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 that 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!

Date: 2015-01-11; view: 874