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Craziest Ways People Faked Their Own Death · Be Amazed

• 0:00
  [SPEAKER_00]: How wrong would your life have to go for you to consider faking your own fatal demise?
• 0:05
  [SPEAKER_00]: You might be thinking that getting caught for some sort of serious crime is the only reason anyone would go to such extreme lengths.
• 0:12
  [SPEAKER_00]: But amazingly, some people have faked their own death for the smallest, strangest, and most insane reasons.
• 0:20
  [SPEAKER_00]: from wanting to avoid marriage, ditch their friends, or just avoid a cell phone fine, there's no reason to stupid for these people, and how some people have fake their death is almost as insane as the reason itself.
• 0:34
  [SPEAKER_00]: Prepare for the worst as we reveal the craziest ways and stupidest reasons people fake their own deaths.
• 0:55
  [SPEAKER_00]: If this episode was titled Complaints, I have about my phone service provider, it would be four and a half hours long.
• 1:04
  [SPEAKER_00]: Everyone has different ways of handling the constant frustrations our phone companies inflict upon us, but Corey Taylor of Chicago took his fury with his provider Verizon to new extremes.
• 1:16
  [SPEAKER_00]: Back in two thousand seven Corey learned he'd have to pay one hundred seventy five dollars to get out of his long-term phone contract with Verizon early.
• 1:27
  [SPEAKER_00]: Not keen to fork over the dough he searched for a cheaper way out.
• 1:31
  [SPEAKER_00]: After learning that wireless companies cancel the contracts of their deceased customers, Taylor made up a fake death certificate and had a friend fax it to Verizon.
• 1:42
  [SPEAKER_00]: You might not believe it, but for a little while this actually weren't.
• 1:46
  [SPEAKER_00]: Or it did, until Verizon's eagle-eyed billing department, who deal with stunts like this all the time, suspected that Cory might not be dead at all.
• 1:57
  [SPEAKER_00]: In the end, Corey had to cough up the one hundred seventy five dollars.
• 2:01
  [SPEAKER_00]: I feel your pain, Corey.
• 2:03
  [SPEAKER_00]: Nice try though.
• 2:05
  [SPEAKER_00]: In two thousand ten, Mexican police issued an arrest warrant for one Lenin Carbalito, who'd been involved in some dark criminal deeds.
• 2:15
  [SPEAKER_00]: Eight days later, however, the warrant was revoked.
• 2:18
  [SPEAKER_00]: Why?
• 2:19
  [SPEAKER_00]: U.S.
• 2:20
  [SPEAKER_00]: Well, Carbelito's family had presented the police with his death certificate, which said he had died after falling into a diabetic coma.
• 2:29
  [SPEAKER_00]: The police figured there was no use continuing to pursue a dead person, and for the next three years, Lenin Carba Lido was presumed dead.
• 2:39
  [SPEAKER_00]: Cut to July, seventh, two thousand thirteen when the small town of San Agustino, Matango, gathered to elect its next mayor.
• 2:47
  [SPEAKER_00]: The clear favorite was the candidate from Mexico's Democratic Revolution party who ended up romping home with an eleven percent margin of victory.
• 2:57
  [SPEAKER_00]: The numbers were in, all the ballots had been counted, and the next mayor of San Agustin, Amatango, was, you guessed it, Lenin Carbalito.
• 3:06
  [SPEAKER_00]: As it turned out Carbalito had fooled his party with fake documentation and false testimony.
• 3:12
  [SPEAKER_00]: While you might think Carbalito's stupid for resurfacing in such a public way after faking his death, it also says a lot about the police that failed to find him, until he was elected mayor of a small town.
• 3:25
  [SPEAKER_00]: Mayor Carbillito was promptly arrested and sent to face the litany of charges against him.
• 3:31
  [SPEAKER_00]: I mean, you can't be that surprised, this guy's a liar.
• 3:34
  [SPEAKER_00]: He became a politician after all.
• 3:37
  [SPEAKER_00]: Have you ever found yourself stuck with a group of people you want nothing to do with?
• 3:41
  [SPEAKER_00]: It can be hard to get rid of them without giving them a proper reason.
