Truth is, before you make that final leap into the great and anonymous unknown, you have to think about those investigators in your burned-out life, and consider what they might be looking for.
The creation of a new life while still living the one you want to exit just leaves a trail. There will be digital evidence, physical evidence, even eyewitness evidence.
Ever see a cowboy movie where the hero is trying to evade the posse of bad guys and so he breaks off a tree branch and sweeps it along the path behind him, erasing his footprints? That’s what we’re doing here.
Resign yourself to the truth now, compadre: you left something behind. The best we can do is try and minimize the danger that presents to your future endeavors.
Computers are not your friend. Of course, they are—while you’re cobbling together faked and altered papers, ordering necessary supplies, sending anonymous money orders, watching pornography, et cetera. Then, when it’s time to light out, that shiny glass and metal rectangle that gently warmed your lap through many a nervous night has the potential to be your worst enemy.
If you leave your beloved electronic devices behind—any of them—you risk leaving an open invitation to dig into whatever digital trails you’ve established since you first purchased those machines.
Of course, if there’s a relative lack of drama in your vanishing, then backtracking you through cyberspace won’t be too appealing to investigating authorities. However, it’s probably not the best idea to bank on the apathy of former friends, colleagues, and loved ones—even if they didn’t always display interest or shower you with compliments, their curiosity might inspire them to do a little snooping into your digital underwear drawer. So be thorough: clear your history and wipe that hard drive. But don’t stop there!
As you prep to go, trash that laptop. You’ll need to purchase something called a neodymium magnet. It’s the most powerful magnet you can buy. Run that piece of electro-magic all over your laptop.
Then, take said laptop into the backyard (or any relatively private location) and with a handheld implement such as a sledgehammer, axe, or even a very large rock, proceed to beat the living daylights out of it. Then burn it. Throw the ashes into the ocean and call it a day.
I know this is all a bit much, but hey: I’m making a point here. It’s just wise to eliminate those inroads into your life.
Proceed to do that with every digital thing you own. Phones, pagers, tablets, theremins: the works. For the love of all that was good and preprogrammable, take any copy machine you’ve ever touched and destroy it twice. Those things have a longer memory than the elephant you forgot to invite to prom.
It all sounds like a brutal waste of money, I admit, but this is where another preparatory measure might come into play: if you’ve laid aside that stash we talked about earlier, then the moment you’re heading down the highway into new life city, you can hit up the next big box store you see and get some brand-new stuff. However…
About the Internet. This part is going to be tough. It might even be a deal breaker for some. We love the Internet, don’t we? It’s the most fun a thoroughly modern member of Western society can have by themselves… or with a group of faceless strangers.
But, now? You’ve got to cut ties, burn bridges. Do you frequently leave encouraging comments on YouTube videos of make-up artists turning themselves into animals? Never watch another Beauty Vlog again—it’s not worth the temptation to reveal yourself to a familiar community.
You might think the most surefire way to avoid playing Peeping Tom on your old life is simply obliterating all your accounts, but that type of mass deletion will send up red flags to those around you (not to mention the authorities). Don’t do that! Simply stop using them. Never, under any circumstances, sign back in to nostalgically reread old messages from lovers, friends, and creditors. The moment you’re done, you are done.
Which brings me to another crazy thing, a normal part of human nature. If you start a brave new digital presence with your recently acquired persona, here is the cardinal rule: never, ever become digital “friends” with anyone you ever interacted with on the Internet, if you can avoid it.
Think about the real world. Say every time in your old life when you headed over to the King Soopers to grab an Italian sub from Jeff in the deli section, you guys shot the shit about how the Cubs were doing this season. Which, being the Cubs, was probably always bad—but it gave you and Jeff something to jaw about. In daily life, plenty of people have casual little connections like that, and we have a megaton of similar connections online.
Once you’ve left the old life of Timmy McNeal for the new life of, say, Paul Woodman, does it make a lick of sense to say, “Man, I’d love me an Italian sub from that King Soopers. I’ll just say hi to Jeff while I’m there, see if he thinks we’ll ever draft another Sammy Sosa.”
