Stuff You Should Know - Faking Your Own Death: We All Do It, But Why?

Episode Date: May 20, 2025

Face it, when things get desperate we all consider faking our death as an easy way out. But what they don’t tell you in school is that it’s much harder than it looks, it’s way less glamorous, and you have to pull it off perfectly to not get caught.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

You're listening to an iHeart podcast. Welcome to Stuff You Should Know, a production of iHeart Radio. Hey and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh and there's Chuck and it's just us because we don't know where Jerry is, but that's okay because this is Stuff You Should Know. just us because we don't know where Jerry is, but that's okay because this is stuff you should know. Oh well, Jerry may have engaged in pseudoscience because she's so tired of working with us.

Yeah. And she didn't wanna tell us. Yeah. That's one reason somebody might wanna get out of their life or you know, not for real, but that's what pseudoscience is, is spaking your own death. Yeah, and that definitely does sound like something Jerry would do. Yeah, like she couldn't bring herself to tell us,

so she's like, well, maybe I could just disappear. Right. So yeah, pseudosight, I'd never known that before, but pseudosight is a different term for faking your own death. Like pseudo, like fake, and side, death. That's right. So I don't think side means death. I think it's a little worse than side, death. That's right. So I don't think side means death.

I think it's a little worse than that, but you get the point. And I don't remember what brought this up. I just had this idea to do this one. I don't remember what it was. But it turns out that there's like, this is a thing. It's not just something you see in the movies. Like a surprising amount, I don't want to say a lot, but a surprising amount of people have tried this.

And it's probable that even more people have tried it than we think because the only ones that we know about are the ones who got caught. Presumably there's plenty of people out there who tried this and was successful. Yeah, or tried it and failed, but didn't get caught. Okay, sure, yeah, that's a good point too. I hadn't thought about that one.

As you would say, there are three tranches. That's right. I wouldn't say that, because I love myself. No, but you're the tranche master. Oh, that's so like 2010. I forgot about that. Can you believe that was 15 years ago? Trunches were hot. Yeah, they were.

They were all a rage. So why would anybody do this, Chuck? I think we should start with that. Well, I mean, one of them I listed, Get Out of a Personal Relationship. I mean, I was kind of joking about Jerry, but, you know, it would be probably more like, I want to leave my family, you know, if it's a movie at least, although this happens in

real life, I want to leave my family. They're so boring. Yeah, and go set up another life with this new family that's going to solve all my problems. Right, that's how it works. It seems like the most common is probably a financial thing. You either have some huge debt you're trying to get out of, or you're trying to commit insurance fraud to get a big payout or something,

or you've embezzled from your company, or something like that. Yeah, apparently. So Olivia helped us out with this, and she found that there seems to have been an increase in pseudosides, or people getting caught trying their hand at pseudocide after the 2008 financial crisis. Yeah, that I mean that's speaking of tranches. So

another big one too is if you are about to be incarcerated for a very long time and happen to have let you out on bail, there's a higher likelihood that you're going to try this than say, you know, when you're gainfully employed and you're sitting around reading the newspaper fairly content. Yeah, for sure. Very sadly, of course, one of the reasons is like the sleeping with the enemy method, which is you're trying to escape some sort of abusive situation in your home,

whether it's a spouse or a family member or something like that. Right. Or you wanna frame your wife, like in the movie Double Jeopardy with Ashley Judd. Yeah, boy, is this 2007? You know what, this really feels like an earlier stuff you should know type episode, so let's do it.

Let's do it, let's do it. Tronches everywhere, Ashley Judd appearances. I will figure it out as we go along, okay? Yeah, our boss is just coming to us and saying that there's people that wanna put commercials on our podcast and we're saying, no, why would we ever do that? Yeah, and then the other people are saying, what's a podcast?

Exactly. So let's see, what else? Oh, I think this one's probably, it's pretty niche, but if you're a lottery winner and you have a bunch of family you don't care about that are coming out of the woodwork, you might try this as well. Yeah, that's true. And here's the thing, if you have that kind of dough, I mean, making yourself disappear and faking your own death is not cheap, as we'll see.

So it is definitely more common for people of great means to try this kind of thing. First of all, they may have the money to pull it off because it can be expensive to like really do it right these days. Or if you're the kind of person who, you know, defrauded someone or a company of millions and millions of dollars,

that puts you in a certain league. I've never had that opportunity to do something like that, for instance. Right, precisely. So yeah, it's just kind of a selection bias almost. Yeah, totally. Men also are more likely to try this, or at the very least are more likely to get caught

Yeah, and I could see that being the case rather than just being yeah more likely to do it and also Again, probably because of selection bias a little bit finance bros are Likelier than others to try this or at least to get caught to you. Yeah, that makes sense with just the risky sort of you know, maybe they got into that hot water because, you know, this deal that just couldn't be resisted or whatever because it's so much money, bro. Right.

