In order to tell you the following story I’m going to have to make an embarrassing admission: I LexisNexis myself every day. That is to say, I plug my own name into LexisNexis, the online cuttings service, to see if any stories have appeared about me in the past 24 hours. In terms of vanity, it is one up from Googling yourself since it includes sources — like the Evening Standard’s Londoner’s Diary — that are not picked up by Google. However, unlike Google, it is not free. Conducting a search does not cost anything, but if you want to read any of the ‘results’ you have to pay a charge of $1.50/article. The upshot is that I never hit the ‘purchase’ button unless I am completely satisfied that the article in question is about me and not some other ‘Toby Young’.
In the past, this daily trawl of the world’s newspapers and magazines has produced some strange results, but none as strange as the following headline from the Associated Press on 13 February 2006: ‘Man convicted in ’96 killing escapes from Lansing’.
Now, the ‘Toby Young’ featured in this story clearly was not me, so I decided not to stump up $1.50 to read the article. But my curiosity was piqued.
The following day’s search produced an even stranger headline: ‘Dog trainer accused of smuggling convicted murderer out of prison’. Then, two days later, my trawl threw up another pair of headlines, both about the same incident: ‘Dog trainer uses a crate to help inmate break out, authorities say’ and ‘Woman who drove inmate out of prison led seemingly normal life’.
What on earth was going on? Piecing the story together, it looked as though the ‘Toby Young’ who was the subject of these articles was a convicted murderer who had escaped from prison with the help of a love-struck dog trainer.
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