World Begins to Disappear Never Be Together Again

For Matthew Alan Sheppard, all of the anxiety, deception, and mirage converged in one moment on a crisp winter weekend in February 2008. From the outside, he hardly seemed like a human prepared to carelessness everything. At 42, he'd been happily married for 10 years, with a 7-year-old daughter and a comfortable dwelling house in Searcy, Arkansas. An environmental health and safety managing director for the electrical parts maker Eaton, he'd risen in three years from overseeing a establish in Searcy to roofing more than than 30 facilities throughout Northward and South America. A recent raise had pushed his salary close to half dozen figures. To his coworkers and hunting buddies, he seemed an amiable guy with a flourishing career.

To Sheppard, though, that same life felt like information technology was collapsing in on itself. With his promotion had come the stress of new responsibilities and frequent travel. He had been steadily putting on weight and now tipped the scale at more than than 300 pounds. Financially he was beyond overextended. A gadget lover whose spending always seemed to exceed his income, he had begun shifting his personal expenses to his corporate credit card — first dinner and drinks, then a washer and dryer, so family vacations. In early February, when an Eaton official emailed to inquire about his expense reports, he felt everything closing in. He began devising a programme to escape.

So on a Friday ii weeks later on, Sheppard drove with his wife, Monica, their daughter, and his mother in law to a rented cabin in the foothills of the Ozarks on the picturesque Picayune Cherry River, an hour from Searcy. He chosen it a much-needed concluding-infinitesimal getaway for the family, and for most of the weekend, it was.

Then, in the fading Sunday afternoon low-cal, with his daughter and mother-in-law occupied in the motel, Sheppard walked downwardly to the dock with Monica and their black lab, Fluke. When Monica looked abroad, Sheppard helped the canis familiaris — always eager for a swim, just as he'd counted on — off the platform and into the Niggling Reddish River'south notoriously deadly current. His wife looked dorsum just in fourth dimension to come across Sheppard heave his own 300-pound frame into the river afterwards their honey lab.

Thrashing in the 39-caste water, Sheppard managed to manus the leash upwardly to Monica, who hauled the dog to condom. Only he struggled to swim back to the dock. Flailing badly, he gasped that he was having trouble breathing. A moment later on, equally the current pulled him downstream, his head dipped beneath the surface and didn't reappear.

A frantic 911 phone call from Monica minutes afterwards launched a search-and-rescue performance involving more than 60 people. Swoop teams scoured the river, and a plane scanned the area from overhead. The next morning, Sheppard'due south shell-shocked coworkers brought their own boats upwards to help with the search. They plant his fluorescent orangish Eaton cap in shallow water not far downstream. But when 24 hours passed without another sign, the authorities abased — publicly, at to the lowest degree — whatsoever hope of finding him alive.

The urge to disappear, to shed i'southward identity and reemerge in some other, surely must exist as old as human society. It'due south a fantasy that can flicker tantalizingly on the horizon at moments of crunch or abound into a persistent daydream that accompanies life's daily burdens. A fight with your spouse leaves you lot momentarily despondent, perhaps, or a longtime human relationship feels expressionless on its feet. Your mortgage payment becomes of a sudden unmanageable, or a pile of debts gradually rises to a higher place your head. Mayhap you merely awaken one solar day unable to shake your disappointment over a selection you could have fabricated or a improve life you lot might accept had. And then the thought occurs to you: What if I could drop everything, abandon my life's baggage, and start over as someone else?

Most of united states snuff out the question instantly or toy with it occasionally equally a harmless mental escape hatch. Only every twelvemonth, thousands of adults decide to act on information technology, walking out the door with no plan to return and no want to exist found. The precise number is elusive. Nearly 200,000 Americans over age xviii were recorded missing by law enforcement in 2007, but they correspond only a fraction of the intentional missing: Many aren't reported unless they are believed to be in danger. And co-ordinate to a 2003 British study, two-thirds of missing adults make a conscious decision to leave.

