by Carole Moore
Stonehouse was identified and arrested on Christmas Eve, a little over a month after he faked his disappearance, and all because another Englishman chose the same time to vanish in a blaze of worldwide publicity.
As for Lord Lucan, at the time this was written, he remains a fugitive from justice.
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Thousands of people disappear each day, most of them by choice. Although juvenile runaways are by far more prevalent, plenty of adults also decide to vanish. Most do so without national attention, but some, like the American Jennifer Wilbanks, attract the white-hot glare of the public spotlight as infallibly as a cobra responds to a snake charmer’s tune.
Wilbanks, who became known as the “runaway bride,” disappeared five days before her April 30, 2005, wedding. The young woman vanished while out jogging, triggering a massive media response. As reporters tripped over themselves questioning her husband-to-be, her parents, and her bridesmaids in her home state of Georgia, Wilbanks traveled by bus through Las Vegas and other western cities, leaving in her wake plans for a lavish nuptial ceremony that included a wedding party of twenty-eight bridesmaids and groomsmen and a guest list of more than five hundred.
Police say her escape was well planned: she purchased a bus ticket from her Duluth, Georgia, home to Austin, Texas, cut her hair, and instructed a cab to pick her up from a random location to take her to the bus station. Wilbanks covered her tracks like a pro.
She called Georgia on the day of her wedding and claimed she’d been abducted—a story concocted to make it easier to return home. Wilbanks admitted she lied, but the search-and-rescue bill for the city was calculated at a cost of more than $40,000. She and her fiancé, John Mason, initially reconciled, but parted after selling their story for a reported $500,000.
Many who “disappear on purpose” do so because they’re trying to avoid detection of criminal activity or arrest. One of the most famous and successful intentional disappearances in the United States is that of James J. “Whitey” Bulger, who has been on the run for more than a decade.
Bulger, a Boston-based gangster who goes by numerous aliases, disappeared in connection to an investigation that revealed he had an FBI agent on his payroll. In addition to nineteen counts of murder, Bulger is wanted today for drug trafficking, extortion, and numerous conspiracy charges. He vanished on December 23, 1994, after being tipped off about federal indictments by John Connelly, an FBI agent and Bulger’s man on the inside. Sources say Bulger planned for his future disappearance well: he established safe deposit boxes containing alternate identification, money, and other valuables in numerous places.
Despite being featured on the FBI’s ten most wanted list, becoming the subject of numerous books and articles, and having his story appear on television episodes of America’s Most Wanted, as far as anyone knows, Bulger remains alive and on the run. A $2 million reward has been offered for information leading to his arrest.
Bulger was notorious before he went on the lam, but he certainly is not the only well-known individual to intentionally vanish over the years. Although she did resurface, many questions about the disappearance of mystery writer Agatha Christie were never resolved. Christie vanished in 1926. Her car was later found abandoned while police continued to search for the authoress, one of England’s biggest celebrities. She later turned up at an inn, registered under another name. The British writer never fully explained or discussed her disappearance, although for decades her fans have speculated about her reasons. Personal problems, not legal ones, were the most plausible impetus.
Another literary luminary, Ambrose Bierce, did his disappearing a little earlier than Agatha Christie. Born in 1842 in Horse Cave, Ohio, Bierce was a respected Civil War veteran who became a well-known San Francisco columnist and writer. After being posted in Washington, D.C., Bierce revisited the Civil War battlegrounds in Virginia, dined with presidents, and developed a caustic but respected outlook on war and politics. In 1913, Bierce departed the nation’s capital on his way to El Paso, Texas. From there he crossed the border into Mexico. The celebrated writer’s final communication to the world was a letter he wrote on December 26, 1913. No trace of Bierce, then seventy-one years of age, has ever been found. While some believe he met with foul play, others think he vanished intentionally—theories that may never be debunked or proven.
Another well-known writer who took a hike was Ken Kesey, hippie author of One Flew over the Cuckoo’s Nest. Kesey faked his death by suicide during the 1960s in order to avoid drug charges but was revealed as a sham after only a few months in hiding.
Kesey and John Stonehouse’s preferred method of vanishing, by faking one’s demise, is a popular vehicle for escaping an unhappy life—or the consequences of that life. In a case that grabbed headlines in 2008, disgraced hedge fund manager Samuel Israel III, son of a wealthy and well-known New Orleans family, pretended to have jumped to his death from a New York bridge rather than go to prison in connection with a plot to defraud thousands of investors. Authorities put little stock in Israel’s staged death, unmasking his plan after Israel turned himself in at the urging of relatives.
Celebrities and criminal masterminds aren’t alone in occasionally walking away from their lives. News reports are full of ordinary people who disappear and then resurface, sometimes many decades after they were last seen.
The relatives of an Indiana man missing for fifteen years ended their ordeal when a determined Indiana State Police investigator reopened the old case of his disappearance, using his driver’s license to track him down.
Monty Stutzman, who vanished in 1993 at the age of twenty-three, was reunited with his family at his Mississippi home after Indiana State Police Detective Scott Jarvis played a hunch and tracked Stutzman through a driver’s license check. He was found living with his new family in Mississippi and reportedly told investigators he fled the area because he faced a probation violation.
