"She never asked for anything. Everything I ever did was voluntary," Turnmire says now. Her salon became a second home for Terri and Hannah, and she helped kickstart fundraising campaigns that preoccupied hundreds of people in Urbana for several months last year. She is a diminutive woman of 56; her natural facial expression is one of worry. "Like when we sold candles to pay for Hannah's treatment? I volunteered to do that. I just took her at her word. I guess I'm a very trusting person. Lots of us are. This isn't New York." In total, Urbana had donated more than $US10,000 ($A17,000) — not to mention countless gifts and meals and hours spent at bake sales — by the time Terri Milbrandt, 35, appeared in court recently charged with one of the more astoundingly elaborate and heartless hoaxes in recent memory.

Between April and December 2002, prosecutors allege, Milbrandt — along with her 44-year-old husband Robert and her mother, Mary Russell, who is 57 — convinced not just an entire town but Hannah herself that she had leukaemia, and would probably die within weeks. They shaved her head to simulate the effects of chemotherapy, police say, and booked her into psychological counselling to help her confront her imminent death. Terri fed Hannah sleeping pills, then took her on long, aimless drives among the strip-malls and cornfields of Ohio until she fell asleep. Afterwards, she would tell her they had been to the hospital, and she had slept through her treatment again. It is clear that Urbana has seen better days. On its two main streets, about a fifth of the storefronts are empty. The Douglas Inn, a vast 19th-century former hotel dominating the town square, is said to be dangerously infested with cockroaches; some of its few remaining human residents heat their rooms with the hotplates of their ovens. And yet despite this — or, perhaps, because of it — Urbana is the kind of place where things like community and generosity and doing right by your neighbours are still taken very seriously. Nearly every shop still trading displays a handwritten poster urging the local high-school football team to Go! Fight! Win!, or something similar.

It helps, of course, if you're socially conservative — "44 million Americans killed," reads one lurid anti-abortion billboard near the centre — and belong to one of Urbana's 36 mostly fundamentalist churches. "This is a cohesive community," says Tim West, the amiable missioner of Urbana's Episcopalian Church of the Epiphany, one of the non-fundamentalist few. "Politically speaking, there are maybe 10 Democrats. People think alike, act alike, look alike. And it's not unusual for them to band together to help a sick kid."

This was the context in which collection boxes made from coffee cans began to appear in the shops and businesses of Urbana last April, adorned with a photograph of Hannah and a verse from the Book of Matthew. "Heal the sick, cleanse the lepers, raise the dead, cast out demons," it read. "Freely you have received; freely give." And people did. Shoppers donated change; the electrical manufacturer Grimes Honeywell, one of Urbana's largest employers, held staff fundraisers at all three sites. At North Elementary School, where Hannah was in second grade, the president of the Mothers' Club, Julie Urquhart, made the appeal her personal project. Within weeks, she had the pupils holding cookie sales and donating the aluminium ring-pulls from fizzy drink cans, which they sold for recycling. "They even had a Hannah Hat Day," the Urbana Daily Citizen newspaper noted in a report last June, under the headline "Community Reaches Out To Little Girl". "Everyone wore a hat, because Milbrandt must wear a hat since she had the chemotherapy and lost her hair."

