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By Root 647 0

criteria and had been born in a different state. In addition, being super-cautious about this, I had my eye on the future, anticipating that surrounding states might at some point start reporting deaths to each other if the deceased was born in a neighboring state. This could be a major problem—if, for example, I applied for a passport in the future under my new identity. When verifying a passport application, the Department of State checks the validity of the applicant’s birth certificate, and could uncover the fraud if a cross-referencing program were developed in the future. Because I had to avoid such risks, I would only use identities of infants who were born several states away.

I spent an entire week searching with the microfiche. When I found a potential candidate, I would hit the Copy button, and a printer would come to life and churn out a copy of the death certificate. Why did I bother getting as many as I could find? Just for backup, in case I ever found myself needing to change my identity again.

Everyone else in the office was just as warm and friendly as the Registrar. One day, a clerk came up to me and said, “I have a relative in Las Vegas I’ve lost track of. You’re a private investigator, so I wondered if maybe you could help me find him.”

She gave me as many details as she had. That night, in my hotel room, I ran a people search using an information-broker database service to find her relative’s address, and then called line assignment at the local phone company to obtain the unlisted phone number. No big deal. I felt good about helping this lady because everybody had been so kind and helpful to me. I felt I was just repaying them for the favor.

When I handed her the information the following morning, she was so ecstatic that she rewarded me with a big hug, making far more of a fuss over me than I felt I deserved for so little effort. From that moment on, her fellow clerks became even friendlier, inviting me to share their doughnuts and telling me anecdotes about their lives.

Each day as I worked, the nearby printers would be drumming away, printing out certificates that people had requested. The din was annoying. On my third day, getting up to stretch my legs after several hours of sitting, I walked by the printers to take a closer look, and I noticed a pile of boxes sitting by them. When I saw what was in the boxes, my jaw dropped: hundreds of blank birth certificates. I felt as if I had just stumbled on a pirate’s treasure chest as I watched the certificates roll out of the printer.

And yet another treasure: the device for embossing the certificates with the official state seal of South Dakota was kept outside the microfiche room, sitting on a long wooden table. Each clerk would just walk up to the table and emboss a certificate before sending it out.

The next morning the weather turned bitter, with snow flurries and freezing temperatures. Luckily I had thought to bring along a heavy jacket that I put on before going to the State Registrar. I worked through the morning, waiting for the lunch hour. When most of the staff was either out of the office or busy eating and chatting, I draped the jacket over my arm and strolled to the restroom, nonchalantly scoping out where all of the remaining employees were and how distracted or attentive they seemed to be. On my way back to the microfiche room, I walked by the table where the embosser was kept. In a single smooth gesture, without slowing down, I grabbed it, holding it so it was hidden under my jacket, and continued back to the fiche room. Once inside, I glanced out the door: no one was paying any attention.

With the embosser now resting on a table next to a stack of blank birth certificates, I began to emboss the state seal onto them, trying to work quickly but quietly. I was struggling to hold my fear in check. If anyone were to walk in and see what I was doing, I knew I would probably be arrested and carted away.

Within about five minutes, I had a stack of some fifty embossed blank certificates. I headed back to the restroom, on the way returning