17. Interview with Graham Baker: Part 1

Graham Baker is a private investigator and bounty hunter in Jacksonville, FL. Over the past few years, he has frequently been an object of interest in the public eye due to the high profile captures of various celebrities on the run from the law, including but not limited to: Lindsay Lohan (cocaine possession), Lil’ Wayne (gun/marijuana possession), Charlie Sheen (domestic violence/probation violation), and Andy Dick (sexual battery). Mr. Baker works out of his office in Downtown Jacksonville which overlooks the conglomeration of buildings surrounding St. John’s River on Florida’s northeast coast.

16 July 2011

– Yes, sir. Dealt with pseudocide^[1] on many an occasion.

– [Mr. Baker chuckles]It’s a science. Not for everybody, I’ll tell you that. It’s kind of like—alright, put it in layman’s terms, it’s kind of like a one night stand where the girl ends up pregnant, you get me? A drunken, spur of the moment decision that drastically changes at least one person’s life, depending on whether or not the guy sticks around, but he’s not thinking like that when he goes in that room, right? He just wants to get laid. [Mr. Baker chuckles again]

– It’s the truth, hombre. And, in the same vein of thought, most pseudociders, they’re operating off of instinct. They don’t care about the consequences, they just want that one night of peace. We’ve all got the fight or flight plan built in to our DNA. Some people have just got different triggers than others. But what most people don’t realize, the most difficult thing about pseudocide is you’ve got to leave everything behind. I mean everything.

– Most people don’t think about that when the idea pops into their head. Or maybe they do but they don’t really know what it means. They see the bills piling up, their boss is on their ass day in, day out, they got a girlfriend or boyfriend or wife or husband at home whose treating them like shit, loan sharks are breathing down their neck, pick your poison. And they think, I could leave all this behind. I could definitely leave all this behind. But your job, your spouse, your finances, all of that’s only part of who you are, you follow?

– We humans, we’re complicated creatures. Very complicated. When people go through with the task of disappearing who they’ve been their entire life, when they realize they really can’t go back to anything that’s ever defined them as a person, that they’ve got to resort to all types of drastic measures to really get away—I’m talking total identity annihilation, sometimes even plastic surgery if you’ve got the type of features that are easily identifiable—they usually snap. And that’s when they make the mistakes that get them caught by whoever’s looking for them, any type of hunter, from the crazy stalker to the FBI. It’s all outlined in my book, The Pseudocider’s Handbook. Check it out some time.

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[1] Pseudocide: a slang term meant to indicate the act of faking one’s own death.

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