Mark was tweaking when he forged his own death certificate.  Meth gave him diamantaire focus and huge confidence.  The drug was like a cheering section in his veins, telling him he was a genius, they’d never catch him.  This was late in October 2003, at his desk in the apartment on Willoughby Avenue in West Hollywood. 

Mark based the forgery, as usual, on his brother Luke’s death certificate, now more than ten years old.  Using Photoshop, he altered names, dates, vital statistics. ( Such a boon, Photoshop.  For his first forgery, he’d had to use scissors and adhesive.)  He imported the public health director’s signature straight into the file.  The final flourish was the embossed seal he’d bought off the shelf at Office Depot. 

Sometime between 2 A.M. and 5 A.M., Mark completed the death certificate, as well as a fake New York Times paid death notice—a ridiculously easy project, by comparison.  In the high-WASP tones of his childhood in Mount Vernon, New York, he wrote a cover letter for the documents, addressed to the Los Angeles County Probation Department.  He signed the letter in the name of his dead brother, Luke. 

It was his sad duty, “Luke” wrote, to report the death of his brother, Mark Olmsted, from AIDS complications.  He continued: The members of Mark's family had been shocked to discover, among his personal effects, evidence of his recent arrest.  Mark had kept all of them completely in the dark about his troubles with the law.  But here, enclosed, were Mark’s obituary and a certified copy of his death certificate, so that the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department need no longer concern itself with Mark. 

On November 4, a deputy probation officer replied by mail to “Luke.”  The county was dropping all charges against his deceased brother, Mark, effective immediately. 

More than ten years after L.A. County declared him dead, Mark Olmsted contacted me on Twitter, claiming to have carried out an ingenious, decade-long con during one of the most terrible pandemics in world history.  He said he'd been diagnosed with AIDS in the early 1980s, at age 30, and had never expected to reach his 40s.  But instead of dying, he had succumbed to a kind of temporary insanity—one that lasted for years. 

To finance the life he kept thinking would end at any moment, he had committed increasingly creative and reckless varieties of fraud.  He told me in our first conversations that he had faked his own death several times; I couldn’t quite keep track of how many.  He had stolen his brother’s identity and faked his death, too, despite the fact that his brother was already dead. 

Over the phone, he sometimes sounded like a profiteer of the AIDS era, and sometimes like a victim of it.  I wasn’t always sure he was even telling me the truth.  He talked and talked, in the insistent, consuming way that people who have endured trauma often do—a wall of words. 

He had conned his way into great sums of money, but now he had little to his name aside from his strange story.  It’s a love story, in a way, and a ghost story.  A story of two men who, if they hadn’t been brothers, most certainly wouldn’t have been friends. 

Luke, Mark’s brother, was two years older.  He was a Boys’ Life boy, industrious and athletic, an Eagle Scout who earned all his badges.  In high school, Luke had a steady girlfriend and starred on the swim team.  When Sandra, their teenage sister, was beaten by a boyfriend, it was Luke she went to for protection, not their alcoholic father.  She told me that Luke was more like a parent than a brother.