How to Disappear Completely and Never Be Found Page 10
Along these lines, withheld taxes are usually turned in by employers during April, July, October and January for the preceding quarter. This means that a man who works, even under his own name and Social Security number, in January, February and March can quit on April Fools Day and be on his way long before the reports that will pinpoint his location are processed.
Union pension plan payments and health and welfare contributions are often filed on a monthly basis and these records, too, are available for inspection. As a general rule, however, unions make a more conscientious effort to protect the privacy of their members than governmental agencies or commercial institutions.
An example of the extent to which snooping is conducted by so-called law enforcement agencies came to light recently when a well-to-do artist received a packet of cancelled checks from his bank. Neatly wrapped around the package was an interdepartmental memo addressed to the bank employees who process customers' monthly statements. It gave the artist's name and account number, then went on to say, "This memo is to authorize you to read checks to the FBI before sending the statement to the customer." The italicized words were underlined in red ink.
The memo also contained the name and phone number of FBI agent Bud Watkins. While the FBI declined to comment on this item, Wells Fargo Bank admitted the memo was authentic. The artist was never charged with the commission of any crime. He believes the memo was included with his statement intentionally by a bank employee who wished him well.
The police blandly excuse their unlawful acts with the age-old alibi that they do it only for the greater public good. Of course, that's their interpretation of the public good. In their eyes this permits them to conduct illegal searches, seizures, bugging, beatings in back rooms, unlawful opening of first class mail, delving into supposedly confidential records and the like. And don't forget tapping telephones and accessing telephone company records.
The answer for the prudent disappearee should be self-evident. He must conduct himself with utmost propriety at all times and, as the late columnist Charles McCabe put it so well, "Stay out of government buildings insofar as possible."
Publicity
The disappearee should attempt to keep out of the public eye as much as possible. While we have already discussed the reasons for not taking a job as a TV reporter, radio announcer, bellhop or other highly public job, there are subtler ways that vanishers trip themselves up through publicity. Stay away from public activities like rallies, marches, protests, etc. Such events are swarming with media photographers. You never know when you'll wake up one morning and see your smiling face on page one.
You should also avoid membership in publicity-seeking clubs. Their membership records may be available to the authorities or other investigators looking for you. A number of disappearees have been found when their pictures turned up in small club newsletters.
As a photographer myself, I can tell you that there are a great number of people who are absolute masters at avoiding the camera or spoiling shots. Their faces are always partially obscured by someone else's head or some object. And it happens enough that I know it is not coincidence; they watch out for cameras and keep themselves out of the line of fire.
Some people just run into bum luck and have their identities revealed. A good example of this is the old William Desmond Taylor murder case. Taylor was a top Hollywood movie director of his time who wound up murdered one day. In a case like this the police immediately make a thorough, painstaking investigation, starting from scratch. And scratch is, "Who was he?"
It turned out that Taylor was a disappearee who in his original identity had been a prosperous businessman from New York who had simply walked out of his life some years before. Since that time he served with distinction as an officer in the Canadian Army, had been in Alaska, and finally wound up as a movie director in Hollywood. His new identity was so well established that not much more was ever discovered. And his killer has not been identified to this day.
In the natural course of their investigation the police questioned his valet, a man who called himself "Sands." Sands was never a suspect himself. And as they had no particular reason to detain him, the police let him go, explaining that if they thought of more questions they would look him up.
They did think of some more questions, but they're probably still looking. For when Sands walked out of the police station he walked into oblivion and was never seen again. Many of the people involved in the case believe that Sands was Taylor's brother who had also disappeared some years before. An intensive search was mounted, but to no avail.
It was only through the incredible bad luck of Taylor's murder that any attention at all was ever paid to Sands.
Miscellaneous
A disappearee should never go about with more than one set of identification papers on his person. Any official questioning is likely to entail examination of the contents of the suspect's pockets. Nothing is going to be more immediately suspicious to an experienced officer than discovering that a suspect's ID is in two or three different names. Many petty criminals are tripped up on this point. Obviously a disappearee should not carry contraband of any size, shape or description on his person, either inside the United States or outside. What is regarded as contraband varies greatly from country to country. In some parts of the world, being discovered with a Bible in your luggage would be grounds for detention.
