Speaker 1: Missing in Arizona contains graphic depictions of violence and may
Speaker 1: not be suitable for all listeners. From iHeartRadio and Neon
Speaker 1: thirty three, I'm John Walzac and this is Missing in Arizona,
Speaker 1: the story of a man who disappeared after allegedly killing
Speaker 1: his wife and kids, blowing up their suburban home, and
Speaker 1: escaping into the wilderness. Twenty three years later, I'm hunting
Speaker 1: Robert Fisher and I need your help. April fourth, two
Speaker 1: thousand and two, the Arizona Republic headline Israel intensifies West
Speaker 1: Bank assault, Hesbela missiles prompt fears of new front and
Speaker 1: right above that Robert Fisher likely alive with new identity.
Speaker 1: On the eve of the first anniversary of the murders,
Speaker 1: the paper says two hundred thousand Americans, including presumably Fisher,
Speaker 1: are living under false names to avoid capture for crimes
Speaker 1: both large and small. It cites book called Hide Your
Speaker 1: Assets and Disappear, a step by step guide to vanishing
Speaker 1: without a trace by Edmund Pankow, which answers questions like
Speaker 1: how do I create a new identity, how do I
Speaker 1: stay lost? And how do people fake their own deaths?
Speaker 1: From Amazon quote this invaluable guide outlines exactly what you
Speaker 1: should know before you go, including the ever increasing difficulties
Speaker 1: you'll face as the world becomes more tightly linked through
Speaker 1: electronic networks. The book comes out in nineteen ninety nine.
Speaker 1: It's an instant bestseller New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Amazon,
Speaker 1: one of the top books in the nation. A paperback
Speaker 1: version is released in April two thousand. Is Robert Fisher
Speaker 1: aware of it? I don't know, but much of America is.
Speaker 1: It isn't some obscure book. Many people doubt that Fisher
Speaker 1: could vanish and assume a new name. Impossible, they say,
Speaker 1: And maybe they're right today, But he disappears in a
Speaker 1: different world. Before nine to eleven, hijacks our futures, iPhones
Speaker 1: our retinas, and TikTok our brains, before big genealogy slurps
Speaker 1: up our DNA and caramels pump our face into the cloud.
Speaker 1: Is easier to evaporate, change your name, start anew, and
Speaker 1: many people do.
Speaker 2: Including Crazy Eddie Antar, the.
Speaker 1: Owner of an electronics retail chain, best known for his
Speaker 1: crazy commercials.
Speaker 3: Ladies Gentlemen in Reindeer.
Speaker 4: It's a crazy Any Christmas blow.
Speaker 2: Out Flix, You'll save more money than.
Speaker 1: Ever before, have anything and everything in a home entertainment.
Speaker 5: You're crazy and his prices are insane.
Speaker 1: Eddie himself didn't appear in the ads. Nonetheless, he became
Speaker 1: such a celebrity that by nineteen eighty six in New
Speaker 1: York he had ninety nine percent name recognition. His commercials
Speaker 1: were parodied on SNL, and there was even a brand
Speaker 1: of heroin named after him. His downfall involved a stabbing
Speaker 1: a wife named Debbie, angry at a mistress named Debbie,
Speaker 1: rampant fraud, insurance scams, sales, tax stuff, a sister slapping
Speaker 1: fight called the New Year's Eve Massacre, and bankruptcy. Color
Speaker 1: me shocked if we don't see a Netflix mini series
Speaker 1: on this within a year. In nightteen nine, according to
Speaker 1: The New York Post, he fled the country with six
Speaker 1: passports in five different names, forty three million in cash,
Speaker 1: and his mistress. He spent the next three years on
Speaker 1: the run in Israel, Switzerland, Brazil, and the Cayman Islands
Speaker 1: before he was arrested and extradited back to the US.
Speaker 1: While at large, he used the aliases Alexander Stewart, Stuart Alexander,
Speaker 1: Joseph Levy, Joseph Levy, Ben Ezrashlomo and Kelso. Upon capture,
Speaker 1: a US attorney called him the Darth Vader of Capitalism.
Speaker 1: Crazieti died in twenty sixteen. My main source here was
Speaker 1: the book Retail Gangster, The insane real life Story of
Speaker 1: Crazyetti by Gary weiss Elmer.
Speaker 2: Edward Sally.
Speaker 1: Sally was imprisoned in nineteen seventy in New Jersey for
Speaker 1: killing his girlfriend's two year old son. Four years later,
Speaker 1: he escaped. He moved to Florida and assumed the identity
Speaker 1: of Vinnie Taylor, a famous guitarist for the band Shah
Speaker 1: Nan Nah. Taylor died of a heroin overdose in nineteen
Speaker 1: seventy four. Sally told people that he really was Taylor.
Speaker 1: He said he faked his death. Then he started booking
Speaker 1: gigs under the alias Daniel Danny C. Catalano. Later, he
Speaker 1: used a real photo to promote himself online. He claimed
Speaker 1: to be a bad boy ex member of Sean Nah
Speaker 1: Nah and Florida's number one greaser. The band considered suing
Speaker 1: him but chose not to. He was captured on May tenth,
Speaker 1: two thousand and one, exactly one month after the Fisher
Speaker 1: House exploded. He died in two thousand and seven.
Speaker 4: Theodore John Conrad.
Speaker 1: On July eleventh, nineteen sixty nine, the day after he
Speaker 1: turned twenty, Ted Conrad, a bank teller, stole two hundred
Speaker 1: and fifteen thousand dollars equivalent to one point eight million
Speaker 1: dollars today from a vault in Cleveland. Because the theft
Speaker 1: came late on a Friday, no one noticed it until Monday,
Speaker 1: July fourteenth, Six days later, Man landed on the moon,
Speaker 1: so Conrad benefited not only from a headstart on the cops,
Speaker 1: but also from a busy news cycle. Who cares about
Speaker 1: a bank robbery when all eyes are focused on the sky.
