This article was taken from the October issue of Wired UK magazine. Be the first to read Wired's articles in print before they're posted online, and get your hands on loads of additional content by subscribing online
For Matthew Alan Sheppard, all of the anxiety, deception and delusion converged in one moment on a crisp winter weekend in February 2008. From the outside, he hardly seemed like a man prepared to abandon everything. At 42, he'd been happily married for ten years, with a seven-year-old daughter and a comfortable home in Searcy, Arkansas. An environmental health-and-safety manager for the electrical-parts maker Eaton, he'd risen in three years from overseeing a plant in Searcy to covering more than 30 facilities throughout North and South America. A recent raise had pushed his salary close to six figures. To his coworkers and friends, he seemed an amiable guy with a flourishing career.
To Sheppard, though, that same life felt like it 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 scales at more than 21 stone.
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, then family holidays. In early February, when an Eaton official emailed to inquire about his expense reports, he felt everything closing in. He began devising a plan to escape.
So, on a Friday two weeks later, 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 Little Red River, an hour from Searcy. He called it a much-needed last-minute getaway for the family and for most of the weekend it was.
Then, in the fading Sunday-afternoon light, with his daughter and mother-in-law occupied in the cabin, Sheppard walked down to the dock with Monica and their black labrador, Fluke. When Monica looked away, Sheppard helped the dog - always eager for a swim, just as he'd counted on - off the platform and into the Little Red River's notoriously deadly current. His wife looked back just in time to see Sheppard heave his own 21-stone frame into the river after their beloved lab.
Thrashing in the 4°C water, Sheppard managed to hand the lead up to Monica, who hauled the dog to safety. But he struggled to swim back to the dock. Flailing desperately, he gasped that he was having trouble breathing. A moment later, as the current pulled him downstream, his head dipped below the surface and didn't reappear.
A frantic 911 call from Monica minutes later launched a search-and-rescue operation involving more than 60 people. Dive teams scoured the river, and a plane scanned the area from overhead. The next morning, Sheppard's shell-shocked coworkers brought their own boats up to help with the search. They found his fluorescent orange Eaton cap in shallow water not far downstream.
But when 24 hours passed without another sign, the authorities abandoned - publicly at least - any hope of finding him alive.
The urge to disappear, to shed one's identity and re-emerge in another, surely must be as old as human society. It's a fantasy that can flicker tantalisingly on the horizon at moments of crisis or grow into a persistent daydream that accompanies life's daily burdens. A fight with your spouse leaves you momentarily despondent, perhaps, or a longtime relationship feels dead on its feet. Your mortgage payment becomes suddenly unmanageable, or a pile of debts gradually rises above your head. Maybe you simply wake up one day unable to shake your disappointment over a choice you could have made or a better life you might have had.
And then the thought occurs to you: What if I could drop everything, abandon my life's baggage and start again as someone else?
Most of us snuff out the question instantly or toy with it occasionally as a harmless mental escape hatch. But every year, thousands of adults decide to act on it, walking out the door with no plan to return and no desire to be found. The precise number is elusive. Nearly 200,000 Americans over 18 were recorded missing by law enforcement in 2007 but they represent only a fraction of the intentional missing: many aren't reported unless they are believed to be in danger. And according to a 2003 British study, two-thirds of missing adults make a conscious decision to leave.
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People who go missing do so 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 most people who abandon their lives do so for non-criminal reasons - relationship breakups, family pressures, financial obligations or a simple desire for reinvention. Government programmes provide new identities for endangered witnesses but plenty of people who testify in lower-profile cases are on their own to face potential retribution, or to flee to a safer identity. So too are those trying to escape the unwanted attention of stalkers, obsessive ex-spouses or psychotically disgruntled clients. Starting over, however, is not as simple as it used to be. Digital information collection, location-aware technology and post-9/11 security measures have radically changed the equation for both fugitives and pursuers. Yesteryear's The Day of the Jackal-like methods for adopting a new identity - peruse a graveyard, pick out a name, obtain a birth certificate - have given way to online markets for social-security numbers and Photoshop forgeries. Escapees can set up new addresses online, disguise their communications through anonymous email and hide behind prepaid phones.
In other ways, however, the advantage has tipped in favour of investigators. Where once you could move away, adopt a new name and live with minimal risk, today your trail is littered with digital breadcrumbs dropped by GPS-enabled mobile phones, electronic bank transactions, IP addresses, airline ID checks and, increasingly, the clues you voluntarily leave behind on social-networking sites.
It's almost easier to steal an identity today than to shed your own. Investigators can use cross-linked government and private databases, easy public distribution of information via the internet and television, and data tucked away in corporate files to track you without leaving their desks. Even the most clever disappearing act is easily undone. One poorly considered email or oversharing tweet and there will be a knock at your door. As missing-person investigators like to say, they can make a thousand mistakes. You have to make only one.
