Criminal - Vanish

Episode Date: February 17, 2017

People have faked death to escape criminal convictions, debts, and their spouses. In 2007, a man named Amir Vehabovic faked his death just to see who showed up at the funeral (answer: only his mom). John Darwin faked his own death in a canoeing accident in the UK. And the ex-boyfriend of Olivia Newton John, Patrick Mcdermott, is rumored to have faked his death.  It's an appealing soap-opera fantasy, but actually disappearing requires an incredible amount of planning. How do you obtain a death certificate, a believable new identity, or enough money to start a new life? Today -- the answers to those questions, stories of fake death gone wrong, and a man who spends his life bringing back the dead. Playing Dead: A Journey Through the World of Death Fraud, by Elizabeth Greenwood Steven Rambam's Investigative Agency, Pallorium, Inc. Say hello on Twitter, Facebook and Instagram. Sign up for our occasional newsletter, The Accomplice. Follow the show and review us on Apple Podcasts: iTunes.com/CriminalShow. We also make This is Love and Phoebe Reads a Mystery. Artwork by Julienne Alexander. Check out our online shop.  Episode transcripts are posted on our website. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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worth your attention, and they call these series essentials. This month, they recommend Wondery's Ghost Story, a seven-part series that follows journalist Tristan Redman as he tries to get to the bottom of a ghostly presence in his childhood home. His investigation takes him on a journey involving

homicide detectives, ghost hunters, and even psychic mediums, and leads him to a dark secret about his own family. Check out Ghost Story, a series essential pick, completely ad-free on Apple Podcasts. So my death certificate says NSO certified true copy of death certificate issued to Elizabeth Greenwood.

And then I have an accompanying police report that details the accident. It says both vehicles suffered severe damages. The driver of the Innova, which is the car that slammed into me, was rushed to the nearby San Juan de Dios Hospital, as well as Ms. Greenwood, which later proclaimed dead on arrival. How did it feel to hold your own death certificate? Oh my gosh. Holding my own death certificate felt incredibly eerie. I don't think I had really fully processed or comprehended what that experience would be like. government document that stated my birthday and my death day and the time of my death and, you know, next of kin, all of these little boxes that my life had become and just seeing it all reduced in that kind of way, you know, in something that would just be filed in a bureaucrat's desk. It was very unnerving and unsettling,

and I felt very sure that I did not want to die that day. This is Elizabeth Greenwood. She's 33 years old, lives in Brooklyn, and died in 2013. On paper, anyway. As an experiment, I wanted to see how far I could get if I were to fake my own death. Is it possible to kill off this part of myself that, say, has a lot of debt,

or, you know, in the cases of other people who are facing jail time or who have had marital indiscretions, these are all, you know, big motivations for faking your death. Why a person would want to disappear and try to start over, that's probably better answered by another show. We wondered about the practical aspects,

how to prepare, where to hide, and what not to do. And once you start thinking about these logistics, it's hard to stop. How much does it cost to fake your own death? The price I heard quoted to me, if you wanted to fake your death somewhere like the Philippines, including, you know, getting your cadaver, getting your documents, you know, soup to nuts, the whole thing, about $5,000. Huh. Which doesn't seem like a tremendous amount of money if you think about it. Elizabeth Greenwood wanted to find out herself.

Is it really that easy? So she bought a plane ticket to the Philippines and started asking around. Not to single out the Philippines, but it's one that I heard mentioned again and again. And I'd read newspaper articles dating back, you know, even to the 80s, mentioning these black market morgues in Manila where people would go in and, you know, purchase a body, an unclaimed body, to then cremate, try to pass off as yourself, and collect insurance. She tapped into a world that most of us have never even thought about, how to fake your own death. And it turns out that the practicalities, buying a fake police report, a death certificate, and even finding a body, that's the easy part.

That just takes money. The real challenge is life after death. It's awfully hard to leave yourself behind, no matter how badly you might want to. I'm Phoebe Judge. This is Criminal. There are lots of how-to guides on how to fake your own death. How to Disappear Completely and Never Be Found, from 1985, basically romanticizes the idea of ditching your wife and running off with your mistress to live in the Caribbean. There's an even stranger book, Vanishing Point, How to Disappear in America Without a Trace, which is a whole section on gold mining

as a, quote, way to make an honest living while remaining invisible to society. Those books have cult followings, but they're outdated. It's a lot harder to fake your own death when your phone, your computer, and even your TV seem to know exactly what you want before you even ask. And all we know about faking your own death, we've learned from people who failed at it.