Speaker 1: Conrad fled to d c then California, then Massachusetts, where
Speaker 1: he took the name Thomas Randell, started a family and
Speaker 1: got jobs at golf clubs and car dealerships. No one
Speaker 1: found him for fifty two years, not until November twenty
Speaker 1: twenty one, and by that point it was too late.
Speaker 1: He died in May twenty twenty one. His daughter Ashley
Speaker 1: released a podcast last year called Smokescreen My Fugitive Dad.
Speaker 1: Jose lazarro Cruise. Cruise allegedly murdered his wife in Virginia
Speaker 1: in nineteen ninety one, he tried to flee to Canada
Speaker 1: before paying a smuggler to help him cross into Mexico.
Speaker 1: He then made his way to El Salvador, where he
Speaker 1: started a new family and got a job as a
Speaker 1: truck driver. He was captured in twenty twenty two and
Speaker 1: extradited to the US. As of this recording, he's a
Speaker 1: waiting trial. My source here was CNN Robert Hogland. July
Speaker 1: twenty seventh, twenty thirteen. After filling up his wife's car
Speaker 1: with gas and buying a road map, Hogland, a fifty
Speaker 1: year old Connecticut real estate appraiser, returned home to pay bills,
Speaker 1: play scrablawnline, and mow the lawn. His wife was on vacation.
Speaker 1: His son left the house later that morning. Sometime in
Speaker 1: the next twenty four hours, Hoagland disappeared, leaving behind his wallet, phone, keys, passport,
Speaker 1: and medications. His family suspected foul play. In twenty sixteen,
Speaker 1: the case was featured on the popular TV show Disappeared
Speaker 1: Still Nothing. After vanishing, Hoagland started a new life in
Speaker 1: rock Hill, New York, only ninety miles away. He used
Speaker 1: the name Richard King, got a job paying cash, and
Speaker 1: paid cash to rent a room from a guy he
Speaker 1: met on Craigslist. He evaded authorities and his family until
Speaker 1: he died in December twenty twenty two.
Speaker 2: Gloria Schultz.
Speaker 1: In July nineteen ninety four, while driving drunk, Schultz crashed
Speaker 1: into and killed a twenty one year old woman in Scottsdale,
Speaker 1: only eight miles from the Fisher House. Out on bail,
Speaker 1: she absconded in May two thousand and one, a month
Speaker 1: after the Fisher murders. She was tried and convicted in absentia. Then, finally,
Speaker 1: on April seventeenth, twenty twenty four, as I scripted this show,
Speaker 1: police found out that Schultz had been living in Yellowknife, Canada,
Speaker 1: under the name Kate Dooley. She died of cancer in
Speaker 1: twenty nineteen. My source here was a report by True
Speaker 1: Crime Arizona host Brianna Whitney. I could go on and on,
Speaker 1: but you get the idea. It is possible to escape
Speaker 1: and assume a new identity, even today, but especially in
Speaker 1: the past. So for now, one final example. On April thirtieth,
Speaker 1: two thousand, a year before the Fisher murders, the New
Speaker 1: York Times magazine ran an article titled Doesn't Anybody Know
Speaker 1: how to be a Fugitive Anymore, which profiled a man
Speaker 1: who lived under an assumed identity for twenty eight years,
Speaker 1: much of it at the Abode Apartment hotel in Scottsdale,
Speaker 1: only a mile and a half from the Fisher House,
Speaker 1: just twenty four hundred feet west of the hospital where
Speaker 1: Robert Fisher worked in the eighties and nine nineties while
Speaker 1: he worked there.
Speaker 2: Okay, So the first question that I always ask people,
Speaker 2: and I think it's especially important in these cases.
Speaker 4: What is your name, Howard Mechanic?
Speaker 2: What was your name for the twenty eight years?
Speaker 4: And what she lived under and assumed the identity was
Speaker 4: Gary Treadwaite.
Speaker 1: May fourth, nineteen seventy Kent State National Guardsmen shoot and
Speaker 1: kill four students protesting the Vietnam War. A photo of
Speaker 1: a girl crying out in anguish as she crouches down
Speaker 1: over a body spreads rapidly around the nation. Anger explodes,
Speaker 1: college campuses burn, A riot breaks out in New York
Speaker 1: as construction workers beat protesters in the streets and thousands
Speaker 1: of people lay siege to city hall. Guardsmen in New
Speaker 1: Mexico stab eleven people with bayonets police kill two students
Speaker 1: in Mississippi. At the White House, President Richard Nixon takes
Speaker 1: questions from reporters.
Speaker 3: President, some Americans believe this country is heading for revolution,
Speaker 3: and others belave the crime and dissent and violent demonstration
Speaker 3: are leading us to an era of repression. I wonder
Speaker 3: if you would give us your view of the state
Speaker 3: of the American society and where it's heading.
Speaker 2: That would require rather extended answer.
Speaker 5: Briefly, this country is not headed for revolution, in part
Speaker 5: because we do have the safety valves of the right.
Speaker 1: To dissent in times of turmoil, He says, leaders should
Speaker 1: abide by a simple rule.
Speaker 5: When the action is hot, keep the rhetoric cool.
Speaker 1: Reporters, twitch gears. How do you view the situation in
Speaker 1: the Middle East.
Speaker 5: Moments if a situation has become ominous.
