Faking Your Own Death

If you haven't seen Harold and Maude, do so. It's the only place where I learned anything about faking your own death. And it's very funny.

[QUOTE=Andirion;971757]I was wondering if anyone has any information about people who've faked their own death. How they did it, why they did it, etc.

This is sort of out there, so I don't know how much there might be to know about this particular topic. But I figured I would ask.

Anything you got would be cool.

Thanks.[/QUOTE]

Survivor?

I think Scott Bacula played in a couple of movies like this. Lord of Illusions was interesting. There was another one...

Or what about urban legends of celebrities faking their own deaths? Elvis, John Belushi...

There is a list of people who have disappeared or who's bodies were never found, which kind of works with the whole 'faking your death' scenario.

Some people from the top of my head:
D.B. Cooper
Zodiac Killer
Osama Bin Laden (eh, sue me)
Amelia Earhart
Roberto Clemente
Oscar Zeta Acosta (Hunter S. Thompson's Lawyer)

Lots of folks used to leave notes that they were jumping off the Golden Gate Bridge. Kind of old school, but it had to have worked a couple o' times.

burning the house down. a favorite of mine to write about.

I once moved away from a town and someone started a rumor that I killed myself.
It spread like crazy.
5 years later and I still run into people that thought I was dead. There was a memorial service and everything.

Suckers.

There is a piece in the workshop about it, titled K[I]illed by Rumor[/I]

So a good way is to move and have a friend start a rumor that you are dead.

This of course is just a social death, not a legal one.

Not that hard to do if you are going for the short term. You get someone to say you are dead. That someone has to be a good lier. You show up. Even better if the person says they killed you and your body is in the trunk and they are taking you to hide the body and you jump out and grab them.

[QUOTE=dunelord;1003663]Not that hard to do if you are going for the short term. You get someone to say you are dead. That someone has to be a good lier. You show up. Even better if the person says they killed you and your body is in the trunk and they are taking you to hide the body and you jump out and grab them.[/QUOTE]

I don't know about that. If you're going to convince anybody that you are dead. There has to either (a) be a body that they can see is absolutely dead or ( be a very good reason that there is no body that they can ID (fire, drown in the ocean, car explodes, etc...)

Better than killing yourself by faking death, I'd suggest getting lost in a foreign third world country in the Eurasian region. People assume missing forever and later, most of them assume death. Law enforcement offices don't consider you dead till they see the corpse or some evidence of your death. So you'd be missing forever in their records.

Sell your passport to some human trafficking racket. The person who returns in your place will not be you. You might be safely assumed dead. Make sure that with your lost or new identity you get away to a location as far as possible from where you sold the passport.

If you really want to get back to your own country: Get yourself in a human trafficking racket and get a fake identity and return to your country after a decade or more. Do this before they start implementing biometrics

Once they start implementing biometrics and the system becomes completely dependent on computers, this whole element of faking death will become very simple to be in a story. Because to add that in the story you will just need to hire a good hacker Thus killing the major thrill. So use the element while we're still not there