People who go missing do then with an endless variety of motives, from the considered to the impulsive. There are of course those running from their own transgressions: Ponzi schemers, bail jumpers, deadbeat parents, or insurance scammers dreaming of life in a tropical paradise. But near people who abandon their lives exercise so for noncriminal reasons — relationship breakups, family pressures, fiscal obligations, or a simple desire for reinvention. The federal government'southward Witness Security Program provides new identities for endangered witnesses, but thousands of people who testify in lower-contour cases are on their own to face potential retribution or flee to a safer identity. So also are those trying to escape the unwanted attention of stalkers, obsessive ex-spouses, or psychotically disgruntled clients.

Starting over, however, is non equally simple as it used to be. Digital information drove, location-aware technology, and postal service-9/11 security measures have radically changed the equation for both fugitives and pursuers. Yesteryear's 24-hour interval of the Jackal-similar methods for adopting a new identity — peruse a graveyard, selection out a proper name, obtain a birth document — have given style to online markets for social security numbers and Photoshop forgeries. Escapees tin can set up new addresses online, disguise their communications through anonymous electronic mail, and hide behind prepaid phones.

In other ways, still, the advantage has tipped in favor of investigators. Where in one case you could move a few states over, adopt a new proper noun, and alive on with minimal gamble, today your trail is littered with digital bread crumbs dropped by GPS-enabled cell phones, electronic bank transactions, IP addresses, airline ID checks, and, increasingly, the clues you voluntarily go out behind on social networking sites. It's almost easier to steal an identity today than to shed your own. Investigators tin utilise crosslinked government and private databases, easy public distribution of information via the Cyberspace and idiot box, and data tucked abroad in corporate files to track you without leaving their desks. Even the nigh clever disappearing deed is easily undone. One poorly considered email or oversharing tweet and there will be a knock at your door. Every bit missing-person investigators like to say, they can make a thousand mistakes. You only have to brand one.

On the Monday morning after Matt Sheppard disappeared, Detective Sergeant Alan Roberson of the Cleburne Canton Sheriff's Office drove down to the Eaton plant to check Sheppard's employment record for emergency contacts. When Roberson arrived, the visitor was holding an all-hands meeting announcing Sheppard's presumed death. "There were a lot of people who were very affected by it," he says. Later noticing discrepancies in Sheppard's employment record, Roberson spoke with the Eaton homo resource folks, who told him that two weeks before they had alerted Sheppard to suspicions that he'd been misusing his corporate credit card. "That got me thinking," he says.

When Sheppard's body didn't plow upwardly after another day, Roberson's curiosity deepened. He knew that Sheppard carried a company BlackBerry; his wife had told constabulary it must accept gone in the water with him. On Wednesday, Roberson asked Eaton to check for any activity on it. Certain plenty, they discovered text messages sent later on he had supposedly drowned. Equally far as Roberson was concerned, the rescue operation was at present a manhunt.

The police force subpoenaed AT&T — afterward Roberson's visit, Eaton had filed formal theft past charade charges confronting Sheppard, alleging that he'd placed more than $twoscore,000 in personal charges on his corporate carte — and the carrier tracked the messages to cell towers in the Searcy area. Just past the fourth dimension AT&T checked for the content of the messages, they'd already been purged from the organisation. Tracking the numbers texted from the phone didn't turn up everyone'south account. Roberson concluded they were prepaid prison cell phones.

When he tried to reinterview Monica Sheppard, she'd retained a lawyer and refused to cooperate. A few months later, she sold everything and moved away with her daughter.

After that, Roberson says, "the trail went cold. We merely flagged everything nosotros could observe." In March, the police conveyed their suspicions to the local printing. Roberson contacted edge security in example Sheppard used his passport and asked the IRS to picket for whatsoever W-2 filed with his Social Security number on information technology. When Monica took off without leaving a forwarding accost, Roberson besides contacted the local uncomplicated school Sheppard's daughter had attended, asking it to go far affect if anyone requested the daughter'southward records.

Tennessee specifically outlaws "intentionally and falsely creating the impression that any person is deceased," but strictly speaking, in about places in that location is nothing illegal about walking abroad from your life. Nevertheless, it's easy enough to run afoul of the constabulary in the procedure of fleeing, whether through abandoned debts or identity theft. Insurance claims based on fake deaths — likewise being illegal — are naturally frowned upon by insurance companies, who tend to pursue them to the ends of the world.

