Welcome to Stuff you should know, a production of iHeartRadio.
Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh, and there's shock and it's just us because we don't know where Jerry is. But that's okay, because this is stuff you should do.
Oh well, Jerry may have engaged in pseudoside because she's so tired of working with us. Yeah, then she didn't want to tell us. Yeah, that's one reason somebody might want to get out of their life or you know, not for real. But that's what pseudoside is. It's 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, yes, pseudoside I'd never known that before. But pseudo side is a different term for faking your own death, like pseudo like fake inside 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. Yeah, 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 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. Yeah, 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 were was successful.
Yeah, or tried it and failed but didn't get caught.
Okay, sure, Yeah, that's that's a good point too. I hadn't thought about that one.
As you would say there are three trunches.
That's right. I wouldn't say that because I love myself.
No, but you're the trench master.
Oh that's so like twenty ten. You rather forgot about that. Can you believe that was fifteen years ago?
Hey, tronches were hot.
Yeah, they were all raged, 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 fam, you know, if it's a movie at least, although this happens 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. It seems like
the most common is probably a financial thing. You're 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 pseudocides or people getting caught trying their hand at pseudicide, after the two thousand and eight financial crisis.
Yeah, I mean, speaking of tronchias.
So another big one too is if you are about to be incarcerated for a very long time and I 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 want to frame your wife like in the movie Double Jeopardy with Ashley Judd.
Yeah, boy, we're is this two thousand and seven?
You know what? This really feels like earlier stuff you should know type episode. So let's do it. Let's do it. Try unches 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, like, there's people that want to put commercials on our podcasts, 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 sure 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, you know, that puts you in a certain league. I've never had that opportunity to do.
Something like that, for instance, precisely. So, yeah, it's just kind of a selection bias almost, you know, yeah, totally. Men also are more likely to try this or at the very least or are more likely to get caught. Yeah, and I could see that being the case. Right, We're in just being yeah, more likely to do it. And also again probably because the selection bias a little bit, finance bros are likelier than others to try this or at least to get caught too.
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. The 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 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 gonna 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 the author. I think her day job as a creative writing professor at Columbia. But she wrote a book which, as far as I can tell, is the most exhaustive look at pseudoside anyone's ever created. Her book was released in twenty sixteen. 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, 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. Yeah, 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, Like, just hold your credit card for another second, because they're gonna 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. You should be way easier to get away with this kind of thing.
Yeah, the driver's licenses didn't even have pictures of them exactly. It's nuts.
But if you really want to, you know, go through with like the second tier service, you can get like a kit that may have a new identity for you, kuind of have like a new passport in there, new per certificate maybe something like that. Or if you really want to go with a like the deluxe package, you can spend and you know, tens of thousands of dollars to get somebody like almost like concier 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 too. 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.
If you want a dead body, I can get your dead body by three pm.
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 kidaver and you're not just missing presumed dead, that's definitely going to help your your pseudo side 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 pseudo side 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 an 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, uh, 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 hadn't. 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 two thousand and eight.
It is all over again. We need to make this episode twelve minutes long.
Yeah, 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 get cremanes.
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, those 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 you just have the cremains, and it's like, well, you know, what are you going to do? This is supposedly the dead person. That 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 you're 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. You go to one of these places and say, oh, yeah, that's my that's my cousin, and they're they're going to be like here, give me some money, and you know you can handle everything from there.
Yeah, and again, if I mean if you're trying to commit insurance for all it or something that's going to ramp up investigatory practice, most certainly from the insurance company, maybe the cops, depending on kind of 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 like sad reason, maybe and especially if you go to another country and do this, law enforcement in America is probably not going to do anything.
No, they're gonna say god speed because it's not.
A crime specifically, and maybe we should take a break, and sounds like a good place to leave it a I agree, all right, we'll be right back after this with more on sudicide.
Stuff you should know, gosh Man show 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 recogn technology and video cameras on everyone's front doorstep and the 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 them 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. Isn't that what they're for?
I think so? Because they pet your kiddy.
Right, It just tangentially helps to track people who fake their own death.
Yeah, or too uh in my case to post on the internet when when squirrels attack is what I call my show.
It's a great show.
Emily sent me one yesterday. She was like, hey, take a look at the doorbell came at twelve eleven and she tripped going up the stairs in a very very funny way, and so she made sure I saw that.
Are you gonna post it?
No?
No, no, no, you should post it to Yakity Sachs. I might do that actually one of the So, yeah, there's a lot of ways that you can get caught these days, in 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 ten years ago. Yeah, the best time to start planning your pseudo side is ten 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 started thinking about it ten 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, for figuring out what tour is and then buying like a false identity the same day. You want to plan it better than that.
Yeah, I feel like in movies a lot of times, that's the giveaway is they'll 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 you know, a list of cable bills and a credit history and stuff that goes back, you know, ten years. It's like just having your ID isn't enough if you have a
history already built up. I mean, this guy was an artist in twenty thirteen named Curtis Wallin who did it a 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 a indigenous Native American tribe. He got a boat operator's license. Like that, 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 like, would a fake person have a boat operator's license.
