Greenwood switches to a tough-guy patois to imitate Ahearn as he explained his reluctance to open up: “‘I googled you and saw you were a cute girl, thought it was a honeypot scheme, thought they were setting me up.’ I said, but Frank, for what? And he said: ‘Anything, it could have been anything!’” It took “the better part of a year” of emails, dodged calls, last-minute cancellations and other near-misses before Ahearn finally agreed to talk to her.
“We get so caught up in the technological aspects that we forget about the analog side, and that’s how people get caught.” It’s now better to have a digital presence, with “mirror sites” featuring the same name as yours, and to “stretch your footprint” so that information passes through multiple people before it reaches you. He has changed his tune of late, Greenwood says. Ahearn, when he first started helping people fake their deaths, believed in the importance of creating a negative trail, an identity with little trace, almost an anti-legend.
Life after life book by elizabeth how to#
Then Greenwood found private investigator Frank Ahearn, author of How to Disappear, and profiled him for the Believer in 2012. “I’m not an inherently morbid person,” she says, “but I am very drawn to the darkly comic and absurd, and I don’t think there is anything more at the crossroads of comic absurdity than faking your own death.” Greenwood, who was finishing up an MFA at Columbia (where she now teaches), sensed that death-faking would be a good topic for a book, but her professors were less certain: what was her story, what was her through-line? Was Greenwood similarly obsessed with the topic as a kid? But then, I’ve been reading up on deaths accidental and homicidal since I was a child, excitedly listing to my mystified parents all the baseball players who were murdered. Greenwood’s book, her first, is catnip to someone like me, who has occasional idle thoughts about the possibility of faking their own death before rejecting those thoughts as ludicrous and unattainable fantasy. It features a motley cast of Ponzi schemers, insurance fraudsters, celebrity hoaxers and the people who love them, believe in them, or hunt for them, in various straits of desperation and skepticism. The result, publishing on 9 August in the US, is Playing Dead: A Journey Through the World of Death Fraud.
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