I think this is going to be a Catch-22 situation. Without somebody’s real name, you’re never going to be able to prove someone’s death, or even their life. But if someone did plan on faking their death (and I’m not saying that happened–I was around when Wally was here too, and I believe the report was genuine), they wouldn’t be going around giving people their real name.
It is possible to confirm a death with someone’s real name alone. In my line of work, I have had occasion to use the Social Security Death Index for the US. While privacy laws are different in Canada, there are other means of finding out the same information through official channels, probably best done through an official request, although one would probably also have to include last known address.
Without a real name, however, we are left only to speculate, and I don’t see the point in that.
Duke, we would have to work off the assumption that (if he did fake his death, which I am far from convinced of) he only decided to do so after he would have given out his name.
I’ll throw in my 2 cents. IMO, Wally liked it here and (most)everybody here liked Wally. He had a great sense of humour, as can be seen in his threads, and he had a genuine caring personality and I think he really did care for (most) other posters here.
There is nothing that he ever posted that would give anybody the indication that he would fake his own death and slink into the shadows, we had one poster try something like that and he caused some serious panic for several hours, at least, before the “joke” came to light and he got banned for it.
If Wally had just wanted to fade away there were at least a handful of people here who would have kept in contact with him and they didn’t. Only a sick bastard would get some perverse pleasure from faking their death and watching friends suffer with it. Wally was not a sick bastard.
I work at the paper and can corroborate some of Shirley Ujest’s statements about obits.
The small obits that run every day run at no cost to the deceased’s family. But they’re not culled from comprehensive government records; funeral homes send them to the newspaper every afternoon. There have definitely been people whose obits didn’t make the paper due to the funeral home omitting their name from the daily list they send in, accidentally or otherwise.
The larger obituaries that sometimes have a photo do cost money (a surprising amount of money, IMO). They’re usually run on the anniversary of someone’s death, since they are usually submitted and paid for several days before they run.
The third type is the obit-story, when a local person of note dies. This is treated just like any news story; we send a reporter, they talk to as many relatives/friends/colleagues as they can, and run it with its own headline and so on, typically on the same page with the daily tun of obits (unless it’s someone really prominent, in which case it’ll go on local front or occasionally A1).
Shirley Ujest pretty much summed up my position. I knew that there were questions about some of his posts not being original (including the infamous cybersex one), but this is the first I’ve heard anything about his death being faked. I was around for part of Wally’s tenure and never doubted he was anything other than what he presented himself as. In fact, it was the announcement thread about his accident that prompted me to stop lurking and register. (Does that mean that if his death was faked, the poster JeffB doesn’t exist?)
UncleBeer, I don’t have any problem with you deleting the link – I just wish you had done it before I found it. I wasn’t aware of that LJ, and after reading some of the posts, I hope I forget it.
Wally’s memorial thread is gone. At some point in the past, that thread was being used by a person, or persons, unknown to create controversy. Whoever was doing that would bring up the memorial thread from its rightful place of rest with some rather pointed accusations of plagiarism directed at Wally. Oddly enough, not too disimiliar to what I’ve seen in the LJ thread which spawned this SDMB thread.
In any case, we decided to remove the memorial thread from public view through a vBulletin function not necessarily intended for that purpose. That function, however, was the only means we had at the time to remove things from view without actually deleting them (we have other options now). Sadly, it appears that during one of the version upgrades we have implemented since hiding the thread, it was lost.
Yeah, I’m sorry too, Jeff. This hasn’t been one of my finer moments of moderating. And it’s certainly not going to be one of my finer memories of this little community. There are people who are acting quite shamefully in the LJ in my considered opinion. Whoever they may be, I feel rather dirty for whatever association I may have with them. Bleah.
Well, if I had given out my real name to someone on the board, I’d be leery of trying to fake my death afterwards, especially if I were as well-known and loved as Wally was. What if the board had put together a memorial fund, and tracked down Wally’s relatives to find out what charity Wally would have wanted to support, only to find out he wasn’t actually dead? (And if you’ve got someone’s real name, you can find their relatives very easily–I do it quite often here at work so we can send memorial letters.) I can’t imagine anybody would leave themselves open to such potential embarrassment.
I would almost be pressed to assume that, if somebody here knew his real name, that would be a sure sign that he didn’t fake his death. Besides, there’s no rule that you have to stay here, no matter how much a part of the SDMB community you are. A lot of well-known names from Wally’s time have left, not all of them even saying so much as good-bye. If he really felt he had to leave, he would have just left.
To sum up–I have no creedence in the “fake death” speculation.