It just didn't work out, bro. Here's another interesting thing is it is more common for people to come to the United States to, like, collect on an insurance policy, like if you're from another country, and then just go back to your home country. Yes, and you just mentioned insurance for the second or third time. People who work for insurance companies

are well aware of all of these things that we're rattling off and more. Oh yeah. Because as we'll see later on, there's a lot of stuff that you could do wrong that an insurance investigator is going to pick up on. We'll talk more about that, but that's a big part of this whole thing.

It's a big reason people do this, insurance fraud, and it's a big reason people get caught, insurance investigators. Yeah, for sure. And as we'll see, it's way more common for like the insurance company to hire somebody to find you rather than the cops to come after you because the cops are like, well, you know, surely no skin off my back. That's right.

And the insurance company is like, well, they just got millions of dollars from us, so we're going to do your job. Exactly. We should probably give a pretty big shout out at the outset here to Elizabeth Greenwood. She's an author. I think her day job is a creative writing professor at Columbia. But she wrote a book, which as far as I can tell

is the most exhaustive look at pseudosci, anyone's ever created. Her book was released in 2016ocide anyone's ever created. Her book was released in 2016. It's Playing Dead, A Journey Through the World of Death Fraud. And I guess she had a conversation with a friend about how she could get out of her student debt and somebody said you should fake your own death.

She said, you know, that's a great idea for a book and here we are, ipso facto, talking about it now. Yeah. And she actually went through part of the process just to actually go through it to see how hard or easy or expensive it was to write about it. She didn't go through with it, but she went as far as finding out where this is, you know, when you talk about something sort of unusual like this, it seems like there's always like, oh, well, you know, when you talk about something sort of unusual like this, it seems like there's always like, oh, well, you need to go to this place because they just got the market cornered on that, whether it's like, you know, Swiss bank accounts or

offshore accounts, you know, like they have it set up so you can do this kind of stuff. And apparently, that place for Pseudo side is the Philippines. Yeah. Who knew? For sure. That's another thing too. If you died in the Philippines, your insurance claim is going to get investigated

pretty thoroughly. Just because of that. Yeah, so Elizabeth Greenwood is not the first person to try this, but just based on her experience, she found that you can pretty easily find people who are more than happy to assist you with this for a fee, and a relatively cheap fee, especially considering the type of documentation you get. I think for a couple hundred dollars you can get an official death certificate from

the Filipino government. And that's a big part of why the Philippines is so, like, the center of all of this. Because you're not getting forged documents, you're getting false official documents. Because, you know, somebody's got a friend on the inside and they're taking bribes. And, like, so you're getting good actual documentation. It's just all based on falsehoods. But that's not it. It doesn't end there. Just hold your credit card for another second, because they're going to double this offer. Yeah. I mean, it's sort of like any service. They're like, well, if you just want the birth certificate, you can get that for a couple of hundred bucks. But that's probably not going to be enough these days. Back in the old days, that was probably all

you needed. It used to be way easier to get away with this kind of thing. Yeah, the driver's licenses didn't even have pictures on them. Yeah, exactly. It's nuts. But if you really want to go through with the second tier service, you can get a kit that may have a new identity for you. You could have a new passport in there, a new birth certificate, maybe something like that. Yeah. Or if you really want to go with the the deluxe package, you can spend, you

know, tens of thousands of dollars to get some, like almost like concierge service for someone who's like, I can erase your tracks, I can make it like you were never here, I can make sure you don't get caught, I can get people to, we can cook up a story and I can get witnesses to testify that they saw this car wreck and pulled your body out of the wreckage. And you know, we know people that work in morgues and hospitals and if you want to pay the money, we can really, really do this thing right. Yeah, we can get you an actual dead body.

You want a dead body? I can get you dead body by 3pm. Right. And that's gonna probably that's gonna sit in for you. Apparently, this really kind of drives it home. If there's a cadaver and you're not just missing presumed dead, that's definitely gonna help your pseudocide become successful.

Like you said, there's black market morgues that essentially if you're unidentified or unclaimed in the Philippines, there's a chance somebody's going to hang on to your body and you might be sold to fulfill someone's pseudoscience attempt. And it's not just the Philippines either. I saw at least one story here in Georgia, I think Coffee County, God knows where that

is, where this, I guess, undertaker at a funeral home had a ton of bodies that he supposedly buried that he was selling for this reason, or for other reasons, but also this was one of the things you could buy a body for. And even like a legitimate funeral home has an incentive to just kind of be like, yeah, it's nice to meet you, cousin Ed,

just give me the money and you can take this body, right? Okay, now I know where we did this. We did a video about this. Oh yeah? Yep, I knew we had done something, but I looked up the podcast and we did something, we did some kind of video on this because it may have just been centered around

the Coffee County thing. Because as soon as you said Coffee County, I was like, wait, there was a guy there that did this. So yeah, it is 2008. It is, all over again. We need to make this episode 12 minutes long. Oh, great. Here's my question, though.

