Man who faked his death to avoid prison gets prison

Nov. 19 (UPI) -- A Minnesota man trying to avoid a prison sentence for an $11.5 million insurance fraud decided to fake his own death, but he was found out and sentenced on Monday to 12 years and eight months in prison.

In May 2011, Travis Scott pleaded guilty to one count of wire fraud and one count of money laundering after filing a false insurance claim. As part of the claim, he received $9.5 million for losses and got another $1.9 million for business interruption.

In order to convince people he was dead, Scott ground up some of his teeth, extracted pints of his own blood and pulled out pieces of his hair. He combined all of those pieces together in a stocking cap and shot them with a shotgun. He left the cap in a canoe on Lake Mille Lacs in September 2011, along with a suicide note saying he had weighed himself down in case he didn’t die from the shotgun blast.

But Mille Lacs County Sheriff Bruce Lindgren wasn’t buying it.

“Treated seriously, the facts didn’t add up,” said Lindgren. “It became very evident very soon this is likely an individual who wants everyone to believe he died, and had gone through an extravagant effort to make us believe it. The likelihood that he had committed suicide was remote.”

After leaving the cap and note, Scott, 36, fled to Canada and was able to obtain the birth certificate of Paul Decker, a baby who had died at the age of 2. Scott acquired a driver’s license and was attempting to get a passport to travel to Australia or Belize when he was arrested for using fake prescriptions to get medicine.

Police figured out his true identity and discovered he was a wanted man.

In court on Monday, the judge also ruled that Scott was responsible for restitution of $11,517,772.20.

[Minneapolis StarTribune]