For a decade exactly? He got insurance, 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 his look. I guess yeah, by 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 pasy 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 that wouldn't be like, what is this weird thing? He looks like a Picasso, but like it would still fool facial recognition.
Yeah. Well, and of course, like you said, he's photoshopped. These days, it could be very easily done with AI much quicker.
Sure, I'm old school, though, remember this is twenty ten.
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 going to write and be like photoshopple is created in nineteen ninety seven.
It probably was, actually, yeah, probably somewhere in the nineties.
He also the way he started all this was created an email address. You know, it seems pretty logical. He's the private tour 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'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 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. So bitcoin is obviously, you know, converting if you have holdings or whatever you
want to convert to bitcoin, that's a 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. Like everything can be tracked and traced so much easier now.
Yeah, including bitcoin. Although the bitcoin transactions themselves are anonymous, that or who's buying what is anonymous, the actual transition transaction is public and it's publicly listed in the bitcoin blockchain. And you 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 want to on the day before you disappear and like allegedly die. You don't want to clean out your bank accounts. That's a big, big red flag. That is bush league, right, Yeah.
Twenties and hundreds will be fine. Just put it in this garbage sack.
Yeah, yeah, don't look at me.
Yeah.
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 but 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 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 pseudo side is getting in touch with someone from their previous life. Yeah, if this is the kind of thing you want to do, you have to. And this is how it plays out in the movies too. I feel like you got to 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 track email and phone calls and everything else, and it's gonna be very easy if you put in that birthday call the mom just one last time, a year after you're dead.
Yep, they'll be like, your your 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 capsize, So sure they're dead too if they're micro chipped. 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 good point.
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 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 as a crime, it could be. And just put like insurance fraud aside that maybe 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, right, even if you're not like, it's not identity theft, that which is different, even if you're not stealing someone else's identity, like done, Well, I'm not gonna spoil something from a TV show, oh, because it's two thousand and eight almost blurted it out, but I don't want to do that.
But Don Johnson from Miami Vice.
Yeah, sure, let's just say that all A said is done like stealing someone's identity, like let's say like you were in the army with or let's go ahead and ruin the Simpsons principal Skinner did.
That, right, Yeah, Harmon Tansarian. Yeah, you know what.
My favorite my favorite line from that.
I was about to say to you, go ahead there, what if.
It's the same line, wouldn't that be it is? Do you think it is ahead with the superintendent or whatever? Uh huh, he says, I'd like to introduce our but our new principal Seymore Skinner. Principal Seymore Skinner something like that.
Yeah, very fun. 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 that's what I said. That's identity fraud.
Okay, So even if you even 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 want to 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 is 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 gonna be tough for the cops to
track you, even if they really want to. Everyone who's ever seen a movie like Beverly Hills copp or whatever knows that the captain is going to 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 going to track you to New Zealand. They're just gonna have to like move on, get another take on another case. It'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 in 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, right, they'll they'll hire some pis to get on that case. Pretty toot sweet for sure.
And since this is two thousand and eight, twenty ten, I got to give the obligatory shout out to magnum p I.
Right, that's right, because that's when he was most popular.
Well, that's when I loved him the most.
No, uh is your love Wane?
I think I just started taking him for granted, same old story.
Yeah, I understand happenstallars in a long relationship.
You want to take another break.
Yeah, let's take a break and we'll maybe we'll dive into that what an insurance company might do to find you? How about that?
Oh? Good idea stuff you should know, Josh, and shock 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 like 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 that's worth our time and money.
Yeah, that's apparently they think of basically any payout under a million dollars of small potatoes.
So yeah, so so mister Clark, No, his was just nine hundred ninety nine, nine hundred ninety nine dollars a ninety nine cents. Just exactly brush that one aside.
Forget about it. Yeah. Basically, anytime your death is sudden, unexpected, or suspicious in any way, they're going to 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. Yeah, 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 eyes and cross the t's, maybe they might be a little suspicious, but it definitely will get investigated. And also, if you're like everything just send everything to my PO box, that's that's a pretty big red flag.
Yeah, or even like a friend's address would be a red flag as well. What else, if you're super thirsty for a life insurance policy and they find out that you've applied with a bunch of different carriers all at the same time, that's going to raise red flags, especially if the payout is substantially disproportionate to your net worth. So you're worth three hundred thousand dollars or fifty thousand dollars, but the payout is like ten million dollars. That's just
by virtue of that being very tantalizing. It's going to be it's going to be a red flag.
Yeah, here's a pretty good one that I didn't think about. If they'll look up their insurance client or whatever and they'll be like, this is weird. Josh Clark went and picked up a year's worth of his heart medication all at once, and then right after that went to visit one of his relative 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 that you just have to. It would burst out of your chest otherwise.
And then also there's some missteps that people who try this often make. One is staying in the same city. That's fine, 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. Come on, not that famous, you're famous enough that somebody would knarck on you.
So if I just went well, I'm not going to say the country, just in case I want to keep you in this 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 want to, 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 or 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 want to go slightly further to the left or the right for your new identity, not even politically, I just mean, like veer, oh.