The idea is that you get this body and have it cremated and you pass off those human remains or cremains, but how does that work with DNA? Like, why don't you, if that's the case, why can't you just or cremains. But how does that work with DNA? Like, why don't you, if that's the case, why can't you just get cremains? I think cremation destroys DNA pretty good. So why don't they just say, like,

here's a bag of teeth and ashes? Some people do. Okay. I don't, yeah, I think so Elizabeth Greenwood, this Filipino guys, I guess they're trying to upsell her. But she said that some, like, they offer not just a corpse, but a fake funeral. They'll stage a funeral, a real funeral,

but there's, like, the mourners there are paid. There's photographs of, you know, people at your funeral that if the insurance company asks for something like that to document it, you've got it. But she's like, this is all very unnecessary. Just like what you said. You just have the crem it. But she's like, this is all very unnecessary. Just like what you said. You just have the cremains and it's like, well, you know, what are you gonna do?

This is supposedly the dead person. It makes way more sense. It's way cheaper. It's way less of a hassle. And like I was saying, some legitimate funeral homes, like if the laws in your country say one of the roles you play is like taking over custody of like unidentified people, like say a homeless person who dies, you're responsible for giving them a respectful burial. If you go to one of these places and say, oh yeah, that's my cousin. And they're going to be like, here, give me some money and you can handle

everything from there. Yeah, and again, if you're trying to commit insurance fraud or something, that's gonna ramp up investigatory practice, most certainly from the insurance company, maybe the cops, depending on what's going on. And obviously if you're escaping justice, stuff like that. But if that's not what you're doing, if you're just trying to get out of your life

for some sad reason maybe, and especially if you go to another country and do this, law enforcement in America is probably not gonna do anything. No, they're gonna say Godspeed. Because it's not a crime specifically. And maybe we should take a break, and that sounds like a good place to leave it, eh? I agree.

All right, we'll be right back after this with more on Suicide. ["Suita Side"] Stuff you should know. Gosh and shock. Woo! Stuff you should know. All right, so before we broke, I mentioned before that it used to be way easier to get away with this kind of thing.

I think this probably happened a lot more back in the day. As with all crime, it's just gotten more difficult to get away with that stuff. Besides DNA, facial recognition technology and video cameras on everyone's front doorstep and surveillance cameras that cities have employed all over, you know, major cities all over the world. It's just really hard to not get caught on one of these eventually and someone say, hey, the guy going into that Italian restaurant there is totally my dad, I would recognize him anywhere. Right, right. I thought those doorstep cameras were

to create a sense of community, like you would find out what a great person your UPS driver is. Isn't that what they're for? I think so, because they pet your kitty. Right, it just tangentially helps to track people who fake their own death. Yeah, or to, in my case, to post on the internet when squirrels attack, is what I call my show. Right. It's a great show.

Emily sent me one yesterday. She was like, hey, take a look at the doorbell cam at 12-11. And she tripped going up the stairs in a very, very funny way. And so she made sure I saw that. Are you going to post it? No, no, no, no. You should post it to Yakety Sachs. I might do that actually. So yeah, there's a lot of ways that you can get caught these days

and ways you might not have thought of. Here's a word to the wise. If you're going to try to stage your death and everybody who has anything to do with the research of this article says, don't bother, you're going to screw it up probably. You had better researched every single aspect you can possibly think of and started a long time before,

it would really help if you had thought about this 10 years ago. The best time to start planning your pseudoscience is 10 years ago, the second best time is today, but it's not really a good time second best. That's the old saying. But if you had started thinking about it 10 years ago, you could have really actually given this identity,

your new false identity legs by like getting credit cards in its name, building a credit history. Like it would be way easier to step into that life than say like, you know, figuring out what Tor is and then buying like a false identity the same day. You wanna plan it better than that. Yeah, I feel like in movies a lot of times, that's the giveaway is they'll be like,

well, you don't have any credit history and I really can't find anything about you, but if you've got a list of cable bills and a credit history and stuff that goes back, you know, 10 years. It's like just having your ID isn't enough. If you have a history already built up, I mean, this guy, it was an artist in 2013 named Curtis Wallen who did it as sort of performance art, like as a project. And he created an alter ego and he got a driver's license.