Speaker 1: Nixon also mentions our fight against inflation before circling back
Speaker 1: to campus unrest.
Speaker 5: When you do have a situation of a crowd throwing
Speaker 5: rocks and the National Guard has caused it, called in
Speaker 5: that there is always the chance that it will escalate
Speaker 5: into the kind of a tragedy that happened at Kent
Speaker 5: State the.
Speaker 1: Day after Kent State. Howard Mechanic attends a protest at
Speaker 1: Washington University in Saint Louis. Two to three thousand furious
Speaker 1: students surround the campus ROTC building. Someone lights it on fire.
Speaker 1: Burn Baby Burn, They can't. According to The New York
Speaker 1: Times Kent State, Kent State, this is not the first
Speaker 1: time Mechanic twenty two, has found himself in the middle
Speaker 1: of a violent bedlam. He was in Chicago in nineteen
Speaker 1: sixty eight as police assaulted protesters outside the Democratic National Convention.
Speaker 4: The guy next to me got his head beat and
Speaker 4: I just sort of tried to pretend I was invisible,
Speaker 4: so had a good hit, but I was God's pretty bad.
Speaker 2: Well, there have been moments in my life, you know,
Speaker 2: I'm young, where it feels like everything is crumbling, especially
Speaker 2: in the last few years, and I think that that's
Speaker 2: a feeling shared by people on both sides of the
Speaker 2: political aisle, whatever your beliefs, that we're at this crossoads moment.
Speaker 2: I'm really just curious to hear your view on that.
Speaker 2: As someone who lived through a very volatile time in
Speaker 2: the sixties and were president at some of these very
Speaker 2: interesting moments, what does today feel like compared to nineteen
Speaker 2: sixty eight.
Speaker 4: Well, if you asked me back in sixty eight what
Speaker 4: things would look like in twenty twenty three, I would
Speaker 4: have expected there'd be a lot more difference.
Speaker 1: He also wouldn't have expected to spend twenty eight years
Speaker 1: as a fugitive starting a new life using a fake name,
Speaker 1: dodging law enforcement. That saga begins at the protest the
Speaker 1: night of May fifth, nineteen seventy, as the ROTC Building burns,
Speaker 1: angry students block fire trucks and throw rocks at cops
Speaker 1: and firefighters. Someone also tosses a large firecracker called a cherrybomb.
Speaker 1: A witness says it was mechanic who threw it. He's arrested, and,
Speaker 1: in a stroke of bad luck, he's the first person
Speaker 1: in the nation charged under an oppressive new law, the
Speaker 1: nineteen sixty eight Anti Riot Act. He gets a five
Speaker 1: year prison sentence for throwing a firecracker, which he denies doing,
Speaker 1: based on testimony from a single witness, a student named
Speaker 1: Donald Bird, whose story changes repeatedly.
Speaker 4: Saying part of the time that the cherry bomb could
Speaker 4: have come from any of several people in my vicinity.
Speaker 4: Then he said it was propelled from my body. Then
Speaker 4: he said I shot it with a slang shot, and
Speaker 4: he also said I threw a cherry.
Speaker 1: Bird dies in nineteen eighty three. Someone else later confesses
Speaker 1: to throwing the cherry bomb, but in nineteen seventy, Mechanic
Speaker 1: feels a sense of panic. First, he has to serve
Speaker 1: four months in a local jail for violating a restraining
Speaker 1: order intended to keep him off his college campus. After that,
Speaker 1: he faces five years in federal prison for a crime
Speaker 1: he didn't commit. While in jail, hippie hating guards, many
Speaker 1: of them ex military, repeatedly threaten him. Once says that.
Speaker 4: If he had a chance, he's going to put a
Speaker 4: bullet in my head.
Speaker 1: Guards tell other prisoners they aren't allowed to speak to Mechanic.
Speaker 4: Because most of them are African Americans and they thought
Speaker 4: I was going to radicalize them.
Speaker 1: Mechanic worries someone's going to kill him, probably a guard.
Speaker 1: He plans to appeal his federal conviction. He hopes it works,
Speaker 1: but sitting in jail, he decides that no matter what.
Speaker 4: I wasn't going to serve five years.
Speaker 2: So you decided if the appeal failed that you would
Speaker 2: see right.
Speaker 1: The appeal fails, Mechanic gets ready to run. He needs
Speaker 1: cash quickly. Off his record in stamp collections. That helps
Speaker 1: a bit, but he really only has one thing of value,
Speaker 1: a set of commemorative envelopes issued by NASA during the
Speaker 1: Space Race, autographed by astronauts and even famed engineer Verner
Speaker 1: von Braun. He sells it, and now it's time to go.
Speaker 4: When I left Saint Louis, I was Howard Mechanic and
Speaker 4: when I got on the bus, that was Gary Treadway.
Speaker 2: How did you choose where to go? And how did
Speaker 2: you get to Arizona.
Speaker 4: Bought a ticket to go to Albuquerque on a bus
Speaker 4: and it was early September. And when I got to
Speaker 4: Albuquerque and got out of the bus, it was really cold.
Speaker 4: I asked somebody, it's usually is cold around this time
Speaker 4: of year, and they say, yeah, yeah, it is. And
Speaker 4: I want to go to the Southwest because I grew
Speaker 4: up in Cleveland. It was pretty cold, a lot of snow.
