When Christina Marie Chapman first stumbled blindly into a web of international intrigue, in 2020, she’d been trying to turn her life around. She was living in the tiny town of Brook Park, Minnesota, occupying a run-down travel trailer on a rural property her mother owned. Over Chapman’s adult life she’d lived in Texas, England and Colorado—drifting between jobs at big-box stores, fast-food chains, casinos, mortgage brokers—“not anything that I ever dreamed of doing as a child,” she recalls.
The daughter of an ex-Marine father and an accountant mother, she’d been born in South Korea, where her father was stationed, and bounced around before spending her formative years in Pine City, a dozen miles from Brook Park. Now, at 44, she’d retreated home to start over. She took out loans to attend a coding boot camp, hoping to pull herself out of the mire of dead-end jobs. Finally done with the coursework after five months and thousands of dollars, she created a LinkedIn profile to advertise her new skills. Occupation: software engineer.