Man fakes death for over 20 years. Is living with new family in Florida

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Twenty-three years had passed since Linda Iseler had seen or heard from her husband. For more than a decade, the Indiana woman had assumed Richard Hoagland — who had mysteriously vanished after 11 years of marriage — was dead.

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After abandoning his family in 1993, Hoagland moved to Florida, where he constructed an entirely new existence from scratch. Police say he started by stealing the death certificate and adopting the identity of a man named Terry Jude Symansky — a fisherman who died in 1991. News about Hoagland’s arrest broke in July, but his ex-wife and the investigator who uncovered his true identity have spoken out on ABC’s “20/20.” “Using that death certificate, he applies for a birth certificate,” Cardillo told the ABC show. “He uses that birth certificate to get a driver’s license. Once he has that driver’s license, he starts establishing his name as Terry Symansky.”

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The truth began to surface when a nephew of the real Terry Symansky — who drowned in 1991 at the age of 33 — started an Ancestry.com family search, according to NBC affiliate WFLA. Knowing that his uncle was dead, the nephew was surprised to find someone with the same name living in Central Florida. “He looks up his real uncle Terry Symansky and realizes that he died in 1991, which the family knew,” Pasco County Sheriff Chris Nocco told the station. “He then starts scrolling down the page and sees more details that Terry Symanksy was remarried in 1995. He owns property in Pasco County, Florida.”

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