Speaker 4: It was really thinking about the West. It was like
Speaker 4: a vacation from a vacation to me. That's why I
Speaker 4: wanted to get a place that was warmer. And somebody said,
Speaker 4: this is about what it's like in Albuquerque, and I
Speaker 4: asked them, well, where's the best place to go that's warmer,
Speaker 4: and they said, well, Phoenix. So I had to buy
Speaker 4: another ticket and I just got right back on the
Speaker 4: bus and went to Tempee because I knew that was
Speaker 4: a college town and I figured that's where I could
Speaker 4: fit in a little better, which is exactly what happened,
Speaker 4: because I was just a couple of years out of college,
Speaker 4: and in a college town, people come and go all
Speaker 4: the time. I mean, if I went to a small
Speaker 4: town somewhere, I'd be sticking out like a sore thumb.
Speaker 2: So you chose this area in Tempee specifically because of
Speaker 2: the weather and your ability to go on that.
Speaker 1: Right mechanic craft of fake biography for cover.
Speaker 4: My story was that I didn't have a family because
Speaker 4: my parents both died in an auto accident and I
Speaker 4: had no siblings, so that's why they never saw me
Speaker 4: with any family.
Speaker 1: He tells people his father was a diplomat in Africa.
Speaker 1: He gets a job at a health food store, but
Speaker 1: his manager is immediately suspicious. This new employee, who allegedly
Speaker 1: didn't go to college, is too educated and worldly. What's
Speaker 1: he doing in retail earning minimum wage, Mechanic begins to
Speaker 1: purposely seem less intelligent. He also cuts himself off entirely
Speaker 1: from his old life.
Speaker 2: When you left Saint Louis and came to Arizona, how
Speaker 2: many people did you remain in contact with?
Speaker 4: None.
Speaker 1: Within a few years, Mechanics starts his own company, distributing
Speaker 1: health food. At the time, it's hard to find something
Speaker 1: as simple as brown rice. He does well for himself.
Speaker 4: I was a successful businessman. A lot of people when
Speaker 4: they think of a fugitive, they think of Richard Jensen,
Speaker 4: who is the star of the Fugitive TV program. And
Speaker 4: he stayed in a town and had a job for
Speaker 4: a couple of weeks and then had to move on.
Speaker 4: Something happened, And every episode he was in a new town.
Speaker 4: When I was a fugitive for twenty eight years, I
Speaker 4: was never more than five miles from where I got
Speaker 4: off the bus.
Speaker 1: In fact, Mechanic does so well. He buys an eco friendly,
Speaker 1: earth sheltered subterranean house and Tempe truly the American dream.
Speaker 1: Sell your stamp collection, hop on a bus, change your name,
Speaker 1: get a retail job, start a business, buy a subterranean home.
Speaker 1: All it takes is some elbow grease and a time machine.
Speaker 1: In nineteen seventy five, Mechanic attends a health food trade
Speaker 1: show in Las Vegas. It's here that he runs into
Speaker 1: a problem, or more accurately, it runs into him. Also
Speaker 1: in attendance in Vegas is one of Mechanic's former classmates.
Speaker 1: Ben's aerkor.
Speaker 4: He recognized me. I recognized him, and we were like
Speaker 4: twenty feet away and saw us trying to walk in
Speaker 4: into direction, and he'd followed me a sidis turned around
Speaker 4: and said, I Ben, let's go over to your talk.
Speaker 4: And he was the only person whoever spotted me.
Speaker 1: Ben doesn't turn him in. In fact, the two men
Speaker 1: remain lifelong friends. Each summer, Howard visits Ben, founder of
Speaker 1: the company Good Earth Tea, and his wife in Santa Cruz, California.
Speaker 4: We actually went to China in seventy six, which is
Speaker 4: another story, having a fusire of having to get a passport,
Speaker 4: and then the passport gets lost and we have a
Speaker 4: trip to go into China in a couple of weeks
Speaker 4: and I had no passport.
Speaker 2: You got a legitimate passport.
Speaker 4: Yeah, all my documents are legitimate. It's a legitimate driver's license.
Speaker 4: It's a fake name. It's not a legitimate passport. It's
Speaker 4: under Gary Treadway. I'm not Gary Treadway. So I was
Speaker 4: committing passport violation.
Speaker 1: With his trip to China looming and his passport missing.
Speaker 4: Mechanic contacted Passport and I said, my passport's gone, Gary Treadway.
Speaker 4: I was born in the state, and I need to
Speaker 4: get a dufficate passport. And they said, well, you can't
Speaker 4: do that. We need to get your driver's license done first,
Speaker 4: and then you could come back and do it. And
Speaker 4: I said, I need this in two weeks. They said,
Speaker 4: the only way you can do that is if you
Speaker 4: get somebody to walk in the office with you and
Speaker 4: verify that you are Gary Treadway. And the person I
Speaker 4: brought in wasn't Ben. There was somebody who didn't know
Speaker 4: who I was, who worked at the same company. He
Speaker 4: didn't know me, He didn't know that anything about Howard mccank.
Speaker 4: He just went in and he just signed a paper
Speaker 4: stand I'm verified this person is Gary Treadway. And that's
Speaker 4: how I got to dolicod passport.
Speaker 1: Meanwhile, as Mechanic travels to China, investigators are still trying
Speaker 1: to find him. Lucky for them, he has a critical weakness.
Speaker 4: One thing I'm going to recommend is if you have
Speaker 4: an identical twin brother, don't be a fugitive.
Speaker 1: That's right, missing fugitive. Howard Mechanic has a twin Harvey Mechanic.
Speaker 4: Pricey posters of Robert Fisher and they have him aged
Speaker 4: this was what he might look like. Because it's been
Speaker 4: so many years, they try to artificially age in the computer.
Speaker 4: And back then they didn't have computers. They had artists.
Speaker 4: But they didn't need that for me because they had
Speaker 4: pictures of Harvey. They would take pictures of Harvey and say,
Speaker 4: this is what he looks like.
