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Arrested: banker who parachuted from plane in bid to fake his death
Ed Harris14 Jan 2009
AN investment banker and amateur pilot who apparently faked his own death in a plane crash before parachuting into hiding was today in custody in America.
Fresh details of Markus Schrenker's bizarre plot to bail out of his tangled business life emerged today. Police revealed the 38-year-old sped away after parachuting to safety from his company plane over Florida, using a motorcycle he had hidden in a remote pine forest.
Schrenker, whose distress call from 2,000 feet is now assumed to have been faked, is accused of taking millions of dollars from investors.
He was treated in hospital before being taken into custody last night. The banker was seized at a campsite in Quincy, Florida, with deep cuts on his wrist in an apparent suicide bid.
The three-day saga, which gripped the US and which police likened to the plot of a James Bond film, came to an end when authorities finally caught up with the fugitive investment consultant in the north of the state.
He was today in custody in a Gadsden County jail, Sheriff's Lieutenant Jim Corder said, and faces years of imprisonment if convicted of securities fraud. He had been due in court for a hearing in the case next week.
Schrenker was on the run not only from the law but from divorce, as well as a state investigation of his businesses - and angry investors who accuse him of stealing potentially millions in savings they entrusted to him. Charles Kinney, 49, an airline pilot from Atlanta who alleges Schrenker pocketed at least $135,000 of his parents' retirement fund, said: "We've learned over time that he's a pathological liar - you don't believe a single word that comes out of his mouth."
The events of the past few days appear to be a last, desperate gambit by a man who had fallen from great heights and was about to hit bottom. On Sunday - two days after burying his beloved stepfather and suffering a half-million-dollar loss in Federal Court - Schrenker was flying his single-engine Piper Malibu to Florida from his Indiana home when he radioed from 2,000 feet that he was in trouble. He said his windscreen had exploded. Then his radio went silent.
Military jets tried to intercept the plane and found the door mysteriously ajar and the cockpit dark. Reports today said the plane's controls had been set to autopilot. A man with Schrenker's identification apparently checked into a hotel in Alabama after the crash, telling police he had been in a canoeing accident. Investigators believe Schrenker's plan was to let the plane crash into the Gulf of Mexico but the plane ran out of fuel first.