• 3:45
  [SPEAKER_00]: These can be hard to come up with, however, a lesson learned by a twenty-seven-year-old Allison Matera of Newport Richie Florida.
• 3:53
  [SPEAKER_00]: Allison was part of a group at her local church who were shocked when she informed them that she'd been diagnosed with terminal cancer.
• 4:00
  [SPEAKER_00]: She told them treatment was going badly like
• 4:03
  [SPEAKER_00]: really badly, and that having accepted her fate, she would be entering an end of life hospice.
• 4:10
  [SPEAKER_00]: This meant sadly, Allison would have to leave the church group.
• 4:14
  [SPEAKER_00]: The group then began to receive phone calls from hospice nurses with updates on Allison's health and were later informed Allison had tragically passed away.
• 4:24
  [SPEAKER_00]: However, the group was suspicious.
• 4:26
  [SPEAKER_00]: Some had noticed that the nurses who'd contacted them all sounded like Allison, and when they called around all the local hospice in funeral homes, none of them had heard of her.
• 4:38
  [SPEAKER_00]: Still, the funeral proceedings went ahead as planned.
• 4:42
  [SPEAKER_00]: As the group were mourning their friend, a strange woman appeared in the funeral parlor, one who looks suspiciously like Alice in Matera.
• 4:50
  [SPEAKER_00]: Though she claimed to be Alice in sister, the group weren't fooled for an instant.
• 4:55
  [SPEAKER_00]: The police went to Allison's apartment soon after where she confessed her illness had been a hoax designed to separate her from the church community.
• 5:03
  [SPEAKER_00]: And she almost got away with it.
• 5:05
  [SPEAKER_00]: If only she hadn't been dumb enough to attend her own funeral to see how many people had shown up.
• 5:10
  [SPEAKER_00]: Alex Lancaster of the United Kingdom couldn't believe her luck when attending college in Connecticut, she met the dreamy Tucker Blanford.
• 5:18
  [SPEAKER_00]: A whirlwind romance blossom between the two, which swept Alex off her feet.
• 5:24
  [SPEAKER_00]: By Alex's account Tucker was the perfect gentleman, while it seemed too good to be true for a time, there was one hitch in Alex and Tucker's plan.
• 5:33
  [SPEAKER_00]: Being a student, Alex's visa would expire and she'd have to move back to the UK.
• 5:38
  [SPEAKER_00]: But Tucker came up with the perfect solution.
• 5:42
  [SPEAKER_00]: Just as Alex was about to leave America for good, her boyfriend became her fiance.
• 5:48
  [SPEAKER_00]: That's right, Tucker turned around and proposed, and Alex was ecstatic.
• 5:54
  [SPEAKER_00]: When she returned to the UK, Alex spoke with Tucker on the phone every day.
• 5:59
  [SPEAKER_00]: They planned to have their wedding in Connecticut with Alex going as far as to purchase her dream wedding dress.
• 6:05
  [SPEAKER_00]: But not all fairy tales have a happy ending.
• 6:09
  [SPEAKER_00]: One day, Alex got an unexpected call from Tucker's father who informed her that her fiance had died.
• 6:17
  [SPEAKER_00]: Alex was told that Tucker had had a severe mental breakdown and had left for heaven after attempts to institutionalize him, proved fruitless.
• 6:26
  [SPEAKER_00]: Needless to say, Alex was devastated.
• 6:30
  [SPEAKER_00]: After taking a few days to process her grief, she reached out to Tucker's mother to express her condolences.
• 6:36
  [SPEAKER_00]: But when she picked up the phone, Tucker's mother was surprised to learn that her son was dead and informed Alex that, as far as she knew, he was alive and well.
• 6:46
  [SPEAKER_00]: You guessed it, Tucker wasn't dead at all.
• 6:49
  [SPEAKER_00]: He'd gotten cold feet and impersonated his father over the phone to fake his death to get out of the wedding.
• 6:55
  [SPEAKER_00]: When Alex confronted him, Tucker sent an apology by a text no less, and paid back half the one thousand two hundred dollars he owed Alex in wedding expenses.
