How Not to Fake Your Own Death

Before we get into this post, we would like to make it clear that at the GNU Public Dictatorship we do not believe in faking your own death. There are many other more creative ways in which you can accomplish the same purpose, but that's not the point here. The point here is to explain in part what went wrong with Marcus Schrenker's attempt to fake his own death. Incidentally, Marcus would never have needed to fake his own death if he hadn't been cheating his customers, but that's beside the point. Once he chose to fake his own death he made several elementary mistakes that we hope all of you will avoid should you choose to fake your own deaths.

First we should talk about his method. Here he made a fairly good choice with the very popular "one-man plane crash." The general flow of this method is that a person will get in a plane at point X, letting one or more people know his or her intention to get to point Y. Somewhere between the two points he or she will abandon the plane mid-flight, let it lose control and crash to the ground while he or she floats down with a parachute. He or she then disappears from the public eye until the whole thing blows over. The important aspects of this plan are that (1) nobody sees the crash, (2) nobody knows the crash has occurred until well after they realize you didn't make it to point Y, (3) either the amount of time between the crash and the finding of the aircraft is long (as in the case of a remote mountain range) or the crash is so massive that no signs that you were not in the plane at the time of the crash would be visible. Assuming these conditions hold, the success of this plan relies mostly on the ability of the person to remain hidden.

Now that we have established that his choice of method for faking his death was sound, let's talk about his execution. He seemed to do fine up to the point where he was to abandon his plane, but at this point he made several mistakes. First, he decided to go overboard and call in a distress signal. This choice invalidated all three assumptions as now the authorities know you are crashing and can track you on radar or by visual means, and will likely find the crash very soon. Second, he decided to leave the autopilot on so that the plane would crash into the Gulf of Mexico. This was a mistake as it allowed the responding airmen to find the plane, still in flight, without its alleged pilot. You do have to give Marcus credit for thinking about crashing into the ocean, though. If he had succeeded it would have been very hard to find the remains of his aircraft. His third mistake was checking into a hotel in the area rather than laying low for a while.

Overall, we think Marcus could have done much better. We hope this post has helped you not to make the same mistakes as he made should you choose to fake your own death.