9/11 Yarn a Web of Lies

Sept. 27, 2007 — -- In all the stories that came out of 9/11 -- stories of love, loss and heroism -- Tania Head's tale had it all.

As president of the World Trade Center Survivors' Network and as a tour guide at ground zero, she told countless people for the past six years about being burned on the 78th floor of the south tower. Head says she was rescued by a citizen hero, and felt compelled to escape by her promise to return a wedding band to a victim's wife and by her love for a man she later learned had died in the north tower.

Tania Head's story, however, was too good to be true, as The New York Times reported Thursday.

Though she'd spoken to journalists for years and recounted her story hundreds of times among other survivors, the newspaper found that nearly every detail of Head's tale was false.

Now the many survivors of 9/11 and the families of victims who had come to trust Head, at times suppressing their own grief to help her cope with her enormous loss, are left to wonder why she would perpetrate such an enormous fabrication.

"I've heard her story over and over," said Janice Cilento, a social worker and board member of the World Trade Center Survivors' Network.

"I've been there anytime she needed someone to listen, even if it was at three in the morning. She has stolen my time and my soul," she said.

Cilento said many of the network's members "feel very upset and betrayed.

"We have members who thought Tania's trauma was so extreme they did not want to discuss their own. They gave their time to help her, and she didn't even need it," she said.

The Times reported that Merrill Lynch had confirmed that no one by the name of Tania Head had ever worked on the 78th floor of that company. The family of the victim who Head claimed was her killed fiancé, or her husband in some versions of the story, and whom the paper identified only by his first name, Dave, to protect his family's privacy, told reporters they had never heard of Head.

Head claimed she was rescued by Welles Remy Crowther, an equities trader who has been credited with saving several people on the 78th floor.