• 7:06
  [SPEAKER_00]: He now also admits that instead of faking his death, he should have been more honest with Alex about his reasons for wanting out of the marriage.
• 7:14
  [SPEAKER_00]: Oh, really?
• 7:14
  [SPEAKER_00]: That's some good reasoning, Alex.
• 7:17
  [SPEAKER_00]: But despite the lies and trauma, Alex spun the horrific experience into a positive one.
• 7:24
  [SPEAKER_00]: She now owns a successful business making wedding favors.
• 7:29
  [SPEAKER_00]: That's right, if you get cheated out of your own wedding by a lying sociopath, why not set about improving the wedding days of others?
• 7:38
  [SPEAKER_00]: If that story is making you think about marriage, why not commit to my podcast by following it if you haven't already?
• 7:45
  [SPEAKER_00]: You could even make our big day extra special by giving me a five star rating.
• 7:50
  [SPEAKER_00]: Go on, say yes, we'll be happy together.
• 7:53
  [SPEAKER_00]: All done.
• 7:54
  [SPEAKER_00]: Fantastic.
• 7:55
  [SPEAKER_00]: Roll on with the next dummy demise.
• 7:58
  [SPEAKER_00]: Steven Kellaway was his richest and honest man in the UK could hope to be.
• 8:04
  [SPEAKER_00]: He was earning one hundred thousand pounds a year, roughly one hundred thirty thousand dollars from his psychological counseling business, as well as owning a property portfolio worth one million pounds around one point three million dollars.
• 8:19
  [SPEAKER_00]: But despite his life of comfort, Stephen was still out to make a quick buck wherever he could.
• 8:25
  [SPEAKER_00]: Using his extensive property portfolio, Stephen was able to swindle forty-three thousand pounds, which is a little under sixty thousand dollars off the welfare state.
• 8:35
  [SPEAKER_00]: Money that was intended for families in need.
• 8:39
  [SPEAKER_00]: But just as authorities uncovered the fraud in two thousand eight, he unexpectedly died during a family trip to Moscow.
• 8:47
  [SPEAKER_00]: A few months later, Steven's wife Nelly returned from Russia, carrying an earn, a death certificate, and three of Steven's life insurance policies.
• 8:57
  [SPEAKER_00]: But that wasn't all.
• 8:59
  [SPEAKER_00]: It was revealed that the couple had used the money Steven had stolen from the state on Nelly's new breast implants.
• 9:05
  [SPEAKER_00]: Nelly was promptly arrested in charged with three counts of fraud and two counts of money laundering.
• 9:11
  [SPEAKER_00]: But it didn't end there.
• 9:13
  [SPEAKER_00]: Unfortunately for him, Steven's parents casually let slip that he'd visited them in Brighton three times over the course of two thousand nine a year after he'd supposedly died.
• 9:25
  [SPEAKER_00]: After an international manhunt, Steven was found hiding in Bangkok, Thailand.
• 9:30
  [SPEAKER_00]: Once captured, he admitted the original plan.
• 9:33
  [SPEAKER_00]: He'd fake his death allowing Nelly to claim two million pounds in life insurance, which is roughly two point six million dollars, and then they'd be reunited abroad.
• 9:43
  [SPEAKER_00]: However, when Nelly was arrested and suspicions arose that Stephen was not really dead, the plan had to be abandoned.
• 9:50
  [SPEAKER_00]: The money was eventually recouped in their entire property portfolio was repossessed.
• 9:57
  [SPEAKER_00]: After that ordeal, it sounds like Steven and Nelly needed some psychological counseling of their own.
• 10:03
  [SPEAKER_00]: Next up, you couldn't have found a more run of the mill English married couple than Anne and John Darwin, until an untimely tragedy turned their lives around.
• 10:13
  [SPEAKER_00]: In two thousand and two, John Darwin tragically perished in a canoe accident at sea.
• 10:19
  [SPEAKER_00]: Poor Anne was forced to tell their sons that their father had gotten into a canoe and never gotten back out again.
• 10:26
  [SPEAKER_00]: Except John was still alive, and not only that, but Anne was in on the ruse as well.