He got an ID certifying him as a member of an indigenous Native American tribe. He got a boat operator's license. Like that's kind of a deep cut, I think. Yeah, I think so too. I think, you know, that's the kind of thing where you're like, would a fake person have a boat operator's license?

Yeah, for a decade. Exactly. He got insurance. So like, if you have all this stuff, then all of a sudden, you're just not as suspicious, I think. No. He went even further too.

Like he disguised his look, I guess. Yeah. You gotta do that. I guess so, yeah. For like your ID, because it would be very easy for somebody to scan a database of driver's licenses looking for somebody's face.

That's easy peasy these days. But what he did was he took his driver's license photo and then merged it with a couple other people's features to create an entirely synthetic new person. That's what he used for his photo. I guess it was close enough that if you showed it to somebody they wouldn't be like, what is this weird thing?

You look like a Picasso. But it would still fool facial recognition. Yeah, and well, and of course, like you said, he's Photoshopped these days, so it could be very easily done with AI much quicker sure I'm old school though. Remember. This is 2010. Yeah, that's right This new Photoshop thing is amazing isn't it it is and I don't know what the heck you mean by AI Someone's gonna write and be like Photoshop was created in 1997. It probably was actually

Yeah, probably somewhere in the 90s. He also, the way he started all this was created an email address. You know, it seems pretty logical. He used the private Tor browser. And he got in touch with someone on Craigslist anonymously and said, I want to buy this computer, I want to pay cash. Cash, as you'll see, is a big part of all this.

Yes. Anytime you want to do this, have a lot of cash on hand. We're not instructing you on how to do this. No, it's kind of coming out that way though, huh? It is And again, if you're doing something like this, you've either you're either a bad person who's done something We were wrong or you've had something done very wrong to you, which is very sad. So Again, we're not making light of it. But um, he bought that computer with cash he sort of disguised himself when he met up. And then he used more cash to buy a Bitcoin

at a computer shop, like a brick and mortar store. Right. So Bitcoin is obviously converting, if you have holdings or whatever, you wanna convert to Bitcoin or cash, it's a better way to do it than obviously having that in your name, but that's very hard to do these days.

Everything can be tracked and traced so much easier now. Yeah, including Bitcoin. Although the Bitcoin transactions themselves are anonymous, or who's buying what is anonymous, the actual transaction is public, and it's publicly listed in the Bitcoin blockchain. If your real name is associated somewhere down the line with say your Bitcoin wallet,

and the feds track a Bitcoin to go to your wallet, they know that you have just bought a Bitcoin, and so they can follow you and see what you do with that Bitcoin. So it's really, really hard, even with cryptocurrency, to remain anonymous, which is another reason that you would want to do this years ahead of time. You mentioned buying everything with cash.

You don't wanna, on the day before you disappear and like allegedly die, you don't wanna clean out your bank accounts. That's a big, big red flag. That is Bush league, right? Yeah. Um, 20s and hundreds will be fine. Exactly. Just put it in this garbage sack.

Yeah. Exactly. Yeah. Don't look at me. Yeah. Um, so yeah, you want to have been socking away cash, maybe burying it in mason jars in your yard. Who knows while you also have your regular, legitimate bank accounts

that you do not touch when you leave. Because dead people don't withdraw a bunch of money from their accounts the day before they die. It's just a bad look. So it's another reason to start planning this long ahead of time if you have any opportunity to. Yeah, and I mean, like, you know, we've listed a bunch of ways you can get caught.

It turns out that the way most people get caught when they attempt a pseudoside is getting in touch with someone from their previous life. Yeah. If this is the kind of thing you wanna do, you have to, and this is how it plays out in the movies too, I feel like, you gotta really, really commit to this and decide like, I am never gonna see my kids again or I'm

never gonna call my mom on her birthday or anything you have to completely disappear from that life because especially once again I hate to say it again these days it's very easy to to track email and phone calls and everything else and it's gonna be very easy if you put in that birthday call to mom just one last time, a year after you're dead. Yep, they'll be like, you're toast, man, we caught you. Yeah. There was another one.

