Ghost in the Wires_ My Adventures as the World's Most Wanted Hacker - Kevin Mitnick [115]
With the cards in my wallet, I threw a couple of suits and some other clothes and my toilet kit into a bag, boarded a plane for Sioux Falls, and, once there, rented a car to drive to the capital city of Pierre (or “Peer,” as they pronounce it there). The four-hour drive was mostly on autopilot due west into the late-afternoon sun, along flat Interstate 90, with small towns I’d never heard of scattered along the way. Much too rural for this city boy: I was glad I was just passing through.
Here comes the “ballsy” part. The next morning, dressed in the suit I had worn for my law-firm interview, I found my way to the offices of the State Registrar for Vital Statistics, where I asked to speak with someone in charge. Within minutes the Registrar herself walked up to the counter—something I couldn’t quite picture happening in a state like New York or Texas or Florida, where the top official would no doubt be too busy or feel too self-important to meet with anyone lacking important connections.
I introduced myself and handed her my business card, explaining that I was a private investigator from Las Vegas working on a case. My mind flashed back to one of my favorite television shows, The Rockford Files. I smiled as she looked at my card because the quality was about the same as the ones Rockford created using that business-card printer he kept in his car.
In fact, the Registrar wasn’t just willing to see me, she was happy to assist a private investigator in carrying out his research task, which I told her was a confidential investigation into deaths.
“Which person?” she asked, wanting to be helpful. “We’ll look it up for you.”
Umm. Not at all what I wanted.
“We’re looking for people who died from certain causes of death,” I ventured. “So I need to look through all the records for the years of interest.”
Though I was afraid the request sounded a bit strange, South Dakota was a be-friendly-to-your-neighbor kind of place. She didn’t have any reason to be suspicious, and I was ready to accept all the help she was willing to give.
The very friendly Registrar asked me to come around the counter, and I followed her to a separate, windowless room that held the old certificates on microfiche. I emphasized that I had a significant amount of research to do and that it might take me several days. She just smiled and said I might be interrupted if a staff member needed to use the fiche, but otherwise it shouldn’t be a problem. She had one of her assistants show me how to use the microfiche and where to find the films for particular ranges of years. I would be working in the microfiche room, unsupervised, with access to all the birth and death records going as far back as the state had been keeping them. I was looking for infants who had passed away between 1965 and 1975, at an age between one and three. Why would I want a birth year that would make me so much younger than my actual age? Because I could pass for that much younger, and if the Feds ever used age criteria when searching recently issued driver’s licenses in a state where they thought I might be living, they would—I hoped—skip right over me.
I was also looking for a white baby boy with an easily pronounced, Anglo-sounding surname. Trying to pass for Indian, Latino, or black would obviously not work unless I intended to have a good makeup artist follow me around everywhere I went.
Some states were starting to cross-reference birth and death records, probably in an effort to prevent illegal aliens and others from using a birth certificate of a deceased person. When they received a request for a birth certificate, they would first check to make certain no death certificate was on file for that person; if there was, they would stamp deceased, in big bold letters, on the copy of the certified birth certificate that they sent out.
So I needed to find deceased infants that met all my other