New York City- and Texas-based investigator Steven Rambam has conducted several 1000 missing-person searches over about three decades. He fabricated a name for himself in the '90s tracking down suspected Nazi war criminals in hiding. Sardonic and brash, with a thick Brooklyn accent, he has a knack for using engineering to discover people who don't want to be found. For Rambam, the proliferation of increasingly comprehensive data drove has been a boon. Even as anonymization engineering improves, to the benefit of fugitives, "the ability to pull data from remote locations and cross-reference that data has increased even faster," he says. "So far the good guys are ahead, but mayhap past a couple of inches."

To enhance his ability to search everything from DMV records to college yearbook photos, Rambam created his ain investigative search engine and database, PallTech. Information technology's so proficient that other licensed investigators and law enforcement agents pay to apply it. Given a name, date of birth, and Social Security number, PallTech churns through hundreds of databases — collections of private and public records — and spits out up to 300 pages of investigative fodder like addresses, relatives' names, and aliases. It also enables elaborate combinations of searches, based on, say, a first name and month of nativity. All of which helps investigators exploit the most common error fabricated by people starting over: using details from their sometime lives in their new lives as a way to help keep things straight. "Whether it's transposing your social security number, your date of birth, or the letters of your name — that's the quickest fashion yous're going to get found," says Robert Kowalkowski, a Michigan-based investigator.

There'south likewise enough of private data that makes your life easier — and your pursuer's, too. Take frequent flier accounts, Rambam says. "Y'all get miles and convenience, and I get everywhere you've flown." Or Amazon.com: "The convenience of books delivered to your door, and I have all your addresses, at least one phone number, the books you read." PayPal and eBay: "Everything you've ever browsed: books to lamps, every address, people you've ever sent gifts to." (When Wired told him about the $5,000 contest to detect the author of this piece, Rambam noted that he is working on a book about his feel using high tech tools to hunt down a friend.)

Exactly how investigators get that data depends on who is missing and the persistence of who is searching. Court-ordered subpoenas can requite law enforcement — or private investigators hired onto the case — access to everything from ISPs to airline companies. Other times investigators may go more creative, scouring the runner'south abandoned laptop or persuading a colleague to hand over an email that might comprise a location-revealing IP address. They might enlist the public's aid, using cold-case Spider web sites to spread pictures and collect tips.

There are also a few investigators for hire who are all the same willing to tread in dubious legal areas with tactics like pretexting, an historic period-quondam technique. Posing as the missing person, the investigator calls the phone company, cable company, or banking concern and uses a few of the target's personal details — and a measure of charm — to extract records from credulous customer service representatives. In recent years, Congress has strengthened anti-pretexting and computer-crime laws. Merely if your life depends on not being found, it's all-time to presume that your digital DNA is upwardly for grabs.

People trying to outrun their onetime identities have to reckon not merely with the data collected about them but also with any facts they've revealed about themselves. Facebook, MySpace, and Twitter are an investigator'southward gold mine, containing everything from your address books and photos (and, for a tech-savvy investigator like Rambam, what camera they were taken with) to your hobbies and favorite bars. A social profile that one time would've taken an investigator weeks of on-the-footing piece of work to build is a few clicks away. Minimal search-engine acumen — or an undercover business relationship on a social networking site — tin can plow upwardly a collection of friends for investigators to target, fifty-fifty if an online business relationship is marked "individual."

Mostly, investigators work past building a profile of the person they are hunting and then waiting to capitalize on typical human being frailties — poor memory, vanity, a craving for social contact. A few years agone, an investigator named Philip Klein was hired past Dateline NBC to locate Patrick McDermott, a onetime Hollywood cameraman who also happened to be Olivia Newton-John's former partner. McDermott had disappeared from a fishing boat in the Pacific, and the government presumed him dead. Early on on, Klein likewise turned up only the vaguest hints that McDermott could be live. "This was the ultimate walk-away," Klein says.

Then Klein decided to fix a Web site about the disappearance. Purporting to be asking for tips, it was designed specifically to trap visitors' IP addresses. Suspecting that McDermott was in contact with at least one confidant from his former life — and relying on the investigator's proverb that people on the run e'er monitor the pursuit — Klein blocked search engine crawlers from cataloging the site. He gave the URL only to McDermott's friends and family. Xc-6 hours later, it started registering multiple daily hits from an IP address in the beach town of Sayulita, Mexico. Klein says he eventually tracked McDermott around South America and contacted him through an intermediary. McDermott had a simple message for the investigator: His new life was "nobody's business."

