Faking Your Own Death: We All Do It, But Why?

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

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Speaker 00

  This is an iHeart Podcast. Guaranteed Human.

• 0:04Josh Clark?

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• 1:04Speaker 00

  Welcome to Stuff You Should Know, a production of iHeart Radio.

• 1:14Josh Clark?

  Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh and there's Chuck and it's just us because we don't know where Jerry is, but that's okay, because this is stuff you should know.

• 1:23Speaker 02

  Well, Jerry may have engaged in pseudocide because she's so tired of working with us.

• 1:32Josh Clark?

  Yeah.

• 1:32Speaker 02

  Then she didn't want to tell us.

• 1:34Josh Clark?

  Yeah.

• 1:35Speaker 02

  That's one reason somebody might want to get out of their life or, you know, not for real, but that's what pseudocide is, is faking your own death.

• 1:43Josh Clark?

  Yeah, and that definitely does sound like something Jerry would do.

• 1:46Speaker 02

  Yeah, like she couldn't bring herself to tell us. So she's like, well, maybe I could just disappear.

• 1:51Josh Clark?

  Right. So yes, pseudocide, I'd never known that before, but pseudocide is a different term for faking your own death. Like pseudo, like fake and side, death.

• 2:02Speaker 02

  That's right.

• 2:03Josh Clark?

  So I don't think side means death. I think it's a little worse than that, but you get the point.

• 2:08Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 2:08Josh Clark?

  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.

• 2:27Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 2:28Josh Clark?

  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.

• 2:41Speaker 02

  Yeah, or tried it and failed, but didn't get caught.

• 2:46Josh Clark?

  Okay, sure. Yeah, that's a good, that's a good point, too. I hadn't thought about that.

• 2:49Speaker 02

  As you would say, there are three tranches.

• 2:52Josh Clark?

  That's right. I wouldn't say that because I love myself.

• 2:55Speaker 02

  No, but you're the tranche master.

• 2:59Josh Clark?

  Oh, that's so like 2010. I forgot about that. Can you believe that was 15 years ago?

• 3:05Speaker 02

  Hey, tranches, tranches were hot.

• 3:08Josh Clark?

  Yeah, they were. They were all rage. So why would anybody do this, Chuck? I think we should start with that.

• 3:14Speaker 02

  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, you know, if it's a movie at least, although this happens in real life, I want to leave my family.

• 3:30Josh Clark?

  They're so boring.

• 3:31Speaker 02

  Yeah, and go set up another life with this new family that's going to solve all my problems.

• 3:35Josh Clark?

  Right, that's how it works.

• 3:37Speaker 02

  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.

• 3:52Josh Clark?

  Yeah, apparently. So Livia 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 pseudocide after the 2008 financial crisis.

• 4:06Speaker 02

  Yeah, that, I mean, speaking of tranches.

• 4:10Josh Clark?

  So another big one, too, is if you are about to be incarcerated for a very long time and they 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.

• 4:32Speaker 02

  Yeah, for sure. Very sadly, of course, one of the reasons is that 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.

• 4:47Josh Clark?

  Right. Or you want to frame your wife like in the movie Double Jeopardy with Ashley Judd.

• 4:53Speaker 02

  Yeah, boy, we're... Is this 2007?

• 4:57Josh Clark?

  You know what? This really feels like an earlier Stuff You Should Know type episode. So let's do it. Let's do it. Tranches everywhere. Ashley Judd appearances. I will figure it out as we go along, okay?

• 5:08Speaker 02

  Yeah, our boss is just coming to us and saying that like there's people that want to put commercials on our podcast and we're saying, no, why would we ever do that?

• 5:15Josh Clark?

  Yeah. And then the other people are saying, what's a podcast?

• 5:18Speaker 02

  Exactly.

• 5:20Josh Clark?

  So let's see, what else? Oh, I think this one's probably, it's pretty niche, but if you're a lottery winner and you have a bunch of family you don't care about that are coming out of the woodwork, you might try this as well.

• 5:35Speaker 02

  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.

• 6:11Josh Clark?

  Precisely. So, yeah, it's just kind of a selection bias almost, you know?

• 6:16Speaker 02

  Yeah, totally.

• 6:18Josh Clark?

  Men also are more likely to try this, or at the very least are more likely to get caught.

• 6:23Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 6:24Josh Clark?

  And I could see that being the case rather than just being, yeah, more likely to do it. And also, again, probably because of selection bias a little bit. Finance bros are likelier than others to try this, or at least to get caught, too.