Speaker 2: How close did that match up? Later on when you
Speaker 2: were looking at photos that you guys age time.
Speaker 4: Well, actually, I was a heavy one when we were
Speaker 4: a kid. They used to call me load, but now
Speaker 4: he's a heavy one. For decades, they hassled him all
Speaker 4: the time because whenever he was stopped and he showed
Speaker 4: his identification, they thought he could be me, and so
Speaker 4: they brought him into the police station to get him fingerprinted,
Speaker 4: and they have to run a finger prince to Washington
Speaker 4: and they'd hold him for a while until that was cleared,
Speaker 4: and that happened to him on a couple occasions, and
Speaker 4: so he had enough, and he got false identification and
Speaker 4: he was living under his normal name. But if he
Speaker 4: was ever stopped, he pulled out his false identification and
Speaker 4: was never pulled into the police station again.
Speaker 1: Harvey the twin later joins the Harry Krishna movement, shaved
Speaker 1: head devotees in orange robes hand out flowers at airports,
Speaker 1: highly highly visible. Howard is now afraid that Harry Krishna
Speaker 1: will recognize him and then figure out, no, wait, that's
Speaker 1: not Harvey, it's Howard the Fugitive. One time in Tempe,
Speaker 1: Howard is in a grocery store and.
Speaker 4: A guy Christiana guy which she can spot, a Christian
Speaker 4: guy for a mile away sort walked by me and
Speaker 4: turned around and he said, Megendra, what are you doing
Speaker 4: here or something like that. Magendra's Harry Christna name Harvey Head.
Speaker 4: So I said, you got the wrong person, and I
Speaker 4: just sort of left real quick.
Speaker 1: In nineteen seventy two, when he flees Saint Louis, Howard
Speaker 1: leaves his family a note that's the last they hear
Speaker 1: from him. Six months. Then he calls his aunt from
Speaker 1: a payphone, tells her to have his parents come over
Speaker 1: the following Sunday at a set time. This is how
Speaker 1: he speaks to them for years without detection. He knows
Speaker 1: the investigators are surveilling their phone bills, but he guesses
Speaker 1: correctly that no one's monitoring his aunt.
Speaker 2: How often were you able to communicate with your family
Speaker 2: and evade detectionment.
Speaker 4: Well, I evaded detection the whole time for twenty eight years,
Speaker 4: and my parents stayed with me. By the time two
Speaker 4: thousand came around, they were living in the apartment next
Speaker 4: door to me at my apartment hotel. They would winter
Speaker 4: in Arizona. They would come out every winter and stay
Speaker 4: in the apartment next door to me.
Speaker 1: In nineteen eighty, Mechanic marries a woman named Ingrid Gold,
Speaker 1: but before the wedding there's a problem. In the early seventies,
Speaker 1: he visited a forger to obtain fake birth certificates.
Speaker 4: Told them to print a couple for me. Well, he
Speaker 4: printed like fifty of them, and I said, glad to
Speaker 4: give me fifty, He says, Once trinders are running, it's
Speaker 4: only like a minute, So here's fifty.
Speaker 1: Mechanic hides them in the back of his closet. Then,
Speaker 1: while away, one day, his roommate and wife to be
Speaker 1: start rifling around and.
Speaker 4: They found fifty birth certificates. They contact me and say,
Speaker 4: what's going on here? So that's how she found out.
Speaker 2: So she knew when you got married, she knew.
Speaker 1: Yeah, Mechanic tells Ingrid his real identity.
Speaker 2: Well, I imagine on Ingrid's part when she found fifty
Speaker 2: copies of your birth certificate, she knew something was up,
Speaker 2: and then she finds out you're not who you say
Speaker 2: you are. That the best way that could turn out
Speaker 2: is maybe your Howard Mechanic and not Ted Bundy.
Speaker 4: Right, they don't have problems like that.
Speaker 2: She probably just breathe a cyber lisk that you weren't,
Speaker 2: like a serial killer, a run or something.
Speaker 1: In nineteen eighty one, Ingrid gives birth to a baby boy, Ari.
Speaker 1: Three years later, she and Howard divorce, but they remain
Speaker 1: friends and dedicated parents.
Speaker 2: How old was your son when you told him?
Speaker 4: I think he was about nine.
Speaker 2: How did you tell him and what was his reaction?
Speaker 4: I had him come over and we watched a documentary
Speaker 4: called Berkeley in the Sixties, which is an excellent program.
Speaker 4: After the movie, I said I wanted to talk to
Speaker 4: you about something, and I told him, you know, I
Speaker 4: was involved in activities like that against the war, and
Speaker 4: I was charged with something I didn't do. I had
Speaker 4: spent some time in jail, and then they charged me again,
Speaker 4: and I didn't serve my time. I lived under assume name.
Speaker 4: That's what I told him.
Speaker 2: How did he process that as a nine year old?
Speaker 4: He didn't think it changed anything. I was still as dad.
Speaker 1: In the early eighties, with his natural food business slowing down,
Speaker 1: Mechanic decides to invest in real estate. He buys a
Speaker 1: twelve unit apartment complex, The Abode, in Scottsdale. He initially
Speaker 1: outsources management to friends, but soon it's too much.
Speaker 4: They tell him that I'm going to need to live
Speaker 4: there to run the place, and so I had to
Speaker 4: move out and move to Scottsdale.