Matthew Sheppard held his breath as long as he could, swimming underwater with the current until he was out of sight. So he surfaced, swam to a dock, and pulled himself out. Afterward retrieving a purse of wearing apparel and $ane,500 in cash he'd stashed the night before, he walked chop-chop down the road to a prearranged spot where a friend — the i person to whom Sheppard felt he could entrust his undercover — waited with the car. They took off southwest toward the friend'due south home in United mexican states, merely south of the Rio Grande.

Two weeks before, when Sheppard saturday down to formulate a plan to fake his death, he'd been armed only with Google and LexisNexis. Stumbling on an article about Steve Fossett, the explorer whose airplane disappeared in September 2007 and whose remains were yet to exist discovered, Sheppard concluded that fifty-fifty without a body, Monica would likely exist able to obtain a legal conclusion of death and thereby collect his company-issued life insurance policy — worth $1.3 1000000. He pored over recent reports of missing persons and faked deaths, looking for strategies to emulate and pitfalls to avoid.

That, in fact, was how he'd come up with the idea of leaving his BlackBerry clearly at a gas station on the Friday before his disappearance. It was a classic misdirection: Someone would take hold of the phone and beginning using it, Sheppard hoped, and any cop who didn't buy the drowning would trace the telephone to some petty thief — while Sheppard'southward existent trail faded. (The ruse backfired, information technology seems, when the thief sent a few messages and then quit, disarming Sergeant Roberson that Sheppard was live.)

Now, ensconced at his friend'due south house in Mexico and working nights as a dishwasher at a local restaurant, all Sheppard had to do was wait. He would monitor coverage of his disappearance, and once he was certain his married woman had collected the insurance — the company had a year after his death to pay upward — he would contact her and explicate everything. She'd encounter him in Monterrey, where he had already scouted out an agave plantation they could buy on the cheap. He'd spend the rest of his days making tequila.

But after two months, he started to become antsy. He missed his wife and daughter also much to look. So, bold that the authorities might notwithstanding be logging Monica'south incoming calls, he bought a prepaid phone, dialed her number, and broke the news that he was still alive. She was hysterical at first, alternately furious and overjoyed. She told him that he should turn himself in. Only Sheppard, knowing he was already in too far, convinced her that they could make a new commencement.

The family reunited in Iowa, where they stayed at a motel. As the life insurance company stalled, they lived off the cash from Monica's sale of their Arkansas business firm and belongings. In Mexico, Sheppard had obtained an Iowa commuter's license and Social Security number for one John P. Howard, to whom he diameter a passable resemblance. At present he constructed a rèsumè around the identity, transposing his piece of work history onto fake firms, and posted it online. For references he gave the numbers of prepaid phones. When prospective employers called, Sheppard pretended to be an 60 minutes representative and verified his own by employment.

Meanwhile, the stress of living on the run was taking its toll, and Sheppard had lost almost seventy pounds. Afterward reading that the Arkansas constabulary had contacted The states Marshals most his case, he became wracked with paranoia. He would come across cars parked at the defunct dealership across the street from the motel and imagine federal agents waiting to pounce. Remembering the blown escapes he'd read most online, he created a daily inspection routine for his motorcar — turn signals, mirrors, taillights — to brand sure the cops had no excuse to pull him over.

Eventually, "John P. Howard" landed an offer for a health and prophylactic director position in Yankton, South Dakota. The family packed up and drove w, where a real manor agent helped them find a rental house in a secluded area near a lake.

The family nevertheless kept to themselves, avoiding the local crowds on boating mean solar day at the lake. And Sheppard found it awkward responding to his new name, and so much and so that he asked his wife to start using it at home. Simply his paranoia began to recede. He even opened a depository financial institution account. It was starting to feel like they'd re-created a normal life — just the three of them and Fluke, their trusty black lab.

The fantasy of swapping out your tired life for a ameliorate one is a stalwart plot device in fiction, from Huckleberry Finn and The Smashing Gatsby to The Rider and Mad Men. In such stories, the decision to accept on a new identity frequently occurs in a unmarried, serendipitous moment; an opportunity presents itself, and the character makes the fateful selection, often getting away with it. In real life, ad hoc escape plans rarely end well.