• 10:33
  [SPEAKER_00]: Having racked up massive debts through poor investments, the Darwin's needed some quick cash.
• 10:39
  [SPEAKER_00]: John, who Anne claimed was often in search of the latest get-rich quick scheme, had faked his death so Anne could claim the life insurance and pay off the couple's debts.
• 10:50
  [SPEAKER_00]: The incident in the canoe was staged with John taking the train across the country to go into hiding.
• 10:56
  [SPEAKER_00]: But after running out of money in two thousand three, John was forced to return home.
• 11:00
  [SPEAKER_00]: While Anne kept up the image of a widow, even to her own sons, her late husband began living in a bed sit they own next door to the family home, with a hidden passage connecting the two houses.
• 11:12
  [SPEAKER_00]: The Darwin's were able to keep this situation going for a while, but they knew it wouldn't work as a long-term solution.
• 11:19
  [SPEAKER_00]: Deciding the best option was to leave the country and help John get hold of a fake passport.
• 11:24
  [SPEAKER_00]: Their destination was the central American nation of Panama.
• 11:29
  [SPEAKER_00]: When Anne announced to her sons that she was moving to Panama, they were pleased and saw it as an important step in her supposedly grieving process.
• 11:38
  [SPEAKER_00]: In Panama, the Darwin's would be able to live a luxurious upper-class lifestyle with the insurance money they'd swindled.
• 11:45
  [SPEAKER_00]: There was only one hitch to the plan.
• 11:47
  [SPEAKER_00]: They required visas and registering for one of those meant identity verification.
• 11:53
  [SPEAKER_00]: That wasn't the only problem either.
• 11:56
  [SPEAKER_00]: Those close to the Darwin's had noticed a couple of strange unexplained instances surrounding John's death.
• 12:03
  [SPEAKER_00]: For one, a colleague of Anne's group's suspicious when she overheard a conversation and sounded like she was having with her dead husband.
• 12:11
  [SPEAKER_00]: For another, the couple's own son raised his eyebrows when he was gifted a book that had purportedly belonged to his father, but was published in two thousand and three a year after his death.
• 12:23
  [SPEAKER_00]: With the whispers getting louder and the evidence against John's death mounting, the Darwin's needed a way to bring him back to life, that wouldn't raise too many questions.
• 12:33
  [SPEAKER_00]: So on December first, two thousand seven Christmas shoppers were alarmed by the presence of a disheveled man staggering confusedly through the crowd.
• 12:43
  [SPEAKER_00]: When someone asked him if he was okay, he claimed he had lost his wife and children.
• 12:48
  [SPEAKER_00]: Then, as the police arrived on the scene, the man, who appeared to have amnesia, revealed that he suspected he might be a missing person.
• 12:56
  [SPEAKER_00]: That's right, it looked like John Darwin had come back to life.
• 13:00
  [SPEAKER_00]: His miraculous survival caught the attention of journalists who noticed that Anne was suddenly nowhere to be found.
• 13:07
  [SPEAKER_00]: Wondering why she was not on the scene to welcome back her lost husband, journalists eventually found Anne hiding away in Panama.
• 13:15
  [SPEAKER_00]: It was only then that suspicious journalist discovered a photo of the Darwin's together posing in front of the house in Panama that they intended to purchase.
• 13:25
  [SPEAKER_00]: That was the final nail in the coffin.
• 13:28
  [SPEAKER_00]: Anne was arrested upon arrival at Manchester Airport and both Darwin's were convicted of fraud and sentenced to around six and a half years in prison.
• 13:37
  [SPEAKER_00]: By two thousand ten, two years after their imprisonment and informed John that their marriage was over.
• 13:43
  [SPEAKER_00]: He tried to convince her otherwise, but now realizing she should never have listened to her psychopathic husband and divorced him upon their release from prison in two thousand eleven.
• 13:54
  [SPEAKER_00]: Though they never made their life in Panama and got new qualifications in prison, allowing her to go about rebuilding her life.
• 14:03
  [SPEAKER_00]: John, on the other hand, managed to do another woman into marrying him.
• 14:08
  [SPEAKER_00]: Man, she's either the most forgiving or most gullible person on the planet.
