Wow, not bad,” Steve Rambam says as he rotates the Department of Foreign Affairs Authentication Certificate two inches from his eyes. We are having dinner after my return from the Philippines. I want his expert opinion on how my certificate would hold up under scrutiny. We’d come full circle, in a way. He first put me onto the overseas death fraud industry, and now we can trade notes on our international intrigue. As usual, though, Steve is all business, skeptical of my unremitting romance with pseudocide.
“It’s a good watermark,” he concedes, holding the sheet up to catch the light at different angles. “This first page is about ninety-five percent of the way there.” Then he flips over to the Office of the Civil Registrar General’s Certificate of Death.
“Okay, this one sucks. They actually double printed it with an inkjet printer!” In a matter of seconds and with a quick glance, Steve unravels the forger’s work. But hope is not lost. He explains how I would proceed if someone were to file and document my death on my behalf. First, my trusted co-conspirator would take it to the US Embassy in Manila, which would issue an embassy certification. And what if it found this document fishy? Would it investigate the papers right there?
“Probably not,” Steve says. “That’s one of the biggest holes in the process. If whatever you take to them appears to be an authentic local certification, they will validate it. They don’t investigate anything.”
With the embassy’s endorsement, my death still would need to be registered domestically in the United States. I’d want to avoid a populous jurisdiction with more resources.
“What are your parents’ names?” Steve asks.
“Merritt and Janette.”
“These aren’t even their names!” he exclaims. In the forger’s haste, he’d failed to collect some requisite data. “But if you presented this in some Podunk county . . .” Steve trails off, not wanting to encourage me, I think. “I don’t know. It depends on how closely it’s investigated.”
In the end, I didn’t file. I’d never really planned to. So I can’t say whether I would have been successful or not. A part of me likes to think I could have outwitted the experts and gotten away with being dead among the living. But I know I’d end up like so many of the people Frank and Steve have investigated who get caught because they can’t sustain their new identity. I’d take up a disguise the way John Darwin advised. I’d dye my tresses jet black and whittle a svelte new figure, only to get caught on a Walgreens security camera fondling a box of hair bleach and a Reese’s bar. We are who we are. Even though we fantasize about leaving ourselves behind, we don’t know how to be anyone else. And the problems begin when we turn away from who we are in favor of some theoretically superior version. As Sam Israel wrote me in an email from prison, with fourteen years left on his sentence, explaining what had put him there: “I got away from myself.”
I never filed, so in that sense, my death certificate experiment is incomplete. But the question remains: Is it possible to fake your own death in the twenty-first century? Despite my anonymous requests on those shabby websites doling out death-faking advice, no one ever came forward who had committed pseudocide and was still presumed dead. The people I interviewed had all been caught or turned themselves in. They provide scalable insight to the question. John and Sam got away with it, but only for a while. And even though I walked right up to the edge when I ordered documents in the Philippines that could have killed me, I don’t know what it feels like to witness my own funeral. I don’t know what it would mean to unburden myself of my debt, along with necessarily and simultaneously losing my family, my friends, and my identity.
But here’s what I do know:
This quest was a catharsis. Handling my own death certificate and a police report that narrated the details of my fatal car crash put me far enough out on the precipice to realize that I didn’t want to jump. But I felt the exhilaration nonetheless. It’s like the moment when you catch your breath after nearly being run down by a taxi: a brush with death shocks you back to life. Somehow, holding a fictional story of an accident and the official stamps and seals that confirmed its existence passed my anxieties through a sieve and purified them on the other side. While I didn’t commit pseudocide, I survived a pseudocide attempt. And the world looks forever different to me.
Like the Believers, I entertained possibilities that cracked open another reality. I saw the world as a scavenger hunt. Everyone I encountered told me that things are not what they seem. Death fraudsters and conspiracy theorists occupy similar strata. After all, if you know either through firsthand experience or evangelical insistence that the most essential component of mortality is not necessarily hard-and-fast fact, then all bets about anything else are off. When I let the accumulation of “facts and evidence” that Pearl described wash over me, I didn’t necessarily buy it, but I felt energized. Their theories, applied beyond their own enthusiastic context, demonstrated that you could rewrite a story. I thought back to what Frank Ahearn mentioned about fielding emails from people who are thinking about disappearing for no reason other than disenchantment with their dull existences. They might have no real intention to disappear beyond daydreaming. But hitting Send on that message exorcises some sort of demon. It acts as a gentle reminder that our realities are far from fixed.
