Pseudocide

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Pseudocide is an American term for a serious (rather than joke) attempt to fake one's own death. It is usually carried out by people who want to escape legal, financial or marital difficulties and start a new life elsewhere, but may also be carried out for financial gain.

Notable pseudocides include:

• John Stonehouse, a British politician who faked his own suicide by drowning in order to escape financial difficulties and live with his mistress. He was discovered in Australia - where police initially thought he might be Lord Lucan - and jailed.
• Graham Cardwell, a Lincolnshire dockmaster who disappeared in September 1998 and was assumed drowned. Eight months later he was discovered living in secret in the West Midlands. He claimed he had thought he was suffering from cancer (though had not sought medical attention) and wanted to spare his family the trauma of it. He was not prosecuted.
• Karl Hackett, a British computer graphics designer who, having lived under the alias Lee Simm for some years, reported himself missing as a presumed victim of the Paddington rail crash in October 1999. He was convicted for wasting police time.
• Alan Kirk Wolford, an American funeral home director who forged his own death certificate in order to evade significant debts.^[1]
• Steven Chin Leung, who faked his death in the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks in order to evade a charge of passport fraud. ^[2]
• Dorothy Johnson, an American woman who allegedly faked her death in the September 11 attacks in order to collect on insurance claims allegedly filed by her daughter, Twila McKee. Johnson and McKee were charged in 2003 with insurance fraud. ^[3]

Fictional cases include:

• Jack Bauer, the main protagonist from the hit TV series 24, who fakes his own death at the end of Season 4 to prevent his own demise by the American government in their attempt to cover up diplomatic problems with China.
• Reginald Perrin, a character from the 1970s British book and sitcom The Fall and Rise of Reginald Perrin, who tries various increasingly eccentric ways of changing his mundane life.
• Mr Polly, a character from the comic novel The History of Mr. Polly by H.G. Wells.

Pseudocides often consist of fake drownings, presumably because this explains the absence of a dead body. A research study that found that at least 26% of "suicides" from San Francisco's Golden Gate Bridge in which no body was found were in fact pseudocides.[1]

There are several books about how to commit pseudocide, including Get Lost!, How to Disappear Completely and Never Be Found, How to Create a New Identity, and The Heavy Duty New Identity.[2]