Nineteen states, including California and South Dakota, at the time had "open" death records—meaning the documents were a matter of public record, available to anyone. Those states hadn’t yet caught on to how easy they were making things for someone like me. There were other states that would have been more convenient for me to get to, but South Dakota seemed so remote that I figured there was much less chance some other guy in my situation might search its records and come up with one or more of the identities I had found.