From a World War 2 spy to Britain’s most notorious murder suspect – here are ten
people who faked their own deaths and the crazy reasons why!
10: John Stonehouse John Stonehouse became a British MP in the
1950s.
He was a man of great ambition.
But unfortunately, all that ambition came to an end after he was reported missing off
the coast of Miami in November of 1974, presumed drowned.
There were a lot of questions surrounding Stonehouse’s vanishing.
There were some claims that said the mafia was involved.
Allegations began flying around that Stonehouse had been a Czech spy during the 1960s.
Then news stories started circulating about his financial affairs.
Nobody could figure out what was going on, but one thing everyone knew was that his vanishing
was mysterious and suspicious.
But John Stonehouse didn't stay dead for long.
He was located in Australia just one month later on Christmas Eve.
He had faked his own death and then fled with his secretary to the land down under in hopes
of building a new life for himself under a different name.
Somebody spotted him, he was busted, and the United Kingdom shipped him back home, where
they charged him with fraud, theft, and forgery.
Stonehouse was then imprisoned for seven years.
It turned out he had been moving money around illegally, including money from charities
that he was involved in.
Oh yes, and it also came out in 2010 that Johnstone had indeed been a Czech spy!
9: Lady Bluebeard Belle Gunness, also known under her alias
Lady Bluebird, is believed to have murdered several of her husbands, many of her children,
and several dozen other humans during her time on Earth.
She is one of the most notorious murderers in history and almost nobody knows who she
is.
To better understand Lady Bluebeard, let's start at the beginning.
She emigrated to the United States from Norway sometime between 1881 and 1886.
Legend has it that she moved to America after being beaten by a man while pregnant, resulting
in a miscarriage.
She met her first husband in Chicago in 1893.
They had four children together.
They even started a business.
But then things got weird.
She burned down their business and collected the insurance.
Two of their children died and she collected the life insurance from them.
Then her husband died and she collected his life insurance.
This goes on and on for quite some time with deaths and businesses burning and insurance
being collected.
In 1902, her next husband died when a meat chopper fell on his head.
Then one of her children died, also after being hit with a meat cleaver.
People eventually started catching on to what this woman was doing and in 1908, four bodies
were found inside of her house, three belonging to her children and one of them allegedly
belonging to her.
The only problem was that the body that was supposed to belong to Belle Gunness had no
head and could not be identified.
It's believed that she faked her own death to get away with what authorities would eventually
realize was a murder spree in which 42 people were killed.
The true Lady Bluebird was never found.
8: Ed Baker Ed Baker was a Texas millionaire.
Like many other Texas millionaires, he made his massive fortune in oil.
He was the founder of Vanguard Groups International.
Ed really hit his stride in the 1980s, at which point he was incredibly wealthy and
going through a mid-life crisis.
He divorced his wife of 10 years, began gambling compulsively, then got married a second time
and divorced yet again less than a year after.
Then two months following his second divorce, he got married to one of his employees.
Everything began to come undone in 1985 when he began spending his investor’s money.
That investor turned out to be associated with the mob.
On November 8, 1985, Ed’s Jaguar was discovered about 20 miles from Houston with the burnt
remains of a body inside.
The body was so crispy and disfigured that nobody could identify it.
There were also gas cans found around the car, suggesting foul play.
Shortly after the corpse was discovered, a letter arrived at his attorney's office saying
that Ed’s life had been threatened and that Ed believed the mafia was after him.
Investigators also learned the Ed had a very generous life insurance policy that would
not pay out to his kids if he were to take his own life.
That's why investigators believed that Ed shot himself and then had an accomplice light
the car on fire so that his death was seen as a murder.
But here's the deal.
Investigator Bob Gale said that the body found in the car probably wasn’t Ed.
Texas millionaires don’t usually light themselves on fire.
It was likely someone else who had been used so Ed could fake his own death, run away to
the Caribbean, and live on the huge amount of funds that he had stolen from his investors.
7: Juan Pujiol Garcia Juan Pujiol Garcia was a spy in World War
II with the British organization MI5, basically the U.K.’s version of the CIA.
Juan managed to fake his own death and keep it under wraps for nearly four decades.
His story is nothing short of amazing.
Juan was a veteran of the Spanish Civil War.
When the conflict broke out with Germany in 1939, he joined the war effort in Britain
against the totalitarianism of the Germans.
However, the British officers weren't interested.
He had no connections or credentials.
So, Juan approached Nazi officials in Madrid and said he wanted to spy on Britain for the
Germans.
He then started sending the Germans false information which they thought he was getting
from London.
He turned into a double agent – one that Britain didn't even know was working for them.
He approached Britain again about becoming an agent in 1942 and there wasn't much they
could do to say no, considering he had already made himself an agent, whether they liked
it or not.
Throughout the entire war, he worked for both sides while only actually working for the
British.
After the war, Juan moved to Venezuela.
The issue was that a lot of Nazis had also fled to Venezuela after the war.
To live the rest of his life in safety, he fabricated a story about dying of malaria
in Angola.
Everyone eventually learned that he was dead, including his first wife and children in Spain.
He didn’t come out of hiding until the 1980s.
6: Lord Lucan In 1974, Lord Lucan became the most notorious
murder suspect in British history.
It all happened after his children's nanny, a woman named Sandra Rivett, was murdered
by being smashed in the head with a lead pipe while in the basement of Lord Lucan’s family
home in central London.
At the time, it was believed that Lucan killed her by accident, mistaking her for his wife.
During the attack on the nanny, his wife was also beaten very badly – and she claimed
it was her husband who attacked her and killed the nanny.