Fear that he was the target of law enforcement also allegedly drove a Florida man to emulate John Stonehouse and stage his own drowning. Bennie Harden Wint failed to return from a dip in the ocean, leaving his fiancée frantic and the beach patrol on a fruitless search—fruitless because investigators say Wint swam down the beach, walked out of the water, and hitchhiked to a new life in North Carolina.
Wint, who went by the name of William Sweet, was unmasked in January 2009 when police pulled him over for a minor traffic violation in the Tar Heel State. Booked into jail because he couldn’t produce any official identification, Wint was identified by authorities as the man who “drowned” off the Florida coast on September 24, 1989.
For those who manufacture elaborate alter-identities, the point of vanishing is to close forever the previous chapters of their lives. They intend to live as someone else—a moderately difficult feat in 1974. Today, in this high-tech, information-driven society, to establish a new identity and live without detection is a much more complicated proposition.
Wired magazine writer Evan Ratliff chronicled the pitfalls of disappearing and avoiding detection after he wrote a story about people who do so (Wired, issue 17.12, December 2009). Ratliff went “on the run” in August 2009; his story appeared in the magazine the following November. Ratliff and Wired then turned the article into a real-life reader’s challenge: Ratliff would disappear for a month, and the reader who found him before the month’s end would win $5,000.
In the piece he wrote for the magazine after his unmasking, Ratliff documented the preparations that went into turning himself into James Donald Gatz (a name based on a character in F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby). Ratliff created his new identity and established misleading clues to spark reward hunters to look in all the wrong places. He succeeded in remaining “missing” for twenty-five days before a couple of guys combined their information and found him. But Ratliff’s experiment, while interesting, was made more complicated by virtue of its high profile. Wired provoked readers to try and find him, the kind of attention people like Stonehouse eschew. Most who
disappear—with the exception of celebrities and well-known criminals—try to do so with as little fanfare as possible.
Frank Ahearn reigns as the sultan of intentional disappearances, an enterprise he knows and understands from both sides. After years of working as a skiptracer (a term for people who find others), Ahearn decided to put his considerable knowledge of the skills it takes to vanish into practice, and now he not only looks for people who’ve skipped out, but also advises others on the proper way to disappear. Ahearn and his partner, Eileen Horan, have authored a book, How to Disappear, which presents advice on the ramifications and pitfalls of vanishing. The upshot: it takes a lot to complete a convincing vanishing act, and it’s not as easy as movies and books make it appear.
Most who make up their minds to leave make critical mistakes. Among the most common errors: not severing ties with individuals from their past; using traceable cell phone numbers, credit cards, and ATMs; requesting the transfer of medical or educational records; forwarding mail or magazines to a new address; using accounts tied to a previous (real) identity; having a traceable Internet account; incorporating a real name (or something associated with a previous identity) into a new one; or leaving behind clues to an eventual destination.
Experts say aliases can trip up those on the run. Often they will choose names that prove easy for them to remember: “Douglas Alan Martin” might become “Alan Douglas” or Mona Sims, who once lived on Johnson Boulevard, may choose Monica Johnson or even Monica Simmons—both names that she can recall with ease.
Skiptracers like Ahearn once relied on paper trails but now depend on electronic ones. What makes electronic “crumbs” so compelling are that they are difficult, if not impossible, to erase: once in a database, almost always in a database.
Unique characteristics can also hurt. From hobbies to food preferences, the devil is in the details. Wired writer Ratliff, who says he suffers from celiac disease and eats gluten free, blew his cover by going to a restaurant that offered gluten-free pizza. He also risked detection to attend a soccer game.
Being a vegetarian, having salon-applied fingernails, drinking Turkish coffee, or following a favorite NFL team can all lead to discovery. Ahearn and other experts like him agree that the details that make you an individual also make you easier to find, and the people doing the searching are going to know as much about a person as possible.
Those most successful at disappearing walk away from everything. These people take nothing from their former lives and leave no hint that they planned to vanish. They stash clothes, new identification, and money against the day they leave. They do their research.
Ahearn says he believes each of us nurses the fantasy of walking away from it all, but the numbers who follow through are miniscule. “I look at my Web stats, and I get 200 to 250 hits a day. And 99 percent of those hits typed in ‘how to disappear’—from Finland to Germany to Russia, from all over,” he says.
Ahearn says the Internet encourages people to explore the idea by providing ways to test the waters and the tools to plan exits from real lives. “I think having the Internet at our fingertips lets us dream. It’s kind of therapeutic,” he says.
While a potential runaway can use the Web to plan an escape, using technology to abandon one life and start another also carries its own price tag: it leaves a trail that professionals like Ahearn have no trouble following.
“I’m the person who can locate the guy with $2 million in the Caribbean,” Ahearn says. He explains that as a skiptracer he is more prone to pursue a fake drowning victim like Samuel Israel than a missing high school kid.
