Furthermore: Where the Headlines Take You

Lost and Found

Wired Magazine writer Evan Ratliff recently wrote a story about Matthew Allen Sheppard, a manager at an Arkansas electrical plant who charged $40,000 worth of personal items on a company credit card, faked his own death and fled to Mexico, but missed his family and was eventually caught while trying to reunite with them. How difficult is it to disappear in the digital age? Pretty challenging! Electronic traces are everywhere: ATM records are networked; any kind of email, Facebook post, text message, or other electronic communication can be monitored; and lots of regular people have their photograph and personal details all over the web so it's easy to see what they look like and what they're into. So Evan Ratliff and his editor Nick Thompson are making a game of going underground – Ratliff has disappeared, and Thompson is leading worldwide manhunt for him. Anyone can join in and compete for a prize of $5,000.  I'm sure you're rarin' to go, but if you'd like to do a little reading first about how to find missing or lost people, research how criminals manage to stay underground, or consider what you might do (or not do) if you wanted to disappear yourself, I've got some suggestions for you!

Imagine you're working on a mystery novel and you need details of how local police go about tracking a suspected pseudocide*. Cozy up with real-life gumshoe Fay Faron's Missing Persons: A Writer's Guide to Finding the Lost, the Abducted and the Escaped and you should pick up a few tips. Faron explains who is likely to go missing, who might want to find them, and common techniques private investigators like herself employ to start finding their quarry. (Writers and other folks generally interested in learning other bits and bobs about crime, criminals and investigators might want to look at the other books in the Howdunit Series, which cover everything from poisons to private investigation techniques.)

Evan Ratliff has to follow some rules for the month that he's underground – one of them is that he can't simply fade away into the wilderness. But some folks who disappear or go missing do it by getting away from cities, traveling on foot, and living close to the land. You can learn how to follow and find people in the natural world with Tracking: Signs of Man, Signs of Hope. Author David Diaz has spent the last twenty years learning advanced techniques for tracking people using the subtle signs they leave behind – foot prints, broken leaves, disturbed undergrowth, trash, blood trails, and more, and he shares his strategies in detail in this creepy but fascinating manual.

People go underground for lots of reasons. Some are trying to escape prosecution for a crime, like Matthew Allen Sheppard. Some just want to turn over an emphatically new leaf. Some folks, though, have stepped so far outside of their cultural norms that their lives are in danger because of their actions – people who turn "state's evidence" and testify against fellow criminals in exchange for immunity are sometimes given new identities, new lives, and long-term protection from the US Department of Justice in the Federal Witness Protection Program. Pete Earley's WITSEC: Inside the Federal Witness Protection Program is the story of how Justice Department attorney Gerald Shur created the program in the early 1960s, to help the Department win its war on organized crime. The book is filled with interesting detail about how WITSEC operates, and stories about people who have been offered protection through the program.

Criminals who've gone underground aren't all mobsters, though. Sidney Lumet's Running on Empty, starring River Phoenix is the story of a whole family on the run. Phoenix plays 17-year old Danny Pope, son of a pair of ex-sixties radicals who blew up a chemical lab that produced napalm scheduled to be used in the Vietnam War, and then were forced underground. The pressure of life in the shadows is getting to Danny, and he realizes he is going to have to make a choice: does he want to stay with his family, or try to strike out on his own without them?

* My new word of the day! The Oxford English Dictionary defines it thusly: "pseudocide, n. 1. A suicide attempt which is intended to fail, a pretended attempt at suicide. Also: the faking of one's own death. 2. A person who attempts or commits pseudocide." [Emphasis mine, of course!]