• 6:38Speaker 02

  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.

• 6:50Josh Clark?

  Right. It just didn't work out, bro.

• 6:54Speaker 02

  Here's another interesting thing is it is more common

• 6:59Speaker 02

  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.

• 7:10Josh Clark?

  Yes, and you just mentioned insurance for the second or third time. There are people who work for insurance companies are well aware of all of these things that we're rattling off and more.

• 7:23Speaker 02

  Oh, yeah.

• 7:23Josh Clark?

  Because as we'll see later on, there's a lot of stuff that you could do wrong that an insurance investigator is going to pick up on. We'll, 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.

• 7:41Speaker 02

  Yeah, for sure. And as we'll see, it's, um, 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.

• 7:54Josh Clark?

  That's right.

• 7:55Speaker 02

  And the insurance company is like, well, they just got millions of dollars from us, so we're gonna, we're gonna do your job.

• 7:59Josh Clark?

  Exactly. We should probably give a pretty big shout out at the outset here to Elizabeth Greenwood. She's an author. I think her day job is a creative writing professor at Columbia. But she wrote a book, which as far as I can tell, is the most exhaustive look at pseudocide anyone's ever created. Her book was released in 2016. It's Playing Dead.

• 8:28Josh Clark?

  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.

• 8:45Speaker 02

  Yeah, and she actually went through part of the process just to actually go through it to see how hard or easy or expensive it was to write about it. She didn't go through with it, but she went as far as finding out where this is. You know, when you talk about something sort of unusual like this, it seems like there's always like, oh, well, you 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 pseudocide is the Philippines.

• 9:21Josh Clark?

  Yeah.

• 9:22Speaker 02

  Who knew?

• 9:22Josh Clark?

  For sure. That's another thing, too. If you died in the Philippines, your insurance claim is going to get investigated pretty thoroughly.

• 9:30Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 9:31Josh Clark?

  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 of 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.

• 10:10Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 10:10Josh Clark?

  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 going to double this offer.

• 10:28Speaker 02

  Yeah, I mean, it's sort of like any service. They're like, well, if you just want the birth certificate, you can get that for a couple of hundred bucks. But that's probably not going to be enough these days. Back in the old days, that was probably all you needed. It used to be way easier to get away with this kind of thing.

• 10:41Josh Clark?

  Yeah, the driver's licenses didn't even have pictures on them.

• 10:44Speaker 02

  Exactly.

• 10:45Josh Clark?

  It's nuts.

• 10:46Speaker 02

  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. You could have like a new passport in there, a new birth certificate, maybe something like that.

• 10:58Josh Clark?

  Yeah.

• 10:59Speaker 02

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

• 11:33Josh Clark?

  Yeah, we can get you an actual dead body.

• 11:36Speaker 02

  You want a dead body? I can get your dead body by 3pm.

• 11:39Josh Clark?

  Right, and that's gonna, probably, that's gonna sit in for you. Apparently, this really kind of drives it home. If there's a cadaver and you're not just missing presumed dead, that's definitely going to help your pseudocide become successful. Like you said, there's black market morgues that essentially, if you're unidentified or unclaimed in the Philippines, there's a chance somebody's going to hang on to your body and you might be sold to fulfill someone's pseudocide 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.

• 12:19Josh Clark?

  Where this, I guess, undertaker at a funeral home had a ton of bodies that he supposedly buried that he was selling for this reason or for other reasons. But also, this was one of the things you could buy a body for. And even like a legitimate funeral home has an incentive to just kind of be like, uh, yeah, it's nice to meet you, cousin Ed. Just give me the money and you can take this body, right?

• 12:43Speaker 02

  Okay, now I know where we did this. We did a video about this.

• 12:48Josh Clark?

  Oh, yeah?

• 12:49Speaker 02

  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, there was a guy there that did this.

• 13:05Speaker 02

  So, yeah, it is 2008.

• 13:08Josh Clark?

  It is all over again. We need to make this episode 12 minutes long.

• 13:11Speaker 02

  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 cremains?

• 13:26Josh Clark?

  I think cremation destroys DNA pretty good.

• 13:29Speaker 02

  So why don't they just say, like, here's a bag of teeth and ashes?

• 13:33Josh Clark?

  Some people do.

• 13:34Speaker 02

  Okay.

• 13:34Josh Clark?

  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 gonna do? This is supposedly the dead person. It makes way more sense. It's way cheaper. It's way less of a hassle. And like I was

• 14:16Josh Clark?

