Scamtown - Knit to Death | 10

Episode Date: October 7, 2024

An indie yarn maker’s popularity skyrockets on social media platforms in the mid-2000s and her online store is booming—until customers start to complain about diminished quality and delays in orders. Then her shop sends an email claiming she's died. But … has she? Take a peek into the world of “pseudocide”—faking one's own death—and the lengths people will go to in order to disappear.Scamtown is an Apple Original podcast, produced by FunMeter. Follow and listen on Apple Podcasts.http://apple.co/Scamtown

We've dealt into all types of fraud, financial insecurity, even scams motivated by revenge, love, or obsession. But this one is a little different for us. Yes, death. As in, a mysterious passing upends a close-knit community. Pun intended, we are talking about knitters. But what happens if people don't believe you're dead? Join us on a strange journey that involves high-quality yarn,

online sleuthing, and zombie sightings. Welcome to Scam Town, an Apple original podcast produced by Fun Meter. I'm Brian Lazzarte.. I'm Brian Lizarte. And I'm James Lee Hernandez. We're filmmakers who've been trading stories now for quite some time, obsessed and compelled to bring some of our favorites to life. We love a surprising heist, an intricate scam, or just pulling back the curtain on something you think you know. Entering a world that's stranger than fiction and writing that line between comedy and tragedy. This is Scam Town,

a place for our favorite stories that do just that. Today's episode, Knit to Death. The birth of social media was a weird time. It wasn't that long ago, but it's hard to remember life before it came on the scene. Facebook today opened up its social networking site to the masses. Previously, only college or high school students or businesses could join Facebook. But now anyone with a valid email address can join. You had Facebook, YouTube, MySpace, Reddit, Tumblr, all launching within just a few years.

Sell-it-yourself shopping sites like Etsy and eBay were just getting started too. As the ability to connect was getting easier, people who might have only had the option to do so in person or via email or blog were finding ways to create new kinds of communities. This was especially true for knitters. What was once considered an old-timey hobby, conjuring up images of silver-haired ladies sitting around knitting circles, was becoming popular.

You might even say cool. An activity you can do while waiting or watching something. It even appealed to celebrities. Meryl Streep, Julia Roberts, Catherine Zeta-Jones, all owned knitting needles. Oh, and Russell Crowe? For many, many years, people in the knitting fraternity have tried to enjoy me in their soft bosom. But he's not a knitter, though he says he learned how to knit as a child. These days, the craft yarn industry breaks in at least a billion dollars a year in the U.S. alone.

James, remember those Hey Girl yarn memes with Ryan Gosling? Oh, you mean the ones that are like, Hey girl, can I just say that you lounging on the couch wearing pajamas for the second day in a row while knitting is so sexy. Or, hey girl, yes, I think you should absolutely get that yarn ball tattoo. Or, hey girl- Yeah, yeah, yeah. I got it, James. Well, you might remember there was a knitting scene in that film Lars and the Real Girl, which is what kicked off that series of yarn-inspired memes. So knitters are stitching, and with the help of the internet, they're also bitching.

Bearing witness to this is talk show host Seth Meyers. Don't worry about the knitters. What are they going to do, hunt you down? Well, they did. He felt their wrath after conflating crocheting and knitting. And as we've established, they are foul-mouthed. My Twitter feed is a cesspool. A lot of the early drama among the knitters themselves

was about the right way to knit something, or who invented a specific design. I talk about craft-related drama on this channel, and today I have got a story for you. I'm Em, made in the moment, Emma in the moment. Those are all my names. Emma's channel on YouTube, Dissecting and Reporting on Yarn Drama, has more than 100,000 followers. Oh, that person copied me. That person stole my idea.

And sometimes those just sort of fizzle out. And other times those have pretty public back and forths. But no one knew the online drama that was about to take on a real-life mystery. It all began in 2006, when two very early yarn influencers go crazy over the handmade merch of an independent yarn seller on a show called Lime and Violet, a popular knitting podcast at the time.

