Time to disappear

For Matthew Alan Sheppard, all of the anxiety, deception, and delusion converged in one moment on a crisp winter weekend in February 2008. From the outside, he hardly seemed like a man prepared to abandon everything. At 42, he’d been happily married for 10 years, with a 7-year-old daughter and a comfortable home in Searcy, Arkansas. An environmental health and safety manager for the electrical parts maker Eaton, he’d risen in three years from overseeing a plant in Searcy to covering more than 30 facilities throughout North and South America. A recent raise had pushed his salary close to six figures. To his coworkers and hunting buddies, he seemed an amiable guy with a flourishing career.To Sheppard, though, that same life felt like it was collapsing in on itself. With his promotion had come the stress of new responsibilities and frequent travel. He had been steadily putting on weight and now tipped the scale at more than 300 pounds. Financially he was beyond overextended. A gadget lover whose spending always seemed to exceed his income, he had begun shifting his personal expenses to his corporate credit card — first dinner and drinks, then a washer and dryer, then family vacations. In early February, when an Eaton official emailed to inquire about his expense reports, he felt everything closing in. He began devising a plan to escape.