10 Criminals Who Changed Their Identity to Escape Justice
10 Criminals Who Changed Their Identity to Escape Justice
Welcome to WatchMojo, and today we’re looking at ten criminals who changed their identities in order to evade capture.
Nicholas Alahverdian
Facing severe fraud and sexual assault charges in the US, Nicholas Alahverdian faked his own death from cancer in 2020. Fleeing to Scotland, he conjured up a ludicrously dramatic new persona: Arthur Knight, an eccentric and supposedly-orphaned Irish gentleman. When police finally tracked him to a Glasgow hospital in 2021, Alahverdian refused to break character. He faked an accent, demanded to be wheeled into court, and hid behind a cumbersome oxygen mask, going on about being a victim of a global conspiracy. Despite his theatrical, Oscar-worthy tantrums, the law saw right through the absurd facade. He was extradited to America in 2024, given ten years to life in prison, and died in 2026.
Elizabeth Carmichael
Back in the 1970s, an audacious entrepreneur named Elizabeth Carmichael promised to revolutionize the auto industry with The Dale. At the time, America was plagued by an oil crisis, and gasoline was very scarce and expensive. Carmichael’s Dale was a three-wheeled car that was heavily marketed as a cheap and fuel-efficient vehicle. Of course, it was all a sham. Carmichael was actually born Jerry Dean Michael, and she was a fugitive from federal counterfeiting charges since 1961. After transitioning and adopting her new identity, she nearly pulled off the ultimate automotive con. When the fraud inevitably collapsed, Carmichael went on the lam yet again and adopted another identity. Fast forward to 1989, when an episode of “Unsolved Mysteries” ran a segment on the missing Carmichael. A sharp-eyed viewer from Texas recognized her as the local florist, Kathryn Johnson. She was extradited to California and sentenced to 32 months in prison.
Aribert Heim
For decades, Tarek Farid Hussein was a fixture in his local Cairo neighborhood. He was known as Uncle Tarek, an eccentric elderly man who walked with a cane and extensively studied the Quran. But no one knew of his sordid past. Hussein was actually Nazi war criminal Aribert Heim, who conducted a number of sadistic concentration camp experiments during World War II. Remarkably, he managed to practice medicine in post-war Germany until 1962, when an impending arrest warrant forced him into the shadows. The so-called Butcher of Mauthausen vanished without a trace, fleeing across the globe to Egypt. There, the brutal Nazi completely reinvented himself, converting to Islam, growing a thick beard, and becoming Hussein. Heim successfully cheated justice and died of cancer in 1992 before the world finally uncovered his horrific secret.
Robert Durst
With investigators breathing down his neck regarding the disappearance of his wife and the execution of his best friend, eccentric real estate scion Robert Durst decided it was time to flee. So he fled the east coast and went south. Renting a cheap boarding house room in Galveston, Texas, the millionaire shaved his eyebrows, donned a wig, and masqueraded as a woman named Dorothy Ciner. It was a bizarre charade for a man worth hundreds of millions of dollars. Ultimately, Durst couldn’t outrun his violent tendencies. The drag-wearing fugitive was finally busted in 2001 after murdering and dismembering his neighbor, Morris Black, whose remains were found floating in Galveston Bay. He was acquitted of Black’s murder and returned to being Robert Durst before famously partaking in “The Jinx.”
Félicien Kabuga
With enough money, you can hide from almost anything. Félicien Kabuga was the monstrous bankroller behind the Rwandan genocide. Using his immense wealth as a business tycoon, Kabuga personally armed the militias that slaughtered hundreds of thousands of people. While international tribunals hunted him, Kabuga embarked on a game of cat and mouse that ended up lasting 26 years. He relied on a deeply entrenched network of sympathizers to stay one step ahead of the law, cycling through a staggering 28 different aliases. But authorities finally caught a break in 2020. Police raided a quiet apartment in a suburb of Paris and found a frail 84-year-old man named Antoine Toubou. Of course, this was actually Kabuga, and the decades-long global manhunt for one of the world’s most wanted fugitives ended with a whimper. He died in UN custody in 2026.
