49. FAKED DEATHS AD 2002

PSEUDOCIDE

As if the prospect of one certain death weren’t more than enough for most of us to contemplate, some people have seen fit to add an additional voluntary one, in an event that is common enough to have its own name: pseudocide.

Of course, nobody knows exactly how common the faking of one’s own demise actually is, because naturally enough successful pseudocides don’t make it into the statistics. But one—possibly apocryphal—estimate is that as many as a quarter of the reported leaps from San Francisco’s Golden Gate Bridge in which the body is not found represent pseudocides. Certainly, there is enough interest out there that at least one publisher has seen fit to market a book on the subject: How to Disappear Completely and Never Be Found. And CNBC’s American Greed: The Fugitives episode on pseudocides wisely advised that it probably isn’t a good idea to use a corpse of the opposite sex, or leave your fingerprints on your own death certificate.

It isn’t hard to imagine why an individual might want to wipe the slate clean and start all over again. People have an almost limitless menu of ways in which to mess up their lives, and even in a life that would appear to most observers as entirely satisfactory, something superior may always beckon. The existential dissatisfaction that is evidently so deeply embedded in the human condition seems to result from the fact that, no matter how good things are, we can always imagine that they might be better—even if we can’t specify exactly how. A dangerous combination.

What is harder to explain is why anyone would want to escape from their old lives by feigning their own death. After all, there are plenty of ways for those fed up with their old existences simply to move and assume a new identity, without having to go to all the trouble and risk of faking the biological end of the old one. The shelves of bookstores groan with self-help volumes advising you how to go about doing that, and fiction overflows with creative ideas on the subject.

Still, the faking of one’s own death remains a popular prelude to beginning a new life, and perhaps it is not surprising that a favored method of departure is via drowning. One famous case combining drowning and fiction is that of John Stonehouse, a British member of Parliament who, in order to escape business woes and start a new life with his mistress in Australia, faked his watery suicide after having gotten the idea from Frederick Forsyth’s novel The Day of the Jackal.

The great attraction of drowning is that it does not necessarily require a body, which is the hardest thing of all to fake (see chapter 36, Counterfeit Cadavers). All you need to do is to create circumstances that would lead to a coroner’s verdict of presumed death by drowning; yachting accidents and bridge jumps over fast-moving waters fill the bill particularly nicely. What’s more, even though most bodies eventually wash up somewhere, and questions might eventually be raised if yours doesn’t, there is also apparently something about water itself: observers have noted the “baptism effect,” whereby water is psychologically and spiritually symbolic of cleansing, and thus also of new beginnings.

On January 11, 2009, Marcus Schrenker faked his death in a plane crash when the scams his Indiana investment firms were running started to unravel. Investigators found no body or blood inside the plane. Two days later he was captured hiding in a pup tent in a Florida campground, where he had attempted suicide by slitting his wrists.

There are other motives that relate to the murkier realms of the human psyche. Take the example of “Lord” Timothy Dexter, a difficult and eccentric late eighteenth-century businessman of Newburyport, Massachusetts. Feeling insufficiently adulated by those around him, Dexter decided to pretend to have died to see how much sorrow his family and friends would express. When his wife failed to shed enough tears at his wake he sprang from his casket and beat her, then caroused with the cronies who had been mourning him minutes earlier. Dexter’s case may have been an extreme one; but a desire to test the love of family and friends appears not to be an unusual motivation for pseudocide.

In March 2002, John Darwin disappeared while canoeing near his oceanfront home in County Durham, England. After he was declared dead, his wife collected on a £680,000 insurance policy. Five years later he was spotted very much alive with his wife in Panama, thanks to a photograph posted on a Facebook page.

More straightforward, and more common, is insurance fraud: load yourself up with life insurance, stage your death, and disappear along with your beneficiary. In 2002 a canoe belonging to John Darwin, a deeply indebted former prison officer, was found empty at sea near his home in northern England. Soon thereafter, disguised as an old man, the thirty-one-year-old returned to live next door to his wife, Anne, whose house he secretly entered through a hole in the shared wall disguised by a cupboard. This subterfuge ultimately gave rise to the immortal headline THE LIE, THE SWITCH, AND THE WARDROBE.

The next year, after Darwin had been declared legally dead and Anne had collected substantial insurance money, the “old man next door” moved in with her. He acquired a false passport, and the pair then traveled quite extensively before buying property in Panama in 2006. In 2007, with an impending change in visa laws threatening to expose his fake passport, Darwin decided to return to England and feign amnesia.

Once home, he discovered the police were reluctant to believe his story that he had no recollection of the past five years, partly because they already knew Anne had been cashing out and was planning to move abroad. And then the Daily Mirror ran an exposé, based on a real estate agent’s publicity photo of the pair taken in Panama in 2006 that had found its way onto the Internet. The jig was up, and in 2008 both John and Anne were convicted of insurance fraud, serving prison time until 2011.

Pseudocide is also an option for fraudulent financiers. In April 2008, Samuel Israel III was sentenced to twenty years in prison for defrauding investors in his bankrupt Bayou Hedge Fund Group. On June 9, 2008, after he had failed to report to prison, his car was found on the Bear Mountain Bridge, north of New York City. “Suicide is painless”—a tag line from the TV show M*A*S*H—was scrawled in the dust covering its hood. The authorities proved reluctant to believe the implication that Israel had jumped off the high bridge, and following their appearance on America’s Most Wanted Israel and his girlfriend turned themselves in after having spent a month living in a trailer park.

The march of technology is, alas, making pseudocide tougher all the time. Ubiquitous video surveillance, biometrics, DNA, digital databases, and wised-up insurance companies are all making it ever harder and less profitable for us to separate ourselves from our identities. Even the photo that jailed the Darwins turned up when someone simply thought to Google “John, Anne, Panama.”