At 26, Lady Bardales had already been many things: a police officer, a security agent to the First Lady, a model and tabloid star.
Then she was a fugitive.
Bardales, captured in Peru this week, had been on the lam since November 26, when she skipped out before a court could determine whether she was guilty of illegal enrichment.
The court was to decide whether she could have afforded the $US47,000 ($NZ62,977.35) farm and red Honda Accord she bought on a national police officer's $US553 monthly salary in 2005.
Comparing her to Monica Lewinsky, local media speculated that then-president Alejandro Toledo had given her cash amid a steamy affair -- claims both Bardales and Toledo, whose term ended in 2006, denied.
Bardales said the land came from her deceased grandmother, and the cash from an Israeli businessman boyfriend who disappeared.
While police may have had trouble tracking her down during seven months on the run, the paparazzi did not. In January, Bardales -- dubbed 'Lady B' by Peruvian tabloids in a nod to British Princess Diana -- was photographed vacationing in the seaside town of Mancora, Peru wearing a moviestar-like get-up of baseball cap and sunglasses.
But her stint as a fugitive ended Wednesday around 3am, when six officers arrested her at a relatives' house in Pimentel, a Peruvian beach town near her parents' home.
She used her notoriety, strutting a catwalk last year in a slinky, crimson dress and posing for a magazine cover with a pistol and black belly-shirt.
When a court called for her arrest months later, Lima's Peru21 newspaper ran a photo of her in a lacy, dark mini-dress with the headline: "Wanted." In the process, she became one of Peru's most hotly debated pop personalities.
To some observers, Bardales' soap opera-like rise and fall was more about politics than justice.
When she was first investigated in 2005, then-congresswoman Cecilia Tate told reporters that opposition lawmakers were trying to make her case into a Monica Lewinsky-like affair to torpedo Toledo.
"This case doesn't have to do with Bardales," Jorge Bruce, a psychologist and political columnist for Peru21, said this week.
"It's an indirect attack on Toledo" by those who wanted to discredit the former leader in office, he said.
In the end, Peru's obsession with the fugitive brunette led to one place: an unglamorous women's prison where she now awaits the verdict again.
