This idea was presented to me over dinner recently by a smart fella who, I gotta admit, made a compelling case. My humble essay is simply a re-framing of his idea:

Imagine that you are Billionaire Arch-Villian Kenneth Lay. You have an effload of money. You are the smartest man in any room you walk into. And you've just been convicted of the sodomization of thousands of shareholders, customers, and government agencies by way of your Ponzi scheme corporate shell, Enron. Sentencing has not yet been completed, and you are out on bail. Oh, and you have a cadre of wealthy and well-connected friends, including the former governor of your home state and now President, who has a cute nickname for you.

Oh, and you don't want to go to jail.

How much would it cost you to fake your own death? How many people would have to be bought off to make that happen? One to pretend to have found the body and phone it in, one to three medical personnel to declare the body belongs to Ken Lay and the body is dead? Was there an autopsy? Does the county coroner need to be bought off? I'm certain the funeral director and one or two members of his/her staff would have to be purchased. Let's guess that anywhere from four to twenty people would need to be bought off. I'm guessing we'd actually come in at the lower end of that range, because the fewer people involved, the better.

How much, exactly, would it take to buy off a doctor? Even one with a decent reputation, who presumably would have a higher price? Would three million do it? Five? I doubt a mortician would require anywhere near that much.

Avoiding any kind of investigation would be easy. You've got friends in Very High Places, remember.

So, a few people say they saw a dead body, and that the body was Ken Lay's. Nobody official questions whether they are telling the truth because, hey, there's no reason to suspect otherwise, and nobody would order an investigation in any case. Even at five mill a pop for twenty co-conspirators, you're talking no more than 100 million at the absolute most to pull this off.

Chump change.

Hmmm.

So when my friend mentioned this theory (actually, he's quite convinced that Kennyboy is alive), I thought to myself: what would you expect to be true if the man in question did, indeed, fake his death?

Well, you'd expect that the body in question would be cremated. That there'd be very few witnesses to his death. That there'd be no autopsy.

Well, guess what? The body was cremated before the funeral.

There were very few witnesses to his death.

And there was an autopsy. A big fat autopsy complete with gruesome details and blood samples and all kinds of verifiable stuff. This doesn't rule out fakery completely, but it certainly ups the price and increases the likelihood of some piece of the conspiracy breaking down.

Ken Lay is almost certainly dead. But if he didn't fake his own death, he oughtta have.