The about convincing way to disappear is to make people believe you are dead. And the well-nigh common locales for faking a demise are big bodies of h2o — places where a corpse might merely sink or wash away, thus explaining a lack of remains. The chaos of a natural disaster, too, offers a tantalizing opportunity. Regardless of the diversionary method, the success of any stint on the run depends on a combination of advance planning and constant vigilance. "Most of them are not really going to take the fourth dimension and energy to lay the groundwork to disappear," Rambam says. "For a lot of people it'due south an impulse affair: 'I tin't accept information technology anymore, I've got to get out of here, now.'" Take Samuel State of israel: Bedevilled of fraud, the New York hedge fund manager in 2008 tried to convince authorities he'd leapt from a bridge over the Hudson River by writing Suicide is painless, the theme song from G.A.S.H., in the dust on the hood of his abased car. His program patently did non extend beyond parking an RV at a Massachusetts campground, and he turned himself in a month later on. (Other times, there's just no accounting for bad luck: Australian businessman Harry Gordon, who faked his decease in a boating accident in 2000, lived under a new identity for five years until the afternoon he passed his ain brother on a mountain trail.)

Perhaps the most infamous recent faked death attempt, that of Indiana coin managing director Marcus Schrenker, involved a plan equally daring and bizarre. Accused of financial mismanagement, Schrenker, an amateur pilot, climbed into his Piper unmarried-engine and set up a flight plan for Destin, Florida. Flying over northern Alabama at 24,000 feet, he made a sequence of increasingly drastic radio calls to the nearest command tower, announcing that he had meet turbulence; that his "windshield was spider-cracking"; that the shattered glass had cut his neck; that he was "bleeding profusely" and "graying out." He and so pointed the autopilot toward the Gulf of United mexican states and bailed out with a parachute over Harpersville, Alabama. Later on landing, he fabricated his way to a motorcycle he had stashed at a local self-storage unit.

Unfortunately for Schrenker, when two Navy F-15 pilots caught up with the even so-airborne Piper, they noted that the plane was in fine shape — except for the open pilot's side door and empty cockpit. Fifty-fifty worse, Schrenker failed to put enough fuel in the plane to get it to the gulf. It crashed 200 feet from a residential neighborhood in northern Florida. In the wreckage, government found a campground guide minus pages for Alabama and Florida and a handwritten crib canvass with the bullet points "windshield is spider-cracking," "bleeding very bad," and "graying out." Federal marshals institute him at a KOA campground in Florida two days later. Perhaps swayed by the additional testify that prosecutors turned upward on his laptop — including Google searches like "how to jump out of the plane when parachuting" and "requirements to become a Florida driver's license" — he pleaded guilty in early June.

Sergeant Roberson got the call from the Searcy elementary school in early August. He chop-chop subpoenaed the school, tracked the request for the Sheppards' daughter'south records to Yankton, and chosen the U.s. Marshals. He knew it was yet a gamble. "In the back of your caput, you wonder: Am I wrong?" Roberson says. "Is he dead?"

South Dakota-based federal agents pulled up an accost for the family and contacted the landlord. "I rented to that guy," he told them upon seeing Sheppard's picture, "just his name is John Howard." The alias led quickly to Howard's very Sheppard-like rèsumè, still posted on Monster.com. And then, in a scene befitting Sheppard'southward nearly paranoid fears, officers staked out the house, setting up in trees nearby, waiting for him to announced.

Sheppard was gazing out his dorsum window at deer when he heard cars speeding downward the gravel road toward the firm so the marshals bursting through the front end door. His married woman screamed, "He's non here!" just the agents found him a few seconds later hiding next to a bed. He didn't say a discussion.

In a rare study tracking people from the federal government's witness protection program that appeared in a 1984 issue of The American Behavioral Scientist, a psychologist named Fred Montanino outlined the difficulties of living under a fake identity. He determined that people were probable to feel "severe social distress" and "a pervasive sense of powerlessness," driven by the necessity of constant deception. "When the social textile is torn, when individuals are erased from one role of it and placed in another," Montanino concluded, "problems ascend."