By the same token, a disappearee should not attempt to pass various customs officers with a six-shooter on his person or in his luggage. This is especially important because handguns are flat verboten almost everywhere in the world including some states in the U.S. This most emphatically includes New York with the infamous Sullivan Act.
Detach With Your Past
It should go without saying that one of the prime requirements of a successful disappearance-cum-identity change is the complete divorcing of the new existence from the original. This is easier said than done, and some people just can't handle it at all. Private detective agencies, police departments and skip-tracing firms have a myriad of ploys for locating vanishers, and almost without exception their tricks are based on the assumption that the missing person will eventually be foolish enough to communicate in some way, directly or indirectly, with one phase or another of his original existence. And in all too many instances they do just exactly that.
Take the sad example of the lamster who carried out a completely successful disappearance. Up to a point. In this case the man was an avid model boatbuilder, and he had no sooner established himself in his new life than he subscribed to the modelmaker's publications he'd read before he vanished. The private detective agency employed to find him assumed--correctly, as it turned out--that the subject might change everything else, but he wouldn't abandon his lifelong hobby. So the detectives simply bought the mailing lists of the modelmaker's magazines and checked them for new subscribers. They could tell which were new and which were old by the coding on the mailing labels. As in any specialized field, subscribers tend to stay with their favorite publications year in and year out, and there aren't actually all that many new subscribers in any given month. The detectives checked the new subscribers against city and telephone directories, eliminating the ones who had been residents at the same address for any length of time. Of the very few who remained, one was their boy!
All moneys should be transferred from one identity to another in cash, using bills that are not too large. Even in today's overheated economy $100 bills are not all that common. Fifties, though, are rapidly on the increase, largely because some State Unemployment Compensation Offices pay their clients off with as many fifties as possible.
Travelers checks, cashier's checks, bank drafts and the like leave a trail between identities like a seven-dog team crossing a field of new-fallen snow. And they are sometimes hard for a man to cash before his new identity has had an opportunity to mature and "set."
And most emphatically, no gloating telephone calls to the abandoned spouse. It is better by far th
at he/she should feel sad or so-what than angry and/or resentful. The old saw about never stirring a hornet's nest with a stick goes triple here. Long distance phone calls are logged for billing purposes by the telephone companies as a matter of routine, although local calls aren't as a general rule. But even these leave a paper trail between the two telephones.
If for some reason it becomes necessary to mail something back to someone he knew in his original existence, then the vanisher should by all means use a remail service.
Remail services make a specialty of remailing letters and postcards for a fee, and almost invariably give prompt and satisfactory service. To locate a remail service, look in the classified ads of publications like Popular Mechanics, writers magazines, men's magazines, and any publication carrying low-cost classified ads. The charge for remailing is surprisingly nominal, and remailers are located pretty much all over the world. Some will even send their customers packets of local postcards to be filled out and returned to the remailer who then drops them in the mail at regular intervals, or as directed. See the Directory of Mail Drops in the reference chapter.
But remail service or no, the vanisher would be best advised not to do any communicating with his former life. Period.
Even to "keep track" of the activities of the abandoned family members can be a risk. I was astonished at the number of identity-changers who knew in minute detail what was going on in their previous existence!
And it should go without saying that no matter how tender the moment, or how great the temptation to confide, he should never divulge or even hint at the identity change to young ladies. Or not-so-young ladies. Exclamation Point! The old gag about the fastest methods of news dissemination being telephone and tell-a-woman is as true today as when it was coined some hundred years or so ago.
An astonishing number of disappearees violate this obvious and basic rule, to their ultimate sorrow, and identity-changers of all people, should know only too well how vindictive a woman can be when sufficiently provoked.
A little-appreciated facet of disappearing and identity switching is the extreme vulnerability of a vanisher to blackmail. And his absolute helplessness in the face of it, short of disappearing again.
A man died not too long ago down in Naples, Florida. He was the business manager for a family with extensive holdings throughout the country. Happily married, he and his wife were quite popular in the community.
Almost before his body cooled his "wife" spirited it out of town for burial. Whereupon the real Mrs. X turned up. Seemed our successful Floridan was really a disappearee out of Cleveland, Ohio.
