KEY POINTS:
Every time Bruce Dale went to a big rugby game in Christchurch, he felt it.
Anxiety. Anxiety as the television cameras panned across the crowd at the stadium. Would someone watching the game at home recognise him?
He felt the same anxiety in shopping malls.
Disappearing itself had been easy. He hadn't even grown a beard and it didn't feel as if the police, or his family, had really looked for him.
Adjusting to his new name - Michael Francis Peach - was difficult.
But he had a new job, a house, a business and love interest. He'd made friends, even though he didn't talk much about his past.
He certainly didn't miss his ex-wife - who was nearly 1000km away and believed he was dead. Dale wasn't that close to some of his siblings and never had many friends up north anyway.
He did miss his three kids terribly. His eldest daughter was now a teenager and his two boys would have grown. What did they look like?
After five years, some of the anxiety had faded. But it was still there, because Dale was not the man he claimed to be.
Bruce James Dale was last seen on November 6, 2002. That morning, he sent his grandmother some flowers for the anniversary of his grandfather's death.
He withdrew the last $4450 out of his ASB account and, looking dishevelled, went around to his mother-in-law and left $2450 in an envelope for estranged wife Sharon.
Dale's passport and a $1 million life insurance policy were laid out on a dresser at his Tuakau home with seven empty cans of Woodstock bourbon strewn about.
His car was deserted 25km away at Port Waikato's Sunset Beach, with more cans and his reading glasses inside.
He had problems. The seven-year marriage - his second - had ended unceremoniously that June after Sharon found out about an affair.
His debts ran into the thousands and he feared his money problems would see him end in jail - a prospect, he admitted to others at the time, that he could not handle. He was alarmed, too, that Sharon could be caught up in his troubles and she also would be put behind bars.
Details of his financial problems are covered by a suppression order.
Dale raised suicide as an option with Sharon, saying she could collect the $1.12 million in life insurance (there was an additional $120,000 mortgage policy), clear the debts and set up the boys and a daughter from his first marriage for life.
"You wouldn't have the balls," was her straight-talking response.
A police search at Port Waikato, including using the helicopter, found nothing. After a public appeal witnesses told of seeing a man fitting Dale's description looking sad and angry and walking off towards the rocks at the end of the beach.
It seemed like a perfect suicide.
And so it should have been: it had been five months in the planning since he took Michael Peach's identity.
Becoming Michael Peach was "a piece of piss," he would later say.
However, a suppression order continued at Dale's court appearance yesterday in Christchurch prevents the Weekend Herald revealing the method he used. Armed with his new name, Dale - or Peach as he was now calling himself - applied successfully for an IRD identity and number. He bought a Ford Laser under Peach's name and even parked it outside his Tuakau house.
He stashed a bike in the boot of his own car and used this to get away from the beach. It was almost his undoing, as a truckie's sighting of him riding wobbly back home was reported - and ignored - to police.
And with his last remaining $2000, he hit the road.
He got to Wellington but after a couple of hours found it was not to his liking.
So he took a ferry over Cook Strait and drove south to Christchurch - the city which was to become his new home.
Once he settled, Dale scanned the media, expecting to see reports about his disappearance and was surprised when nothing appeared, a source close to him says.
A joiner, he quickly got a job, and his first employer didn't look too much into his past, saying "joiners are bloody hard to come by".
He was in a bad state of mind, and at first it was "incredibly difficult" but he pushed on with his new life, the source says.
It was a key meeting with a fellow joiner, and the friendship and business which sprung from it, that would give him the leg up in Christchurch he needed.
The joiner and his wife became like a second family to him. He would eat at their home and attend birthday parties.
Without them, he admitted he would not have survived in Christchurch, the source said.
He began to meet people, got the business up and running, bought a house in the seaside suburb of New Brighton and found a new partner.
An associate said he would talk about Sharon all the time but as his ex, not his wife. Another said he found it strange how Dale never talked about his past. He had strong views, and seemed to know the best way to do things.
Michael Peach was up and away, but the secret life took its toll. When he was in shopping malls, he was always anxious he would be spotted by someone he knew.
At big rugby matches there was always the risk someone would spot him in the crowd on their television screens.
He even risked detection by travelling back to Auckland more than once for work.
As time went by, those anxieties waned, though he continued to miss his children terribly.
The children missed him more. The daughter was 11 when he disappeared, the boys 7 and 3.
A funeral service was held at Port Waikato.
They wrote letters and made boats and posted them out to sea.
His eldest son even built a grave for him behind their house and would sit beside it and talk to his father.
Sharon, on the DPB, was practical: in 2004 she applied for a court order to have him declared dead ahead of the usual seven-year waiting period so she could get the insurance money.
It outlined the circumstances, including affidavits about how much he supposedly loved the three children given as a reason he could not possibly be alive.