As you can imagine, Lord Lucan was the main suspect.
His car was found stained with blood, abandoned at New Haven.
But that was where the trail turned cold.
Lucan didn't exactly fake his own death, but he did a pretty good job of vanishing and
becoming a legend to the British public.
Nobody knows if he's alive or dead even today, and he's reportedly been spotted at a sheep
station in the Outback, at a Nazi colony in Paraguay, backpacking on Mount Etna, living
in New Zealand with a goat named Camilla, and even living as a hippie until ultimately
dying in 1996 under the name Jungle Barry.
Probably none of these things are true.
Nobody knows when Lord Lucan died or if he's still alive.
There were stories that he was fed to tigers at a private zoo in Kent.
But again, nobody has any idea what happened to this guy.
5: Robert Berger Robert Berger made a mess of faking his own
death.
As a Long Island criminal, Robert tried to falsify his passing to avoid going to jail.
But he was foiled by something as silly as a spelling error.
Robert filled out a death certificate himself and then his lawyer submitted it.
But prosecutors saw the spelling error immediately, a clear giveaway that the document was a forgery.
Robert had been facing charges for attempted grand larceny, a crime that isn't that big
of a deal in the grand scheme of things.
But after faking his death, he now faces up to four additional years in prison.
According to AP News, the death certificate looked exactly like the official document
normally issued by the New Jersey Department of Health.
However, the word “registry” was actually spelled “regsitry,” which really gave
it away.
If it hadn't been for that little spelling mistake, Robert Berger might still officially
be dead.
4: Zack Smith Zack Smith recently faked his own death – not
to get out of going to prison or to escape from fraud or money laundering charges, but
to kidnap two women in his apartment.
Zack, a young guy only 20 years old, sent an email to his ex-girlfriend saying that
he was his own father.
The email informed the ex-girlfriend that Zack was dead and that she should pick up
her property from his apartment.
Of course, Zack was not really dead.
His ex went to the apartment with her friend, probably for emotional support, to collect
her belongings.
What she found instead was Zack still alive and armed with a BB gun!
He then trapped his ex and her 15-year-old friend in his apartment and held them at gunpoint.
It's not exactly clear what he did them while they were imprisoned inside his home, though
there were reports of screaming.
According to NBC News, it was Zack’s brother who told the police what was going on and
helped to get the girls released, after which Zack was charged with two counts of false
imprisonment.
3: Julie Wheeler A man in West Virginia has been sentenced
for helping his wife, Julie Wheeler, to fake her own death.
Shockingly, the husband was sentenced to 8 months of confinement by the Department of
Justice U.S. Attorney’s Office for his part in the scheme.
But what was the scheme, you ask?
It all began when Julie Wheeler committed health care fraud.
She was overbilling care and pocketing the difference.
To avoid being sentenced for fraud, she thought it would be a smart idea to just show up dead.
So, with the help of her husband, they made it look as if Julie had fallen into New River
Gorge and died.
But this was obviously a pretty silly plan considering there would never be any body.
The bogus story resulted in several days of search efforts by local agents and volunteers,
wasting a whole lot of money and time.
Julie was then discovered hiding inside of a closet in her own house.
Julie has since been sentenced to 54 months in federal prison and ordered to pay nearly
$300,000 in restitution.
How's that for faking your own death!
2: Bad Boyfriend A woman recently took to TikTok to discuss
the unusual way in which she was dumped by her boyfriend of two years.
This woman goes simply by Kathryn.
So far as her story goes, she had been with her boyfriend for two fantastic years.
She was ready to marry him, have his babies, and settle down for life.
But then the coronavirus pandemic struck.
Her boyfriend texted her one day and said he was worried that he may have caught the
virus.
He said that he visited the hospital because of his symptoms but thought maybe he was feeling
a little bit better.
This was the last thing that he ever said to her.
As you can imagine, Kathryn was terrified.
She really thought he died from the virus.
After all, that's exactly the way he made it sound.
He never responded to her calls and after a week, his phone went to voicemail.
She called local hospitals, she phoned the police, and eventually she filed a missing
person report.
This is when everything started to spiral out of control.
When she tried to report her boyfriend missing, the police told her that he didn't even exist.
The boyfriend had been lying for two years about his true identity.
And then he used the coronavirus as an excuse to fake his own death and ghost his girlfriend
forever.
1: Takashi Mori A Japanese businessman named Takashi Mori
was arrested in the Philippines after his involvement in a massive life insurance fraud
worth several million dollars.
According to the Criminal Investigation Command, Takashi and his son worked together to falsify
public documents that would allow Takashi to fake his death and for his son to collect
$6.5 million without lifting a finger.
How did he manage to do this?
Takashi Mori paid officials in the homicide department at the Manila Police Headquarters
$10,000 each to issue him a death certificate.
They also issued a fake autopsy report saying that Takashi drowned.
Then the body of a man was legitimately recovered from Manila Bay and identified by Takashi’
son as being his father.
The body was cremated and sent to Japan where the insurance claims got underway.
But $6.5 million is a lot of money.
The Japanese Embassy wished to verify his death, as they thought it was suspicious that
his body was cremated in the Philippines without anyone being notified.
When they launched an investigation, they discovered Takashi Mori in a small house,
living in suburban Valenzuela with his daughter-in-law.
He was busted and charged – though it’s not clear exactly what kind of creepy stuff
was going on between Takashi and his daughter-in-law in their little shack by the sea.
Would you fake your own death to cash in on the insurance?
Let me know in the comments and thanks for watching!
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