The Last Place You'd Look (10 page)

Most who make up their minds to leave make critical mistakes. Among the most common errors: not severing ties with individuals from their past; using traceable cell phone numbers, credit cards, and ATMs; requesting the transfer of medical or educational records; forwarding mail or magazines to a new address; using accounts tied to a previous (real) identity; having a traceable Internet account; incorporating a real name (or something associated with a previous identity) into a new one; or leaving behind clues to an eventual destination.

Experts say aliases can trip up those on the run. Often they will choose names that prove easy for them to remember: “Douglas Alan Martin” might become “Alan Douglas” or Mona Sims, who once lived on Johnson Boulevard, may choose Monica Johnson or even Monica Simmons—both names that she can recall with ease.

Skiptracers like Ahearn once relied on paper trails but now depend on electronic ones. What makes electronic “crumbs” so compelling are that they are difficult, if not impossible, to erase: once in a database, almost always in a database.

Unique characteristics can also hurt. From hobbies to food preferences, the devil is in the details.
Wired
writer Ratliff, who says he suffers from celiac disease and eats gluten free, blew his cover by going to a restaurant that offered gluten-free pizza. He also risked detection to attend a soccer game.

Being a vegetarian, having salon-applied fingernails, drinking Turkish coffee, or following a favorite NFL team can all lead to discovery. Ahearn and other experts like him agree that the details that make you an individual also make you easier to find, and the people doing the searching are going to know as much about a person as possible.

Those most successful at disappearing walk away from everything. These people take nothing from their former lives and leave no hint that they planned to vanish. They stash clothes, new identification, and money against the day they leave. They do their research.

Ahearn says he believes each of us nurses the fantasy of walking away from it all, but the numbers who follow through are miniscule. “I look at my Web stats, and I get 200 to 250 hits a day. And 99 percent of those hits typed in ‘how to disappear’—from Finland to Germany to Russia, from all over,” he says.

Ahearn says the Internet encourages people to explore the idea by providing ways to test the waters and the tools to plan exits from real lives. “I think having the Internet at our fingertips lets us dream. It’s kind of therapeutic,” he says.

While a potential runaway can use the Web to plan an escape, using technology to abandon one life and start another also carries its own price tag: it leaves a trail that professionals like Ahearn have no trouble following.

“I’m the person who can locate the guy with $2 million in the Caribbean,” Ahearn says. He explains that as a skiptracer he is more prone to pursue a fake drowning victim like Samuel Israel than a missing high school kid.

Ahearn says people usually leave for two main reasons: money or danger. Those reasons are divided along gender lines: men leave for money, and women for danger. Men tend to come into some cash and decide to live out their fantasy, or they get into financial hot water and want out. Women can react to stalking situations or violent and abusive relationships by running. And while the bulk of intentional disappearances were once men, Ahearn says more and more women now choose to bail out. As for numbers, there is no real way to know how many people disappear by choice each year and how many are abducted because not every case is solved.

“We’re seeing more professional women coming to us or contacting us, women who are married and need an exit plan,” Ahearn explains.

When it comes to finding someone, Ahearn says it all depends on the sophistication of the hunter. “If it’s somebody who is searching you out, like a cop or a skiptracer, and they are pretty savvy with technology, it’s a question of who is better. It’s like a duel,” he says.

Law enforcement officers who track white-collar criminals do so by learning to think like them, much as those who specialize in violent crimes delve into the habits and psyches of killers and rapists. Tracking a man who has embezzled a large sum of money and run off with his secretary takes a different skill set than tracking a pedophile and child abductor.

“If law enforcement is looking for you, they know at any time you [could] pop up on the radar; how many criminals are caught because a headlight is out?” Ahearn points out.

Criminals often fall into the hands of their pursuers because little things go wrong, or they do something stupid (from their point of view, not so much from the cop’s vantage point), like run their mouths. Often intentional disappearances are resolved the same way—the perpetrator does something unplanned or without thinking—getting back into the same line of work, providing skiptracers with a juicy lead.

“You can’t be Joe the bus driver in Chicago and then disappear and be Joe the bus driver in Wisconsin,” Ahearn says. “The two facts [to take into consideration] are who you are and who is looking for you.”

If there’s a common thread running through those who intentionally skip out, it is that they are seeking freedom of some sort: freedom from somebody or something, says Ahearn. “I don’t think that disappearing itself is that hard; what it always comes back to is that the grass is always greener. Once you get there you have to rebuild your life. Some people are good at it; some aren’t,” he says.

As for the process itself, Ahearn claims that a successful disappearance is more about preparation and follow-through than walking out. He says someone who wants to disappear the right way—perhaps a woman trying to get away from an abusive partner—should prepare for her new life by leaving nothing to trace. She should obtain a mail drop and use it for all mail in connection with her future life. He recommends prepaid phones and monetary resources that can’t be traced (like a new bank account or a stash of cash). For research, Ahearn counsels avoiding Internet cafes, since most have keystroke loggers in place, which remember passwords and personally identifying data, which in turn allows others to trace that information, and instead use a laptop. Connect on random wireless locations around a town or city.

For those searching for a loved one who is missing, he advises them to pursue every lead: credit cards, cell phone bills, trips, and so on.

“Most likely there will be a clue there somewhere,” Ahearn says. “Everybody makes mistakes—that’s the bottom line.” Ahearn urges answering questions for clues: Does the missing person have relatives? Is he in contact with them? What does he do for a living? Look at the whole picture, especially the data, and that could lead to the next step.

“You still have to be who you are,” says Ahearn. But the difference with those who are intentionally missing is in the amount of discretion they use. Some have no problem adapting to a new identity and life; others do.