The impulse and instinct to begin again is as deeply imprinted on our psyches as it is to begin in the first place. We are creatures of equal parts aspiration and foible. Our very humanity provides the perfect conditions to set us up to fail, sometimes on a grand scale, and yet compels us to try again. Our egos want to wipe the slate clean. But our roots, our selves, can’t be extinguished. The tragedy is not attempting to carry out our fantasies of rebirth; the tragedy is that it’s so difficult to do.
When I first met Frank, he summarily dismissed some of the death fakers I later got to know as “morons and idiots.” I had laughed along, shaking my head at the absurdity and shortsightedness of their plots. But after getting to know these individuals and their particular contexts beyond the brief newswire pieces detailing their crimes, I realized that everyone’s story was far more complex. And getting to know them as people made it easier to put myself in their position—to understand the desperation that can drive one to this extreme.
But I appreciate that there is more to the story, and I fear that the people I have written about in here will say I got it wrong. That I couldn’t possibly understand what it’s like to be in their shoes. I’ve tried throughout to see the world, their lives, and sometimes their crimes from their vantage. I’ve tried to be fair, but I have my own perspective. Over the course of faking their own deaths, some of these individuals stretched, broke, or rounded off the truth. The stories I’ve told are true, but the people who told them have told lies in the course of their experience. I am more interested in the stories they tell themselves, and the ways in which they tell them.
What it comes down to is choices: how the assemblage of tiny decisions we make all day can, before you know it, accumulate into a mountain so high that jumping off with a hidden parachute appears to be the only way out. Life is a trip wire, with one turn ricocheting and activating the next. Albert Camus said that life is the sum of all our choices. But I see now how minuscule those choices can seem and how massive their outcomes can be. I had the unique privilege of hearing people work backward over their lives. If the credit card bill had gotten to John Darwin in time, he would’ve paid the minimum and never had to kayak into the sea. Sam Israel said that if he could do it over, he would never have gone out on his own to form the hedge fund that turned into a massive fraud. He would have stayed at his job on Wall Street, still making a comfortable living. You don’t just wake up one morning having lost $450 million. Until you do. I doubt that John and Sam drafted trapdoors and hidden staircases in their original blueprints. But each decision determined the next. And, assuming a logic that often required a bit of cockeyed strain for me to follow, it usually made sense.
What have I learned from all this? I’ve learned that faking your death is less romantic than I thought it would be. The people I met traded in the dark and the bizarre, but they all still waded through the quotidian business of living. Pearl now works for a car dealership in Southern California. Steve takes care of his parents in Brooklyn. Snooky and Bong look after their kids.
I’ve learned it is still possible to fake your death in the twenty-first century, and, in some ways, it’s easier now than ever. But digital products that claim to anonymize, such as burner phones and Tor, are fallible. Analog technologies—pen and paper, a pay phone (if you can find one)—are more secure than anything processed through a microchip. At the end of the 2014 documentary Citizenfour, about the National Security Agency’s surveillance on Americans’every move, NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden and reporter Glenn Greenwald exchange messages on sheets of notepaper and then tear them up into pieces. As Steve Rambam said, privacy is dead. Get over it.
While faking your death holds an intrigue that simply disappearing doesn’t, vaporizing without the guise of a fatal accident is more effective.
But I’ve learned that if you fake your death, don’t come back. Not for your wife. Not for your girlfriend. Not for your kids.
If you fake your death, don’t do it at sea. Go for a hike.
If you’re interested in claiming a life insurance payout, don’t get greedy. Keep the policy modest.
Don’t bother with a stand-in body and an elaborate funeral. Spend your time and money on obtaining quality authenticating documents.
In your new life, commit to a disguise for your new identity, and use your real first name.
Don’t Google yourself and lead your hunters to your hideout.
And for the love of God, don’t drive if you’re supposed to be dead. Ditch the car.
But this is no how-to manual. I’m not a technologist or woman on the make. What I sought to know wasn’t death but freedom—from debt, from myself.
In reporting this book, I found freedom in the strangest of places. Leaving Jonathan Roth behind in jail that day right before Christmas, I realized that if you don’t learn to appreciate the tedium of life, you could easily end up groping for a quick fix. It seems antithetical to embrace that which plagues you. And there are exceptions. Battered wives need not invest in their violent husbands. But turning away from debts, personal and financial, has even graver consequences. One shortcut provokes the next, and before you know it, you’re considering desperate measures. I often think of John Darwin’s image of being perched atop the double black diamond ski run in Jackson Hole, Wyoming. Once you’ve turned away from the commonplace in favor of glory, there’s no way out but down.