Did you mention the pet chip? No, but yeah, that's one you probably might not be thinking of. Yeah, you could easily overlook something like that. Let's say you take your dog or your cat with you, right? You took them out on the boat and the boat capsized. So sure they're dead, too If they're microchipped you might have forgotten that you ever had a microchip Your pet can pretty easily be tracked and if they track down your pet, they're going to track you down, too

So yes, I think if we're if we're if we're getting across that This is really hard to do successfully. I feel like then, you know, we're really achieving our goal. Yeah, but again, I'm not gonna feel too bad about giving semi-instruction here because believe it or not, it's not a crime. Usually stuff you do to get away with this is a crime. It could be, and let's just put like insurance fraud aside

that may be the reason you're doing it, but the actual doing it, the act of doing it, you're probably gonna be breaking some laws, even if it's just like fake dental records or any kind of untrue, even writing a fake suicide letter could be considered forgery or fraud, I guess. And then if you take on a new identity, that's identity fraud. Even if you're not like, it's not identity theft, which is different, even if you're

not stealing someone else's identity, like Don, well, I'm not going to spoil something from a TV show. Because it's 2008, I almost blurted it out, but I don't want to do that. Don Johnson from Miami Vice? Yeah, sure, let's just say that. All this stuff is Don. Like stealing someone's identity, like let's say you were in the army with,

or let's go ahead and ruin the Simpsons. Principal Skinner did that, right? Yeah, Armand Tansarian. Yeah. You know my favorite line from that episode? I was about to say it to you, go ahead though. What if it's the same line? Wouldn't that be funny? It is. Do you think it is? Uh-huh. Go ahead. With the superintendent or whatever? Uh-huh. He says I'd like to introduce our new principal Seymour Skinner. Principal Seymour Skinner.

Something like that. Yeah. Very funny. That was a weird episode. Yeah, agreed. So you said that if you steal someone's identity, like that's obviously a crime for sure. If you make up a completely false identity, like you didn't steal it from anybody, it's just completely made up, you're still eventually going to make a crime.

Well, I mean, that's why I said that's identity fraud. Okay, so even if you, so you said that even if it's just totally made up, it's still identity fraud? I did, sir. Okay, good. Because yes, eventually you're going to have to legalize it. And once you do that, you're in trouble. There's a lot of laws you're suddenly breaking. The thing is, though, is there is something you said earlier about the cops as kind of being like they can't really be bothered. Depending on how well you execute this and where you go, like say you move to another country, it's going to be tough for the cops to track you.

Even if they really want to, everyone who's ever seen a movie like Beverly Hills Cop or whatever knows that the captain is gonna be on that detective's butt to clear that case and go ahead and move on to the other ones because they have a backlog. So they're not gonna track you to New Zealand. They're just gonna have to move on,

get another, take on another case that's maybe a little closer that doesn't involve New Zealand. But again, if it has anything to do with insurance fraud, there's probably going to be an insurance investigator who will show up in New Zealand disguised as a sheep and then pounce the moment that you walk past. Yeah, or if it's not insurance, certainly if you have defrauded a corporation or a bank or something like that for like tens of millions

or maybe even hundreds of millions of dollars, they'll hire some PIs to get on that case pretty toot sweet. For sure. And since this is 2008, 2010, I got to give the obligatory shout out to Magnum PI. Right. That's right, because that's when he was most popular. Well, that's when I loved him the most. No, has your love waned?

I think I just started taking him for granted. Same old story. Yeah, I understand. Half install us in a long relationship. You wanna take another break? Yeah, let's. Half install us in a long relationship. You wanna take another break? Yeah, let's take a break and maybe we'll dive into what an insurance company might do to find you. How about that?

Oh, good idea. Woo! Stuff you should know. Okay, so we're back and you said you promised everybody, without consulting me first, that we would start talking about what life insurance companies will do to find you. Yes. I guess we could start talking a little bit about what might trigger this as far as an insurance company saying, like, all right, we definitely need to use our own resources here, aside from cops saying that they're not going to help out much. And that is, the first trigger is, if your policy has a payout over a million bucks,

they'll be like, all right, that's worth our time and money. Yeah, that's like, apparently they think of basically any payout under a million dollars as small potatoes. So- Yeah. So, so Mr. Clark, no, his was just $999,999.99. Let's just brush that one aside. Forget about it. Yeah, basically anytime your death is sudden, unexpected, or suspicious in any way, they're going to investigate, not necessarily because they think you've committed death fraud, but because they need to investigate anyway to rule out something like suicide,

because there might be an exception for suicide on your policy. That's a big one. They also look for inconsistencies. If there's any kind of inconsistency on, say, like, your driver's license or your death certificate or something like that, that's going to catch their attention, too. This is all just preliminary stuff they're looking at

before they really decide to get involved in an investigation, even. Yeah. You mentioned the Philippines as being like the biggest red flag, but really any claim involving a death in a foreign country is going to get investigated. Just to sort of dot the i's and cross the t's. Maybe they might be a little suspish, but it definitely will get investigated. And also, if you're like, everything like, just send everything to my PO box. That's a pretty big red flag. Yeah, or even like a friend's address would be a red flag as well.