I plan to break my yarn diet this week, and I have a very good reason for it. What's the reason? Mystical creation. Oh, yes. Mystical Creations Yarn, or MCY for short, was owned and operated by Danielle Glunt, who had been working and hand-dyeing yarn for several years from her home in Edgewood, New Mexico. Pick a color you like. Pick a yarn type that you like from any of the, I want to say it's like 30 or 40 different yarn types she has. This podcast plug has an almost

Oprah-like effect, at least in the yarn community. MCY's business goes through the roof. Mary Bethel, who goes by the handle Seahag Mary on knitting forums, loved MCY's merch from the start. Their yarns were so colorful and pretty. So it was an easy choice for me to start buying it. And it was very affordable too. It didn't hurt that MCY's yarn was priced to move at about $20 a skein, or unit of yarn. Now, thousands of customers strong and growing, a surge of orders made it busy enough that Glunt had a higher assistance. Here's Emma again. They were doing kind of unique color designs on the yarn, especially for the time. And as soon as they were given a little bit of exposure, then it started spreading by word of mouth. And having not seen things like that before,

want to know where it was from. So things are going great. The initial order from Mystical Creations wasn't even correctly sent. Well, actually, not for long. Bethel says what she received in the mail sometimes didn't match what she ordered. I ordered two skeins of yarn, and I think I ended up with four skeins. Now, no one would complain about getting free yarn, but this seemed a little different, like a mistake.

And customers were noticing other problems, too. Messy ones. I bought red and green and my fingers were red and green from the dye running and the knitting needles would take on a little bit of that dye tint too. Avid knitter Carrie Score, aka Carrie Craft Geek, has been reporting on fiber offenses on her YouTube channel for years. She remembers seeing someone post a photo of a shawl they made, and it looked like some sort of crafting crime scene. They had this picture up of them washing their shawl, and the water was just red from all the dye that was coming out.

It was like a bloodbath. And that's when people started to realize like, okay, something is off. Like the yarn's taking a really long time to get here. And then when it shows up, it's bleeding a lot. That's not, that's not supposed to happen. We're used to people posting on Yelp, but this first person let me share my experience about why something sucks was also new at the time. And MC Wise customers weren't just giving the equivalent of one-star ratings, they were able to go into intricate detail on Ravelry, aka the Facebook of knitting. Just to give you a flavor of some of those comments,

here are a few of those posts being read out loud. You'd think that if you couldn't handle a lot of business, you would just list what you can handle. Mystical Creations has the worst customer service. All of it adds up to a dire list of serious issues. As the negative complaints about incorrect orders, bleeding yarn, late shipping, and inconsistent service came flooding in, MCY announced it would be closing its Etsy shop to focus solely on their online business. And the complaints continued. If you get a reply, it's curt and rude and a lack of personal responsibility for her business. When I contacted Danielle, I was told that it must have been stolen because I live in such a bad neighborhood. If a product is paid for, the

seller is obligated to either provide the product or refund the money because otherwise it's called stealing. It sounds to me like they're saying you're shit out of luck. I doubt any of us will see any refunds. Pretty sad. It was just one negative comment after the next,

usually followed by some not soso-helpful response from MCY. Who is this strange person who is coming up with all of these excuses and stories instead of just saying, whoopsie, I made a mistake and I'm sorry. MCY customers who never received their orders or money back started to file official complaints. Some did with the Better Business Bureau, the New Mexico Attorney General's office, and even some with the FBI's Internet Crime Complaint Center. And suddenly, one day, there's this email that goes out basically saying that Daniel Blunt is sick. The family didn't know about it.

They're shutting down the business and they're going to do their best to fulfill orders. Here's some of that bombshell message from a sibling. Due to catastrophic effects of a debilitating illness, the company doing business as Mystical Creations Yarn has been forced to permanently shut down operations. My sister is trying her best to fill all orders and every order will be out this week. If anyone would like to continue with her journey or send prayers, please email me and I will see that she gets them when she returns home. Dying yarn, as you can see, has been her passion for years and I don't think that she will give it up if she comes out of this. Sincerely, the family, Mystical Creations Yarn. Thank you ever so much for shopping with us. It's a sad message. Things are clearly taking a dark turn. Two weeks after that message, a new email goes out. This time from her sister,

Margaret, saying that Danielle died minutes earlier of cancer. Nobody knew what was really happening. I think there was confusion. I think there was concern. There was a smattering of sympathy expressed. She passed away over the weekend, and I'm sure things are a fiasco at this point. Business issues aside, she leaves a husband and two children behind. Immediately after her death announcement, online sleuths started digging and questioning it, like yarn conspiracy theorists. One Raveler finds a memorial for Danielle

on another site that allegedly predates the I'm writing this seconds after her death email. An insurance investigator, who also happens to be a knitter, says he's going to hunt down the truth. Some propose organizing a fact-finding trip to her house. Others compile a list of businesses believed to be fronts for the defunct MCY. Then, after about a month of a smattering of sympathy and a lot of doubt, something happens. A local in Edgewood, New Mexico, near MCY's headquarters, was supposedly just moseying down the supermarket aisle. And guess who she spots?