On the Monday morning after Matt Sheppard disappeared, Detective Sergeant Alan Roberson of the Cleburne County Sheriff's Office drove down to the Eaton plant to check Sheppard's employment record for emergency contacts. When Roberson arrived, the company 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.
After noticing discrepancies in Sheppard's employment record, Roberson spoke to Eaton's personnel department, who told him that two weeks earlier 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 turn up after another day, Roberson's curiosity deepened. He knew that Sheppard carried a company BlackBerry; his wife had told police it must have gone in the water with him. On Wednesday, Roberson asked Eaton to check for any activity on it. Sure enough, they discovered text messages sent after he had supposedly drowned. As far as Roberson was concerned, the rescue operation was now a manhunt.
The police subpoenaed the AT&T phone network - after Roberson's visit, Eaton had filed formal theft by deception charges against Sheppard, alleging that he'd placed more than $40,000 in personal charges on his corporate card - and the carrier tracked the messages to mobile phone towers in the Searcy area. But by the time AT&T checked for the content of the messages, they'd already been purged from the system. Tracking the numbers texted from the phone turned up nothing. Roberson concluded they were prepaid mobiles.
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 just flagged everything we could find." In March, the police conveyed their suspicions to the local press. Roberson contacted border security in case Sheppard used his passport and asked the tax authorities to watch for any W-2 (a P60 in the UK) filings with his social-security number on it. When Monica took off without leaving a forwarding address, Roberson also contacted the local elementary school that Sheppard's daughter had attended, asking it to get in touch if anyone requested the girl's records.
Tennessee specifically outlaws "intentionally and falsely creating the impression that any person is deceased" but, strictly speaking, in most places there is nothing illegal about walking away from your life. Still, it's easy enough to run foul of the law in the process of fleeing, whether through abandoned debts or identity theft. Insurance claims based on fake deaths - besides being illegal - are naturally frowned upon by insurance companies, who tend to pursue them to the ends of the Earth.
New York City- and Texas-based investigator Steven Rambam has conducted several thousand missing-person searches over almost three decades. He made a name for himself in the 90s tracking down suspected Nazi war criminals. Sardonic and brash, with a thick Brooklyn accent, he has a knack for using technology to find people who don't want to be found. For Rambam, the proliferation of increasingly comprehensive data collection has been a boon. Even as anonymisation technology 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 maybe by a couple of inches."
To enhance his ability to search everything from motor-vehicle records to college-yearbook photos, Rambam created his own investigative search engine and database, PallTech. It's so good that other licensed investigators and law-enforcement agents pay to use 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 birth. All of which help investigators exploit the most common error made by people starting over: using details from their old 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 way you're going to get found," says Robert Kowalkowski, a Michigan-based investigator.
There's also plenty of private data that makes your life easier - and your pursuer's, too. Take frequent-flier accounts, Rambam says. "You get miles and convenience, and I get everywhere you've flown." Or Amazon: "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."
People trying to outrun their old identities have to reckon not just with the data collected about them but also with whatever facts they've revealed about themselves. Facebook, MySpace and Twitter are an investigator's 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 favourite bars.
A few years ago, an investigator named Philip Klein was hired by
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 authorities presumed him dead. Early on, Klein likewise turned up only the vaguest hints that McDermott could be alive. "This was the ultimate walk-away," Klein says. Then Klein decided to set up a website 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 maxim that people on the run always monitor the pursuit - Klein blocked search-engine crawlers from cataloguing the site. He gave the URL only to McDermott's friends and family.
Ninetysix 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 private 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. Then he surfaced, swam to a dock and pulled himself out. After retrieving a bag of clothes and $1,500 in cash he'd stashed the night before, he walked quickly down the road to a prearranged spot where a friend - the one person to whom Sheppard felt he could entrust his secret - waited with a car. They took off southwest towards the friend's home in Mexico, just south of the Rio Grande.
Two weeks before, when Sheppard sat down to formulate a plan to fake his death, he'd been armed only with Google and LexisNexis. 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 conspicuously at a gas station on the Friday before his disappearance. It was a classic misdirection: someone would grab the phone and start using it, Sheppard hoped, and any cop who didn't buy the drowning would trace the phone to some petty thief - while Sheppard's real trail faded. The ruse backfired when the thief sent a few messages and then quit, convincing Sergeant Roberson that Sheppard was alive.
Now ensconced at his friend's 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 sure his wife had collected the insurance he would contact her and explain everything. She'd meet 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 get antsy. He missed his wife and daughter too much to wait. So, assuming that the authorities might still be logging Monica's incoming calls, he bought a prepaid phone, called her number and broke the news that he was still alive. She was hysterical at first, alternately furious and overjoyed.
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 house and belongings. In Mexico, Sheppard had obtained an Iowa driver's licence and social-security number for one John P Howard, to whom he bore a passable resemblance. Then he constructed a CV around the identity, transposing his work history on to fake firms and posted it online.