Speaker 1: Though he doesn't know it at the time, this is
Speaker 1: the beginning of his demise. If you like this show,
Speaker 1: please download our first two seasons, Missing in Alaska and
Speaker 1: Missing on nine to eleven. For updates, visit meon thirty
Speaker 1: three dot com or follow me on Twitter at John
Speaker 1: wallzac Walczak. Thanks for listening. Howard Mechanic Lives perpetually under
Speaker 1: the sword of Damocles. He's always one mistake away from disaster,
Speaker 1: from being found out going to federal prison.
Speaker 4: One day, he gets a letter from Social Security Administration
Speaker 4: saying that we have a problem.
Speaker 1: In nineteen seventy two, Mechanic assumed the identity of a
Speaker 1: man named Gary Raymond Tredway. The only problem, Gary's not
Speaker 1: actually dead, and now the real Gary and the fake
Speaker 1: Gary are both using the same Social Security number, which
Speaker 1: raises red flags. Mechanic responds quickly saying, Oops, there's been
Speaker 1: a mistake. My name is actually Gary Robert Treadway. The
Speaker 1: Feds ask for a proof, Howard, excuse me. Gary pulls
Speaker 1: out one of his fifty Ford's birth certificates. He plans
Speaker 1: to change his middle name from Raymond to Robert, but
Speaker 1: first he needs to find a typewriter that matches the
Speaker 1: exact print.
Speaker 4: And I actually had to go to four or five
Speaker 4: thrift stores to try to find the same typewriter because
Speaker 4: I got a birth certificate from nineteen forty eight.
Speaker 1: Finally, miraculously he finds the right typewriter. He submits the
Speaker 1: double fake birth certificate. He's free and clear for now,
Speaker 1: But what a close call. He knows he needs a
Speaker 1: backup plan, an escape hatch just in case. He needs
Speaker 1: a third identity so if someone catches him he can
Speaker 1: flee again. He heads to a cemetery.
Speaker 4: I found a gravestone and saw the birth date. Anybody
Speaker 4: born forty eight. I was looking for somebody maybe who
Speaker 4: died before. They would have a social Security number if
Speaker 4: they died when they were a kid. And I found
Speaker 4: somebody like that, then you just check to see where
Speaker 4: they were born. This person was born in Phoenix, so
Speaker 4: you're right and say I need a duplicate. Here's my name,
Speaker 4: here's my address. Send me a duplicate, and they send
Speaker 4: the duplicate. So you didn't go to someone who forced papers.
Speaker 4: You just found a name in a cemetery and asked
Speaker 4: for papers. In golf, I got the birstitot. Once you
Speaker 4: have a birst you get your driver's license. Once you
Speaker 4: have that, you can get a passport. That's the way
Speaker 4: it used to be, and you can't do it anymore.
Speaker 2: You had a passport under a different name. If Gary
Speaker 2: Strudway was exposed, were you planning to flee the country?
Speaker 4: That was early on, but by the time I got
Speaker 4: into the nineties and the head of sun and had
Speaker 4: businesses and stuff. Now that wasn't anything I was going
Speaker 4: to consider anymore.
Speaker 2: If you had fled the country early on, where would
Speaker 2: you have gone.
Speaker 4: I didn't want to go to Canada. A lot of
Speaker 4: the people who are subject to the draft they went
Speaker 4: to Canada. A lot of my buddies, not a.
Speaker 2: Lot of the weather that you didn't want to go.
Speaker 4: I could have been, could have been. Also, I felt
Speaker 4: I was an American, even though the United States government
Speaker 4: was treating me so badly. I just filled I was
Speaker 4: an American and I wanted to stay in the United States.
Speaker 1: As Howard settles into Scottsdale, he's kind of lonely.
Speaker 2: What was dating like under an assumed identity?
Speaker 4: Well, I had to hide my background, And maybe that's
Speaker 4: why the way I am right now, Because when I
Speaker 4: was a fugitive, I couldn't get close to people, but
Speaker 4: I still wanted to be with women. But conversations would
Speaker 4: come up about something and I would change the subject,
Speaker 4: and I wouldn't want to have friends because friends would
Speaker 4: want to know a lot. So I became more of
Speaker 4: a loner, and I still enjoy that life. As a
Speaker 4: loaner right now. You know, I live by myself. I
Speaker 4: don't have a relationship with a woman right now.
Speaker 2: So did you have friends during that period?
Speaker 4: I don't think so.
Speaker 1: Sometime in the late nineties, Mechanic places a personal ad
Speaker 1: in a newspaper seeking a quote left thinking non smoking
Speaker 1: vegetarian social activists. A woman named Janet Grossman contacts him.
Speaker 1: They start dating. At the time, his parents are living
Speaker 1: in one of the apartments he owns in the same
Speaker 1: building as him. His twin brother, Harvey, also visits. Howard
Speaker 1: tells Janet that his parents are his aunt and uncle
Speaker 1: and his brother is his cousin. She doesn't buy it.
Speaker 4: When she saw my twin brother, she knows something was phony,
Speaker 4: and she wasn't supposed to be around because she wasn't
Speaker 4: living there at the time she was visiting. She had
Speaker 4: her own place, and she was over, And I didn't
Speaker 4: really want her to be over when Harvey was there,
Speaker 4: because that would make sense for somebody named Harvey Mechanic
Speaker 4: to be my twin brother, and I'm Gary Treadwaite, so
Speaker 4: I had to tell her.
Speaker 1: As the new millennium approaches, Mechanic feels increasingly confident. It's
Speaker 1: been nearly thirty years. Surely no one's looking for him anymore. Right,
Speaker 1: He lets down his guard starts to get involved in
Speaker 1: state and local politics. He becomes an activist. Actually, he says.
Speaker 4: When you say I became an activist, it wasn't I
Speaker 4: became an activist. I was holding down my activism for
Speaker 4: the first three years. I was already an activist starting
Speaker 4: in sixty seven.
