I am working on a short story and for purposes of the plot, I need a character to fake his own death.
Unfortunatly, I’m not sure how to make it plausible. Do the police generally check dental records/fingerprints of the deceased if there is no sign of foul play(accident/suicide)? The story takes place in the 1950’s, so that pretty much eliminates DNA testing.
Here’s a site with an article about it. I won’t provide a link just the URL. I’m sure you can figure out how to make it work.
htt p://www.rantmorgan.com/modules/news/article.php?storyid=4
There’s nothing particularly bad on the site. I’m just paranoid about breaking any rules here.
Leaving a body, even if it is not your own, is evidence. It also becomes quite sophisticated to keep the ruse. Why not have your subject just disappear, period?
Why not make it in the early 1950s so you could use the Korean war as part of the deception? Fred Bloggs goes to war and his buddy dies in battle. Bloggs switches the dog tags and assumes the identity of his dead friend. He comes home but never goes back to his real home, nor the home of his dead buddy.
Take it from there.
Armond Tanzarian is a great name for that character (even though he did return to the house of his bud).
But his mother didn’t even notice.
Just a thought: what if the police find signs of forced entry in his house, and a huge pool of blood in his bedroom? So much blood that he couldn’t possibly be alive - unless he had collected his own blood over many weeks in his fridge for this purpose. It could be made more convincing by planting more blood in a stolen car and abandoning it by a river or sea.
I like it. Probably expand it a bit, say perhaps adding signs of a struggle. A bullet or two in the wall(and a corresponding fired cartridge in a gun, left at the scene), a knife stained with the guy’s blood in the abandoned car, some bloody gloves as well.
And if this were to happen in a major city, there’s probably less chance the cops would bother doing something about it.
The big downside to this would be the risk of being caught and tried/shot for desertion. Or captured by the Koreans, which wouldn’t be any better.
And of course, if buddy still has his face, he might recognized by somebody despite the wrong dog tags.
Wouldn’t the saved blood, even in the fridge, need an anticoagulant? If there’s enough a/c to last for weeks, would the pool of blood even clot? Unclotted blood sounds like something that would provoke too much curiosity.
Maybe self-kidnapping would be good. I doubt that voice analysis in the '50s was up to recognizing him as the ransom caller if he muffled his voice. For that matter, if his family were to deliver some money he’d have a good stake to start his new life. (That’s risky, though.) Of course he would be killed by the ‘kidnappers’ and the body disposed of.
The dog-tag trick Duckster mentions has the advantage of leaving the false body buried in a foreign country, but he would return to living someone else’s life. He could run into trouble with government agencies and anybody else who keeps detailed records. He might do better picking up on the identity of a deceased child from some small town somewhere; I think the technique has been discussed here before.
Wouldn’t it depend how long the blood was sitting in the room before the police got around to looking at it? After a couple days, it may or may not make a difference(but I don’t know, so I could be wrong).
I like the self-kidnapping thing.
There has already been an excellent story and movie written about this, called: “No Where to Run”, starring David Jansen.
David planned his death for years, wore a beard the whole time he was preparing to fake his death, he switched his life insurance from term to whole life so he wouldnt be breaking any laws like fraud, saved up a quarter of a million dollars in cash, etc. The story was narrated by a private investigator who was hired by his wife, but switched sides and cooperated with David since David paid him more money.
The movie had several twists which made it very interesting, including a very good surprise ending.
Okay, so he makes the decision to fake his own death, but it’s not urgent.
He should travel out of town once or twice a month for his job, if possible, because then he can keep the police from ever finding anything out. For example, if he lives in DC and travels to Philadelphia, he could stop in Baltimore and pay cash for any tools he needs to get the job done. The Johns Hopkins Medical Center, for example, might have an intern who would sell him the equipment for taking his own blood (needle, bag or possibly glass bottle, etc.). A knife or gun, whatever – if forensics are primitive enough, he could use pigs’ blood for most of the blood.
He could fake his death in Philly, too – obviously, you can substitute your own cities – which would give the murder detectives in Philly and the missing person detectives in DC a hell of a time. When they finally both figure out “the truth” it will have taken them a significant amount of work; they’ll be convinced that they’re right because the answer was harder to come by.
Make it look random. For example, the people he works with in Philly should know that he takes a “shortcut” through the bad part of town when traveling between cities. He could make a point of being late for an appointment, or showing up with a black eye. I wasn’t around for the fifties – would getting a black eye from a mugger require a police report? Would he have reason to say “oh, don’t worry about it, it’s nothing?” Could he layer his lie by telling most people that it was just a stupid accident, but “confiding” in a Philly friend that it was a mugger and that he was too embarrassed to report it?
The more he makes the cops work to discover “the truth,” the more likely they are to believe it.