois who identified pictures of the missing man as Elliott.

Relatives had assumed Elliott was dead when he never returned from a St. Louis chess tournament in 1979 and his blood-spattered truck was found in an inner-city neighborhood. His wife collected $84,000 in life insurance in 1986.

So, after Elliott turned up by the side of the road in Riverside County last month, authorities arrested him on a series of state and federal charges, and a judge ordered him held without bail for fear that he might flee.

“It’s not the crime of the century,” Assistant U.S. Atty. Brent Whittlesey, who is handling the federal case, said Friday. “We just found a missing man.”

Anderson said that Elliott will plead guilty to the federal charge regarding the passport at his arraignment March 22, and will plead guilty to the pending state misdemeanor charges of using a fake birth certificate and lying on an application for a driver’s license.

Meanwhile, Bradford and Anderson have been contacted by tabloid TV programs “Hard Copy,” “Inside Edition” and “A Current Affair” and wooed with several book and television-movie offers. Bradford speaks nightly with Elliott, and still hopes they will someday marry.

“I haven’t changed my opinion of him at all. I still love him. We’ll have to see what happens. . . . I plan my future one day at a time,” Bradford said in an interview Friday. “I don’t care what you call him, you can call him Mickey Mouse, it’s a name. He’s the same person.”

Bradford said Elliott plans a reunion with his wife and seven children once he is released from jail.

“He just should have gotten divorced and done things the right way. Why he didn’t, I don’t know,” she said. “I don’t have any answers.”