The recent story about Andy Kaufman’s brother claiming Andy faked his death/hoaxing the media on Andy faking his death(delete as appropriate) got me thinking. I’ve heard of some non-celebrities managing to convince friends and even sometimes authorities that they were dead before turning up years later–I think there was a case of a UK couple showing up in South America after five years when friends and family thought they were dead. There have been criminals who authorities assume are dead, but none that I can think of that have been officially declared dead before turning up alive. And of course there have always been hard-to-believe rumors about Elvis or Jim Morrison or Richey Edwards faking their own deaths to escape the celebrity scene.
But has any even moderately well-known person actually managed to fake their own death a la the alleged Andy Kaufman story? That is, has anyone managed to disappear, or create a death scenario so convincing that their colleagues, the media, and the authorities were absolutely sure they were dead without, you know, actually dying? Of course at some point they would have had to come out of hiding, or at least be correctly identified at their real death, for us to ever know.
My gut feeling is that the answer would be “no”, given how reluctant the authorities are to declare someone dead without a body (or at least without strong evidence that the person is gone). But perhaps it’s possible that someone could completely avoid detection–and that would mean no use of ID, SSN, known bank accounts, or anything else from their past life–for the seven years the police take to declare a missing person deceased. I suspect some organized crime figures, who have easy access to false identification and compelling reasons not to be seen for long periods of time, might have been able to pull it off. But has anyone else done it?
There are none that I am aware of for the long-term but Agatha Christie faked her own death for about 11 days and it was successful for that time in spite of a massive manhunt in all of England. She was super-famous at the time and nobody knows exactly why she did it.
There have been a number of non-famous people that have pulled it off semi-successfully although it is impossible to know the really successful ones by definition.
Patrick McDermott, who was a long-time boyfriend of Olivia Newton-John, faked his death for a long time. He was eventually exposed. He wasn’t quite famous himself, but he was close to someone famous, and there were a lot of news stories about his disappearance:
Suspected of murdering his Nanny and assaulting his wife, Lord Lucan vanished in November 1974 and in spite of an extensive manhunt, has never been found. Lucan was officially presumed dead on 11 December 1992.
Hans Schwerte was a highly regarded professor for German literature and from 1970 to 1973 the president of the University of Aachen (in Germany).
In the early 1990s, it was discovered that Hans Schwerte actually was born Hans E. Schneider who had been a member of the SS in WW II. After the war, he assumed a new identity and his wife had him declared dead under the Name Schneider in 1946; it took almost 50 years until his past caught up with him.
John Stonehouse, a British MP, managed it for a couple of months back in 1974. He disappeared from a Florida beach in late November and was assumed drowned or eaten by sharks. Obituaries were published in the British papers.
He was caught on Christmas eve in Australia, having attracted the attention of bank employees because he was moving large sums of money about. They thought he might be Lord Lucan, who had disappeared two weeks before Stonehouse; bad timing may have done for his scheme.
This local guy killed his family and faked his own death in the same fire. Investigators saw through it, and he is presumed alive. His dog and pickup were found up in the mountains. FBI poster for Robert William Fisher.
I’m familiar with some of these cases. I’d tend to discount Agatha Christie, Lord Lucan, Aimee Semple McPherson and Robert William Fisher because for the most part media and authorities assumed they were missing but alive; even if they were trying to mislead others into thinking they were dead, local authorities assumed from the start that they were alive. (I think Fisher and Lucan are dead now, though.)
I hadn’t heard of Stonehouse. I think of those mentioned he might be our top candidate. His death was reported in the media and it seems that nobody was really looking for him when he was caught by accident. That’s one of the key factors in faking your death instead of just disappearing–if you convincingly fake your death people stop looking for you. I also think Schwerte deserves a mention, although in the chaos of post-WWII Germany it was understandable to assume that anyone who hadn’t been identified soon after the end of the conflict was among the countless anonymous dead.
In “The Rutles,” made soon after this, the Brian Epstein equivalent character “moves to Australia” (as a parody of Epstein’s death). I always thought it was just a random throwaway joke, until I read about Stonehouse in some SDMB thread.