Hey, I see Danielle around all the time. This is a small town. Yes. The Danielle, the dead former owner of MCY, is just grocery shopping at Walmart. Not as a ghost or a zombie, but real life in the flesh Danielle. This news of her death was a sham, but this was just one eyewitness account. Then came a few others. A neighbor said they saw her drying yarn in her yard. Then a payment service rep claimed they spoke to her on the phone. Now, were these just conspiracies? Or was she really spotted? And what's so funny about that is one of the little pieces of lore around this story is that Danielle Blunt was seen at Walmart with dye on her hands.

With dye on her hands. Danielle Glunt getting spotted in a Walmart stained with dye got us wondering a lot about fake death, also known as pseudocide. According to the Oxford English Dictionary, the term first started to be used in the 1950s, though faking your own death has been around considerably longer. Attempts go way back. More recently, in the 20th century, ceremonial magician Alistair Crowley did it to get away from a woman he was with in the 1930s.

And Ken Kesey of One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest fame did it in the 1960s to try and avoid serving time for pot possession. But it is such a drastic decision. Like, what motivates people to do this? And can you even get away with it? I am the world's foremost expert in pseudocide, whether I like it or not. Elizabeth Greenwood wrote a popular book called Plain Dead, a journey through the world of death fraud.

The New York Times Book Review called it a disappearing act for the fraudulent minded. Greenwood says her interest in death faking started with a random conversation over dinner about her sky-high student loans. I was like, holy shit, what have I done? What have I done? I'm never going to be able to pay these back. I think I'm going to need to, you know, find a nice country, no extradition policy and just slip through the cracks. Or, he said, my friend I was talking to, he said, or you could fake your death. And he said that very offhandedly, but I was totally fascinated by that idea. She got a little obsessed with it. I was just totally captivated and had to know everything. I think it really kind of captures the best and worst of human narcissism. You know that there's a fact as hard and cold as death, but we humans are like,

ha ha ha, not so. I am going to crack this. In an attempt to crack it herself, she dove into research, speaking to an insurance fraud investigator who tipped her off to the kind of red flags they look for in suspected fake death cases. Greenwood ended up traveling to the Philippines, one of the countries she was told was a hotspot for death fakery. I got connected with some fixers on the ground. They play both sides of the investigation. Depending on who's paying them will work for the police or the insurance company, and in my case, the fraudster.

A payday is a payday. While there, Greenwood walked in the footsteps of someone trying to prove they're dead. If I had to think of an analogy to this, it's like the imitation crab of death. Yeah, it's kind of like Tofurky or even worse, turkey bacon. You can go to the office of the medical examiner, to the morgue, because often what happens is that there are many unclaimed bodies. So it's kind of claiming a body that roughly fits your specifications, but often it's like immediately cremating it

and trying to pass off those remains as you, the fraudster. Oh, this is so weird. Like you just go claim a body like it's lost and found. I don't think that there's a morgue that's not creepy. Right. Like the four seasons of morgues still sucks. People would also sometimes submit video footage of the funeral,

where they would hire kind of like local people to play the part of mourners. But Greenwood was told these homegoing services aren't always what they seem. You know, this looks like a really big funeral. People were coming up to the casket, paying their respects. But as he looked more closely at that video, he realized it was the same like dozen people circulating throughout. Now, Danielle of MCY didn't have a funeral. But a few weeks after her death, someone posts an obituary to Ravelry.

The community quickly realizes it's actually a pay-to-print death notice for someone else entirely. They also connect this mystery poster's IP address to one linked to mystical creations. And remember her sister Margaret? Well, our sleuths found no such sister, but did discover Danielle's full name. Danielle Margaret Glunt. The mortality shenanigans didn't stop there. One of the many odd things about this story is that within a short period of time around Danielle's fake death, other people in the yarn community also allegedly

committed pseudocide. Early on when that first email came out, somebody even said, this is really painful that she's claiming to be ill when she's not because we have somebody in our community, Mama Monkey, who is ill. And we're going through the pain of that. Later on, they come to find out that Mama Mookie had faked illness, faked her death. And in the mid-2010s, a fiber arts influencer named Megan Guinness Ryan faked a series of tragic deaths in her family. Turns out her name wasn't real either, but she was a genuine fraudster. And a yarn dyer known as Goth Socks,

who was also overloaded with orders, said she died for 10 minutes following a prescription overdose, which some people in the craft world speculated was a lie to garner sympathy from jilted customers. It was weird, like something was going around, like mono back in the day. These cases have become so known in the community

that it's kind of a running joke that if you need to escape or get out of something, just fake your own death. Elizabeth Greenwood says, at the very least, to get over the pseudocide finish line, you're at least going to need a death certificate. In my fake, fake death, I died in a car accident. You know, traffic in Manila is very scary.

