Convicted fraudster of Colorado Springs cheerleading fame suspect of crimes again
Editor’s note: This case was dismissed on Feb. 2, 2024.
A person with a long history of fraud in the Colorado Springs area has landed back in jail following new allegations.
Storme Shannon Aerison, who legally changed her name from Charles James Daugherty, was booked into El Paso County jail on Jan. 20 on suspicion of forgery and crimes against an at-risk person.
Attempts to contact Aerison for this story were unsuccessful.
The arrest affidavit was not available for Aerison’s most recent arrest, but court records indicate that the case was opened in 2021. However, Aerison — who was born intersex with both male and female genitalia according to court testimony — has a criminal history in the Colorado Springs area that goes back much further.
As reported by The Gazette in 1990, Aerison enrolled at Coronado High School, and even made the all-girl varsity cheerleading squad, before school officials discovered the ruse and called the police. For eight schooldays the then-26-year-old attended classes and afterschool activities as a junior by the name of Cheyen Weatherly. Aerison told school officials that she had been studying in Greece under a private tutor, and presented a list of courses and grades, which later turned out to be fraudulent.
Aerison, who was a male cheerleader at Harrison High School in the early 1980s, participated in one pep assembly before being caught.
“We needed somebody big,” one junior varsity cheerleader told The Gazette at the time. “He was the base (for the pyramid). He was very, very good.”
Aerison would be charged with third-degree forgery and criminal impersonation following expulsion from school.
Six years earlier Aerison was convicted on one count of theft for posing as a female Air Force Academy student and cheerleader to steal a $15,000 car from a Colorado Springs dealership.
By 2000 Aerison was again facing allegations of fraud.
Colorado Springs police investigated allegations that Aerison was posing as a female model and defrauded photographers, calendar companies and overseas hotels out of money, airline tickets and rooms, promising to advertise their businesses in fictitious calendars featuring the self-described “supermodel.”
In one of the charges, according to Colorado Springs police, Aerison — using the name Christy Gabriel — convinced an Air Force Academy cadet, a Colorado State University student and a West Point cadet that she was a swimsuit model, then used the men to fund and staff a photo shoot in Hawaii.
“The suspect has been playing the part of a female ‘supermodel’ for at least the last five years,” according to the 2000 arrest affidavit. “During that time, he has been involved in numerous schemes in which victims have lost sums of money … Mr. Aerison seems to have no regard for the law, or for the financial welfare of others.”
In and out of custody between 2000 and 2004, Aerison was caught violating bond in 2004.
For the next three years the case dragged on in the court system while Aerison spent considerable time in the State Mental Health Institute in Pueblo as doctors tried to determine if she was competent to stand trial. Aerison’s attorneys had argued that she suffered from dissociative identity disorder, formerly known as multiple personality disorder. A district court judge ruled that Aerison was competent to stand trial.
In 2007 Aerison was sentenced to five years in prison, followed by five years of mandatory parole and 10 years of probation.
Criminal records also indicate that Aerison was charged with several credit card-related theft charges in Hawaii in 2014. According to the Hawaii Reporter newspaper she was arrested attempting to check out of the Kauai Marriott Resort with a stolen credit card. Court records show she was sentenced to six years in community corrections.
Storme Shannon Aerison’s booking photo from Jan. 19, 2024.
Storme Shannon Aerison, in a booking mug, in 2007.
Storme Shannon Aerison, in a booking mug, in 2007.