In the resulting legal imbroglio a very interesting fact came to light. His original wife had been milking him for several hundred dollars a month for years as the price for keeping her mouth shut. How she managed to locate him in his new identity no one knows. My guess is that he was seen on the street by somebody who knew him in his original existence and promptly tipped off the original wife. Florida is, after all, an extremely poor choice for a vanisher from Cleveland because so many people from that city spend the cold weather months in Sunny Florida.
On his death the original wife made every effort to get her hands on his Florida estate, including the very home in which he had resided in bliss with his new lady. Fortunately for the latter he had anticipated this and had taken the proper legal steps to protect her rights. So the new "wife" was able to salvage at least some of the Florida holdings. Her popularity in the community helped in this, too.
The original wife, by the way, had managed to have him declared dead in Ohio and had collected his life insurance, in addition to the regular monthly payments she'd been bleeding him for. This in turn put her in a very interesting relationship with the insurance people!
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POSTSCRIPT
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On rereading the manuscript I've come to the conclusion that perhaps it is the men who don't disappear who should be pitied. They are the grouchy, embittered, ulcer-ridden men one sees every day, bound by ties of duty, loyalty and fear to a life they detest, hopeless in their forties, old before their time in their fifties. In this age of loud and vocal minorities, the disappearees in our midst--and they are legion!--who constitute a minority group in every sense of the word, are refreshing in that they aren't hollering for handouts, howling about discrimination, or complaining about their lack of opportunity. And though in modern society the problems of an adult with no "paper background" are manifold and pressing, these people go calmly about overcoming their problems unaided, alone and with a complete absence of bitching.
And I believe it can be truly said that they are the only group that has come anywhere near to beating the system.
I salute them!
--Doug Richmond
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REFERENCES
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The following books are good sources of further information on the topics discussed in this work.
MISSING PERSONS
SEARCH, by Jane Askin, Harper & Row, New York, 1982. Written for adoptees searching for their biological parents, it discusses how paper trails many years old can be used to locate a person. HOW TO FIND MISSING PERSONS: A Handbook for Investigators, by Ronald George Eriksen 2, Loompanics Unlimited, Port Townsend, WA, 1984. The definitive manual for skip tracers and private eyes.
AMONG THE MISSING, by Jay Robert Nash, Simon and Schuster, New York, 1978. Interesting stories on people who have disappeared permanently.
ID IN AMERICA
THE PAPER TRIP I and THE PAPER TRIP II, Eden Press, Fountain Valley, CA, 1984 and 1985. The classic and original books "For a New You through New ID." NEW I.D. IN AMERICA, by Anonymous, Paladin Press, Boulder, CO, 1983. Excellent material, just what the title says.
MAIL ORDER I.D., by Michael Hoy, Loompanics Unlimited, Port Townsend, WA, 1985. Definitive guide to fake ID sold through the mail, with names & addresses of sellers, and photos of their products.
ID IN OTHER COUNTRIES
HOW TO GET ID IN CANADA, by Ronald George Eriksen 2, Loompanics Unlimited, Port Townsend, WA, 1983. This book is to Canada what the above books are to the USA. PAPER TRIPPING OVERSEAS: New I.D. in England, Australia and New Zealand, by Tony Newborn, Paladin Press, Boulder, CO, 1985. The title is self-explanatory.
FINDING WORK
HOW TO STEAL A JOB, by Bill Conners, Financial Management Associates, Phoenix, AZ, 1977. A good book on the "hidden" job market, with a good section on how to create a fake job history. TEMPORARY EMPLOYMENT: The Flexible Alternative, by Demaris C. Smith, Betterway Publications, White Hall, VA, 1985. Excellent guide to finding temporary employment.
GUERRILLA CAPITALISM: How to Practice Free Enterprise in an Unfree Economy, by Adam Cash, Loompanics Unlimited, Port Townsend, WA, 1984. The definitive guide to evading taxes and keeping a low profile in the Underground Economy.
HOW TO DO BUSINESS "OFF THE BOOKS", by Adam Cash, Loompanics Unlimited, Port Townsend, WA, 1986. Just what the title says--the sequel to the above book.
GETTING CREDIT
THE COMPLETE CREDIT BOOK, by Bruce Brown & Tom Nelson, Inflation Reports, Los Angeles, 1986. A fine guide to obtaining credit, including howto get a Visa or Mastercard with no credit check.
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END