Larry Lavin agreed to let his wife Marcia write a letter to her mother. He instructed her, however, to describe their new-born daughter as a boy, just in case the letter got into the wrong hands. The letter was mailed through a series of mail drops to disguise their real location. Lavin knew the FBI wanted him badly. He was right.
The FBI prosecutes a thousand drug dealers for every one ringleader they catch. Lavin had put the Philadelphia cocaine organization together himself, and the authorities wanted to put him away very badly. FBI agents seized Marcia's letter after getting a warrant to search her mother's house. But Lavin was clever. There was nothing in the letter to give him away. Except...
Marcia had described in the letter Christopher's third birthday party, held at one of those family pizza parlors where "the bear brought out his birthday cake & sang him a song." Both the agents on the case were family men who had been to such places, but never saw a bear. They contacted Chuck E. Cheese, the national chain of pizza/entertainment parlors. While Chuck E. Cheese never used a bear, they knew of a chain called Showbiz Pizza operated primarily in the South that employed a cuddly mascot named Billy-Bob the Bear.
The FBI agents also learned that Lavin was going to make a prearranged phone call to his close friend, Ken Weidler. Weidler himself was prosecuted for his part in the cocaine ring and had agreed to cooperate with the feds for a lighter sentence. He didn't like helping them, but he knew Larry had studied wiretapping and surveillance techniques and was not likely to stay on the phone long enough to give the police time to trace it. He was wrong.
While they couldn't trace the exact number, the FBI was able to nail down the 804 area code. Within that area code there were only two Showbiz Pizza outlets--one in Lynchburg and one in Virginia Beach. The FBI knew that hundreds of retired agents lived in the Virginia Beach area, so they mailed out letters to all of them, enclosing color photos of Larry and his wife. The letters paid off. One of the retired agents was a neighbor of Lavin's who had been out fishing on Lavin's boat, only he knew him as Brian James O'Neil.
On May 15, 1985, Larry Lavin, alias James O'Neil, was arrested on a Virginia Beach dock as he climbed off a friend's boat after a day of fishing. Lavin was surprised but unemotional. He agreed to cooperate with the police in exchange for freedom for his wife and kids. Larry Lavin has not been sentenced at this writing. Authorities predict it will be at least 20 years before he is a free man again.
Private Eyes & Skip Tracers
You can see that the life of the identity changer is much more difficult when someone has the resources to back up their compulsion to find him. Corporations and wealthy individuals may not turn to the police because they don't want to publicize your disappearance. Whether they inform the authorities or not, they will often hire private detectives to hunt you down.
Where I went to college there was an exceptionally bright student who just vanished one day. He was one of those "boy geniuses" who entered the university in his young teens and had a difficult time adjusting socially. He was very much into the fantasy game Dungeons & Dragons to the extent that he used to act it out in the drainage tunnels that criss-crossed beneath the campus. At first it was thought that his disappearance was related to the game.
This is the sort of story that makes for great newspaper copy, of course. The boy's parents were very wealthy. While they notified the police, they also hired a private detective to search for their son. The media played out the drama for weeks with each new effort made by the police. But it was the private eye that finally found the kid in a hospital in Houston and brought him back home. Nothing much came out in the way of his motive for disappearing except that foul play was not involved.
Not too long ago there was a locally celebrated case in San Francisco where a man who was not a U.S. citizen fled with his children to Mexico. There was important money involved on the mother's side, but none on the father's. The man was promptly located by San Francisco's most prominent private eye and the children were returned to San Francisco within a week.
The more money and/or publicity involved in a disappearance, the more intensive and prolonged the search will be. If it's big money, chances are a good detective agency will be after you, or even the federal government. But for the debtor who leaves his creditors in the lurch, the companies involved will probably write off the money or turn the case over to skip tracers.
Professional tracing agencies are usually after people who have not changed their names and they have difficulty finding a person who undergoes a disappearance-with-identity-change. They are relatively systematic in their search for missing heirs, stockholders, alumni and the like and boast in their advertising of "85% success rates." I strongly suspect that most of the remaining 15% are deliberate, systematic disappearees.
All tracers constantly and persistently go through phone books, directories, newspapers and so on. Chances are they will find
