Petra Pazsitka: How to disappear without a trace

WHEN German woman Petra Pazsitka, 24, decided she wanted a new life she simply vanished, hoping never to be seen again.

And it might have remained that way, had a man not confessed to her murder.

This week Ms Pazsitka was not only found alive and well, 31 years after disappearing, her face was also plastered across news sites across the world after it emerged the confession was bogus.

Details of the elaborate lengths she went to keep herself hidden also surfaced: she only used cash, didn’t have a bank account, passport or social security card. In fact, she lived almost like a spy working undercover.

So far Ms Pazsitka has refused to say why she wanted to disappear and has rejected attempts to reconnect with her family, even her 80-year-old mother who burst into tears when she heard the news.

But her story, as incredible as it seems, may not be a one-in-a million scenario. Frank Ahearn is a privacy expert who has written a bestseller called How to Disappear and more recently The Digital Hit Man.

Ahearn specialises in helping people disappear and is contacted by up to 10 people a year who want to disappear. Only about two of them actually need to go.

In How To Disappear, he says the worst thing anyone can do if they wanted to quietly fade away is to stage some sort incident, like being lost at sea, or in the bush for example.

As tempting as being able to conveniently explain your sudden disappearance, such measures usually involve major searches by police and other authorities who would likely discover inconsistencies in your story.

Going down the illegal route and using false documents is another thing Ahearn doesn’t advise, once again because of the problem it creates. Because the documents are obviously false it opens up the possibility that you could be questioned by authorities about your fake identity — and in the process reveal your real one.

Like false papers, social media can also prove a ‘missing’ person’s undoing.

Mr Ahearn advises getting off social media well in advance, meaning backing out of Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and even email. People who are very active on these platforms and suddenly stop using them will naturally raise suspicions.

Something Ms Pazsitka mastered and perhaps the key to her staying hidden so long was her use of cash for virtually everything. She paid all her bills in cash therefore avoiding leaving any sort of trace. In his book Ahearn says every interaction you make you should be thinking “Is this the least traceable method I could use?”

The hardest part for people who deliberately vanish, says Mr Ahearn, is severing contact with virtually everyone in their life. For most people, this is where where virtually everyone fails, as there is usually someone the runaway wants to maintain contact with.

It also requires a complete overhaul of the way you live: hobbies, favourite places to visit, and daily routines all need to change.

In an interview with wired.co.uk, Mr Ahearn said his clients were victims of stalkers or rich people worried about their digital safety.

“The disappearing thing, I could do three or four a year ... ten people contact me but only two of them may need to go. The others, I can disappear them using information. It’s extremely time consuming, but if I hired an employee there’s not privacy.”

The key to finding people when they didn’t want to be was actually not to look for them at all, he told Wired. It was to look for the clues they left behind. A home computer is sually full of research into the place they might have gone, he said.

That perhaps was the key to Ms Pazsitka’s successful vanishing act. The digital footprint people could leave in the 1980s was almost non-existent. People thought she’d been killed, so they weren’t looking.

How else she managed to stay hidden for so long will remain a mystery until she sheds some light on her life these past 31 years. So far at least, she’s staying silent.

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