Speaker 1: This is important. As time passes, Gary Treadway melts away,
Speaker 1: Howard Mechanic emerges from the permafrost. Now more than ever.
Speaker 1: He feels like he can be himself. As he leans
Speaker 1: into activism, he becomes increasingly brazen. On April ninth, nineteen
Speaker 1: ninety nine, exactly two years before the Fisher's final day,
Speaker 1: he's quoted on the front page of the Arizona Republic
Speaker 1: as Gary Treadway slamming public subsidies for developers. The attention snowballs.
Speaker 1: He fights to limit corporate financing of political campaigns. His
Speaker 1: photo runs in a small newspaper, then a local TV
Speaker 1: station interviews him. He's good at this.
Speaker 4: People were asking me to run for office, and I
Speaker 4: didn't say no. Most fugitives are not asked please run
Speaker 4: for office. People wanted me to run for office, and
Speaker 4: I should have said no, but I didn't. By that time,
Speaker 4: I thought I'd get away with it, but I was wrong.
Speaker 1: In late nineteen ninety nine, Gary Truadway launches a campaign
Speaker 1: for Scottsdale City Council. If elected, Robert Fisher will be
Speaker 1: one of his constituents. Now his photo runs not just
Speaker 1: in any newspaper, but in the Arizona Republic, which has
Speaker 1: a half million subscribers. In February two thousand, Penny Overton,
Speaker 1: a reporter for the Scottsdale Tribune, contacts Treadway. She wants
Speaker 1: to write a basic profile of him, boring standard stuff,
Speaker 1: not as exciting as the big story of the time,
Speaker 1: a woman who tossed her husband's headless torso in a
Speaker 1: dumpster behind a local grocery store. Instead of the torsost,
Speaker 1: Penny gets stuck profiling Gary Treadway, boring old Gary Treadway.
Speaker 1: She tells him she's going to run a background check.
Speaker 2: How did you react in that moment?
Speaker 4: Well, I was pretty freaked out.
Speaker 1: Gary starts to sweat, He's visibly shaken. Penny doesn't get it.
Speaker 1: She leaves confused. What's up with this guy? Gary asks
Speaker 1: to meet again. Sitting pollside, he tells her the truth.
Speaker 1: He begs her not to reveal it. She leaves once more,
Speaker 1: not sure what to do that weekend. According to The
Speaker 1: New York Times, she goes hiking. In the meantime, Gary
Speaker 1: announces he's dropping out of the race. He says he
Speaker 1: has leukemia. I need to concentrate my energies on fighting
Speaker 1: the disease, he says, rather than running for office. This
Speaker 1: is the breaking point. Gary lied about his identity while
Speaker 1: running for public office, then lied again about having cancer.
Speaker 1: The Tribune runs Penny's story, Gary Treadway is Howard Mechanic.
Speaker 1: Everything falls apart us Marshall's arrest Mechanic On February tenth,
Speaker 1: two thousand, fourteen months to the day before the Fisher
Speaker 1: House explodes. He sent to prison to serve the five
Speaker 1: year sentence he fled in nineteen seventy two. He later
Speaker 1: pleads guilty to additional charges of failing to report to
Speaker 1: prison and using false information to obtain a passport. Fellow
Speaker 1: inmates are confused by his last name. They ask him,
Speaker 1: why do.
Speaker 4: They call you a mechanic? Do you take contracts? Did
Speaker 4: you know that's what mechanics used for a hit man.
Speaker 4: Check out Charles Browns the movies called The Mechanic.
Speaker 1: On January twentieth, two thousand and one, in the final
Speaker 1: hours of his presidency, Bill Clinton grants Mechanic a pardon.
Speaker 1: He's free In the end, what lessons can we learn
Speaker 1: from Mechanic? What can his experience teach us about Robert Fisher?
Speaker 1: I still have so many questions.
Speaker 2: Did you ever consider faking your own duff?
Speaker 4: No, because it wouldn't helped anything. Really, if I was
Speaker 4: under a man hunt and I was on the top
Speaker 4: ten most wanted, that might be a good strategy to
Speaker 4: get people from stop looking.
Speaker 2: Did you do anything to change your physical appearance when
Speaker 2: you flipped?
Speaker 4: No, I thought about changing my fingerprints. But if somebody
Speaker 4: had a doctor, that would make sense. But I wouldn't
Speaker 4: walk into a doctor and say please do this. The
Speaker 4: doctor would turn me in.
Speaker 2: Maybe, meaning if you knew someone like you had a
Speaker 2: friend who was willing to help you.
Speaker 4: If there was a doctor I knew could trust that
Speaker 4: would never say that, that would be something I considered,
Speaker 4: and it probably came into mind on a few occasions
Speaker 4: because I thought that would be what would get me
Speaker 4: was my fingerprints. As it turned out, that would not
Speaker 4: help any.
Speaker 2: When you say you considered changing your fingerprints, do you
Speaker 2: mean burning your fingertips to obscure your fingerprints.
Speaker 4: Actually, that's probably what it would be. And maybe I
Speaker 4: wasn't thinking clearly about the options, but I did think
Speaker 4: about it.
Speaker 2: What was your mental process like during those years? Were
Speaker 2: you able to push this out of your head for
Speaker 2: a while or was it always there? You always had
Speaker 2: the anxiety of dealing with this.
Speaker 4: Over the years, it gets diminished. But what never diminished
Speaker 4: were the nightmares until two thousand when I was discovered
Speaker 4: and turned myself in. As soon as I turned myself in,
Speaker 4: the nightmares ended, but I had a continuing nightmare I
Speaker 4: was being chased, I was being caught. I'd have a
Speaker 4: cold sweat and I'd jump out of bed. So that
Speaker 4: never ended, but it ended immediately after I became Howard
Speaker 4: Mechanic again.