Yeah, what else? If you're super thirsty for life insurance policy and they find out that you've applied with a bunch of different carriers all at the same time that's gonna raise red flags especially if the payout is substantially disproportionate to your net worth so you're worth 300 thousand dollars or fifty thousand dollars, but the payout is like ten million dollars Yeah, that's just just by virtue of that being very tantalizing. It's going to be it's gonna be a red flag

Yeah, here's a pretty good one that I didn't think about If they'll look up their their insurance client or whatever they'll be like, hmm, this is weird Josh Clark went and picked up a year's worth of his heart medication All at once and then right after I went to visit one of his relatives that he hasn't visited in a decade. So this sounds a little shady to me. Yeah. I have to take that medicine

because my heart's so big and tender. Right. I know. You just have to... It would burst out of your chest otherwise. Yeah. And then also, there's some missteps that people who try this often make. One is staying in the same city.

That's mind-bogglingly dumb if you're trying to fake your own death. Yeah, if I were to do this, I guarantee no one would find me. No, because you wouldn't do it like you're lazy. I could disappear into another country quite well, I think. Oh yeah, I mean, you're pretty famous. Oh, come on, not that famous.

You're famous enough that somebody would narc on you? And so if I just went, well, I'm not gonna say the country, just in case, I wanna keep it in my pocket. I was thinking that too, man. After all the research I've been doing that is surely just hanging around in my browser history, if I ever tried to fake my death, it would be pretty obvious that I tried it

just from all the research for this one. Yeah, for sure. You also don't wanna like, there's lots of e-mistakes you can make, like electronic mistakes, whether it's cell phone stuff or Googling yourself from an internet cafe in the Philippines, you know, stuff like that, that could get you pinched.

Yeah, and then also if your new identity is pretty close to your old identity, that might be, you might wanna go slightly further to the left or the right for your new identity. Not even politically, I just mean like, Veer. I didn't think about that. If you adopt a complete, if you're known for being like, whatever, like a MAGA Republican

and you adopt a new identity as this progressive liberal, pretty smart move probably. Yeah, there's this guy named Josh Clark who is a Republican who I think is in the Georgia House. I could just take over his life. Yeah. And still be Josh Clark, but a totally different Josh Clark. Yeah.

What else, Chuck, anything? I mean, those are all the things that would trigger, like, an insurance investigation. Pretty much. Yeah. Yes. So like we said, Chuck, this is like, this happens. People do this and when they get caught, it makes the news.

So there's pretty good documentation of people all over the world trying this. Um, one that comes up quite a bit is a German student who in 1984 was 24 years old, her name was Petra Pazic. Yeah. And she went missing from Braunschweig, Germany. I'm not doing very well with this. No, that's perfect. Braunschweig makes me hungry for some sort of sausage.

Yeah, it totally sounds sausagey. Yeah, so she was reported missing, right? In 1984, she was 24 at the time, I think you said. And at a certain point, police got a guy that confessed to her murder. So that was like a case closed kind of situation, even though the body wasn't found. And the guy later said, I actually did not kill her. He recanted his confession. So she was declared dead, dead, dead about five years later in 89

and lived quite a while with a sort of hidden identity. Yeah, she finally got caught. It turns out she had been living by working, being paid under the table. She seems to have had like no credit or any need for anything like that. She was just living a very modest, quiet life, paying for everything with cash. So she got away with this for more than 25 years. And she was burgled at some point.

She called the cops and I guess just as routine, they asked to see her ID. And she hadn't bothered to get any other kind of ID, so she's like, you caught me. I'm Petra Pezika. And they said, we've been looking for you forever. And apparently they did not press any charges because they couldn't find any crime that she'd actually broken.

She didn't defraud anybody. She hadn't gotten any false documents. She just left her life, essentially. No one knows why. that's the weird thing. Yeah, so they said Guten tag, and they left, I guess. Yeah, but even after her being found out, and the story being huge international news, she just wouldn't say why she did that.

She just said, I don't wanna contact my family. Yeah, and there are other cases too, where police have, like in the interview or whatever, found out why and don't release that to the public. Like it's probably some sort of really sad, tragic situation. And I've seen police statements where they're like, we had an interview and we understand why this happened, but there were no crimes committed

and why it happened is Nanya. Yeah I think this is not actually that case I saw somewhere if I'm not mistaken that her family was baffled by why she left and why she didn't want to see them No, no, no, this was I wasn't talking about this. Okay. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah for sure and hats off to any cop that protects somebody Like that, you know totally I'll mention this one. This guy, Sam Israel III, he was a hedge fund manager and he was, you know, this is one of those deals where he stole $300 million, was sentenced to prison a couple of decades

in prison. So it was one of those back up against the wall, I'm going to jail and debt up to my eyeballs now. Or I guess that even wouldn't count as debt anymore once you're going to prison. That's just, you know, you were found out. Sure. And in June 2008, he wrote a message, suicide is painless, and the pollen on his SUV,

he just kind of traced it out, and jumped from a bridge in New York State, very conveniently landing on that construction net below. That is so scary. Pretty scary, but I guess, you know, that's there to catch people, I guess. Sure. So he went to that very specific bridge for that reason,

and security cameras caught him literally getting up in another car in an SUV that pulled up and it was like, you know, the sound was off, but I'm sure they heard like, woohoo, we did it. And like they honked their horn and they got in touch with his girlfriend, arrested her as a possible accomplice. He was on the most wanted list because it was, you know, pretty clear what had happened at that point.