Early on, David Curnutte's seven-year-old daughter Emily came home to report that one of her best friends had leukaemia. "She wasn't real sure what leukaemia was, but she said that Hannah was going to die soon," the 38-year-old firefighter says, leaning forward on the sofa in his small living room in Urbana. Curnutte likes being a firefighter, and his house is crammed with firefighting memorabilia: a big yellow helmet, covered in signatures; a poster for the fire movie Backdraft; and the covers of specialist firefighting magazines from September 11. Outside, an old fire hydrant is propped against the porch. It was only natural that Curnutte, having tried to explain Hannah's situation to Emily, would approach his union to help out. "I thought, man, if my daughter had cancer, I'd need the money, I wouldn't be able to work. So we decided to give them all we could." That meant an official contribution of $US500, and also, from personal donations, a puppy Hannah had asked for. She called it Socks. Curnutte talked on the phone to Terri Milbrandt every couple of weeks. "I look back on it," he says, "and it's, like, while Hannah's head was shaved evenly, who, as a parent, is going to think that another parent is going to do that?" Back at the Touch of Beauty, Milbrandt would frequently cry as she explained Hannah's condition to Turnmire. Milbrandt told her the family was saved: they had started to attend Faith Fellowship, a charismatic congregation that meets in a huge, low-slung, modern building just outside Urbana, and she knew now that God would take care of things. He did, sort of: Faith Fellowship made a donation of $US2200. "And I remember that she made calls from the nail salon to her home, to ask Hannah's older sister Katie if Hannah had woken up yet," Turnmire says. "At the time, I thought she was worried about whether she'd woken up after her chemotherapy. Now I wonder whether she was afraid she'd given her an overdose."

In November, Terri mentioned that they would have to skip Thanksgiving: they couldn't afford the food. So Turnmire made sure that her own church, Only Believe Ministries, put them on the list for a free Thanksgiving basket — turkey, vegetables and all the rest — and she delivered it. When she went round with her daughter Jenny, Turnmire says: "Hannah was bouncing around, playing on the couch, and I remember saying to my daughter as we left, ‘If I didn't know she had cancer, I'd swear she was a healthy child'." Did she ever wonder why, if the Milbrandts were really as destitute as they claimed, Terri could always afford to get her nails done? "She had that covered," Turnmire says. "Her other daughter came in with her on one occasion and explained that that was the one thing she wanted to make sure her mother had for herself, because of all the sacrifices she was making. So she'd pay for it from her job. They had it all covered. The amount of energy that went into it, to cover every detail — she had an answer for everything, no matter what." Exactly who was deceiving whom inside the Milbrandts' modest home on West Light Street, though, will remain a mystery at least until the trials, which are expected to begin in the next few months. Terri has confessed to the fraud, but Robert maintains that he, too, had no idea that his daughter was ill. That claim is greeted with universal scorn by the townspeople of Urbana, but Mark Feinstein, his defence lawyer, maintains that he will change their minds. "Let me give you one example," Feinstein says. "She told him there was a home healthcare nurse named Beth, who was visiting the house because she needed help with Hannah. There was no Beth. Well, Robert said he'd like to meet Beth at some point. And two days later, in his driveway, he finds a stethoscope. He takes it inside, and (Terri) says: ‘Oh, Beth was saying she couldn't find her stethoscope.' He had no reason to doubt her."

Terri made sure the hoax developed incrementally, Feinstein says, reporting first that Hannah had a tumour in her jaw, then that it had spread, then that she had developed leukaemia. But wouldn't a father want to accompany his dying daughter to at least one of her hospital treatments? "There were occasions that he actually did plan to go to doctors' appointments," Feinstein insists. "He'd say: ‘Good news! I'm going to be off work on Thursday,' and she'd say ‘Great!' And then on Wednesday she'd say that the doctor's office had called and had to change the appointment." It was almost Christmas before the cracks began to show. Terri told Turnmire the family couldn't afford any presents, and Turnmire found herself offering to raise enough money to buy whatever Hannah wanted. What she wanted was a Barbie Dream House, which cost $US100. After she had raised some of the money from her customers, Turnmire drove to Toys ‘R' Us in Springfield, 16 kilometres away, and got a 50 per cent reduction. Turnmire's display of generosity made Milbrandt cry again. Then, right before Christmas, Terri came to the nail salon with Katie and told Turnmire she was taking the family to New York for the holidays. "We got family up there," Turnmire remembers her saying. "An uncle of mine sent me some money for food and transportation."