And it was just like a pretty straightforward kind of T-bone, death on impact kind of car accident. Despite the fact that the paperwork was bogus, Greenwood says the experience was still spooky. Holding those documents in my hands, seeing, you know, just in cold black and white, the time of death and my name and age and next of kin. I mean, it's totally chilling.

While exploring pseudocide, she learned that death fakers have a few things in common. Someone who has kind of outsized ambitions for themselves and will sometimes get themselves into hot water financially and legally. On the other side, it's people hoping to profit off their death. And there is definitely overlap between those two. Which certainly brings Glenn's case to mind, since most of the community suspected her of packing it in because of mounting debt or another panicky situation. It's almost a shame that she and the other Yarn Death fakers didn't have experts to consult with. Like Frank M. Ahern.

I was really good at it. He's one of the experts Greenwood consulted for her research. After years of tracking people down as a skip tracer, he became a master of how not to be found. If you contact me, life is not going well. That sounds like a catchy slogan. In pictures and on YouTube, nine times out of ten, Ahern is sporting an all-black outfit and dark shades. What one might call hitman chic.

It also serves to create an air of mystery about the man you call when there's nowhere left to turn. I had one guy, hi, listen, I'm being indicted on this interstate trafficking charge. You think you'd help me? You know, tedjones at gmail.com. I'm like, are you kidding me? He wrote a bestselling book about it called, naturally, How to Disappear, Erase Your Digital Footprints, Leave False Trails, and Vanish Without a Trace. In the more than decades since it was published, Ahern has become the authority on how to go poof. And he's got opinions on pseudocide. The dumbest thing people do is think they're deaf. And, you know,

law enforcement used to fall for the whole fake your death routine, but they're savvy today. They don't just go, oh, he's dead. And as we've seen, that doesn't stop people

from trying. In Danielle Glunt's case, she continued to be spotted around New Mexico. They came to be known in the fiberverse as zombie sightings. Here's Emma reading one of the Ravelry posts from the time. A woman claiming to be Danielle Glunt, presenting Danielle Glunt's driver's license with an address

on Futures Road as proof of ID, was seen and overheard today depositing checks at a neighborhood branch bank. She was driving a brand new car with dealer stickers and tags still on it, I might add. What's interesting is that there's no actual law making pseudocide a crime. Which I guess kind of makes sense. But some of the things you do in addition to it, like doctoring a death certificate or submitting that life insurance claim, are illegal. Ahern says there's no end to the rogue's gallery of examples of people who thought they were smart and then messed up. Like John Darwin makes the most successful disappearance ever. So he came up with a plan. Having run up enormous debts through incompetence,

he struck upon the brilliant idea of faking his death through a canoeing tragedy right here on the beach by his home. Darwin, aka Canoe Man, was able to pull off his fake death for five and a half years. And then he goes back to the UK and he says, I lost my memory. I didn't know where I was. And somebody found a picture of him on Google images down in Panama, you know, with his wife. It's worth making a distinction between attempting to fake your death in the physical world versus online. Elizabeth Greenwood says it's all about where you have the biggest presence. I think the principal difference between someone who fakes their death in the world versus someone who fakes their death online, I think it really

comes down to a question of where do you feel most alive? And in the case of Danielle Glunt, it seems like this online community was a big part of her life. So that makes sense to me. It is the stage upon which you would fake your death. Glenn's case also reveals the connections that some people feel towards someone they don't know online. You know, the kind of intimacy that's forged in these communities makes people feel that they have a stake and a say in what's going on in someone's life who they've maybe never met in person. Some people wanted Danielle Glunt to come out and say, I'm alive, I'm sorry. And they were never going to get that. Keri Skora says her true motivations were never clear. I always sort of had this question about Danielle, which is,

did she start shady or did she just end up in a shady place? And I don't know the answer to that. We've heard theories, seen clues, but ultimately the question remains, more than 15 years later, what really happened to Danielle? Ideally, we'd be able to ask her ourselves. We wanted to find Danielle and ask her what happened, or find anyone who might have more answers. So, we started making lots of calls, including to her family, to see if they could help. Hello?

And we're able to reach her oldest son, Zachary, named after his father. Yeah, so my name is Zachary Glunt. I am the son of Danielle Glunt. Up to this point, we've really only had one perspective of Danielle from everyone else. What Zachary shared with us was a totally different side. Opening up about his mom's love of knitting and how he grew up surrounded by yarn. You would walk into our house, like let's say like the kitchen, right? Like you couldn't even put a cup on the counter. There would be just yarn everywhere.