Witnessing people’s reactions to my project also became a litmus test that revealed to me more about their backgrounds than they likely intended. When I tell the backstory of how my fascination with the topic originated from debt, people who carry a burden themselves understand immediately: I owe a tremendous amount of money, and I considered faking my death to escape it. People who come from more affluent backgrounds, who don’t know the terror of a figure owed growing with interest despite monthly payments, assume I am writing a book about faked death to make a profit to pay my lenders. So innocent, those moneybags.
Yes, this quest began in retaliation for my student loan debt. But my relationship with the money I owed shifted when I listened back to interviews and denounced the entitlement that permeated several people’s arguments: you fleeced those investors, you acquired all those homes you couldn’t afford—shouldn’t you pay it back? And it was so easy to recognize in others because I, too, possessed that same entitlement. I, too, thought I could live beyond my means and fly under the radar undetected. And though I think it’s bullshit that universities gouge the middle class, I am grateful for the education that money gave me and how it led me—obliquely, bizarrely—to this topic. I will pay the bare minimum monthly payment for the rest of my life and call it the idiot tax. I will smile as I write those checks. Because here I am, this is what I get to do. And on the occasions when the monthly payment has exceeded the balance in my checking account, the customer service agent from Sallie Mae usually understands. Payment. Every debt has to be repaid. Repaying one’s debts, according to Plato, at least, is the true definition of justice. Nothing is ever free. There is no such thing as getting away with it. When I looked, I saw ugliness, broken families, loneliness. Some people I spoke to clung to me as one of the few left who would listen to them. They had lost so much. Is transformation without annihilation possible? Freedom comes at a high cost. These lessons are not glamorous, like what I was hoping to find. But, God, are they true.
The Google search prompted by my feeling of despondence at my pauper fate was almost five years ago. Five years, though hardly a lifetime, has some heft. While I worked on this project and got on planes and trains to meet strangers who graciously took me in and shared their stories, life happened alongside. I lost one friend to cancer and another to suicide. I watched my knee swell to the size of a softball with Lyme disease. I cheated on the man I thought I was going to marry. I got away from myself. That sprawling empty openness where anything could happen was at my feet once more. But this time it was because I was in free fall. I didn’t have to fake my death to torpedo my life.
I moved out of the rent-controlled apartment in Chelsea. I went to weddings and baby showers. I sent care packages to friends who lost parents and friends who miscarried. I finished graduate school and, mercifully, received a teaching fellowship to underwrite it. I edited the memoirs of nineteen-year-old Columbia University students. I did a stint as a substitute gym teacher. I fell in love and broke my own heart. (It is my contention that we always break our own hearts.) I saw the sun rise over water towers. I read and drank coffee in the same red armchair in a new corner of a different room. This is all there is, and I learned that it was all okay. That I would be okay. That people shoulder far worse than measly student loan debt. This isn’t a story about death, or even about reinvention. This is a story about growing up, a little later in the game than I’m proud to admit.
These days, when I Google “fake your own death” (on the same dying laptop, during another interminable New York City winter), the results are pretty much the same. The wikiHow website still espouses “11 Steps (with pictures!)”; listicles enumerate “ridiculous” cases of people who tried and failed in exquisite fashion; new white-collar criminals continue to attempt schemes that result in outcomes so far afield from the release they imagined. There are details of getaway plans that might have worked with a little more finesse. There are components of each exit that probably did succeed. I know that the delicious moment of freedom they inevitably (if briefly) felt doesn’t fit in a two-hundred-word newswire. I know now that beyond the headlines, there are families who bear scars.
But if life is a collection of choices that you experience in moments, then that moment of freedom—the ecstatic catharsis—also counts. When your weight is caught in the construction net, when you paddle the canoe away, when you piece together the clues, when you place your obituary in the paper, when the fixer’s phone lights up with a Grim Reaper text, when you pass your backpack containing your death certificate through an X-ray machine, then, for just a moment, you are free.
Today my death certificate sits in my filing cabinet enclosed in the plastic sheath Snooky took me to buy at the mall after our seafood dinner. It is curling under the weight of tax returns, freelancing pay stubs, and news clippings of people who faked their deaths. I rarely dip into that filing cabinet unless I need to fish out a piece of evidence that my income, my self, exists. I’ll thumb through the disorganized folders in search of some esoteric and half-ripped W-9 and catch a glint of light reflecting off the clear casing with a long manila dossier inside. I’ll pull it out, undo the clasps, and run my fingers over the gold foil seal and red ribbons authenticating my death. This macabre souvenir, this possibility of an exit, returns me to a day when I could have died but didn’t. I turn back to searching for the paper. I turn back to my boring old life, and smile.