Trading in your old identity and adopting a new 1 involves more than remembering an ill-fitting new proper noun. Information technology means a lifetime of duplicity that complicates every social interaction, lacing inconvenience and dubiety into such humdrum tasks as registering a car or getting health insurance. "You practise, to a certain extent, have to erase who you are," says Frank Ahearn, author of the guidebook How to Disappear. "Victims of stalkers take the motivation of saving their own lives. Information technology'southward non every bit much of a — excuse my French — psychological fuck." But those looking to "pick up and live a palm tree lifestyle," he says, oft "don't realize how hard it is to starting time over."

A life on the run means enduring the intense isolation of leaving friends and family behind. "It takes an extremely dedicated person to forget everything in their by," says William Sorukas, chief of domestic investigation for the Us Marshals, "and never make that phone recollect to the family, not after 10 years go back domicile and bulldoze through the neighborhood again."

Of course, applied science can let the kind of anonymous contact with friends and family that wasn't possible in the past. "Mom can take a telephone under another name that only you telephone call, or maybe yous use encrypted email," Rambam says. "But somebody always makes a mistake."

Even in a earth of cross-linked databases and location-enlightened phones, most people living on the lam are undone by self-approbation. "Practice you take a hobby — are you a model train collector or a butterfly collector? Everything that defined your prior life, y'all accept to stay away from," Rambam says. However nearly anyone on the run comes to require ordinary human contact. "When the newness wears off, you ask, 'How exercise I live my life?'" Ahearn says. "'How do I appointment? How do I not tell people about where I'm from?' People loosen up and go dorsum to who they were."

And that's how most attempts to vanish end. A school registration, an electronic mail dorsum abode, a campsite guide with pages torn out. All mistakes look avoidable in hindsight, of course, and the nature of such stories is that only the failures surface. To succeed at disappearing is to never have your methods told. But for those who are caught, there's always the sour taste of what could take been.

Iii months into his 10-yr prison stint for theft and insurance fraud, Matthew Sheppard shuffles into the deputy warden's office at the Eastward Arkansas Regional Unit on a sweltering summer afternoon. Clad in a baggy white prison uniform, he is 100 pounds lighter than when he went into the Little Red River. Sitting across from me on the warden'southward burrow, he reflects on his tale in a subdued tone, tinged with relief. Even after his arrest, he says, "nobody ever sat me down and asked me the details" of the escape. (Monica, too, pleaded guilty for insurance fraud and was sentenced to vi months in jail. Prosecutors accused her of being involved from the commencement, only Roberson says he isn't sure. Either fashion, she was technically guilty from the moment she learned her husband was alive.)

Looking back now, Sheppard himself has problem making sense of it all. Today, none of his problems seem insurmountable, even the overcharged corporate credit card. He probably could have admitted wrongdoing and left the company, perhaps even paid it back and kept his task. Just at the fourth dimension, "it felt like the whole earth was on my shoulders."

After spending his early on prison days laboring on outdoor work crews, he now works indoors handling the prison house'south structure contracts. He'southward hoping for a work release, peradventure fifty-fifty with a company he worked with at Eaton. "I've been through the hardest fourth dimension of my life; physically, mentally, with my family," he says. "I would settle for working at McDonald's."

He'd known the school registration was risky, and he wasn't surprised when I told him that was how the authorities had caught him. Simply he tries not to think too much nigh where he might be if only he'd kept his guard up a flake longer. "I don't run into how I could accept taken intendance of my family and kept my girl out of all of this forever," he says. Mostly, he wants people to know he's remorseful for what he inflicted upon his coworkers, neighbors, and family unit.

By intentionally disappearing, Sheppard didn't save himself of his burdens — he but swapped them for some other set. "What was worse?" he wonders now. "What I was dealing with when I did this? Or what I had to deal with when I was on the run?"

He does allow, on reflection, that a larger body of water might have made for a more disarming expiry. "That was one of the stupid things," he says, with a hint of laughter in his optics, "that I didn't go to a lake or something."

Contributing editor Evan Ratliff (eratliff@atavist.cyberspace) wrote well-nigh dinosaur proteins in Wired, issue 17.07..

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Source: https://www.wired.com/2009/08/gone-forever-what-does-it-take-to-really-disappear/

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