  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. If you go to one of these places and say, oh, yeah, that's my, that's my cousin. And they're, they're gonna be like, here, give me some money and, and, you know, you can handle everything from there.

• 14:44Speaker 02

  Yeah. And, and again, if, I mean, if you're trying to commit insurance fraud or something, that's gonna ramp up investigatory practice, most certainly from the insurance company, maybe the cops, depending on kind of what's going on. And obviously, if you're escaping justice, stuff like that. But if, 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 gonna do anything.

• 15:10Josh Clark?

  No, they're gonna say godspeed.

• 15:13Speaker 02

  Because it's not a crime specifically. And maybe we should take a break and that's, it sounds like a good place to leave it, eh?

• 15:19Josh Clark?

  I agree.

• 15:20Speaker 02

  All right, we'll be right back after this with more on suicide.

• 15:36Speaker 03

  First thought is like, wow, how are we gonna do all this?

• 15:39Josh Clark?

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• 18:43Speaker 02

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

• 19:21Josh Clark?

  Right, right. I thought those doorstep cameras were to create a sense of community, like you would find out what a great person your UPS driver is. Isn't that what they're for?

• 19:34Speaker 02

  I think so, because they pet your kitty.

• 19:36Josh Clark?

  Right, it just tangentially helps to track people who fake their own death.

• 19:41Speaker 02

  Yeah, or to, in my case, to post on the internet when squirrels attack, is what I call my show.

• 19:48Josh Clark?

  It's a great show.

• 19:49Speaker 02

  Emily sent me one yesterday. She was like, hey, take a look at the doorbell cam at 1211. And she tripped going up the stairs in a very, very funny way. And so she made sure I saw that.

• 20:01Josh Clark?

  Are you gonna post it?

• 20:02Speaker 02

  No, no, no, no.

• 20:03Josh Clark?

  You should post it to Yakity Sacks.

• 20:06Speaker 02

  I might do that, actually.

• 20:08Josh Clark?

  Um, 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. Um, it would really help if you had thought about this 10 years ago.

• 20:42Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 20:42Josh Clark?

  The, the best time to start planning your pseudocide is 10 years ago. The second best time is today, but it's not really a good time. Second best. That's the old saying.

• 20:57Josh Clark?

  But, uh, if you had started thinking about it 10 years ago, you could have really actually given this identity, your new false identity legs by like getting credit cards in its name, building a credit history. Um, 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.

• 21:20Speaker 02

  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, a list of, uh, cable bills and, uh, a credit history and stuff that goes back, you know, 10 years, uh, it's like just having your ID isn't enough. Uh, if, if you have a history already built up, I mean, this guy, it was an artist in 2013 named Curtis Wallen, uh, who did it as sort of performance art, like as a project. And he created an alter ego and he got a driver's license. He got an ID certifying

• 22:00Speaker 02

  him as a member of a, uh, indigenous, uh, Native American tribe. He got a boat operator's license. Like that's, that's kind of a deep cut, I think.

• 22:09Josh Clark?

  Yeah, I think so too. I think, you know, that's the kind of thing where you're like, would a fake person have a boat operator's license?

• 22:17Speaker 02

  Yeah, for a decade.

• 22:18Josh Clark?

  Exactly.

• 22:19Speaker 02

  He got insurance. So like, if you have all this stuff, then all of a sudden you're just not as suspicious, I think.

• 22:26Josh Clark?

  No. Uh, he went even further too. Like he disguised his, um, his, his look, I guess.

• 22:33Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 22:36Josh Clark?

  I guess so, yeah, for like your ID because it would be very easy for somebody to scan a database of driver's licenses looking for somebody's face. That's easy peasy these days. But what he did was he took his driver's license photo and then merged it with a couple other people's features to create an entirely synthetic new person. And that's what he used for his photo. I guess it was close enough that if you showed it to somebody, they wouldn't be like, what is this weird thing? You look like a Picasso. But like it would still fool facial recognition.

• 23:13Speaker 02

  Yeah. And well, of course, like you said, he's Photoshop these days, so it could be very easily done with AI, much quicker.

• 23:19Josh Clark?

  Sure. I'm old school, though. Remember, this is 2010.

• 23:23Speaker 02

  Yeah, that's right. This new Photoshop thing is amazing, isn't it?

• 23:26Josh Clark?

  It is, and I don't know what the heck you mean by AI.