• 14:13
  [SPEAKER_00]: On November second, nineteen ninety-five Takashi Mori of Japan found himself charged with insurance fraud.
• 14:20
  [SPEAKER_00]: But, as you've probably guessed, this wasn't any old case of financial misconduct.
• 14:26
  [SPEAKER_00]: Walking down Manila Bay in the Philippines the year before, Mori noticed a body had washed up on the beach.
• 14:33
  [SPEAKER_00]: While most people would either scream, call an ambulance, or both, Mori had an entirely different reaction.
• 14:41
  [SPEAKER_00]: This was his opportunity to make a quick buck.
• 14:44
  [SPEAKER_00]: When officers from the Philippine homicide division arrived on the scene, Mori bribed them into producing a fake autopsy report and death certificate.
• 14:53
  [SPEAKER_00]: Rather than try and identify who it really died, Mori wanted the autopsy report and death certificate in his name.
• 15:02
  [SPEAKER_00]: The body was cremated and the ashes sent to Japan, where Mori's son then made a six point five million dollar life insurance claim.
• 15:11
  [SPEAKER_00]: So far so good for the Morris.
• 15:14
  [SPEAKER_00]: Well as it turns out, the Mori family were a little hasty in cremating whoever's body they found.
• 15:20
  [SPEAKER_00]: Officials at the Japanese Embassy noticed that the cremation had been carried out before they had been informed and permissioned to burn the body had been granted, browsing serious suspicion.
• 15:30
  [SPEAKER_00]: Not long afterwards, police found morey hiding in the home of his daughter-in-law who lived in the Philippines.
• 15:36
  [SPEAKER_00]: The game was well and truly up.
• 15:39
  [SPEAKER_00]: Maurice wife and son were deported from Japan to the Philippines to face trial, and Maurice himself was charged with a very serious and very unusual case of insurance fraud.
• 15:51
  [SPEAKER_00]: During the late nineties and early two thousand Samuel Israel the third, defrauded a whopping four hundred fifty million dollars from investors through illegal Ponzi schemes.
• 16:03
  [SPEAKER_00]: At one point he was even renting a house for thirty two thousand dollars a month from none other than the future forty-fifth president of the United States.
• 16:11
  [SPEAKER_00]: It was some shady shady business indeed.
• 16:15
  [SPEAKER_00]: When his illegal schemes came to the attention of law enforcement, Samuel was arrested for misappropriation and fraud, pleading guilty in two thousand five, and filing for bankruptcy in two thousand six.
• 16:29
  [SPEAKER_00]: Two years later, he was handed a twenty-year jail sentence.
• 16:33
  [SPEAKER_00]: The judgment is one of the most severe penalties for white-collar crime handed down to date.
• 16:39
  [SPEAKER_00]: But before his time inside began, Samuel disappeared.
• 16:44
  [SPEAKER_00]: The only clue he left behind was his car, on which he'd scribbled a very sorted farewell.
• 16:50
  [SPEAKER_00]: By all accounts Samuel believed this would be enough to confirm his death and get the police off his tail.
• 16:56
  [SPEAKER_00]: However, he had failed to consider that, without a body, the police would continue to search for him.
• 17:03
  [SPEAKER_00]: By July, two thousand eight Samuel realized no one believed he was actually dead and appeared at a Massachusetts police station on a motorized scooter to turn himself in.
• 17:14
  [SPEAKER_00]: It turned out he'd been hiding at a local campsite for a little over a month, but a mixture of addiction, guilt, and being featured on America's most wanted, made him give up the goose.
• 17:26
  [SPEAKER_00]: Justice was soon served so while Samuel Israel was through with the past, the past was definitely not through with him.
• 17:34
  [SPEAKER_00]: Next up, Daphne Simpson will always remember the day in January, two thousand thirteen when her husband Jose Salvador Lantiga approached her with terrible news.
• 17:45
  [SPEAKER_00]: Jose revealed that he had been diagnosed with mad cow disease and had six months to live.
• 17:50
  [SPEAKER_00]: But according to Jose, hope was not yet lost.