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 the new identity as this progressive liberal, pretty smart move. Probably.
Yeah. There's this guy named Josh Clark who is a Republican that 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.
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. One that comes up quite a bit as a German student who in nineteen eighty four was twenty four years old. Her name was Petra Pezzika. Yeah, and she went missing from Brownschwig Brown Schweig, Germany. I'm not doing very well with this.
No, that's perfect.
Brown Schweig makes me hungry for some sort of sausage.
Yeah, it totally sounds sausage. Yeah. So she was reported missing right in nineteen eighty four. She's twenty four 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 eighty nine, and lived quite a while with a sort of hidden identity.
Yeah, she finally got caught. She had turned. It turns out she had been living by working, being paid under the table. She seems to have had like no credit or any 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 twenty five 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 So she's like, you caught me. I'm Petra Pazika, 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 tog and they left. I guess.
Yeah. But even after her being found out and being in like the story being huge international news. She just wouldn't say why she did that. She just said, I don't want to 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, you know, we had an interview and we understand why this happened, but there were no crimes committed, and why it happened is NONEYA.
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 one.
Oh 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 the third, he was a hedge fund manager and he was you know, this is one of those deals where he stole three hundred million dollars, 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 I'm in debt up to my eyeballs now, or I guess that even wouldn't count as debt anymore when
you're going to prison. That's just you know, you were found out, sure, And in June two thousand and eight, he wrote a message suicide is painless, and the pollen on his suv can She kind of traced it out and jumped from a bridge and New York State very conveniently landing on that construction net below that is so scary, pretty scary, but I guess you know it. 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 like, you know, the sound was off, but I'm sure they heard like wooo, 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 to 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 were a terrible, terrible pseudocyitist.
Yeah, you did not do that, and it seemed you know, here's some other advice is if you do this, like, don't go off to dinner to celebrate the next night, because a few people get caught at 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 seventies because he was a member of parliament and in nineteen seventy four 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 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 a woman came forward and later on and said, this guy came to my house was he said he was a census taker, a survey taker, and he started asking really weird questions about my husband, like did he ever have a passport? So eventually he was found I think in Australia and a months 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, I'm sorry, the I guess the novel I don't think the movie had come out yet. Day of the Jackal by Frederick Forsyth 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 two thousand and nine, that was he was a guy in his mid thirties from Indianapolis, a money manager 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 saddle bags, 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.
Brah Man. That's 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 desk. It's usually not like an insurance fraud or anything like that, but it's a symptom of what they used to call Munkow's and syndrome, and now they call it FD or
factitious disorder again. Previously Munkhow's and 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 at the dawn of the Internet. People have been
doing this essentially since there was an internet. A woman, a teenager, a basketball star named Casey Nicole.
Remember this.
She was a I guess kind of like a little star of chat forums and that kind of thing, had a big kind of support group online, and she had leukemia. So she posted about her her disease and decline from it that was started in nineteen ninety nine and in two thousand and one. In May of two thousand and one, 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 Donnie Internet, so people are like, what is the Internet being used for already? So some of her followers had previously, you know, 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 just shady enough, combined with the other stuff that were like, why is this teenager quoting you know, songs from the sixties all of us, you know, all over the.
Place, right. I didn't look deeply enough into it to find out how she was finally outed, but a forty year old woman named Debbie Swinson admitted that she was behind the whole thing that Casey Nicole had never existed. She stole the photo of a local girl basketball stars picture 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 going to investigate this. She didn't actually defraud
anybody or make any money off of it. She just probably needs a little bit of help. Yeah, 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 Gizmoto 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 you're at the peak of manipulativeness. And that's exactly what an author named Susan meetcher Mitchen did in twenty twenty.
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 you know, a decent following on Facebook. And in twenty twenty and the voice of her daughter posted that her mom had died by suicide after being bullied in the book world. Yeah, and
it was a very big deal. It was a very shocking revelation that, you know, 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. 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 they someone pointed out that they recognized a little quirk in her writing was that Michen would say instead of supposed to she would type post to post two like I'm post to do this and that little jot from family circus exactly, and that little quirk writing as her daughter gave it away.
Yeah, so she 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 reannounce that you didn't actually die. So people, of course were appalled and angry, and like she she was, I think I think she expected people to be like, oh my god,
thank god you're alive. That was amazing. 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 want to 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 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, 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 nineteen oh one, Andrew Carnegie funded the construction of dozens of libraries and all five boroughs of New York City, and most of 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 apartment sat 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 at teen Center. I thought you might be interested in this little slice of New York City and library history. There are about thirty 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 wrap spanked delivered. I'm yours. That is Madeleine Lovegrove, the children's librarian at the one hundred and twenty fifth Street New York Public Library.
That's awesome, thanks a lot, Madeline. That I had never heard of that, and I would really love to see some of those abandoned apartment that we're 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. Check 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 Stuff Podcasts at iHeartRadio dot com. Stuff you Should Know is a production of iHeartRadio.
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