• 23:30Speaker 02

  Someone's gonna write and be like, Photoshop was created in 1997.

• 23:33Josh Clark?

  It probably was, actually.

• 23:35Speaker 02

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

• 23:53Josh Clark?

  Yes.

• 23:54Speaker 02

  Anytime you want to do this, have a lot of cash on hand. We're not instructing you on how to do this.

• 23:58Josh Clark?

  No, it's kind of coming out that way, though, huh?

• 24:00Speaker 02

  It is. And again, if you're doing something like this, you're either a bad person who's done something very 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 Bitcoin at a computer shop, like a brick and mortar store.

• 24:25Josh Clark?

  Right.

• 24:26Speaker 02

  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.

• 24:44Josh Clark?

  Yeah, including Bitcoin. Although the Bitcoin transactions themselves are anonymous, the or who's buying what is anonymous. The actual transaction is public and it's publicly listed in the Bitcoin blockchain. And if 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.

• 25:27Josh Clark?

  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?

• 25:41Speaker 02

  Twenties and hundreds will be fine. Just put it in this garbage sack.

• 25:46Josh Clark?

  Yeah, yeah, don't look at me. So yeah, you want to have been socking away cash, maybe burying it in mason jars in your yard. Who knows? While you also have your regular legitimate bank accounts that you do not touch when you leave. Because dead people don't withdraw a bunch of money from their accounts the day before they die. It's just a bad look. So it's another reason to start planning this long ahead of time if you have any, any opportunity to.

• 26:14Speaker 02

  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

• 26:22Speaker 02

  when they attempt a pseudocide is getting in touch with someone from their previous life. 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

• 26:47Speaker 02

  especially, once again, I hate to say it again. These days, it's very easy to, to track email and phone calls and everything else. And it's going to be very easy if you put in that birthday call to mom just one last time, a year after you're dead.

• 27:01Josh Clark?

  Yep. They'll be like, you're, you're toast, man. We caught you.

• 27:06Josh Clark?

  There was another one. Did you mention the pet chip?

• 27:09Speaker 02

  Uh, no, but yeah, that's one you probably might not be thinking of.

• 27:13Josh Clark?

  Yeah, you could easily overlook something like that. Let's say you take your dog or your cat with you, right? You took them out on the boat and the boat capsized, so sure, they're dead too. If they're microchipped, you might have forgotten that you ever had a microchip. Your pet can pretty easily be tracked and if they track down your pet, they're going to track you down too, so.

• 27:31Speaker 02

  Good point.

• 27:32Josh Clark?

  I think if we're, if we're, if we're getting across that, um, this is really hard to do successfully. I feel like then, you know, we're really achieving our goal.

• 27:42Speaker 02

  Yeah, uh, 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.

• 27:51Speaker 02

  Usually stuff you do to get away with this is a crime. It could be, uh, and let's just put like insurance fraud aside, that may be the reason you're doing it, but the actual doing it, uh, 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.

• 28:23Josh Clark?

  Right.

• 28:24Speaker 02

  Even if you're not like, it's not identity theft, which is different, even if you're not stealing someone else's identity, like Don, well, I'm not gonna spoil something from a TV show.

• 28:35Josh Clark?

  Oh.

• 28:35Speaker 02

  Because it's 2008, I almost blurted it out, but I don't wanna do that, but.

• 28:39Josh Clark?

  Don Johnson from Miami Vice?

• 28:40Speaker 02

  Yeah, sure, let's just say that. All it said was Don. Uh, like stealing someone's identity, like, let's say, like you were in the army with, or, yeah, oh, let's go ahead and ruin The Simpsons. Principal Skinner did that, right?

• 28:52Josh Clark?

  Yeah, Harmon Tanzarian.

• 28:54Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 28:56Speaker 02

  You know, my favorite, my favorite line from that episode.

• 28:59Josh Clark?

  I was about to say to you, go ahead though.

• 29:01Speaker 02

  What if it's the same line? Wouldn't that be funny?

• 29:03Josh Clark?

  It is.

• 29:03Speaker 02

  You think it is?

• 29:04Josh Clark?

  Uh huh, go ahead.

• 29:05Speaker 02

  With the superintendent or whatever?

• 29:07Josh Clark?

  Uh huh.

• 29:08Speaker 02

  He says, I'd like to introduce our, but our new Principal Seymour Skinner, Principal Seymour Skinner. Something like that?

• 29:16Josh Clark?

  Yeah.

