A man who confessed to faking his own death
is headed to federal prison.
Investigators believe tried to fake his own death
in a plane crash.
Her husband told authorities his wife had fallen from an overlook.
They have bigger dreams for themselves.
They have the ego to think they can do it and pull it off.
When they’re first daydreaming about their fake death,
they think that that is really the great getaway.
But unfortunately, we’ve seen so many times
your problems follow you to your second life,
no matter where you go.
In December 2021, Arthur Knight was in a bad way.
The 34-year-old American was admitted to hospital in Glasgow
with an acute case of COVID.
Things weren’t looking good
and staff decided to put him on a ventilator.
Technically, however, the man in the Scottish hospital
was already dead.
It turns out that Arthur Knight went by many different names.
One was Nicholas Rossi,
a figure on Interpol’s red list, who was wanted back in the US
for charges ranging from fraud to rape.
Another was Nicholas Alahverdian,
a minor figure in Rhode Island local politics
and a vocal critic of the state’s child welfare system,
who had died of cancer in February 2020.
I’d like you to join me in the memory of my friend,
I guess some people here know him also,
Nicholas Alahverdian,
who had a battle with cancer.
I ask that all my colleagues remember him.
God bless.
When Police Scotland arrested
the still very much alive man on December 13th,
he was wanted by authorities in several different US states.
A Rhode Island man authorities say faked his own death
was apprehended alive in Scotland.
What officers found was a pathological liar
who may have cultivated up to a dozen different aliases.
Welcome to
In this episode,
we’ll be looking at the mechanics of faking your own death.
It's a long, strange history,
and it remains an appealing tactic of criminals across the world,
even if it seldom comes off without a hitch.
[THE BUSINESS OF CRIME]
Pseudocide is the snappy name for the art of faking your own death.
It's an idea that's been around for a very long time.
After all, it’s the most eye-catching means
of escaping the baggage of your dead-end existence
and striking out into a new one.
It’s kind of the ultimate fantasy,
in the sense that in this life we would be able to leave behind
the mistakes and mundanity and tedium of daily life
and be reborn.
The number one cause of failure for any faked death
is a lack of preparation.
For many, it represents something of an impulse decision.
Something has gone wrong,
and this very specific, drastic course of evasive action
has come to seem like the only way to solve it.
Desperation, after all, makes people do strange things.
White-collar criminals make for enthusiastic pseudocides.
Indianapolis money manager Marcus Schrenker
was found to have swindled investors out of $1.5 million
shortly before a staged plane crash in 2009.
He was caught two days later
after emails were discovered sent from the dead man to a friend
outlining the mechanics of the entire plan.
Mark sent an email to me tonight.
The email is his description of what happened in that plane,
why he bailed out,
He needs to turn himself in and set the record straight himself.
I don’t want to be the guy that has to clean up his record.
Or consider the case of Rodney and Julie Wheeler.
The West Virginia couple
embarked on a scheme to fake Julie’s death in May 2020
after she’d been found guilty of defrauding
the Department of Veterans Affairs of almost $300,000.
Rodney Wheeler allegedly tried to help his wife fake her death
to avoid being sentenced for healthcare fraud.
Facing up to a decade of jail time, a fake 911 call was placed
claiming Julie had disappeared after falling from a bridge.
The Wheelers tried to fake
Julie falling off the main overlook at Grandview.
That 911 call sent rescue crews on an extensive search,
and that search came at a cost.
After an extensive search,
police found her hidden in a wardrobe at the Wheeler family home.
Not only had their plan been thwarted,
Rodney was also handed two months in a federal lockup
for attempting to obstruct the course of justice.
Rodney and Julie Wheeler are classically your kind of couple
that try to be in cahoots to fake the death of a spouse
and then collect.
But as we saw, that plan crumbled very quickly.
Not every case has a financial motive.
In 2018, Russian journalist Arkady Babchenko
was found on the floor of his apartment in Kyiv, Ukraine,
with blood seeping through his clothes.
He was later pronounced dead.
The following day,
he returned to give a news conference to a room of dumbstruck reporters.
The murder was a ruse,
dreamed up to expose a very real threat to his life,
a plot with alleged roots in the Kremlin.
The door opened. My murderer entered.
He wished me well,
and I wished him well.
He stayed in the apartment for maybe ten seconds.
Then he left.
Everything had to be done as realistically as possible.
So they brought me in the ambulance and loaded me up.
We went a certain distance, and then I started to die.
They started to take measures to resuscitate me.
The resuscitation was unsuccessful.
I died.
Whatever the motive,
preparation is crucial for pseudocide.
Any new life requires a plausible identity
that’s ready to go, right off the bat.
When you go off into your next life,
who do you become
and how do you procure the necessary documents,
line of credit, identity
that we all need to exist in the 21st century.
That costs money
and requires some pretty unusual existing contacts.
It involves an endless list of things
most probably don’t even think about,
including credit scores, cash reserves,
and the ability to actually earn a living in your new life.
Is it really possible to totally leave your old life behind?
As with so much else, money talks.
A fake death certificate might cost anywhere between £100 to £350,
but that alone won’t get you very far.
Twenty thousand pounds and up
will in some places get you a dedicated fixer,
who will erase the details of your old life.
The Philippines is especially popular as a fake death destination.
Death kits do a roaring trade in the country
and might even include purchasing an uncollected corpse from a mortuary
to make for a convincing body stand-in
alongside all of the relevant documentation.
John Darwin, the infamous British canoe conman
who faked his own disappearance,
has called the country home since 2015.
John Darwin returned today
to the beach where he disappeared nearly ten years ago,
having faked his own death
by paddling his canoe into the North Sea.
But enterprising criminals
don’t always stop at a successful pseudocide.
Once the perp has settled into their new existence,
new demands are swiftly made.
Further payments are required
to keep the secret safe from the relevant authorities.
When Nicolas Rossi died in early 2020,
his fake obituaries made a special point of noting
how his ashes were scattered at sea.
When his alter ego Arthur Knight married his new wife a month later,
no friends or family attended the service,
while his father’s name and occupation were left blank.
It was almost like the man didn’t really exist.