Because if you're successful, everyone thinks you're dead. You can't practice faking your own death. There's no kind of dry run you can do, which is part of the difficulty. So the how-tos are all kind of gleaned from people's missteps and misfortunes and people who've gotten caught. Like John Darwin. He was just kind of your average Joe. He called he and his wife Mr. and Mrs. Boring. John Darwin was a corrections officer who dabbled in real estate on the side, but he wasn't that good at real estate and found himself in horrendous debt.

So he decided that he was worth more dead than alive, in his own words. So John Darwin came up with a plan. On March 21, 2002, he took a canoe down to the beach in front of his house. Neighbors saw him paddle off and didn't notice anything out of the ordinary. But then, when he didn't show up for work, his wife Anne called the police. After 16 hours of searching, rescuers and helicopters and Coast Guard boats had only found a paddle. The next day, pieces of John's canoe were found on the beach. The search slowed, and John Darwin was presumed dead. Here's what really happened.

John jumped out of his canoe and swam to shore, where his wife was waiting to drive him to the train station one town over. From there, he took a long train ride north. In the meantime, his wife Anne was working on claiming pension policies in his name, life insurance policies, selling off the homes, releasing the equity that they'd had. John camped out on the beach for a few weeks, and then he actually went back to his hometown. He gave himself the name Carl Fennec and moved into the he actually went back to his hometown. He gave himself the name Carl Fennec and moved into the apartment right next door to his wife. He pretended to be her

tenant. He did have this very elaborate disguise. He walked with a stoop and a limp and a walking stick and dark glasses. He told me that he would actually pass, you know, old colleagues on the street when he was supposed to be dead. He once passed his own father when he was out in his full regalia. But, you know, police officers and other people were still poking around the house for, you know, over a year since his disappearance. So he would spend most of the day out walking out of the house. And he and his wife, Anne, worked out this code that if he came back and if he saw the curtains from the living room window hanging down, that meant that there were police officers around. If they were tied back, it meant the coast was clear and he could come in.

John would use a secret passageway to sneak into his wife's bedroom. After they'd settled into a convincing routine, and the case was no longer front-page news, John and Anne began to enjoy themselves, just like any other retired couple. They traveled, he got a fake passport, and they visited more than a dozen countries. Eventually, they found some land in Panama and wanted to buy it and open an eco-canoing resort. It's already a headache to buy any piece of real estate, all the more so when you're not a real person. But he thought he had a way to get around it. Almost six years after John died, he walked into a UK police station and said,

I think I'm a missing person. Police believed he'd suffered from amnesia. His wife told reporters it was a miracle. But then, a photograph surfaced of John and Anne and a real estate agent, smiling on a website called Move to Panama. The date is printed right on the photo, three years after John's death. That amnesia excuse crumbled pretty quickly. It was a tabloid sensation, and the town where John had hid so long, Seton Carew, became known as Seton Canoe. I caught up with John just after he had gotten out back in Seton Carew, where he was still living. And he's, you know, widely known and somewhat admired as the canoe man there. That's what they call him.

He's kind of a folk hero in some ways who tried to, you know, get one over to the banks who, in a lot of people's opinions, were always screwing the little guy. John and Ann were each sentenced to almost six years in prison for insurance fraud. They were also ordered to repay the more than £500,000 that Anne had received in life insurance and pension payouts. This is arguably the greatest motivator for faking your own death, the money that comes along with it. There are lots of ways you can get in trouble if you get caught, purchasing counterfeit documents, wasting the Coast Guard's time,

but there is no law against pretending you're dead. You get in trouble when you start making people pay for it. In 2005, Patrick McDermott, most famous for having been Olivia Newton-John's on-and-off boyfriend, had just filed for bankruptcy and was in trouble with the courts for not paying child support. He chartered a fishing boat in Los Angeles called The Freedom and made it look like he had drowned. But his debts made his disappearance look pretty suspicious. So a group of investigators hired by the TV show Dateline NBC

set up a website to the effect of findpatrickmcdermott.com, where people could contribute tips and sightings and information about Mr. McDermott's whereabouts. So they were monitoring the web traffic very closely, and they noticed a cluster of centralized IP addresses, all hailing from the same town outside Puerto Vallarta, Mexico. So they just followed this trail of breadcrumbs, and lo and behold, there was Patrick McDermott. Vanity, huh? You want to know what people are saying about you. Yeah, I mean, I think I would.