• 29:17Speaker 02

  Very funny.

• 29:18Josh Clark?

  That was a weird episode.

• 29:20Speaker 02

  Yeah, agreed.

• 29:22Josh Clark?

  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.

• 29:32Josh Clark?

  Like you didn't steal it from anybody. It's just completely made up. You're still eventually going to make a crime.

• 29:38Speaker 02

  Well, I mean, that's what I said. That's identity fraud.

• 29:42Josh Clark?

  Okay, so even if you, so you said that even if it's just totally made up, it's still identity fraud?

• 29:47Speaker 02

  I did, sir.

• 29:48Josh Clark?

  Okay, good, because yes, eventually you're going to have to legalize it. And once you do that, you're in trouble. There's a lot of laws you're suddenly breaking. The thing is, though, is there is something you said earlier about the cops 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 going to be tough for the cops to track you. Even if they really want to, everyone who's ever seen a movie like Beverly Hills Cop or whatever knows that the captain is going to be on that detective's butt to, to clear that case and go ahead and move on to the other ones.

• 30:31Josh Clark?

  Cause they have a backlog. So they're not going to track you to New Zealand. They're, they're just going to 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 you, 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.

• 30:56Speaker 02

  Yeah, or if it's not insurance, certainly if you have defrauded a corporation or a bank or something like that for like tens of millions or maybe even hundreds of millions of dollars.

• 31:08Josh Clark?

  Right.

• 31:08Speaker 02

  They'll, they'll hire some PIs to get on that case. Pretty toot sweet.

• 31:12Josh Clark?

  For sure. And since this is 2008, 2010, I gotta give the obligatory shout out to Magnum PI.

• 31:21Speaker 02

  That's right. Cause that's when he was most popular.

• 31:23Josh Clark?

  Well, that's when I loved him the most.

• 31:26Speaker 02

  No, has your love waned?

• 31:29Josh Clark?

  I think I just started taking him for granted. Same old story.

• 31:33Speaker 02

  Yeah, I understand. Happens to all of us in a long relationship.

• 31:38Josh Clark?

  You want to take another break?

• 31:40Speaker 02

  Yeah, let's take a break and we'll, maybe we'll dive into that, what an insurance company might do to, to find you. How about that?

• 31:45Josh Clark?

  Oh, good idea.

• 31:57Speaker 06

  Stuff you should know.

• 32:01Josh Clark?

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• 32:38Josh Clark?

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• 33:57Josh Clark?

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• 34:30Josh Clark?

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• 35:16Josh Clark?

  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.

• 35:25Speaker 02

  Yes, I guess we could start talking a little bit about what might like,

• 35:30Speaker 02

  what might trigger this as far as an insurance company saying like, "All right, we definitely need to use our own resources here." Aside from cops saying that they're not going to help out much. And that is, the first trigger is, if your policy has a payout over a million bucks, they'll be like, "All right, that's worth our time and money."

• 35:47Josh Clark?

  Yeah, that's like, apparently, they think of basically any payout under a million dollars as small potatoes. So.

• 35:53Speaker 02

  Yeah. So, so Mr. Clark, no, his was just nine hundred ninety-nine thousand, nine hundred ninety-nine dollars and ninety-nine cents.

• 36:00Josh Clark?

  Exactly right.

• 36:01Speaker 02

  Brush that one aside.

• 36:02Josh Clark?

  Forget about it. Um, but yeah, basically, anytime your death is sudden, unexpected, or suspicious in any way, they're going to, they're gonna investigate, not necessarily because they think you've committed death fraud, but because

• 36:14Speaker 02

  Right.

• 36:15Josh Clark?

  they, they need to investigate anyway to rule out something like suicide, because there might be an exception for suicide on your policy.

• 36:22Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 36:22Josh Clark?

  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.

• 36:41Speaker 02

  Yeah. Uh, you mentioned the Philippines as being like the biggest red flag, but really, any claim involving a death in a foreign country is gonna get investigated.

• 36:49Josh Clark?

  Mm-hmm.

• 36:50Speaker 02

  Uh, just to sort of dot the i's and cross the t's.

• 36:54Josh Clark?

  Mm-hmm.

• 36:55Speaker 02

  Uh, maybe they might be a little suspicious, but, uh, it definitely will get investigated. Uh, and also, if you're like, every, everything, like, just send everything to my P O. box. Um, that's, that's a pretty big red flag.

• 37:09Josh Clark?

  Yeah. Or even like a friend's address would be a red flag as well.

