How long to disappear

She told him that he should turn himself in. But Sheppard, knowing he was already in too far, convinced her that they could make a new start.

The family reunited in Iowa, where they stayed at a motel. As the life insurance company stalled, they lived off the cash from Monica's sale of their Arkansas house and belongings.

Howard, to whom he bore a passable resemblance. For references he gave the numbers of prepaid phones. When prospective employers called, Sheppard pretended to be an HR representative and verified his own past employment.

Meanwhile, the stress of living on the run was taking its toll, and Sheppard had lost almost 70 pounds. After reading that the Arkansas police had contacted US Marshals about his case, he became wracked with paranoia.

He would see cars parked at the defunct dealership across the street from the motel and imagine federal agents waiting to pounce. Remembering the blown escapes he'd read about online, he created a daily inspection routine for his car — turn signals, mirrors, taillights — to make sure the cops had no excuse to pull him over.

Eventually, "John P. Howard" landed an offer for a health and safety manager position in Yankton, South Dakota. The family packed up and drove west, where a real estate agent helped them find a rental house in a secluded area near a lake. The family still kept to themselves, avoiding the local crowds on boating day at the lake. And Sheppard found it awkward responding to his new name, so much so that he asked his wife to start using it at home.

But his paranoia began to recede. He even opened a bank account. It was starting to feel like they'd re-created a normal life — just the three of them and Fluke, their trusty black lab. The fantasy of swapping out your tired life for a better one is a stalwart plot device in fiction, from Huckleberry Finn and The Great Gatsby to The Passenger and Mad Men.

In such stories, the decision to take on a new identity often occurs in a single, serendipitous moment; an opportunity presents itself, and the character makes the fateful choice, often getting away with it. In real life, ad hoc escape plans rarely end well.

The most convincing way to disappear is to make people believe you are dead. And the most common locales for faking a demise are large bodies of water — places where a corpse might just sink or wash away, thus explaining a lack of remains. The chaos of a natural disaster, too, offers a tantalizing opportunity. Regardless of the diversionary method, the success of any stint on the run depends on a combination of advance planning and constant vigilance.

His plan apparently did not extend beyond parking an RV at a Massachusetts campground, and he turned himself in a month later. Other times, there's just no accounting for bad luck: Australian businessman Harry Gordon, who faked his death in a boating accident in , lived under a new identity for five years until the afternoon he passed his own brother on a mountain trail.

Perhaps the most infamous recent faked death attempt, that of Indiana money manager Marcus Schrenker, involved a plan equally daring and bizarre. Accused of financial mismanagement, Schrenker, an amateur pilot, climbed into his Piper single-engine and set a flight plan for Destin, Florida. Flying over northern Alabama at 24, feet, he made a sequence of increasingly desperate radio calls to the nearest control tower, announcing that he had run into turbulence; that his "windshield was spider-cracking"; that the shattered glass had cut his neck; that he was "bleeding profusely" and "graying out.

After landing, he made his way to a motorcycle he had stashed at a local self-storage unit. Unfortunately for Schrenker, when two Navy F pilots caught up with the still-airborne Piper, they noted that the plane was in fine shape — except for the open pilot's side door and empty cockpit. Even worse, Schrenker failed to put enough fuel in the plane to get it to the gulf. It crashed feet from a residential neighborhood in northern Florida. In the wreckage, authorities found a campground guide minus pages for Alabama and Florida and a handwritten crib sheet with the bullet points "windshield is spider-cracking," "bleeding very bad," and "graying out.

Perhaps swayed by the additional evidence that prosecutors turned up on his laptop — including Google searches like "how to jump out of the airplane when parachuting" and "requirements to get a Florida driver's license" — he pleaded guilty in early June. Sergeant Roberson got the call from the Searcy elementary school in early August. He quickly subpoenaed the school, tracked the request for the Sheppards' daughter's records to Yankton, and called the US Marshals. He knew it was still a gamble.

South Dakota-based federal agents pulled up an address for the family and contacted the landlord. Then, in a scene befitting Sheppard's most paranoid fears, officers staked out the house, setting up in trees nearby, waiting for him to appear. Sheppard was gazing out his back window at deer when he heard cars speeding down the gravel road toward the house and then the marshals bursting through the front door. His wife screamed, "He's not here!