Ahearn says people usually leave for two main reasons: money or danger. Those reasons are divided along gender lines: men leave for money, and women for danger. Men tend to come into some cash and decide to live out their fantasy, or they get into financial hot water and want out. Women can react to stalking situations or violent and abusive relationships by running. And while the bulk of intentional disappearances were once men, Ahearn says more and more women now choose to bail out. As for numbers, there is no real way to know how many people disappear by choice each year and how many are abducted because not every case is solved.
“We’re seeing more professional women coming to us or contacting us, women who are married and need an exit plan,” Ahearn explains.
When it comes to finding someone, Ahearn says it all depends on the sophistication of the hunter. “If it’s somebody who is searching you out, like a cop or a skiptracer, and they are pretty savvy with technology, it’s a question of who is better. It’s like a duel,” he says.
Law enforcement officers who track white-collar criminals do so by learning to think like them, much as those who specialize in violent crimes delve into the habits and psyches of killers and rapists. Tracking a man who has embezzled a large sum of money and run off with his secretary takes a different skill set than tracking a pedophile and child abductor.
“If law enforcement is looking for you, they know at any time you [could] pop up on the radar; how many criminals are caught because a headlight is out?” Ahearn points out.
Criminals often fall into the hands of their pursuers because little things go wrong, or they do something stupid (from their point of view, not so much from the cop’s vantage point), like run their mouths. Often intentional disappearances are resolved the same way—the perpetrator does something unplanned or without thinking—getting back into the same line of work, providing skiptracers with a juicy lead.
“You can’t be Joe the bus driver in Chicago and then disappear and be Joe the bus driver in Wisconsin,” Ahearn says. “The two facts [to take into consideration] are who you are and who is looking for you.”
If there’s a common thread running through those who intentionally skip out, it is that they are seeking freedom of some sort: freedom from somebody or something, says Ahearn. “I don’t think that disappearing itself is that hard; what it always comes back to is that the grass is always greener. Once you get there you have to rebuild your life. Some people are good at it; some aren’t,” he says.
As for the process itself, Ahearn claims that a successful disappearance is more about preparation and follow-through than walking out. He says someone who wants to disappear the right way—perhaps a woman trying to get away from an abusive partner—should prepare for her new life by leaving nothing to trace. She should obtain a mail drop and use it for all mail in connection with her future life. He recommends prepaid phones and monetary resources that can’t be traced (like a new bank account or a stash of cash). For research, Ahearn counsels avoiding Internet cafes, since most have keystroke loggers in place, which remember passwords and personally identifying data, which in turn allows others to trace that information, and instead use a laptop. Connect on random wireless locations around a town or city.
For those searching for a loved one who is missing, he advises them to pursue every lead: credit cards, cell phone bills, trips, and so on.
“Most likely there will be a clue there somewhere,” Ahearn says. “Everybody makes mistakes—that’s the bottom line.” Ahearn urges answering questions for clues: Does the missing person have relatives? Is he in contact with them? What does he do for a living? Look at the whole picture, especially the data, and that could lead to the next step.
“You still have to be who you are,” says Ahearn. But the difference with those who are intentionally missing is in the amount of discretion they use. Some have no problem adapting to a new identity and life; others do.
“Some just want this new life because the old life is so bad,” Ahearn says. On the other hand, he believes that in many cases the passing of time can make the individual feel less threatened and lead him or her to return. As far as how many leave with the intention of never coming back, Ahearn thinks statistics are wrong and many more people disappear on purpose than is believed.
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Being trapped and feeling hopeless are what Dr. Geraldine Merola Barton, a New York–based ps
ychologist, says spark some to abandon their lives. Bad home situations where there are few, if any, alternatives create desperation in both adults and juveniles. Barton recalls a young woman in a situation where the violence continued to escalate. Knowing she could not rely on her parents to help her, the young woman planned her getaway. During her lunch break at work, she boarded an airplane and flew across the country, where she began a new life as someone else.
“She felt she had nobody who could protect her, no resources. So she turned to herself,” Barton says.
Medication issues also can provide an ignition point for impetuous and often spontaneous flight. For some classes of mental illness, the individual feels better when he’s on his medication, so he thinks he can do without them and stops taking them. This is especially true for individuals with bipolar disorder, who often thrive on the manic episodes and may miss the high they bring. Once off medication, leaving home may seem as if it is a reasonable move, but many who need drugs to function in a normal environment and stop taking them without medical clearance or supervision end up on the streets as part of the homeless population.
Others may experience neurotic behavior, angry overreactions to situations, and the inability to properly evaluate their problems. There is little that can be done about such behavior.
“We don’t have a Big Brother society; we can’t force someone [to take their medications] unless it’s an extreme emergency,” Barton says.
For those who don’t suffer from mental illnesses like bipolar disorder or schizophrenia, though, Barton believes there still may be other less obvious psychological disorders in play.
She recalls a case where a patient who was also a gambler claimed he went into a fugue state (defined as an altered state of consciousness in which a person moves around, talks, and otherwise functions, but is not aware of what he or she is doing) for two weeks, during which time he left his home, his wife, and his kids, and ended up in Las Vegas. When the man “came to,” he did not know how he got to Vegas and found money and clothes he didn’t remember acquiring. Barton says that although the case is extreme, it’s a good example of someone suffering from an underlying dissociative disorder.