• 37:14Speaker 02

  Yeah? What else?

• 37:15Josh Clark?

  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 gonna 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?

• 37:38Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 37:39Josh Clark?

  That's, just, just by virtue of that being very tantalizing, it's going to be, uh, it's gonna be a red flag.

• 37:46Speaker 02

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

• 38:08Josh Clark?

  Yeah, I have to take that medicine because my heart's so big and tender.

• 38:13Speaker 02

  Right, I know, you just have to, it would burst out of your chest otherwise.

• 38:16Josh Clark?

  Yeah, and then also, there's some missteps that people who try this often make. One is staying in the same city. That's mind-bogglingly dumb if you're trying to fake your own death.

• 38:32Speaker 02

  Yeah, if I were to do this, I guarantee no one would find me.

• 38:38Josh Clark?

  No, because you wouldn't do it like you're lazy.

• 38:40Speaker 02

  I could disappear into another country quite well, I think.

• 38:45Josh Clark?

  Oh, yeah, I mean, you're pretty famous.

• 38:47Speaker 02

  Oh, come on, not that famous.

• 38:50Josh Clark?

  You're famous enough that somebody would would narc on you.

• 38:53Speaker 02

  And so if I just went, well, I'm not going to say the country, just in case, I want to keep it in my hip pocket.

• 38:58Josh Clark?

  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.

• 39:11Speaker 02

  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 cellphone stuff or Googling yourself from an internet cafe in the Philippines. You know, stuff like that, that could get you pinched.

• 39:30Josh Clark?

  Yeah, and then also, if you're, 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.

• 39:47Speaker 02

  I didn't think about that. If you adopt a complete, if you're known for being like, whatever, like a MAGA Republican and you adopt a new identity as this progressive liberal, pretty smart move, probably.

• 39:59Josh Clark?

  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.

• 40:08Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 40:09Josh Clark?

  And still be Josh Clark, but a totally different Josh Clark.

• 40:12Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 40:14Josh Clark?

  What else Chuck, anything?

• 40:16Speaker 02

  I mean, those are all the things that would trigger like an insurance investigation.

• 40:20Josh Clark?

  Pretty much.

• 40:20Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 40:21Josh Clark?

  Yeah, um, 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 is a German student who in 1984 was 24 years old. Her name was Petra Pazika. Yeah. Um, and she went missing from Braunschweig, Braunschweig, Germany.

• 40:49Speaker 02

  Nice one.

• 40:49Josh Clark?

  I'm not doing very well with this.

• 40:50Speaker 02

  No, that's perfect.

• 40:52Josh Clark?

  Braunschweig makes me hungry for some sort of sausage.

• 40:56Speaker 02

  Yeah, it totally sounds sausagey.

• 40:57Josh Clark?

  Mm-hmm.

• 40:59Speaker 02

  Uh, yeah, so she was reported missing, right? In 1984, she was 24 at the time, I think you said. And, uh, at a certain point, police, um, got a guy that confessed to her murder. So that was like a, a case closed kind of situation, even though the body wasn't found. And the guy later said, I, I actually did not kill her. He recanted, recanted his confession. So she was declared dead, dead, dead about five years later in 89 and lived quite a while with a sort of hidden identity.

• 41:29Josh Clark?

  Yeah, uh, she finally got caught. She, she had turned, it turns out she had been living, um, by, it's 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 25 years. Um, and she was burgled at some point. She called the cops and, uh, I guess just as routine, they asked to see her ID. And she hadn't bothered to get any other kind of ID. So she's like, you caught me. I'm Petra Pazika. And they said, we've been looking for you forever.

• 42:09Josh Clark?

  And apparently they did not, um, 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.

• 42:24Speaker 02

  Yeah. So they said, uh, Guten Tag and they left, I guess.

• 42:27Josh Clark?

  Yeah. But even after her being found out and, and being, and like the, 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.

• 42:41Speaker 02

  Yeah, and there are other cases too where police have, like in the, in the interview or whatever, found out why and don't release that to the public. Like it's, 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 nanya.

• 43:03Josh Clark?

  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.

• 43:13Speaker 02

  No, no, no, this was, I wasn't talking about this.

• 43:15Josh Clark?

  Okay. Yeah, yeah, yeah, for sure. And hats off to any cop that protects somebody like that, you know?