Or if you would drive by our house, you would see racks full of yarn drying outside for days on end. He says the family business kept them all busy. We lived and breathed yarn. I'd come home and help her dye yarn or help spin it on the wheels. There'd be times where she'd pick us up from elementary school and we got to rush to the post office and get this stuff shipped out. And it'd be like boxes and bags and bags and bags of just yarn that we're shipping out at a time. It would be an exciting time for any small business to see a boom in demand. But behind the scenes, Zachary says his mom

was struggling with more than a backlog of orders. So my mom was diagnosed with bipolar disorder and it got really out of control. And there would be times I could remember as a kid, my mom would just stay in bed for days on end, wouldn't get up. The Glunt sought professional help, but he says life at the house

became more and more unpredictable. And all of a sudden it's like, oh, you owe a thousand dollars. And she bought purses and shoes or clothes or what have you, you know, and it's like, okay, well, you didn't have the money to buy that stuff. And things kept going downhill for the business and especially the family. Zachary says that in 2008, the year of Danielle's fake death announcement, he was 14 years old and wasn't aware of what happened. I didn't even know that the fake death thing

was even a thing. I don't know who came up with that idea, to be honest. But Zachary was aware that his dad fired the remaining employees from MCY and pleaded with them not to come back, even if Danielle asked. Whether it was his mom's idea to fake her death or not, he said, for everyone's sake, it needed to be final. We're cutting the dragon's head off and it's not able to come back. We're not doing this. Finally, MCY did close.

And his parents, who married each other twice, got divorced for the last time. His mom moved out, but things didn't get any easier. She just pissed away my senior year and wasn't there, and it broke my heart. But, you know, excuse me. It was unfortunate. You know, something as simple as, like, you know, she didn't even have a car. Her 18-year-old son gives her a car, and she still doesn't show up to your gate. That's down the road. So it was rough. About a year later, Zachary says his mom was diagnosed with stage four colon cancer.

And she died before his 20th birthday. Maybe she touched some people's lives that I don't know about. I hope that my mother is remembered for being a person that wanted to, you know, see the yarn community grow. There's a short, real obituary in the Albuquerque Journal for Danielle with her remarried name, Danielle Packard. It says she died at 43 years old on January 24th, 2014, and that she loved life and will be missed by all. I guess my biggest thing is I apologize and that she loved life and will be missed by all.

I guess my biggest thing is I apologize for all those people that, you know, you didn't get maybe your right order, you didn't get your reimbursement. You know, I hope people don't hold it against her, especially now that she's not even on this earth, right? We were also able to speak briefly with Danielle's ex-husband, Zach Glunt. His name was on some of MCY's business documents, including signing some of the business checks. But he says he wasn't involved in Danielle's pseudocide and that it was only recently that he learned how much attention this whole episode from their past received online. He did admit it was still painful, saying, quote, I don't know how someone from the dead is still ruining my life.

Which, I mean, it's genuinely sad. Truly complicated and painful. But Daniel's family certainly shed light on why someone might make such a drastic decision like faking their death. And how hard it is to know what might be going on with someone behind the scenes. It's worth mentioning here that several of the people we spoke to in the Yarn community said that the story took on a life of its own in the early days of social media.

And being lied to or taken advantage of made them a lot more skeptical about trusting sellers online. But in the years since, they've also wondered or worried about the real people involved. Hopefully this episode will help give some people closure. And I guess the takeaway from all of this would be life's going to throw you some curveballs and things aren't going to go your way. But the solution is never fake your own death.

Just don't do it. On the next episode, an escape plot, underdogs, and underwater hockey? We'll get the wool pool later, I assume. These guys, they must be pretty desperate to do what they've done. That's next week on ScamTown. ScamTown is an Apple original podcast produced by Fun Meter. New episodes come out each Monday. If you want to check out a few extras from our show, you can find us at Fun Meter Official on Instagram.

The show is hosted and executive produced by us. I'm Brian Lizarte. And I'm James Lee Hernandez. Kathleen Horan produced this episode. Mark Hay was our researcher. Our co-executive producers are Shannon Pence, Nicole Laufer, and Matt Kay. The show was edited and sound designed by Jude Brewer.

Final mixing by Ben Freer from Fiddle Leaf Sound. Music for the podcast was composed by James Newberry. Additional music by Five Alarm. Follow and listen on Apple Podcasts.