No, it does not make sense. Same thing online, maybe even double. If you had a Twitter account and flirted with Ernesto from Santa Monica every day, it’s an epic act of dipshittery to log on as totally new human being Alice Edmunds and start back up dreaming of life with old Ernie.
The bottom line is: separation. It’s human to want to maintain connections, but we don’t usually take stock of just how many of those we have. And herein is the huge challenge in going off that grid and laying low under an assumed name in a new city—truly letting go of everything you had before.
It can be done. It’s an act of sheer will, sure, but look at what you’re doing: beginning a new life with a new name. You are, in essence, a baby.
Do babies come into this world with a network of friends and acquaintances outside Mom, Dad, and the odd sibling or two? Not really. Even the medical personnel who assisted in dragging us into this tornado of action forgot our names within a day of our birth. So open your crying maw and blink up at the sun, baby bird—your bright future awaits! But first…
Offline evidence. This here is simple housekeeping: clean up your crap. Let’s say you went with a plan to alter an ID to suit your purposes. That leaves traces, including incriminating records in your printer’s memory. Clean up all the evidence from that and deep-six it in a dumpster across town. Then smash that sophisticated printer. Make like the guys in Office Space. Treat it like you’re Whitey Bulger getting rid of a snitch. Club that sucker into submission and set it on fire.
At the same time: you’ve got to act like a Girl Scout in a national park and leave no trace of yourself behind. Not even a footprint, if possible. Not everyone will have the means to pay a guy found by another guy to assist in the project, so in the process you’ve got to become your own guy. Or gal. Or whatever works for you, as long as you get gone.
Before we move on, I think it’s a good time to offer a little reassurance. You can do this, if your heart is really in it. Fact is, there are some folks who have done it and to this day we’re not sure what happened to them. One guy, a poet, may have died the day he vanished, or he may have lived out his life in awesome anonymity. A dead body discovered on an Australian beach is a complete mystery today—that dude was very good at making sure no one knew who he was.
Then there’s the German student who decided he liked America enough to stay, so he took English elocution lessons from Gilligan’s Island. He ended up married to a millionaire and mistaken for a harmless New England eccentric before he screwed it all up.
And also ol’ Joe, who may have been the best at this game—though he admittedly exited his first life before the advent of super computers and massive databases linked across states and nations. Nobody knows who Joe was to this day, and in his story you’ll learn a thing or two about making your own departure, because Joe was a detail man till the very end.
Some lawyers love case studies. Me? Eh, sometimes. If the study isn’t relevant to the case, it’s good stuffing for the pillow you nap on in the corner of the law library.
When it comes to the subject of people who apparently/nearly succeeded at assuming new lives (until they did something stupid), case studies get interesting. At minimum, they’re good for a raised eyebrow—at most, you’ll be amazed by what these folks did and who they really were.
Now, let me introduce you to Weldon Kees.
Weldon Kees was a poet in the fifties alongside the finger-snapping, beret-wearing Beatniks, but this guy was his own Midwestern man. And he wasn’t just a poet, but a painter, filmmaker, and experimental photographer.
I’ll be up front about Kees: there’s every chance he set out from Nebraska, parked his car near the Golden Gate Bridge on July 18, 1955, and smiled as he intentionally sank to the bottom of the bay. He probably felt a wider spectrum of feelings than the rest of us—like those folks who can see an extra shade of yellow. He was living at the height of the Beat Generation, guys like Kerouac setting the world on fire, and Kees wasn’t really that sort of jazz-influenced, wild-eyed hipster with a boatload of bennies pumping through his veins. He wasn’t a buttoned-down dude, but he may have felt like a poet without a posse, so to speak. It’s conceivable that Kees bid this cruel world farewell and leaped into the abyss.
Still: an acquaintance swore up and down she saw him hanging out with a hot blonde around the Big Easy in ’62. A fellow writer recounted tossing back tequilas with Kees in Mexico years after the poet disappeared. Over time, the legend sprouted from a seed to a beanstalk—Weldon Kees was alive and living like Elvis in East Hullabaloo.
I made that up, I don’t think there is an East Hullabaloo.
Even if Kees jumped off that bridge to a watery grave, he was unintentionally brilliant in the run up to his vanishing.
First, there’s the part we have no control over: this guy was handsome, artistically gifted, and charismatic. It’s no wonder his disappearance might stir up romantic imaginations, but whatever window these imaginations had into his life was substantially tinted.