• 43:21Speaker 02

  Totally. I'll mention this one. This guy, Sam Israel III, he was a hedge fund manager. And he was, you know, this is one of those deals where he stole $300 million, was sentenced to prison, a couple of decades in prison. So it was one of those back up against the wall. I'm going to jail and I'm in debt up to my eyeballs now. Or I guess that even wouldn't count as debt anymore. Once you're going to prison, that's just, you know, you were found out.

• 43:50Josh Clark?

  Sure.

• 43:51Speaker 02

  And in June 2008, he wrote a message, "Suicide is painless." And the pollen on his SUV, he just kind of traced it out, and jumped from a bridge in New York State, very conveniently landing on that construction net below.

• 44:07Josh Clark?

  That is so scary.

• 44:09Speaker 02

  Pretty scary, but I guess, you know, it, you know, that's there to catch people, I guess.

• 44:14Josh Clark?

  Sure.

• 44:16Speaker 02

  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, "Woohoo, we did it." And like they honked their horn and they got in touch with his girlfriend, arrested her as a possible accomplice. He was on the most wanted list because it was, you know, pretty clear what had happened at that point. And he got found out because he called his mom.

• 44:46Josh Clark?

  Who said, "You need to turn yourself in. This is a terrible idea and you are a terrible, terrible pseudocidist."

• 44:54Speaker 02

  Yeah, you did not do that. And it's, you know, here's some other advices. If you do this, like, don't go out to dinner to celebrate the next night because a few people get caught at dinner, it seems like.

• 45:05Josh Clark?

  Yeah, that actually, that does happen to a surprising degree. My favorite is John Stonehouse, who was a hu- this was a big deal in the UK in the mid 70s because he was a member of Parliament. And in 1974, he went missing off the coast of Miami when he went for a swim. Oh, that was one other thing. If you are, if you disappear in the water, you're automatically going to get investigated by an insurance company because it is just so.

• 45:33Speaker 02

  Oldest trick.

• 45:34Josh Clark?

  Yes, it is. So he went, this is before that, though. He, he made it to Australia. He ran off with his secretary. And as he, while he was dead, in Parliament, people started raising allegations against him. One was that he had enemies in the mafia. Another was that he was a spy for Czechoslovakia. That turned out to be true, weirdly. And then finally, there, a woman came forward then, and later on, and said, this guy came to my house. He 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,

• 46:18Josh Clark?

  he was found, I think in Australia, and he just-

• 46:22Speaker 02

  Like a month later.

• 46:23Josh Clark?

  Yeah. He just had, he had to come forward and basically tell everybody what had happened, right?

• 46:29Speaker 02

  Yeah. And the, well, I guess it's not funny, but the movie, or I'm sorry, the, I guess the novel, I don't think the movie had come out yet. Day of the Jackal by Frederick Forsyth had been published a few years before. And it, 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.

• 46:49Josh Clark?

  Yeah, that's why I 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.

• 46:57Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 46:58Josh Clark?

  Yeah.

• 46:58Speaker 02

  I'll pick one more for me. In 2009, there was a guy in his mid-30s from Indianapolis, a money manager named Marcus Schrenker. He staged a plane crash. He was trying to get out of lawsuits and divorce proceedings. And he got a bunch of cash, put it in his motorcycle saddlebags, went to Alabama, put it in a storage facility. So he had the cash kind of worked out. Then he took his very small little, single-prop airplane from his house in Indiana and was flying above Alabama, radios to air traffic control that, you know, he's going down, something's wrong. He does

• 47:39Speaker 02

  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.

• 47:47Josh Clark?

  Right. Bra. Man, that was dumb. Yeah, we could keep going on. There's a lot of these, but those are, I think those are some of the highlights, don't you?

• 47:56Speaker 02

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

• 48:36Josh Clark?

  Right.

• 48:37Speaker 02

  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.

• 48:48Josh Clark?

  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 Like you said, a very high profile one that what happened in at the dawn of the internet. People have been doing this essentially since there was an internet.

• 49:17Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 49:17Josh Clark?

  A woman, a teenager, a basketball star named Casey Nicole.

• 49:22Speaker 02

  Yeah, I remember this.

• 49:23Josh Clark?

  She was a, she was a, I guess, kind of like a little star of the chat forums and that kind of thing. Had a big kind of support group online and she had leukemia. So she posted about her, you know, her, her disease and decline from it. That was started in 1999 and in 2001, in May of 2001, there was a notice that appeared on her blog that said that she had passed away and people were just stricken by this.