For references he gave the numbers of prepaid phones. When prospective employers called, Sheppard pretended to be HR and verified his own past employment.
Meanwhile, the stress of living on the run was taking its toll and Sheppard lost almost five stone. After reading that the Arkansas police had contacted US marshals about his case, he became wracked with paranoia. He would see cars parked at the defunct dealership across the street from the motel and imagine federal agents waiting to pounce.
Eventually, "John P Howard" landed an offer for a health-and-safety manager position in Yankton, South Dakota. The family packed up and drove west, where an estate agent helped them find a rented house in a secluded area near a lake. Sergeant Roberson got the call from the Searcy elementary school in early August. He quickly subpoenaed the school, tracked the request for the Sheppards' daughter's records to Yankton, and called the US marshals. South Dakota-based federal agents found an address for the family and contacted the landlord. "I rented to that guy," he told them upon seeing Sheppard's picture, "but his name is John Howard." The alias led quickly to Howard's very Sheppard- like CV, which was then still posted on Monster.com. Soon afterwards, in a scene befitting Sheppard's most paranoid fears, police officers staked out the house, setting up in trees nearby, waiting for him to appear.
Sheppard was gazing out of his back window at deer when he heard cars speeding down the gravel road toward the house and then the marshals bursting through the front door. His wife screamed, "He's not here!" but the agents found him a few seconds later hiding next to a bed. He didn't say a word.
In a rare study tracking people from the US federal government's witness-protection programme 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 likely to feel "severe social distress" and "a pervasive sense of powerlessness", driven by the necessity of constant deception. "When the social fabric is torn, when individuals are erased from one part of it and placed in another," Montanino concluded, "problems arise."
Trading in your old identity means a lifetime of duplicity that complicates every social interaction, lacing inconvenience and doubt into such humdrum tasks as registering a car or getting health insurance. "You do, to a certain extent, have to erase who you are," says Frank Ahearn, author of the guidebook How to Disappear. "Victims of stalkers have the motivation of saving their own lives." But those looking to "pick up and live a palm-tree lifestyle," he says, often "don't realise how difficult it is to start over."
A life on the run means enduring the intense isolation of leaving friends and family. "It takes an extremely dedicated person to forget everything in their past," says William Sorukas, chief of domestic investigation for the US marshals, "and never make that phone call back to the family, not after ten years go back home and drive through the neighbourhood again."
Of course, technology can allow the kind of anonymous contact with friends and family that wasn't possible in the past. "Mom can have a phone under another name that only you call, or maybe you use encrypted email," Rambam says. "But somebody always makes a mistake."
Even in a world of cross-linked databases and location-aware phones, most people living on the lam are undone by complacency. "Do you have a hobby - are you a butterfly collector? Everything that defined your prior life, you have to stay away from," Rambam says. Yet almost anyone on the run comes to crave ordinary human contact. "When the newness wears off, you ask, 'How do I live my life?'" Ahearn says. "'How do I date? How do I not tell people about where I'm from?' People loosen up and go back to who they were." And that's how most attempts to vanish end. A school registration, an email back home. All mistakes look avoidable in hindsight, of course, and the nature of such stories is that only the failures surface; the successes take their methods to the grave, both the feigned one and the real one. 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 might have been.
Three months into his ten-year prison stretch for theft and insurance fraud, Matthew Sheppard shuffles into the deputy warden's office at the East Arkansas Regional Unit on a sweltering summer afternoon. Clad in a baggy white prison uniform, he is seven stone lighter than when he went into the Little Red River. Sitting across from me on the warden's couch, he reflects on his tale in a subdued tone, tinged with relief. Even after his arrest, he says, "nobody ever asked me the details" of the escape. Monica Sheppard, too, pleaded guilty to insurance fraud and was sentenced to six months in prison. Prosecutors accused her of being involved from the beginning, but Detective Sergeant Alan Roberson still isn't sure.
Either way, she was technically guilty from the moment she learned her husband was alive.
Looking back, Sheppard has trouble making sense of it all. He probably could have admitted wrongdoing and left Eaton, maybe even kept his job. But at the time, "it felt like the whole world was on my shoulders." He's hoping for a work release. "I've been through the hardest time of my life: physically, mentally," he says. "I would settle for working at McDonald's." He'd known the school registration was risky and wasn't surprised when I told him that was how he'd been caught. Mostly, he wants people to know he's remorseful for what he inflicted upon his coworkers, friends and family. By disappearing, he just swapped his burdens for another set. "What was worse?" he wonders. "What I was dealing with when I did this? Or what I had to deal with when I was on the run?"
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When the US magazine hit news stands on August 15, Evan took off, too. Wired offered $5,000 to anyone who could find him, with $3,000 going to Evan if he made it a month undiscovered. What happened in the hunt for Evan Ratliff?
This article was originally published by WIRED UK
