Saul Goodman - Get Off the Grid! - Saul Goodman's Guide to Staying Off the Radar

A U.S. Marshal who investigated our guy told a reporter about eleven years after Joe offed himself that the fake Mr. Chandler had “lived the perfect life of someone on the run.”

He wasn’t wrong.

Joey Newts had no close friends. He let a few coworkers in just enough for them to learn some of his quirks—one guy told of Joe driving from Cleveland to Maine to shop, only to turn around and go home when he couldn’t find a parking space—but Joe had no bosom buddies. No true companions.

Joey Newts made no waves. Even though cops trying to figure out who the guy was have expressed suspicions he was a fugitive, Joey Newts didn’t commit any crimes that anyone knew of between 1978 and 2003. Clean as a whistle. He might have had a girlfriend or two over the years, sure, but he generally kept his head down and his feet shuffling along. He ended up being remembered as a slightly weird but low-key dude.

Joey Newts was just about the perfect case of how to change your identity and get away with it.

I’m not letting you in on all the fun if I don’t touch on the nature of the legend that grew up around old Joe after his long con became national news.

One theory about Joseph Newton Chandler III: he was the Zodiac Killer. There’s a good reason. In the few photos available of the guy (another good point to remember: be camera-shy), particularly anything made for an ID, it’s pretty easy to match his face up with some famous old suspect sketches of the code-writing maniac.

There were a lot of theories about Zodiac, and one was that he had engineering knowledge and, of course, that he was living in California. Joey Newts apparently lived in the Golden State at some point, and he had engineering skill. On top of all that, who but a wanted serial killer would have reason to not just disappear, but completely erase any trace of who he had been before?

Some also thought he could be D. B. Cooper. Cooper was a similarly built guy—thin, average height—who jumped out of a plane with $200,000 in ransom money in 1971 and was never heard from again. Straight up vanished into the great northwest. Cooper had the means and the reason to get the hell out of whatever he was up to before he took his wild ride, and who’s to say he didn’t lay low, trying on a few new names and lives before settling down as Joe?

I don’t really buy it. A thrill killer and a skyjacker? Those are a couple of guys who love to live on the edge. They probably need that adrenaline jolt to keep their tickers ticking. Joe got his new name in 1978 and then played it cool for a very long time. This guy wasn’t looking for fun: he was looking to be forgotten.

The ladies have been left out in my little recitation of theses known unknowns. See, I saved Lori Ruff for last intentionally. We’ll get into more details about detaching from your old grid and what that really means for you in a few, but I had to bring up Lori first because the late Ms. Ruff may have accidentally been one of the best of this little murderer’s row of Does. Accidentally, because she wasn’t the most mentally sound of the bunch. Normally, I’d insist that this requires a pretty cool, clear head. Lori had some issues and wasn’t very organized, but she’s the most recent case study I know about in which someone slipped off the grid and managed to stay off, even after she was dead and fingerprints and DNA were easily available.

Not to speak ill of the dead, but Texan Lori Ruff was pretty obviously a woman splintering into a million little pieces when she died by her own hand in 2010. She may have seemed like someone who had it all, at one point. A tall woman, very intelligent. But by the time she killed herself, her marriage had completely shattered, and her soon-to-be-former in-laws were seriously considering taking out a restraining order against her. She was incredibly secretive about herself, but obsessed with her husband’s genealogy. She was also hyperprotective of her child, and refused to let others hold the baby at all.

Lori was strange, but no one knew just how strange until she died and they started poking around, trying to figure out exactly who she was.

Before she was Lori Ruff, she was Lori Kennedy.

Before she was Lori Kennedy, she was Becky Sue Turner. And here’s where we learn she was kind of a soul mate to old Joey Newts: the real Becky Sue Turner had been dead since 1971. At some point seventeen years after little Becky Sue said the long good-night, a woman acquired her birth certificate and took it to Idaho, where she snagged a state ID.

That was Lori’s first stepping stone. She now had a plausible birth record and a legit state identification. She took these promising nuggets to the great state of Texas and pulled another awesome camouflaging move: she changed her name again. She became Lori Kennedy via a legal name change.

Honestly, this was a boss move on many levels. Lori had quickly put two full layers between her current identity and whatever name her biological parents had bestowed upon her.

After that, she blitzed through a GED and went to college, firmly establishing an impressive new life for herself.

There’s no need to get into the tall grass about why this mystery woman broke down and took her own life. What’s interesting from my perspective—and yours, too, I’d guess, given this talk we’re having—is how after Lori was gone, very little about what she left behind gave any clue as to who she might have been. She left behind mysterious scribblings: an attorney’s name (he said he never knew her), the words “North Hollywood,” and some info that seemed to hint at legal trouble. Someone also uncovered an example of just how carefully Lori had concealed herself: she’d set up a mail-forwarding service in Nevada that kicked correspondences to her actual address in Texas.

I couldn’t find any evidence anyone ever knew who Lori really was. Considering she was alive and kicking well after the Internet began making it seem impossible to hide from anyone, that’s a hell of an accomplishment. The sad thing about Lori’s story is while we could easily suspect all these guys of being on the run from their own nefarious past, there’s something to be said about running from the demons inside you. Lori may have escaped from any prior crimes or abusers, but it seems as though she was never quite able to find peace within herself.

If my goal is to get your mojo working toward a new life, I’m not doing my due diligence unless I note that the stories I just told you have several common elements and one of them is death. Specifically: suicide comes up a lot.

So let’s be real. Red meat, bitter coffee time: this shit is tough to do. I’m getting this out there right now because we’ve got more of the fun and fascinating world of getting the hell out of Dodge to explore. Keeping your head down, not popping up like a prairie dog to sniff the air and get the attention of The Man: it’s a full-time job.

So, think back on your police training (if not yours, then someone else’s) and keep track of your alertness level using Cooper’s Colors: white, yellow, orange, red.

Former Marine Jeff Cooper broke down combat mind-set into four states: “white” (relaxed and oblivious) to “red” (hyperaware and focused on a target). The in-between levels are “yellow,” which is the average person’s state of mind when driving, let’s say. Relaxed enough, but alert and aware. Up from that is “orange.”

Condition orange is a state of readiness. You’re pretty sure something’s coming, and you have an exit route and a go-bag you can grab the moment you are certain you have to skedaddle.

Everyday humans who haven’t left another life behind exist pretty much day to day in white to yellow zones. In an unwelcome environment, they’re at orange. If they get mugged, it goes up to red.