• 49:57Speaker 02

  Yeah, I do remember this happening. It was pretty big in the news at the time. Cause again, it was a dawn of the internet. So people are like, what is the internet being used for already?

• 50:08Speaker 02

  So some of her followers had, 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, it was 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?

• 50:39Josh Clark?

  Right. I, I didn't look deeply enough into it to find out how she was finally outed, but a 40 year old woman named Debbie Swenson admitted that she was behind the whole thing, that Casey Nicole had never existed. She stole the photo of a local girl basketball star's picture or her photo and used that as Casey. And I mean, that was that, like, I guess the police department told the FBI about it and 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.

• 51:15Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 51:16Josh Clark?

  So that's, that's bad enough, saying that you, you're creating a fictitious teenager who's dying of leukemia, pretty bad. Telling people that you, the real you, has died by suicide. There was an article in Gizmodo that interviewed a professor of psychiatry named Mark Feldman. And he puts it pretty clearly. He says, because of the social stigma involved and the emotional weight associated with suicide. It's particularly powerful. And that if you use that to manipulate people, you're at the, you're, you're at the peak of manipulativeness. And that's exactly what an author named Susan Meachan did in 2020, I think, right?

• 52:00Speaker 02

  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 2020, in the voice of her daughter, posted that her mom had died by suicide after being bullied in the book world.

• 52:16Josh Clark?

  Yeah.

• 52:17Speaker 02

  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.

• 52:36Josh Clark?

  Right.

• 52:37Speaker 02

  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 Meachan would say, instead of supposed to, she would type post to, P O S T to, like, I'm supposed to do this. And that little quirk-

• 52:59Josh Clark?

  Like PJ from Family Circus.

• 53:00Speaker 02

  Exactly. And that little quirk, writing as her daughter, gave it away.

• 53:06Josh Clark?

  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 going to be tons of questions. Let the fun begin. I can't imagine a more arrogant way to announce that you didn't actually die. So people, of course, were appalled and angry and it, 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. And it did not go like that at all. She became reviled and hated. And I think rightfully so. That's a really horrible thing to do to people. And also on top of it, to exploit-

• 53:51Josh Clark?

  Online bullying.

• 53:53Speaker 02

  Yeah, totally.

• 53:53Josh Clark?

  You know, just for your own, your own ego. It's just, it's terrible stuff.

• 53:59Speaker 02

  Yeah, agreed.

• 54:00Josh Clark?

  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 a, somebody on-

• 54:12Speaker 02

  Like a meeting at work?

• 54:13Josh Clark?

  Kind of. This was, so one, 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.

• 54:27Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 54:28Josh Clark?

  Another one was a Percy Jackson fanfiction site that somebody staged their death online because they, they couldn't deliver some fanfiction that they said they would.

• 54:38Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 54:39Josh Clark?

  Weird stuff. At least that's less manipulative. It's just being afraid of confrontation, I guess.

• 54:46Speaker 02

  That's right.

• 54:47Josh Clark?

  Since Chuck just said that's right, I think it's time for listener mail.

• 54:54Speaker 02

  This is about libraries a little bit more. Hey, guys, as you mentioned in the recent short stuff on alt libraries, I wanted to mention this. In 1901, Andrew Carnegie funded the construction of dozens of libraries in all five boroughs of New York City. And most of these buildings came with a family apartment, which housed the custodian who kept the coal fire burning, the furnace. As the furnaces were replaced and 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, a teen center. I thought you might be interested in this little slice of New York City and library history. There are about 30 Carnegie branches left in Manhattan, the Bronx, and Staten Island,

• 55:37Speaker 02

  and the city is slowly working their way through renovations to modernize each location. Next time you're in New York, come check us out. Wrapped, spanked, delivered.

• 55:47Josh Clark?

  Nice.

• 55:47Speaker 02

  I'm yours. That is Madeline Lovegrove, children's librarian at the 125th Street New York Public Library.

• 55:55Josh Clark?

  That's awesome. Thanks a lot, Madeline. That's, I had never heard of that, and I would really love to see- Some of those abandoned apartments that were just left as is.

• 56:05Speaker 02

  She sent a link and it had pictures, my friend.

• 56:08Josh Clark?

  Oh, I can't wait to see that. Thank you for telling me that, Chuck. And thank you again to Madeline. If you want to be like Madeline and send us an email the exact proper way, you can do that. Send it off to [email protected].

• 56:23Speaker 00

  Stuff You Should Know is a production of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts, iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.

• 56:39Josh Clark?

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