Elizabeth Greenwood - Playing Dead: A Journey Through the World of Death Fraud

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For my mom.

For everything.

Everyone forgets that Icarus also flew.

JACK GILBERT, FAILING AND FLYING

T he fixers phone lit up with a text message:

Your friend is dead.

Id been waiting with him and his associate in the frigid Manila hotel lobby all morning for this news. Though the fixer and I were not friends in any conventional sense of the word, we had gotten to know each other through small talk over a half-dozen $5 Cokes. We discussed kids, the weather, how best to fake your death in the Philippines, and, as an added bonus, how to slay an assailant with a ballpoint pen. Aside from getting into the particulars about purchasing cadavers on the black market and murder techniques with ordinary household objects, most of our chitchat could have taken place in the buffet line of a wedding reception. We were killing time, waiting for the forger to produce my death certificate.

And now it was ready. We sprang up from our seats, and I charged the Cokes to my room. Thisobtaining documents that would pronounce me dead without actually ending my lifewas what Id been waiting to do for years.

Now that the moment had finally arrived, I felt a little uneasy. We walked through the megamall, connecting to the underground parking garage to find the car in which we would wend through metro Manila in the evening rush hour to meet the forgers conduit, who, in his hot hands, possessed a dossier that, in effect, could kill me. I compensated by laughing too hard at the guys jokes about their wives.

How did I end up sweating in the backseat of a Mercedes in the Philippines, driving to obtain evidence of my own death? Im pretty happy with my life, for the most part. I loathe adrenaline and unnecessary risk. I dont even like to go downhill fast on my bike. And while I present as effervescent to the degree of ditziness, that warmth can quickly curdle into an animal rage, festered and heightened by ten years of living in New York by my own wits, especially toward strange men who want to take my money.

I sought out these fixers because I wanted to know if it was possible to fake your own death. And, if this handoff went as planned, Id be dead within the hour.

FAKING YOUR DEATHBOTH AS a concept and as an act people attempt with surprising frequencyfirst occurred to me two years earlier, when I was having dinner with my friend Matt. We had met teaching public school in the Bronx. That evening, as we sat in a cheap Vietnamese restaurant, I was feeling sorry for myself. Id recently abandoned teaching to go back to school full-time, which meant foolishly taking out several dozen thousand dollars in student loans to heap upon the $60,000 debt from my undergraduate education, bringing the sum total to a bloated figure in the six digits. At the beginning of the semester, I felt alive and nourished and like I was on vacation after a career of corralling second graders. Then, a few weeks in, I realized what I had done. Id screwed myself financially, big-time (for the second time!), and had nobody to blame but the creep in the mirror.

In the dim crepuscular light of early winter, I was bemoaning my self-imposed financial plight to Matt, who was exhausted and smelled slightly like the syrup from the school cafeteria. He looked less than amused.

I revealed my latest vision of the future over greasy spring rolls:

So the plan is to become, like, a towering luminary and highly sought-after public intellectual, and, I mean, my TED Talk alone will obviously pay back my private loans, but in the very off chance that the film offers dont come knocking straightaway, Ive come up with plan B: Belize.

What does that even mean? Matt asked, his eyelids sagging after a day of coaxing eight-year-olds into mastering fractions.

You know, just slip through the cracks. Find a sun-bleached country with a rickety government and no extradition policy and kick back on the beach, avoiding the feds for the rest of my life.

Would Sallie Mae and the US Department of Education really deploy a repo team to a tiny Central American country in search of a certain debt-laden Rubenesque bottle blonde? Whats a little $100,000 deficit to them? (Well, actually closer to a half million after the lifetime of accrued interest.) This conversation took place in the wake of the 2008 financial collapse, when it had become evident that the middle-class ideal of playing by the rules in search of the American dream was for chumps. Flouting it like the goons on Wall Street was the only way to profit and evade consequences. Defaulting on debts was very much in the zeitgeistplus I could score a vacation in the meantime. I was pretty pleased with my plan, though the fantasy was more of a pressure valve than a blueprint. The puritan in me, while realizing how the system is rigged, still paid her taxes and got regular teeth cleanings. But the idea of throwing on a wig and some shades and starting over was appealing, even though I was still relatively young at the time. I joked about it, but my student loan debt, though not unique in any way, made me feel definitively and inextricably fucked. Two options presented themselves: a Dickensian debtors prison or a life on the lam.

Or you could fake your own death, Matt said casually, shoving another spring roll into his mouth.

Or I could fake my own death, I parroted back, the thought undulating through my skull like squid ink.

Why hadnt that occurred to me? Faking my own death. An untimely end would make a far superior story for the bill collectors than simply vanishing one day. Sloughing off the past, shucking the carcass of my impoverished self, to be reborn, unblemished as a sunrise. My death would not be a conclusion but a renaissancea shot at an alternative ending. The dross of life would not inflict itself upon me: I could arrange and edit to suit my specifications. Faking death could be a refusal, a way to reject the dreary facts, a way to bridge the chasm between who you are and who you want to be. From bit player in your life, you become the auteur. From being pressed up against a wall, you carve a tunnel.

That night, when I got home to my apartment, before I took off my coat, I marched straight to my laptop and Googled fake your own death. I dont know what I was expecting to find in those search results, but I encountered a diverse and vibrant ecosystem: amateur forums where anonymous avatars traded tips on how to score fake IDs and stash money undetected; stories of low-budget con men who ripped off life insurance companies; urban legends of Elvis and Michael Jackson staging death hoaxes and walking among us. There were experts dispensing advice with a steep price tag about how you can maintain your privacy in the digital age and how-tos for erasing yourself in the physical world. Nothing was what it seemed, anything was possible, and you needed only not to repeat the mistakes of those whod gotten caught in order to stay good and gone. Was that it? Were the people who got busted just too messy, their exits too hastily planned?