I don't think I could stop myself. Oh, I would, for sure. If it's that question between, you know, would you rather be invisible or fly, I'd always want to be invisible. I just want to know. But he did it the way that so many people, that was so interesting. Most people who fake their own deaths do this by drowning, right? A lot of the people who get caught faking their deaths do stage a water accident. So when you fake your death, one of the problems

that you would encounter is that you have to make it appear that you are dead, but you still have to take your own body with you. So you have this problem of what to do about the body. So when we think about this, what kind of accidents are, you know, would happen where you wouldn't need to necessarily produce a body, we all think, oh, you know, stage of drowning, and we all think we're Jason Bourne. Well, that is one of the quickest ways to get caught faking your death. Law enforcement usually just doesn't believe it because bodies typically materialize usually within a few days. And especially if you've found yourself in some trouble recently, there's going to be a question,

why didn't this body wash up? So drownings, while it seems like it would be an ideal, is actually, will inevitably raise some red flags. What's the best way to do it? So what I heard time and again people suggest is going for a hike and never coming back because lots of people, unfortunately, do disappear in this country hiking annually. So it is something that happens. And again, it's open-ended.

No one knows quite what happened. Did you get kidnapped? Did you tumble down this ravine? Were you eaten by a mountain lion? So sadly, you know, it does seem more believable that way. Or it plays into these tropes of women being captured, you know, against their will. So again, it's a more open-ended scenario. But women really don't fake their deaths too much. Or if they do, they don't get caught.

So it's a question that has perplexed me for years now. Either women do not fake their deaths as much, which would be understandable because I think that a mother leaving her children to think that she had died, it maybe doesn't seem as in line with how women are conditioned to behave and how we expect women to behave. The alternate theory that I believe, or at least want to believe, is that women fake their deaths just as much as men, perhaps even more, but they're just better at it. They don't talk about it as much. They're better at keeping a lower profile and not necessarily needing to regale people with the tale of their criminal genius. Women are better at everything.

This is Steve Rombaum. If you're trying to disappear, it's his job to make it very, very difficult for you to succeed. If you want to be a successful missing person, if you want to disappear successfully, fake your death successfully, you've got to be on the job every minute of every day for the rest of your life. It's a real job. It's a real job. You're never safe. Right. You know, I can make a thousand mistakes if I'm hunting for you and still find you. If you make one mistake, you're finished. I'll spot it. I'll catch you. Support for Criminal comes from Apple Podcasts. Each month, Apple Podcasts highlights one series worth your attention, and they call these series essentials. This month, they recommend Wondery's

Ghost Story, a seven-part series that follows journalist Tristan Redman as he tries to get to the bottom of a ghostly presence in his childhood home. His investigation takes him on a journey involving homicide detectives, ghost hunters, and even psychic mediums, and leads him to a dark secret about his own family. Check out Ghost Story, a series essential pick, completely ad-free on Apple Podcasts.

Hey, it's Scott Galloway, and on our podcast, Pivot, we are bringing you a special series about the basics of artificial intelligence. We're answering all your questions. What should you use it for? What tools are right for you? And what privacy issues should you ultimately watch out for? And to help us out, we are joined by Kylie Robeson, the senior AI reporter for The Verge,

to give you a primer on how to integrate AI into your life. So tune into AI Basics, How and When to Use AI, a special series from Pivot sponsored by AWS, wherever you get your podcasts. Steve Rombaum is hired by families and also by insurance companies. And he says you should never believe someone is dead until you've seen their body. You're the guy someone calls and says, I need to find. Yes. Yes. I get a lot of cases from other investigators, occasionally from law enforcement. And also I work in the other direction too. I teach undercover agents how not to be found out, how to live within their new persona. He says it's not about being tough or sneaky.

It's about being incredibly careful and good at seeing yourself through the eyes of everyone around you. What books you read, what movies you watch, do you like dogs or cats? Are you a left-winger or a right-winger? You know, are you straight, gay? Do you have some unique habit or hobby? All of that is in what I call your permanent record. It's in marketing files and it's in the internet. And when I'm hunting for somebody who I believe has faked their death or who has, in my opinion, inappropriately disappeared

and I want to look for you, I'm going to get all of that information and I'm going to use it to focus in on anybody that looks like you. I wonder if you ever think when you hear the backstory from the son or the wife wonder if you ever think, when you hear the backstory from the son or the wife, if you ever think, well, maybe this guy should just be left alone.

Just let him disappear. I feel bad for the guys. Let them live in peace. I will tell you that I've done cases where I've met the family members and I thought... I'd run too. Oh, yeah. I'd run too. Absolutely. Let's pretend I need to get away. I need to disappear. How should I do it so that you don't

find me? Okay. How old are you? 33. Okay. So you have parents? Yes. Okay. Could you survive never seeing your parents again? Because I can assure you they're going to be watched and they're going to be watched in ways you can't even imagine. Yes. Let's say yes. Okay. Do you have any things that you just love to do? Do you have any habits or hobbies that you're obsessed about?