And he got found out because he called his mom. Who said, you need to turn yourself in. This is a terrible idea and you're a terrible, terrible pseudoscientist. Yeah, you did not do that. And it's, you know, here's some other advice is if you do this, like don't go out to dinner to celebrate the next night because a few people get caught at dinner, it seems like. Yeah, that actually that does happen to a surprising degree. My favorite is John Stonehouse, who was a huge, this was a big deal in the UK in the mid 70s because he was a member of parliament. And in 1974, he went missing off the coast of Miami when he went for a swim. Oh, that was one other thing.

If you are, if you disappear in the water, you're automatically going to get investigated by an insurance company because it is just so. Yes, it is. So he went, this is before that though. He, he made it to Australia. He ran off with his secretary. though. He made it to Australia. He ran off with his secretary. And as he while he was dead, in parliament, people started raising allegations against him. One was that he had enemies in the mafia. Another was that he was a spy for Czechoslovakia. That turned out to be true, weirdly.

And then finally, there a woman came forward later on and said, this guy came to my house. He said he was a census taker, a survey taker. And he started asking really weird questions about my husband. Did he ever have a passport? So eventually, he was found, I think, in Australia. And he just-

Like a month later. Yeah, he just had, he had to come forward and basically tell everybody what had happened, right? Yeah, and well, I guess it's not funny, but the movie, or I'm sorry, the, I guess the novel, I don't think the movie had come out yet, Day of the Jackal by Frederick Forsythe had been published a few years before,

and it appears that he literally kind of followed the steps of how to obtain a false identity from that book kind of note by note. Yeah that's why he was asking about the passport. He took a constituent's name who had never had a passport and then got a passport in his name so yeah. Yeah I'll pick one more for me in 2009 there was a guy in his mid-30s from Indianapolis, a money manager named Marcus Shrinker. He staged a plane crash. He was trying to get out of lawsuits and divorce proceedings.

And he got a bunch of cash, put it in his motorcycle saddlebags, went to Alabama, put it in a storage facility. So he had the cash kind of worked out. Then he took his very small little single prop airplane from his house in Indiana and was flying above Alabama, radios to air traffic control that, you know, he's going down, something's wrong. He does a DB Cooper, he parachutes out, the plane crashes in Florida,

and the next day he emails his friend and tells him what he did. Right. Bra? Man, that was dumb. Yeah, we could keep going on. There's a lot of these, but those are, I think those are some of the highlights, don't you?

Yeah. We should probably close by talking about another kind of pseudo side, which is a faked online death. It's usually not like an insurance fraud or anything like that, but it's a symptom of what they used to call Munchausen syndrome and now they call it FD or factitious disorder. Again, previously Munchausen syndrome where you will try and get, you know, it's tied into mental illness, but it's a disorder where you're trying to get sympathy by playing sick

or faking sick or actually having sometimes real symptoms of something, but you're not sick. Right. And this is taking that one step further, which is to get that sort of attention that you're craving or whatever you're after through actually faking an online death. And it's happened in some pretty high-profile cases. Yeah, it has. And to be clear, this is way different from somebody trying to defraud an insurance company or escape from an abusive spouse. This is strictly because they want attention, they want sympathy, and or they want to control

other people and manipulate them. It's way different. There's a, like you said, a very high profile one that happened in the dawn of the internet. People have been doing this essentially since there was an internet. Yeah. A teenager, a basketball star named Casey Nicole.

Yeah, I remember this. She was a, I guess, kind teenager, a basketball star named Casey Nicole. Yeah, I remember this. She was a, I guess kind of like a little star of the chat forums and that kind of thing. Had a big kind of support group online and she had leukemia. So she posted about her disease and decline from it. That was started in 1999. about her disease and decline from it. That was started in 1999. And in 2001, in May of 2001,

there was a notice that appeared on her blog that said that she had passed away and people were just stricken by this. Yeah, I do remember this happening. It was pretty big in the news at the time. Because again, it was a daunting internet. So people are like, what is the internet being used for already?