He didn't say a word. In a rare study tracking people from the federal government's witness protection program that appeared in a issue of The American Behavioral Scientist, a psychologist named Fred Montanino outlined the difficulties of living under a fake identity.

He determined that people were likely to feel "severe social distress" and "a pervasive sense of powerlessness," driven by the necessity of constant deception. Trading in your old identity and adopting a new one involves more than remembering an ill-fitting new name. It means a lifetime of duplicity that complicates every social interaction, lacing inconvenience and doubt into such humdrum tasks as registering a car or getting health insurance.

It's not as much of a — excuse my French — psychological fuck. A life on the run means enduring the intense isolation of leaving friends and family behind. Of course, technology can allow the kind of anonymous contact with friends and family that wasn't possible in the past. Even in a world of cross-linked databases and location-aware phones, most people living on the lam are undone by complacency.

Everything that defined your prior life, you have to stay away from," Rambam says. Yet almost anyone on the run comes to crave ordinary human contact. How do I not tell people about where I'm from? And that's how most attempts to vanish end. A school registration, an email back home, a campsite guide with pages torn out.

All mistakes look avoidable in hindsight, of course, and the nature of such stories is that only the failures surface. To succeed at disappearing is to never have your methods told. But for those who are caught, there's always the sour taste of what could have been. Three months into his year prison stint for theft and insurance fraud, Matthew Sheppard shuffles into the deputy warden's office at the East Arkansas Regional Unit on a sweltering summer afternoon. Clad in a baggy white prison uniform, he is pounds lighter than when he went into the Little Red River.

Sitting across from me on the warden's couch, he reflects on his tale in a subdued tone, tinged with relief. Even after his arrest, he says, "nobody ever sat me down and asked me the details" of the escape.

Monica, too, pleaded guilty for insurance fraud and was sentenced to six months in jail. Prosecutors accused her of being involved from the beginning, but Roberson says he isn't sure. Either way, she was technically guilty from the moment she learned her husband was alive.

Plague is caused by the bacterium Yersinia pestis. There have been countless local outbreaks and at least three documented plague pandemics over the last 5, years, killing hundreds of millions of people. The most notorious of all pandemics was the Black Death of the midth century. Yet the Black Death was far from being an isolated outburst. Plague returned every decade or even more frequently, each time hitting already weakened societies and taking its toll during at least six centuries.

Even before the sanitary revolution of the 19th century, each outbreak gradually died down over the course of months and sometimes years as a result of changes in temperature, humidity and the availability of hosts, vectors and a sufficient number of susceptible individuals.

Some societies recovered relatively quickly from their losses caused by the Black Death. Others never did. For example, medieval Egypt could not fully recover from the lingering effects of the pandemic, which particularly devastated its agricultural sector.

The cumulative effects of declining populations became impossible to recoup. It led to the gradual decline of the Mamluk Sultanate and its conquest by the Ottomans within less than two centuries. That very same state-wrecking plague bacterium remains with us even today , a reminder of the very long persistence and resilience of pathogens. But even with successful vaccines, no one is safe.

Politics here are crucial: When vaccination programs are weakened, infections can come roaring back. Just look at measles and polio , which resurge as soon as vaccination efforts falter. Given such historical and contemporary precedents, humanity can only hope that the coronavirus that causes COVID will prove to be a tractable and eradicable pathogen.

Activity: How Many Years to Disappear? Grade Level:. Time: 30 minutes for Activity One; 1 day research, plus 45 minutes to discuss Activity Two Materials: Computer access or library books Setting the stage: Using a map of the area, show the students the location of your local landfill. Activity 1: Take a Guess Fill out the chart by making educated guesses on how long it takes for these items to completely break down when buried. Discussion: How long does your item take to break down?

What factors are necessary for the decomposition of the item? Is your item recyclable? Is it easily recycled in our area? What percentage of this item is recycled each year? List some ways your family can throw away less of this item each year. Watt Watchers of Texas. All Rights Reserved.

Contact Watt Watchers We'd love to help answer any questions and help you get started! Watt Watchers of Texas E.