I like to take walks. Okay, well, taking walks, a lot of people take walks. Okay. What about degrees? Do you care about ever being able to use your degrees? No, they haven't done me any good so far. You and everybody else. So the first thing you have to do is you have to pick up and go.

And you have to already have your new identity in hand. And it has to be an identity that's been alive for a while. You can't just suddenly become Lauren Bacall tomorrow. By the way, what do you want to call yourself? Oh, that's a good question. I mean, is the right thing to do to choose a name that's just common? I think you wouldn't want a wild name. I will say that a common name is a really good defense against a lot of investigative tools. If you are Jose Rodriguez, you're a nightmare for investigators. Okay. So how about my name is Jane Smith? All right. We could do better than that. Just for the purposes of the scenario,

let's call you Roxanne. Okay. Great. So as Roxanne, where are you going to live? I would think I would need to go somewhere where I could get by with the language. So I would think I'd try to get out of the country. Maybe Canada? Okay. Canada is a very good choice. Canada is a very good choice. So you go to Canada, and how do you cross the border?

Well, I love to think about this when I can't sleep at night. I actually think about it all the time. I think I maybe take a canoe. I really do think about it. Okay. Okay, so you take a canoe, and when you get to the other shore, what do you do? Do you take a bus? Do you have a car waiting?

Have you pre-positioned the car? Do you have a bicycle there? If you have a car, in whose name is it registered? What driver license are you using to drive the car? Yep. Do you already have an apartment, or are you going to check into a hotel? If you check into a hotel, they want a credit card and a form of ID, unless it's a really, really bad hotel. So this is when things get complicated. Immediately. Immediately.

You also have to worry about the mundane things, like how to get your prescription medications, what happens to your cat. But Steve says the absolute number one thing people can't prepare for is walking away from the people they love. That's big mistake number one. They don't change their life. They keep in touch with their old friends. They don't move out of town, or they move to a town that we can figure out that they're in.

And, you know, it's not necessarily a mistake. It's, you know, it's being human. You love your parents. You love your kids. You can't conceive of not going to a Cubs game. Well, all right, maybe a Yankees game, maybe not a Cubs game. Well, all right, maybe a Yankees game, maybe not a Cubs game. But, you know, you can't conceive

of giving up your entire life and everything and everybody you care about. And that's what you have to do to successfully disappear. You've got to give up everything that makes you, you. A lot of people go into this thinking that, you know, I'll be able to leave. I'll be able to keep a low profile, but I'll still to be people watching your mom every day,

every year on her birthday to see if you're going to make that call and to find out where you are. So again, it's really taking into account all of these considerations. And also just like your poor mother. Oh my gosh, of course. I mean, I always joke that, you know, I didn't fake my death because my mom, if I did, my mom would have killed me. Like I'd actually be dead now. How long do you think you could last before reaching out to someone? Oh, gosh, not even like a week. That's something I really realized when it comes down to it. You know, it's a pretty lonely life. Where is your death certificate? I would be so scared of that thing that I think I would shred it or something. I wouldn't want to be anywhere near it.

Yeah, like a kind of bad luck totem. You know, everyone always says, if you die anytime soon, no one's going to believe it. So that's good. We'll see. You can see Elizabeth's death certificate in her book, Playing Dead, A Journey Through the World of Death Fraud. Criminal is produced by Lauren Spohr, Nadia Wilson, and me. Audio mix by Rob Byers. Alice Wilder is our intern. Special thanks to Russ Henry and Mary Helen Montgomery.

Julian Alexander makes original illustrations for each episode of Criminal. You can see them at thisiscriminal.com. We've also got links to Elizabeth Greenwood's book and Steve Rombom's investigative agency. Original music by Blue Dot Sessions. If you're interested in sponsoring Criminal, send an email to sponsor at radiotopia.fm. Criminal is recorded in the studios of North Carolina Public Radio, WUNC. We're a proud member of Radiotopia from PRX, a collection of the best podcasts around.

Shows like Benjamin Walker's Theory of Everything. For the past few months, Theory of Everything has been running a series on surveillance, fake news, and Russian conspiracy theories. It's become more about the collecting of data and selling the data, and for an advertiser, buying placements based on that data, then it's been marketing. That's what really leads to this change in self-perceptions. That's what is resulting in behavioral change beyond just interested in ad, but it's actually really changing how you see yourself. Face recognition systems are not designed to give no for an answer. There is some paranoia involved,

but it's like a healthy, realistic kind of paranoia. You can find a link to the show at radiotopia.fm. Go listen. Radiotopia is supported by the Knight Foundation and MailChimp, celebrating creativity, chaos, and teamwork. And thanks to Adzerk for providing their ad-serving platform to Radiotopia. I'm Phoebe Judge. This is Criminal. Radiotopia.

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