• 17:54
  [SPEAKER_00]: There was one surgical procedure that could save his life, but it wasn't available in the U.S.
• 17:59
  [SPEAKER_00]: where the couple lived.
• 18:01
  [SPEAKER_00]: No, to undergo this risky treatment, Jose would have to fly all the way to Colombia.
• 18:06
  [SPEAKER_00]: They went about making the necessary preparations for the trip, but shortly before he was due to leave, Jose broke.
• 18:14
  [SPEAKER_00]: He admitted to his wife that he did not have mad-count as he's at all, but that his secretive military past was catching up with him.
• 18:22
  [SPEAKER_00]: By his own account, Jose claimed he was involved in a team that took out a major crime barren, and now had a rogue CIA agent threatening to expose him.
• 18:32
  [SPEAKER_00]: If the rogue agents' blackmail demands were not met, the crime barren's family would be informed of his identity.
• 18:40
  [SPEAKER_00]: The only solution Jose claimed was to fake his own death from mad cow disease and run for the border.
• 18:47
  [SPEAKER_00]: In April that year, Jose flew out to Magarita Island off the coast of Venezuela and purchased a fake death certificate and certificate of cremation.
• 18:58
  [SPEAKER_00]: Later that month, Daphne flew out to and took the fraudulent documents to the embassy.
• 19:03
  [SPEAKER_00]: Then when she returned to the US, Daphne filed seven life insurance claims totaling six point six million dollars, claiming Jose was dead of mad cow disease.
• 19:13
  [SPEAKER_00]: Of that six point six million dollars, Daphne received around nine hundred thousand dollars.
• 19:20
  [SPEAKER_00]: In the autumn of two thousand thirteen, Daphne took a cruise to the Bahamas and Jose traveled to meet her.
• 19:26
  [SPEAKER_00]: from the Bahamas the couple paid someone five thousand dollars to smuggle them back into the U.S.
• 19:32
  [SPEAKER_00]: Once their Jose changed his name to Harry Fields and the couple were living in North Carolina in time for Christmas.
• 19:39
  [SPEAKER_00]: However, Jose tried to obtain a driving license using fraudulent ID, but officials quickly realized they had been handed dodgy information and using facial recognition technology were able to identify Jose under his proper identity.
• 19:55
  [SPEAKER_00]: The ruse was up and the couple were both arrested.
• 19:58
  [SPEAKER_00]: Jose went to jail for a very long time and Daphne was sentenced to five years on probation.
• 20:04
  [SPEAKER_00]: As for Jose's past as a CIA agent, totally bogus.
• 20:09
  [SPEAKER_00]: It had only ever been about the money, although personally, I'm dying to know why he chose mad cow disease of all things.
• 20:17
  [SPEAKER_00]: Maybe it's because the stakes were so high.
• 20:20
  [SPEAKER_00]: In nineteen fifty nine UK MP John Stonehouse was enjoying a holiday away from Westminster.
• 20:27
  [SPEAKER_00]: Enjoying it so much in fact that he was getting up to a little extra marital naughty time in a hotel room.
• 20:34
  [SPEAKER_00]: That could end a politician's career today, but in nineteen fifty nine it was a foolproof way of bulldozing your public reputation.
• 20:44
  [SPEAKER_00]: So you can imagine Stonehouse's horror when he looked up to the ceiling and saw a camera recording the entire thing.
• 20:51
  [SPEAKER_00]: The camera belonged to the Statenybezpeck-nosed, or in English, the Czechoslovakian secret police.
• 20:59
  [SPEAKER_00]: And so Stonehouse was blackmailed into performing espionage for the Czech government over the next ten years.
• 21:07
  [SPEAKER_00]: Stonehouse's spine went undetected until nineteen sixty nine when his secret was suddenly exposed.
• 21:15
  [SPEAKER_00]: Faced with a potential unmasking as a secret agent and without even mentioning an imminent probe into his debt written financial affairs, there was only one way out for Stonehouse.
• 21:27
  [SPEAKER_00]: By this point, you can probably predict his next move.
• 21:32
  [SPEAKER_00]: One morning in nineteen seventy four stone house discarded his clothes on a Miami Beach and waited out to see.