“Some just want this new life because the old life is so bad,” Ahearn says. On the other hand, he believes that in many cases the passing of time can make the individual feel less threatened and lead him or her to return. As far as how many leave with the intention of never coming back, Ahearn thinks statistics are wrong and many more people disappear on purpose than is believed.

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Being trapped and feeling hopeless are what Dr. Geraldine Merola Barton, a New York–based psychologist, says spark some to abandon their lives. Bad home situations where there are few, if any, alternatives create desperation in both adults and juveniles. Barton recalls a young woman in a situation where the violence continued to escalate. Knowing she could not rely on her parents to help her, the young woman planned her getaway. During her lunch break at work, she boarded an airplane and flew across the country, where she began a new life as someone else.

“She felt she had nobody who could protect her, no resources. So she turned to herself,” Barton says.

Medication issues also can provide an ignition point for impetuous and often spontaneous flight. For some classes of mental illness, the individual feels better when he’s on his medication, so he thinks he can do without them and stops taking them. This is especially true for individuals with bipolar disorder, who often thrive on the manic episodes and may miss the high they bring. Once off medication, leaving home may seem as if it is a reasonable move, but many who need drugs to function in a normal environment and stop taking them without medical clearance or supervision end up on the streets as part of the homeless population.

Others may experience neurotic behavior, angry overreactions to situations, and the inability to properly evaluate their problems. There is little that can be done about such behavior.

“We don’t have a Big Brother society; we can’t force someone [to take their medications] unless it’s an extreme emergency,” Barton says.

For those who don’t suffer from mental illnesses like bipolar disorder or schizophrenia, though, Barton believes there still may be other less obvious psychological disorders in play.

She recalls a case where a patient who was also a gambler claimed he went into a fugue state (defined as an altered state of consciousness in which a person moves around, talks, and otherwise functions, but is not aware of what he or she is doing) for two weeks, during which time he left his home, his wife, and his kids, and ended up in Las Vegas. When the man “came to,” he did not know how he got to Vegas and found money and clothes he didn’t remember acquiring. Barton says that although the case is extreme, it’s a good example of someone suffering from an underlying dissociative disorder.

“He had two very distinct sides to him: One was very conscientious, and the other was sociopathic with no conscience. One was very impulsive; the other was restrained and restricted and full of guilt, shame, and denial,” Barton says. “One side of him was highly devoted, the other deceitful. One side was passive, the other [full of] rage.”

Barton says many who make big commitments without enough forethought end up feeling trapped. She cites Jennifer Wilbanks, the runaway bride from Georgia, who was profiled earlier in this chapter.

“People who are trying to meet other people’s expectations and demands on them feel more and more like they’re being buried alive, and they don’t know how to get out of it,” Barton says.

But, Barton adds, there is also sometimes a failure to attach emotionally and connect to the other people in their lives. As a result, these individuals often find it easier to walk out and leave behind obligations and commitments. They form no real bond with others and opt to cut already tenuous ties with their previous lives, Barton says.

Narcissists also sometimes walk away from their lives because they view others merely in relation to themselves and the others’ ability to provide the narcissists with the things they need. “So the other person doesn’t have rights and feelings as far as the narcissist is concerned,” she says.

Disappointment—either in the other person or directed at the narcissist—can ignite flight. Once this happens, the other person ceases to exist as far as the narcissist is concerned, and it’s not difficult to walk away. When most people leave, says Barton, they generally either have an underlying mental disorder or are leaving behind something they perceive as threatening.

“I think a lot of people who run away have a tendency to think in terms of, ‘You can’t fire me because I quit,’” says Barton. She categorizes them as the types of individuals who change jobs on a frequent basis and are impulsive. “They’re always leaving relationships, jobs, homes, always thinking, ‘There will be something better for me there.’”

She says it’s called the geographic cure—what Ahearn referred to as “the grass is greener”—and adults are not the only ones who seek it; juveniles often also look for something better than what they have. But when a child leaves home, they’re not seeking greener pastures, just different ones. Barton says no matter why a child runs, for parents, the idea of not knowing where he is can be “almost worse than knowing he’s dead.”

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Kelly Hawkins knows what Barton means. Hawkins has been through the wringer with her foster daughter so often that she feels flattened. A therapeutic foster parent trained to deal with high-risk kids, Hawkins’s foster daughter, Maggie (not her real name), takes off with the same casualness that other teenage girls employ when they change clothes. Hawkins says Maggie is both promiscuous and a habitual drug user. She also has assaulted her foster mother.

“[Maggie] went into foster care when she was five. Her mother was a meth addict, and they actually busted a meth lab in the basement of her house,” Hawkins says. Authorities removed two infants who tested positive for drugs at birth from the home but left behind the older children, including Maggie.

“That was the big number-one failure there,” says Hawkins.

Maggie eventually ended up joining the others in foster care, where the siblings were broken apart for adoptive purposes. The children were placed into pre-adoptive homes: Maggie’s was with Kelly. Hawkins herself has not formally adopted Maggie because if she does, she will lose access to many crucial services, including intensive mental health treatment, but she did petition for guardianship of Maggie and received the appointment.

Maggie spent some time in a respite home. Since most foster care programs do not allow kids to stay in unlicensed homes, some states provide respite care in the form of homes that take foster kids on a temporary basis. It gives both the foster parents and the children a chance to experience time away from one another. Hawkins says Maggie began hanging around with the wrong kids and doing drugs.

“The first two times she ran away at age thirteen, she was only gone overnight,” Hawkins says. But then Maggie upped the ante: she disappeared for two weeks.

“No one cared or even comforted me. I was beside myself doing the things other parents of missing kids do, and no one even asked how I was or if they could help. When I confronted one close friend about it, her response was, ‘It’s not like you didn’t know something like this might happen.’ Another said, ‘It’s her own fault,’ as if that made me feel better,” Hawkins says.