Jenny Turnmire chatted with Katie while their mothers spoke. "Mom, did you hear that?" Jenny said to Tish after the Milbrandts had left. "Katie said they're going to New York to go Christmas shopping." "I thought that was a bit funny," Turnmire recalls today. "I said, ‘They can't go Christmas shopping. They haven't got any money."' "Maybe I just heard it wrong," Jenny said. ‘Trust," the young American social theorist Jedediah Purdy wrote recently in the Atlantic Monthly magazine, "is the one attitude that has steadily fallen since social scientists began measuring it." Surveys show that those Americans who still tell pollsters they trust one another "developed their habits of trust in small towns or tightly knit urban communities.

"Whether or not the neighbourhood shopkeeper is a good person, he can usually be trusted, because he will have to deal with you again and again. The same does not go for a telemarketer calling from India or from prison, or the summer employee at The Gap in a mall 50 kilometres from your home. How are you to tell whether the unshaven pedestrian on your suburban street is a child molester or an investment banker from the next subdivision, enjoying an afternoon walk in a bear market?" Urbana is a classic example: the kind of small town where trust still flourishes — where the sheer daily density of human interactions between a small number of people makes trust a basic element of social survival — and where, in consequence, it can be most easily exploited. It was a teacher at North Elementary who finally decided to voice her concerns. The problem was Hannah's hair: it was evenly shaved, and it seemed to be growing back evenly, too. She told the local family services department, who were already in touch with the Milbrandts because of the leukaemia. Days later, at a scheduled meeting with family services, Terri Milbrandt was confronted. She confessed immediately. When they searched the Milbrandt home, police found pamphlets urging people to attend yet another fundraiser for Hannah, along with the scissors used to cut her hair. Under an odd bit of Ohio law, they are now defined as criminal instruments — tools used in carrying out a felony — and their possession is one of several charges faced by Hannah's parents. (The others are child endangerment, theft and engaging in a pattern of corrupt activity; Mary Russell is charged with theft and corrupt activity.) If found guilty, Robert and Terri Milbrandt could each face up to 10 years in prison and fines of $US22,500. "We've got a whole city on their knees today," Urbana police sergeant David Reese told the Urbana Daily Citizen, when he made the arrests, the week after the house search. "I've delivered death messages that people have taken easier than some people are taking this." Since he had searched the Milbrandt home, he said, he hadn't been able to sleep.

"You know, I really don't think she planned on the community getting involved like it did," says Curnutte. "I think she thought she might get money from a society, or something, and then when everybody chipped in, she got way over her head. And I keep wondering what plans did they have for her? If they kept telling everybody it was progressing, well, what next? Were they going to overdose her? Kill her off?" Turnmire doesn't think so: she says Terri had begun to talk about the possibility of remission — based, according to police, on extensive research into leukaemia she had done on the internet — which would have set the stage for an apparent recovery. Some details still nag at Turnmire, though. "There was another girl who had a muscle disease, and she was collecting the (fizzy drink can) tabs so she could pay for a treatment. It was on the news. And she gave them to Terri so that Hannah would have a treatment instead. How could you take them? Wouldn't you have said, ‘No, you keep those for your treatment'? That's something that really bothers me." Terri and Mary Russell are in jail in the nearby town of Mechanicsburg; only Robert has been posted bail. He says he will not leave Terri. He believes she is mentally ill. According to recent reports, she already had a criminal record for offences involving fraud. Hannah has been placed in temporary foster care, within a few kilometres of Urbana, and is attending a different school. The first time seven-year-old Emily Curnutte heard her classmate wasn't really ill was when she saw it on the TV news; they haven't seen each other since.

"Emily asked me if I could get Hannah's telephone number the other day so they could talk," says David Curnutte. "But I don't know how I'd go about that." Against her expectations, the customers of the Touch of Beauty — who contributed at least $US700 among themselves, not including gifts in kind — haven't been angry with Turnmire for persuading them to donate. But would they contribute again with the same alacrity? "I don't know. I still can't believe this happened," she says, shaking her head. "I never could understand how people could get scammed. But here we are. We got a big one." -Guardian