• 21:38
  [SPEAKER_00]: At the next beach along he collected a hidden suitcase changed his glasses and made a break for the airport carrying a dead man's passport.
• 21:47
  [SPEAKER_00]: Back in the UK, everyone assumed Stonehouse had been eaten by a shark.
• 21:51
  [SPEAKER_00]: A minute silence was observed in the House of Commons while Stonehouse was very much alive and well in Hawaii.
• 21:58
  [SPEAKER_00]: There he remained until moving to Moscow before settling in Australia.
• 22:02
  [SPEAKER_00]: A few months later, Australian authorities spotted what looked like a British man wearing a several row suit and reading the Times.
• 22:10
  [SPEAKER_00]: Of course, there was only one person it could be.
• 22:13
  [SPEAKER_00]: a certain British politician who had mysteriously gone missing and left the entire world wondering if he was alive or dead.
• 22:22
  [SPEAKER_00]: It was time to finally arrest Lord Luke in.
• 22:26
  [SPEAKER_00]: Wait, what?
• 22:27
  [SPEAKER_00]: So, Lord Luke in was an infamous aristocrat whose disappearance after the homicide of his child's nanny was one of the biggest political scandals of the decade.
• 22:36
  [SPEAKER_00]: Although the Australian authorities believed they'd finally found him, albeit by accident to this day Lord Luke and his never been found.
• 22:45
  [SPEAKER_00]: But they had found Stonehouse.
• 22:48
  [SPEAKER_00]: On Christmas Eve Stonehouse was arrested, he admitted his identity was returned to the UK and sent a prison for fraud.
• 22:56
  [SPEAKER_00]: While Stonehouse had more understandable reasons to fake his death than most others, there's no denying that his was one extreme downfall.
• 23:05
  [SPEAKER_00]: And here's our last story.
• 23:09
  [SPEAKER_00]: When Alexey Bikov of Omsk Russia decided to propose to his girlfriend, he found a very unusual way of going about it.
• 23:19
  [SPEAKER_00]: On the day he decided to pop the question he instructed his girlfriend Irina to come to a certain place at a certain time.
• 23:26
  [SPEAKER_00]: But when Irina arrived on the scene, she didn't find a romantic dinner or Alexey down on one knee just utter carnage.
• 23:35
  [SPEAKER_00]: There were crashed cars everywhere ambulances frantically darting through the chaos and smoke whafting into the sky.
• 23:42
  [SPEAKER_00]: Then Arena saw Lexi lying, comatose in the middle of the road.
• 23:46
  [SPEAKER_00]: She was informed that Alexi was gone and devastated, broke down in tears.
• 23:53
  [SPEAKER_00]: but then Alexi magically came back to life.
• 23:56
  [SPEAKER_00]: He got down on one knee and proposed to his girlfriend.
• 24:00
  [SPEAKER_00]: That's right.
• 24:01
  [SPEAKER_00]: Alexi had hired a stuntman, a makeup artist, a screenwriter, even a director to stage his death in a car accident.
• 24:09
  [SPEAKER_00]: Irina later said she wanted to murder him for this bizarre, expensive, narcissistic and, in my opinion, toxic behavior.
• 24:18
  [SPEAKER_00]: But Irina decided to marry him anyway.
• 24:21
  [SPEAKER_00]: So what made this guy think such an insane traumatic act was any kind of okay?
• 24:27
  [SPEAKER_00]: Well, Alexey claimed he wanted Irina to realize how empty her life would be without him.
• 24:33
  [SPEAKER_00]: Hmm, purposefully putting your fiance through shock and personal distress and then defining these emotions is how arena would feel if she left him.
• 24:42
  [SPEAKER_00]: That's not only a red flag, that's an entire parade.
• 24:47
  [SPEAKER_00]: I just hope the wedding wasn't as much of a car crash as the proposal.
• 24:52
  [SPEAKER_00]: Which of these ploys did you think was the most insane?
• 24:55
  [SPEAKER_00]: And on the other side of it, who do you think nearly pulled off a pretty genius scheme?
• 25:00
  [SPEAKER_00]: Thanks for listening, see you next episode!