Speaker 1: Our interview now turns to Robert Fisher. Mechanic lived only
Speaker 1: a mile and a half north of his house, less
Speaker 1: than a half mile west of the hospital where he
Speaker 1: worked in the eighties and nineties.
Speaker 4: I used to walk by the hospital all the time.
Speaker 1: It's an astounding coincidence that one of America's greatest examples
Speaker 1: of a fugitive hiding under an assumed identity for decades
Speaker 1: lived so close to a man who later became one
Speaker 1: of the greatest examples of an American fugitive whose fate
Speaker 1: remains unknown today.
Speaker 2: Your knowledge, did you ever meet Barbert Fisher?
Speaker 3: Not?
Speaker 4: To my knowledge.
Speaker 2: Did you ever go to a store called Popular Outdoor Outfitters?
Speaker 4: Yeah?
Speaker 2: He did.
Speaker 4: Yeah.
Speaker 2: Do you have any recommendations about how to trip up
Speaker 2: Robert Fisher? If somebody wanted to trip you up? How
Speaker 2: would you go someone into making that mistake?
Speaker 3: Bough.
Speaker 4: I still hat that the Marshalls made a mistake and
Speaker 4: not take my picture around to yoga groups because they
Speaker 4: knew I back to cioga in prison every day, and
Speaker 4: if they had taken my picture around the yoga group
Speaker 4: in Phoenix, they would have identified me.
Speaker 1: This is a great point, not only that it is
Speaker 1: possible to find fugitives via their new social circles, but
Speaker 1: also that even under a fake name, at their core,
Speaker 1: there's still the same person. A reporter who interviewed Howard
Speaker 1: twenty years ago.
Speaker 4: Had an angle that I was living a lie. He
Speaker 4: interviewed people and what about his lives he was living
Speaker 4: a lie. I wasn't living a lie. Everything I did
Speaker 4: was authentic except a document or two.
Speaker 1: Today, Mechanic lives in the same small city as Robert
Speaker 1: Fisher's mom. He and Janet Grossman are no longer together.
Speaker 1: He's still an activist. He's suing the state of Arizona,
Speaker 1: fighting a fifteen million dollar subsidy for a private rodeo.
Speaker 1: Perhaps the most important part of my interview with Mechanic
Speaker 1: is not what he tells me, but what he doesn't
Speaker 1: tell me. He's open about almost everything except the people
Speaker 1: who helped him escape and remain hidden. Fifty two years later,
Speaker 1: he still vehemently protects their privacy. Without their help, he
Speaker 1: likely wouldn't have been able to flee and start a
Speaker 1: new life. In nineteen seventy two, a friend gave him
Speaker 1: fake identity papers for Gary Treadway. Someone else mailed his
Speaker 1: parents a letter on his behalf. Another friend gave him
Speaker 1: a ride out of Saint Louis so he could hop
Speaker 1: on a bus. Numerous people helped him in other ways,
Speaker 1: for example, forging fifty birth certificates. Between nineteen seventy two
Speaker 1: and two thousand, a dozen people figured out his true identity,
Speaker 1: either because he confessed to them or they caught him.
Speaker 1: None contacted law enforcement. This teaches us some critical lessons
Speaker 1: about Robert Fisher. First, it would have been nearly impossible
Speaker 1: for him to disappear without help. Second, it's likely that
Speaker 1: in the past twenty three years he slipped up at
Speaker 1: some point with someone in some way big or small,
Speaker 1: about his true identity. The key to finding Fisher then
Speaker 1: might not be Fisher. It might be the people around him.
Speaker 1: In two thousand and one or twenty twenty four, Finally,
Speaker 1: despite long odds, Howard Mechanic did run in to people
Speaker 1: who recognized him twice, one in Vegas and one in
Speaker 1: a grocery store, Which makes me wonder, what if one
Speaker 1: of the many alleged sightings of Fisher, none of which
Speaker 1: have been confirmed, was actually him. Wouldn't that be wild?
Speaker 1: Next time I'm missing in Arizona.
Speaker 2: You should just go down it. Let's let's go down.
Speaker 1: Let's go down a little bit, and then turn around.
Speaker 2: Go what are they gonna do? Arrest us?
Speaker 1: You can reach us by phone at one eight three
Speaker 1: three new Tips. That's one eight three three six three
Speaker 1: nine eight four seven seven by email at tips at
Speaker 1: iHeartMedia dot com, tip s at iHeartMedia dot com, online
Speaker 1: at meon thirty three dot com, or on Twitter at
Speaker 1: John waalzac j O, n w A l Czak. Paul
Speaker 1: Ducan is our executive producer, Chris Brown is our supervising producer.
Speaker 1: Hannah Rose Snyder is our producer. Paul Gemperline is our researcher,
Speaker 1: Ben Bollen is a consulting producer, and I'm your host
Speaker 1: and executive producer John Walzack. This episode produced by Taylor
Speaker 1: Chicogne and Evan Tyer. Cover art by Pam Peacock. Neon
Speaker 1: thirty three. Logo designed by Derek Rudy. Our intro song
Speaker 1: is Utopia by Ruby Cube. Please download the first two
Speaker 1: seasons of our show, Missing in Alaska and Missing on
Speaker 1: nine to eleven, and if you're so inclined, give us
Speaker 1: a five star rating. Missing in Arizona is a co
Speaker 1: production of iHeartRadio and Neon thirty three