Disappearing is something that people do not seem to be very good at, says James Morton


I have no idea of the merits or demerits of the case of the man who has resurfaced, so to speak, several years after an alleged canoe accident in which he was believed to have drowned, but it is thought that in the US alone there are more than 1,000 faked deaths a year.



The motives can be trivial, such as that of the Des Moines, Iowa, woman Kimberly Du, who faked her death in 2005 to avoid paying parking fines. She even wrote her obituary, making it look like a page from the Des Moines Register’s website, and sent a letter to the judge, apparently written by her mother, saying she had died in a car crash. The scheme unravelled when she was given another parking ticket a month after her death. In early 2006 she was sentenced to two years suspended probation and fined $500.



What America does today we do yesterday, even if the come-uppance takes a bit longer. In 2002 Shafkat Munir, a gentleman from Blackburn, ‘killed’ himself off over a couple of speeding tickets, appearing at the police station as Rashid Hussain to say that his friend Munir had died. He later forwarded a death certificate, in Urdu. Unfortunately, it all came apart when he was caught on a speed camera in 2005. In January 2008, Munir/Hussain was jailed for a year. He would not even have been disqualified in the first place.



Fake deaths, like real ones, may be spur-of-the-moment events, but most have elements of planning. In 1979, a member of the family of Johnny Sterling Martin called the Family Court in Columbia, South Carolina, to say he had died following a bar brawl in Alabama. Martin had escaped from a work gang some months earlier while serving a one-year sentence for failing to pay child support. Following a tip-off by an ex-wife, Martin was arrested in January 2006 some 150 miles away in Myrtle Beach, where he had been living under his own name for about 20 years. Since his death he had remarried twice and had a third child. The maintenance arrears totalled more than $30,000.



Some people are repeat disappearers. On 17 August 2002, Dane Colson’s bloodstained green Daewoo was discovered in Surry Hills, Sydney after he had failed to return to work. His pregnant fiancee reported him missing and the police feared he had been murdered. He resurfaced in South Australia in December, applying for benefits, surrendered himself to the police and then vanished again until, quite by chance, he was seen in Melbourne. He was charged with an offence of public mischief and returned to New South Wales.



It was not the first time he had disappeared. He had done the same in 1997, for the same reason, when he discovered that a previous fiancee was pregnant. On that occasion he told the girl he had been abducted and held in the boot of a car. On 3 April 2003 he was sentenced to 200 hours community service. The police reckoned the disappearance had cost them more than $100,000.



Not quite a disappearance, but in 2005 in Waterloo, Iowa, Mary Jo Jensen, the mother of Dan Reddout, and her boyfriend James Snyder published Dan’s obituary in the Waterloo-Cedar Falls Courier, announcing his death after a short illness, and that graveside services had already taken place. Jensen and Snyder had taken time off work before Christmas 2005, saying Dan was in hospital. Snyder put a fake obituary in the local paper, saying Dan had died.



When the pair took more time off for mourning and their employers wanted proof of the death, they provided the obituary. It all came undone when Dan was spotted at a local diner where he had once worked. Jensen claimed the whole thing was a ‘mistake’, but both she and Snyder were subsequently arrested and charged after Dan told police about their plan.



In June 2004, 24-year-old Clayton Daniels was found dead behind the wheel of a burned-out Chevrolet near Georgetown, Texas. The fire had been so fierce his body was unrecognisable, its head and limbs burned away. He had been due to surrender for a 30-day prison sentence for a sexual assault offence committed when he was a teenager. His wife Molly arranged a memorial service and her co-workers put $1,000 towards the cost. She soon had a new boyfriend, Jake, who, apart from his dyed-black hair, looked a good deal like the dead Clayton.



Insurance investigators, faced with a $100,000 claim, found no signs of a high-speed crash and DNA samples from the corpse did not match those taken from Clayton’s mother. This was not surprising, since the body was that of an 83-year-old woman who had died in 2003, whom Molly had exhumed. ‘We felt because she was older there would not be much family upset,’ she told the court in May 2005 at her hearing, when she received the maximum of 20 years.



These may all have been splendid con artists, but they had nothing on City worker Alfred James Chapman who, in 1916, told his employers that his son had died in hospital, and that his wife had immediately taken ill and had also died. As a result, the money willed by her to her son had reverted to his eldest daughter, which had caused more expense. As a result of the death of his wife, that daughter had died of shock. Finally, his youngest daughter had died after hearing of the death of her soldier brother in Malta.



His employers were so distressed by the story that they purchased a wreath to be placed on Chapman’s wife’s grave. He took the flowers home, telling his perfectly well family they were table decorations from a dinner given by the firm. In August 1916 he received three months hard labour.



James Morton is a former criminal law specialist solicitor and now a freelance journalist