Still Not Found

In a prior post we speculated that the British must have been completely obsessed for years regarding the disappearance of Lord Lucan, the lead pipe murderer of the family nanny and a very missing man.
Commit a crime like that, then disappear, and be peerage as well--well, the presses must have never stopped. And it seems they didn't.

Aside from the famous missing people mentioned in the prior post, there was also D.B. Cooper, the gentleman who jumped out of an airplane, with a parachute, holding $200,000 in extorted cash, over rough terrain in the Pacific Northwest in 1971. He has never been found, but some of the money did turn up in a riverbank. The case remains open.

We love mysteries. A Tweet from Jen King, @justjenkind, a digital media journalist for ABC News in Brisbane, Australia, puts us onto a recent UK Guardian story about the journalists who ate a lot of dinners and earned a lot of frequent-flyer miles at the expense of their London tabloids over the years, convincing their editors they had to go abroad to pursue some leads.

Apparently there was a legendary reporter, Garth Gibbs, who seemed to have milked more money and vacationed in more locales than other reporters. Mr. Gibbs has, with certainty, passed away in 2011. His associates know that he wouldn't have accepted a court's determination that a death certificate issued based on "presumption" as just handed down, should close the matter out.

The Guardian story relates that Mr. Gibbs pursued his missing person for 30 years. That's a good deal of dining out, and plenty of hotel towels. Lord Lucan, being from Great Britain, was the perfect person to chase all over the globe. Brits visit other countries way more often than Americans, and a Lord might have more ties to former British colonies that could easily put his living possibilities in Hong Kong, Macau or the Bahamas. All jet set locations. All with casinos.

Gibbs's sources put Lucan in a Nazi colony in Paraguay, and living with goats in new Zealand. If he was with goats, he might really have passed away since Robert McG. Thomas years ago famously wrote in a New York Times obituary that the Goat Man had passed away. (Well, maybe not the New Zealand goat man.)

I love reading about old scores, and how they translate the money into today's dollars or pounds. With the recent death of Gordon Goody, a mastermind of Britain's 1963 Great Train Robbery, the take of 2.6 million pounds would today be $50 million dollars.

And when you read of D.B. Cooper's extortion demand for $200,000 in $20 bills, you might think he was settling for what would only be a down payment on a studio in New York City condo. In today's dollars it would be $1.17 million. Now at least a one bedroom down payment.

Missing people and buried treasure are the things we're made of.


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