The declaration was issued - something Dale had not counted on in his plan.
So when he applied for a passport at the Department of Internal Affairs in January this year with a view to travelling to Australia, he did not consider the prospect he had already been found legally dead.
He thought at worst it would be the case of a missing person found.
So when police came to his door on January 28 this year, he had an idea what it was about - but not that he was "dead".
It was a knock on the door that broke the news at Sharon's house, too.
It was Auckland Anniversary Weekend. A female detective asked if she could speak to her, in private, about her ex-husband.
Sharon says she thought they had found some remains - but, no, it was him, alive and well.
She broke into tears, screaming: "What am I going to tell my kids?"
She had to tell them quickly: Dale was due to appear in court the next day and the story would break in the media.
Sharon called the daughter out to Pukekohe and sat the three of them down and said: "Your father isn't dead, he's alive."
The girl burst into tears, the youngest boy - not really old enough to recall the disappearance - was confused but placid, while the older boy went crazy with anger, running out of the house screaming and started throwing rocks.
There were also questions: the police "grilled" her about being in on the scam, her name even appeared on the charge sheets as a co-offender.
The name suppression order did little for Sharon in Pukekohe and her identity leaked out.
The talk there - and everywhere - was that she "had to be in on it", just like the case of British death-faker John Darwin that had just made headlines.
It was alleged that Darwin's wife Anne had let him live in their house and next-door without telling their children.
Sharon's response was to describe the funeral service: "Would I put my children through that if I was in on it too? Of course I wouldn't."
Headlines about the $1 million insurance payout led to people asking her for donations.
Sharon says the money has "gone". The first $121,681 policy was mortgage insurance and had to be used for that.
The $1 million policy had $300,000 divided evenly into trusts for the two boys and the daughter from his first marriage as according to his will. The remaining $700,000 mainly went towards a freehold home, debts to pay off, and a major legal bill from having him declared dead that also involved hiring private investigators.
Sharon says her modest weatherboard home "is certainly not a millionaire's house" and will be left to the three children when she dies.
She bought a washing machine and a dryer. A car, but not a brand new one. "It's easy to get rid of that much money."
Sharon, who has married again, says she had not heard a single word from the insurance company since Dale's reappearance.
The official police position now is that Sharon is innocent, "with no intent at all on her part".
DALE now joins a select list of "pseudocides" - the neologism for outed death-fakers.
Its unique nature means there is no charge for it. Officially he's committed fraud, but has not gained financially.
The sentence he gets in September will be a venture into the unknown.
He's caused some hurt: his teenage daughter; the boys who are aged 9 and 13 and define their family photos by the ones he's missed, and the betrayed Christchurch friends.
Dale's new partner has stood by him, as has a brother he deserted.
Sharon says Dale's deception is tantamount to "child abuse" and has called for a sentence of "a year for every year he was away".
He has seen Sharon once, across the courtroom.
He's written letters to the children from prison; bail conditions have since prevented him from contacting them. Sharon says he'll have a fight on his hands contacting the boys while under her guardianship.
Dale has ditched the Michael Peach persona and is comfortably calling himself Bruce again.
But as he knows, it is just a name. Bruce Dale, who built an existence as another man, now has to resurrect the life he didn't want.
DISAPPEARING ACTS
John Darwin
Englishman John Darwin walked into a police station in central London in December and declared "I think I am a missing person".
He'd last been seen going out on a canoe trip in 2000. Only an oar and the canoe's smashed remains were found.
It has since been alleged his wife Anne was in on the scam and Darwin had been secretly living in their house and next door. Darwin faces prison. His wife faces trial after pleading not guilty.
Harry Gordon
New Zealander Harry Gordon supposedly drowned in a boating accident in Australia in 2000 where police found two empty champagne bottles on the boat's deck.
He'd done it to claim a A$3.5 million ($4.4 million) life insurance policy - but his estranged wife, Sheila, received only A$25,000. Gordon came back to a new life and new love in New Zealand but was caught after Sheila tipped off the police five years later.
Gordon was sentenced to a year's jail, where he wrote How I Faked My Own Death. Sheila was also charged and received home detention.
John Stonehouse
A British Labour MP and minister under Prime Minister Harold Wilson, financial trouble led Stonehouse to assume the identity of a dead constituent in 1974.
He left a pile of clothes on a Miami beach and fled to Australia, hoping to set up a new life with his mistress and secretary. He was discovered after just a month by Australian police, who thought he was runaway aristocrat Lord Lucan. Stonehouse served four years of a seven-year sentence for fraud.
Ken Kesey
The US author of One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest faked his death in 1966 and fled to Mexico in an unsuccessful attempt to avoid imprisonment on marijuana charges.
He left his truck on a seaside cliff with the note "Ocean, Ocean I'll beat you in the end". He was arrested and sent to jail when returned to the United States eight months later.