Kees told one friend he might just start fresh south of the border. That was a cinch back in the day; the border-crossing procedure was a friendly nod and raise of your Schlitz as you rumbled into Juarez. Kees could’ve easily learned a little Español and made his way without much start-up capital.
On the other hand, he hinted he was fine with ending it all, too. He may or may not fit the bill of a guy who sought a new life free of all the bullshit Eisenhower’s America was throwing into the fan. Either way, Kees achieved mythical status prior to departure.
You’d think such a missing presence would send droves of cops, fans, and ex-girlfriends on his trail. Calling back to those opaque windows, Weldon Kees threw some shade into the sitch. In his apartment they found his cat (very much alive), a pair of red socks (in the sink of all places), but no wallet, watch, or bank account passbook. Damned if his sleeping bag wasn’t missing, too.
However, he had a sizable stack of 1955-ish greenbacks in the bank that he never touched again.
While Weldon left us all floundering and flummoxed, he left an important lesson for you free-spirited, pre-disappeared: leave ’em guessing themselves into a tizzy over what the hell happened to you.
Leave socks in the sink, dishes in the closet! It’s all about the art of misdirection, Ricky Jay. Make sure they’re always looking in the wrong place. Take all your camping equipment, build a site in your local park, then drive away. What matters is that no one figures you out.
Now let’s skip back to a post-World War II mystery: a dude with a dancer’s build and poison within. A poster boy for identity eradication: the Somerton Man.
A snazzily dressed, well-built, nice-looking guy lay on the beach, his head propped against the seawall as if he was merely taking a snooze under the Australian summer sun in December of 1948. Except the guy was a goner. And no one knew who the hell he was even nearly seventy years later. This man did a bang-up job of leaving his proverbial footprints close enough to the tide that they were washed clean away.
Herein lies the tale of the Tamam Shud Case—aka the Somerton Man.
Okay, so the guy may have been a spy. That doesn’t invalidate his story here, no way—because the truth is, compañero, we are moving into territory where spies are the men and women who led the way.
The Somerton Man was in his forties and no stranger to the gym. His fashionable getup contained nothing to give the perplexed Aussie cops any idea as to who he was. Just his essentials: gum, cigarettes, and an American-made comb.
Big whoop at first peek, right? Keep those eyeballs sharp and excited; I’m not done with this guy.
Our unidentified friend is hauled from the beach to the coroner and it’s discovered he was at the pinnacle of health. At the time, science available in the land of the koala, the kangaroo, and the really big knife couldn’t determine the exact kind of poison, but the coroner uttered something of a puzzled, “sure looks like poison to me, mate.”
Attempts to track the guy’s fingerprints flopped (and for you spring chickens reading this, DNA wasn’t a thing back then), but police eventually managed to match him up with a locker at a train station in Adelaide. In the locker, they found a suitcase full of clothes and an odd set of tools that the investigators linked to merchant marine use. So maybe he was a handyman sailing under the Jolly Roger, a pirate who’d made a few enemies before winding up Down Under?
Our buddy Somerton Man had torn the tags from nearly everything, but those eagle-eyed officers managed to find the name “T. Keane” scribbled in a couple of places. To further twist the pickle, it became obvious after deeper digging that this guy wasn’t the Keane in question. Dead ends are all anyone ever got with Somerton Man.
What about that weird phrase, “Tamam shud?” Sewn into the lining of one of his pants pockets, police found a sheet of paper inscribed with the words “Tamam shud.” The phrase means “completed” or “finished” and comes from a book of ancient Persian poems, The Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám. And if you’re not yet hooked by the mystery of this lone dude’s name, the enigma continues.
People love an unsolved story, especially one with a creepy code attached. Hence the Zodiac Killer’s inclusion on the Billboard Top 100 of favorite serial killer mysteries. While Zodiac’s code was cracked, Somerton Man left one that has yet to be deciphered. That phrase “Tamam Shud” wasn’t just a reference to a book, it was torn from the pages of a specific copy. Investigators found that copy, and written into the inside cover was a string of capital letters that look like nonsense. There are theories galore, but in the end, no one really knows.