Matteo Messina Denaro
This ruthlessly violent mobster was known as the “boss of all bosses,” and he spent thirty years as Italy’s most wanted man. He spent that time living a surprisingly mundane existence right under the noses of the authorities in his native Sicily. Adopting the identity of a geometrician named Andrea Bonafede, the mobster walked the streets freely, went shopping, and even continued to run his massive crime syndicate. The law finally caught up with him in 2023, arresting the ailing godfather outside a Palermo health clinic where he was receiving treatment for colon cancer. No one knew that the sick and frail Andrea Bonafede was the feared “Diabolik,” the Cosa Nostra boss responsible for dozens of murders, kidnappings, and bombings.
Radovan Karadžić
Serving as the president of Republika Srpska during the Bosnian War, Radovan Karadžić orchestrated some of the most heinous war crimes imaginable and earned himself an indictment for genocide. To escape the international tribunals, the former political leader shed his recognizable suit and tie for a much more spiritual aesthetic. Growing out a massive, Santa-like beard and wearing his hair in a messy topknot, he transformed into Dr. Dragan Dabić, a New Age guru specializing in alternative medicine. Karadžić boldly hid in plain sight in Belgrade, casually making friends at local pubs and even writing articles for a wellness magazine. The radical transformation almost defied belief, and it lasted over a decade before his true identity was exposed in 2008. He is currently serving life in prison.
Whitey Bulger
In early 1997, a man named Charlie Gasko settled into a rent-controlled apartment in sunny Santa Monica. He then spent the next sixteen years playing the part of a reclusive senior citizen who kept to himself and took long walks on the beach. But this kind, beach-loving man was actually Whitey Bulger, the ruthless Boston mob boss who fled his home turf in 1994 after a tip-off about his looming arrest. Alongside his girlfriend, Catherine Greig, Bulger vanished off the map and settled in California under the new alias. The FBI eventually realized they couldn’t catch Bulger, so they targeted his girlfriend instead. They ran a heavy ad campaign about Greig, which caught the attention of their neighbor, Anna Bjornsdottir. She notified authorities, and Bulger was arrested outside of the apartment.
John List
In 1971, a man from New Jersey named John List methodically slaughtered his mother, his wife, and their three children before vanishing into thin air. He went to Colorado and built a new life as an accountant named Robert Clark. It was a successful, albeit terrifying reboot, for the mass murderer. He joined a local Lutheran church, made new friends, and even found himself a new wife, living comfortably for eighteen long years. List thought he had completely gotten away with it. But a brilliant forensic artist named Frank Bender sculpted a shockingly accurate bust of what List would now look like as an older man. This bust was shown on “America’s Most Wanted,” capturing the attention of List’s old neighbor from Colorado, who told authorities that List had recently moved to Virginia. Less than two weeks after the broadcast, agents walked into the Richmond accounting firm where List was employed and placed him under arrest.
Josef Mengele
Auschwitz’s Angel of Death was responsible for unspeakable medical atrocities during the Holocaust, and the name Josef Mengele is synonymous with evil. With the Third Reich crumbling in the mid 1940s, Mengele fled to South America and hid in Argentina and Paraguay under the name Helmut Gregor. However, when Israeli agents famously snatched his colleague, Adolf Eichmann, a paranoid Mengele believed that he was next and fled to Brazil. To permanently cover his tracks, he adopted the identity of an Austrian expat named Wolfgang Gerhard. Protected by a tight circle of Nazi sympathizers, the monstrous doctor lived out the rest of his days swimming and relaxing on sunny Brazilian beaches. He eventually drowned in 1979, having never faced justice for his grotesque atrocities.
Can you believe that these false identities actually worked? Let us know in the comments below!
