One plus, was that there was a cardboard box in the back, and when I looked in it, there was a bottle of whisky and a bottle of Tequila (he must have forgotten that he put them there in his rush to get away from the out of gas car).

Really strange the things that he took, and the things that he left.

I had taken the time to make up a little wanted poster, with a small $50 reward, and to distribute it around trucking companies, asking their drivers to keep an eye out for the guy, and on Friday 15th he was spotted on a corner in Richmond (about 150 miles northwest of us), and he is now in police custody.

It seems that his real name is Richard James Webster.

Ailsa’s pack and my LED torch are there, but the alcohol and cash and fuel are gone.
Looks like a couple of more days and another couple of hundred dollars on our part to recover things.

Yes – he is a very likeable guy.
Ailsa and I have spent much time wondering and talking about the sort of life path that must have taken him to where he is.

I have also spent a few hours contemplating what I could have done differently that would have alerted me to the con earlier.

I am committed to keeping possibility open in my life, which means staying open to things that are unlikely and possible. If I rejected the unlikely, then I would simply have accepted my death 3 years ago. So I cannot use probability alone as a filter, though I can use it to narrow the search for things to verify.

It seems to me that I can only use verification.

The thing about James’ story, was that it had been crafted in such a way that there was very little that was verifiable. His mistake in the end was naming people that he had met in NZ. Once lots of little things had added up to a need to verify, I just called one of the people he had said he had spent time with, and said “either I am calling to ask about a mutual friend, or I am calling to confirm that I have been conned.” That got her interest, and it did not take long to confirm that it was 100% con.

There were many small things that should have alerted me earlier, and in a sense did, yet I so wanted for it to be true, and I so did not want to close down possibility.
He did not have any technology with him, and his explanation was that he left all that stuff in the office, and just wanted to have a holiday (in a sense I could understand that, it is a reasonably common experience for those who do not deeply understand the technologies they are using – though not one I share).

I found it strange that I could find no reference to him in the BBC, and the BBC does not go out of its way to publicise the identify of its staff.

I also found it strange that he did not seem to know many of the basics of using technology, the sorts of things that people who go to far away places and rely in their technology usually learn very quickly. One example being that our Sky TV decoder locked up, and would not change channels, when Ailsa and I were out seeing “The life of Pi” on Friday night. It does that every six months or so, and I simply turn the unit off, and start it again, and whatever the glitch is gets sorted out. Doing such a hard reset (full power off, pause for 10 seconds, then power on again), is the first thing that any support tech’ will teach to someone taking technology into wild places. It deals with 90% of problems. Yet James had not done it. That really had me wondering. I excused it by the fact that the power board that powers the decoder is hidden behind the TV, and is difficult to reach, and it takes a bit of work to track which plug belongs to which unit. And to me, it was a major inconsistency in his story. It was almost inconceivable to me that someone who had actually done what he claimed to have done would not have reset the unity and got control back. He did in fact seem to be a complete technophobe.

Another thing that did raise my suspicion was when he started talking about using cameras to make a documentary about Kaikoura, he did not seem to have any concept of focal length of lenses.

So it seems to me, that an appropriate lesson for me to take from this is to take on the discipline of verifying something about the identity of anyone.
James had nothing easily verifiable about him, and had a plausible explanation as to why in every case.

What eventually caught him out was that I did actually call one of the famous New Zealanders that he said he had recently spent time with; and she didn’t know him.

I am short one old car, and have learned some valuable lessons.

What I do not understand is why he would go so far as to right a note to my daughter explaining that his daughter had advised him to give her the travel miles that would otherwise expire, and it wouldn’t cost him anything.

And then again there is the matter of the promises (?) made and not kept. Could be a different way of looking at those things too.

And then again there is the matter of mis-representing who he is (BBC.) On THAT I don’t see any alternative perspective which would make THAT OK within that perspective…..