My friend seemed simply to have vanished. He had checked out of a hotel in Seattle, Pacific north-west America, a week last Friday. He took a pre-booked car to the Seattle-Tacoma International airport. He was supposed to fly from Seattle to San Francisco and arrive in Sydney on Sunday morning.
He never turned up.
His wife, who had lived and studied in Perth and still has family and friends here, was gravely concerned and phoned the airline for information. She was told that he was a “no show” for his flight and that there was no trace of a rebooking. He doesn’t carry a mobile phone and, when overseas, keeps in contact through email. But she had not heard from him. She contacted his brother, who is a barrister, and other family and friends who tried to reassure her that he must be on another plane, perhaps even on a 14 1/2 -hour international flight and that was why he was out of contact.
http://liarcatchers.com/missing_persons_investigations.html
His brother began to make the first investigative calls. Our vanished friend had indeed checked out of the hotel, come back for his bags and taken the car to the airport. His wife began to speak to Seattle police based at the airport and a missing person case number was assigned. She sent a description and digital images.
She spoke to the Australian Consulate emergency centre in Canberra. But her husband hadn’t registered with Smart Traveller and she was warned of the privacy waiver, that when they found him he would have to consent to release information before she would be allowed to know anything. The Port of Seattle police could not locate him at the airport nor had he been attended to by local medical teams and he was not in one of the area’s hospitals. US customs had no record of him leaving the country.
The next day she registered him as a missing person at their local police station in Sydney.
Family and friends were talking to the Seattle Police Department, the airline, Australian Federal Police, the Australian Consulate in Canberra, the office of a local Member of Parliament.
All that could be determined was that he was still in Seattle, a fact confirmed the next day when Australian authorities said he hadn’t been through immigration.
And by that day, last Monday, his wife was even more distraught. How can someone disappear between a taxi door, automatic doors at an airport, and an airline counter?
Had he been murdered, had a heart attack, run off with someone? None of these possibilities seemed plausible, but in looking for an explanation, everything plays on the mind as the hours of silence tick by.
My friend is a 50-something university lecturer, who had been at a university in America on academic business. He has asked to remain anonymous, and as you read on through this, you will surely understand why.
My wife flew to Sydney to be with her friend.
Throughout Tuesday, the hours continued to tick by, with his family and friends constantly on the phone and email, doing everything they could think of. His brother hired a private investigator.
Then, late that afternoon, finally there was news. The consulate emergency service said they had “no concerns for his welfare”. Under the privacy laws, they couldn’t tell his wife any more than that. Not where he was or why he had not come home.
It’s hard to describe how long a day can seem, how desperate and distressed one can be in the sleepless nights – and how long it now seemed since his “disappearance” on the Friday.
But then on Wednesday morning there was real news. My friend had been arrested and was in a Federal detention centre in Seattle. Big, affable, lovable, intellectual chap that he is, it seemed completely implausible.
His wife was then told by the consulate emergency centre that, when he attempted to check in for the flight, he had been taken into custody by US Federal marshals.
In fact, she was told he had been arrested on a Canadian warrant concerning the theft of $700,000 worth of gold bars in Canada in 1982. My friend, who shows no obvious signs of such a windfall, did not visit Canada in 1982. He has been to the US and even Canada many times since then, particularly in recent years, and never had a problem.
The man the Canadian authorities had been seeking for nearly 30 years had the same surname and was born in the same year, but here the similarities and coincidences end. My friend is an Australian national, born in Australia. But they also had alleged issues with his fingerprints – he has dermatitis on one hand causing open wounds on the fingertips.
I thought it was good news. He was safe, being fed and watered, had a bed and, hopefully, a book to read. He reads a lot.
It was just too bizarre to think of him handling stolen gold bars, so obviously it would all be sorted out.
His barrister brother was still very much on the case and compiled a statement on our friend’s life history and immigration records for the period in question. He communicated with US police, the public defender and our lawyer. The consulate had officials in Canberra, San Francisco and Canada on the case.
What we later found out was that he was, in fact, led away in handcuffs, kept in restraints, offered the choice of being held alone in a secure holding unit or in a cell with many other inmates. He chose solitary confinement, and says he went nearly five days without a phone call, and was subjected to three days of interviews, hearings and fingerprinting.
Thankfully, he is a country and western music fan, and I kept in mind that the whole notion of being arrested by a marshal, chained and banged up in a cell would not be too strange for him. I also kept in mind that, being the sort of chap he is, he would be polite, helpful, compliant, and trying to help them come to the right conclusion about the whole misunderstanding (to use the sort of language he does).
On Thursday morning, my wife rang early from Sydney with the best of news.
“He’s been released. He’s coming home.”
It seems that after all these days, and after being supplied with proof from his brother that he wasn’t in Canada in 1982, and another fingerprinting they had realised that they did not, in fact, match those of the suspect, and they had released him to a courthouse and into the hands of the public defendant’s office.
(Interestingly, a man who was involved in the final fingerprinting, in recognition of the mismatch, could only state: “I don’t have a dog in this fight.”)
Doubtless it happened that, despite previously being informed that the extradition hearing would not be until December, they had finally looked at all the facts and perhaps with pressure from Australian authorities, his local politician and his family things shifted. And they just let him go.
There is a shaft of sunlight here in this story. In the afternoon after his wife finally got to communicate with him, she spoke with the university’s business services department, and upon hearing of his plight, it immediately offered to pay for a business-class flight home.
Needless to say his wife, elderly mother, brother and many friends were exhausted – not to mention the cost of overseas phone calls, retaining an overseas private investigator and attorney, and the cost of airfares.
And last Saturday he arrived home. I spoke to him on the phone and he was in good spirits. The library trolley comes on Tuesdays and Thursdays, he said, and you could chose two books at a time, so he’d had plenty to read – the only problem being that he had to make his choice from the few books he could see through the food-delivery slot in his door.
There was one edition of one book he was particularly taken with.
“You should have nicked it,” I said.
“It had the establishment’s name stamped in the front.”
“Even better.”
But, he said, with all the constant strip searching, there would be nowhere to hide it.
This is the strange, true tale, of an innocent traveller who vanished into the American justice system and then, fortunately, happily, reappeared.
How can someone disappear between a taxi, automatic doors at an airport, and an airline counter?