So some of her followers had previously, saw some sort of hinky things going on in her stories. Some of the medical stuff wasn't really making much sense as far as like how leukemia progresses. And then apparently she would quote a bunch of song lyrics that were not from her generation, which isn't the biggest giveaway. You know, you can listen to music from any generation,

but it just is shady enough, combined with the other stuff that we're like, why is this teenager quoting songs from the 60s, all over the place? Right. I didn't look deeply enough into it to find out how she was finally outed, but a 40-year-old woman named Debbie Swenson

admitted that she was behind the whole thing, that Casey Nicole had never existed. She stole the photo of a local girl basketball star's picture, or her photo, and used that as Casey. And I mean, that was that. Like I guess the police department told the FBI about it and the FBI is like, no, we're not gonna investigate this. She didn't actually defraud anybody

or make any money off of it. She just probably needs a little bit of help. So that's bad enough saying that, creating a fictitious teenager who's dying of leukemia. Pretty bad. Telling people that you, the real you, has died by suicide. There was an article in Gizmodo that interviewed a professor of psychiatry named Mark Feldman and he puts it pretty clearly. He says because of the social stigma involved and the emotional weight associated with suicide,

it's particularly powerful. And that if you use that to manipulate people, you're at the peak of manipulativeness. And that's exactly what an author named Susan Meachin did in 2020, I think, right? Yeah, I totally remember this one. This is a very big deal. She was a self-published romance author.

And she had a decent following on Facebook. And in 2020, in the voice of her daughter, posted that her mom had died by suicide after being bullied in the book world. And it was a very big deal. It was a very shocking revelation that this woman had been bullied to death basically. And the writing community was all up in arms about it and like, you

know, like, see this is what can happen with online bullying, which what really stinks is that is absolutely what can happen with online bullying. Right. But this woman was lying. Her daughter continued to post on, or you know, in scare quotes, her daughter continued to post to the account. And someone pointed out that they recognized a little quirk in her writing was that Meacham would say instead of supposed to, she would type post to, P-O-S-T to, like I'm supposed to do this. And that little quirk-

Like PJ from Family Circus. Exactly. And that little quirk, writing PJ from Family Circus. Exactly, and that little quirk, writing as her daughter gave it away. Yeah, so she was outed. I think she carried this on for two years. And then she suddenly showed back up in her community, her writing community forum and said, "'Hey, I'm alive. "'This is all just a fake.'"

She said, "'There's gonna be tons of questions, let the fun begin. I can't imagine a more arrogant way to announce that you didn't actually die. So people of course were appalled and angry and she was, I think, I think she expected people to be like, oh my God, thank God you're alive, that was amazing.

And it did not go like that at all. She became reviled and hated. And I think rightfully so, that's a really horrible thing to do to people. And also on top of it, to exploit online bullying. Yeah, totally. You know, just for your own ego, it's just, that's terrible stuff.

Yeah, agreed. There's one more I wanna just really quickly point out. This has happened more than once. People have faked their death online to get out of some obligation. I read about somebody on a- Like a meeting at work? Kind of.

This was, so one knitting forum participant died rather than say like I'm not able to come up with the patterns that I said I could. That was one. Yeah. Another one was a Percy Jackson fan fiction site that somebody staged their death online because they couldn't deliver some fan fiction that they said they would. Yeah. Pretty weird stuff.

At least that's less manipulative. It's just being afraid of confrontation, I guess. That's right. Since Chuck just said that's right, I think it's time for listener mail. This is about libraries a little bit more. Hey guys, as you mentioned in the recent short stuff on alt libraries I wanted to mention this in 1901 Andrew Carnegie funded the construction of dozens of libraries in all five boroughs of New York City And most of the bill these buildings came with a family apartment which housed the custodian who kept the coal fire burning the furnace As the furnaces were replaced in the custodians retired the apartments set empty

Some of the apartments are still intact, while some have been converted into storage, mechanical rooms, or, as is the case in the library where I work, a teen center. I thought you might be interested in this little slice of New York City and library history. There are about 30 Carnegie branches left in Manhattan, the Bronx, and Staten Island, and the city is slowly working their way through renovations

to modernize each location. Next time you're in New York, come check us out. Wrapped, spanked, delivered. Nice. I'm yours. That is Madeline Lovegrove, children's librarian at the 125th Street New York Public Library. That's awesome. Thanks a lot, Madeline.

I had never heard of that, and I would really love to see some of those abandoned apartments that were just left as is. She sent a link and it had pictures, my friend. Oh, I can't wait to see that. Thank you for telling me that, Chuck. And thank you again to Madeline. If you want to be like Madeline and send us an email the exact proper way, you can do that.

Send it off to stuffpodcasts at iHeartRadio.com. Stuff You Should Know is a production of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts, my heart radio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows. You're listening to an iHeart podcast.