Lost at Sea: The Jon Ronson Mysteries

by Jon Ronson

  Who Killed Richard Cullen?

  (This story was published in the Guardian on July 16, 2005, two years before the global financial crash that began with the subprime mortgage crisis of July 2007.)

  It is a wet February day in a very smoky room in a terraced cottage in Trowbridge, Wiltshire. A portable TV in an alcove plays the news. Everything in here is quite old. No spending spree has taken place in this house. There are wedding and baby and school photographs scattered around. Six children, now all grown up, were raised here. There’s a framed child’s painting in the toilet, a picture of Wendy Cullen. It reads “Supergran.” When I phoned Wendy a week ago she said I was welcome to visit, “Just as long as you don’t mind cigarette smoke. I’m smoking myself to death here.”

  The “Congratulations! You have been pre-approved for a loan”–type junk mail is still pouring through their letter box. Wendy has just thrown another batch in the bin.

  “You know what the post is like,” she says.

  “I don’t get all that much credit-card junk mail,” I say. “I get some, I suppose, but not nearly as much as you do.”

  “Really?” says Wendy. “I assumed everyone was constantly bombarded.”

  “Not me,” I say.

  We both shrug as if to say, “That’s a mystery.”

  • • •

  IT WAS A MONTH AGO today that Wendy’s husband, Richard, committed suicide. It was the end of what had been an ordinary twenty-five-year marriage. They met when Wendy owned a B and B on the other side of Trowbridge. He turned up one day and rented a room. Richard had trained to be an electrical engineer but he ended up as a mechanic.

  “He loved repairing people’s cars,” Wendy says. Then she narrows her eyes at my line of questioning and makes me promise that I am not here to write “a slushy horrible mawky love story.”

  “I’m really not,” I say. So Wendy continues. Everything was normal until six years ago, when she needed an operation. “I couldn’t face the Royal United Hospital in Bath,” she says, “so I went private. I took out a four-thousand-pound loan.”

  She says she remembers a time when it was hard for people like them to get loans, but this was easy. Companies were practically throwing money at them.

  “Richard handled all the finances. He said, ‘I can get you one with nought percent interest and after six months we’ll switch you to another one.’”

  But then, a few months after the first operation, Wendy was diagnosed with breast cancer and Richard had to take six weeks off to drive her to radiotherapy. The bills needed paying and so, once again, he did that peculiarly modern British thing. He began signing up for credit cards, behaving like a company, thinking he could beat the lenders at their own game by cleverly rolling the debts over from account to account.

  There are currently eight million more credit cards in circulation in Britain than there are people: sixty-seven million credit cards, fifty-nine million people.

  He signed up with MINT: “Apply for your MINT Card. You’d need a seriously good reason not to. What’s stopping you?”

  And Frizzell: “A name you can trust.”

  And Barclaycard: “Wake up to a fresh start.”

  And Morgan Stanley: “Choose from our Flags of Great Britain range of card designs.”

  And American Express: “Go on, treat yourself.”

  And so on.

  Right now nobody knows how Richard Cullen’s shrewd acumen fell apart.

  “He wasn’t a man that talked a great deal,” says Wendy, “and he never, ever discussed finances with me.” But somehow it all spiraled out of control.

  Wendy first got the inkling that something was wrong just before Christmas 2004, when the debt-collection departments of various credit-card companies began phoning. Richard called them back out of his wife’s hearing.

  “You know how men will walk around with their mobiles,” says Wendy. “He used to go out into the garden.”

  She looks over to the garden behind the conservatory extension and says, “He was a very proud man. He must have been going through hell. They were very, very persistent. I don’t think he was even phoning them back in the end.”

  Finally, he admitted it to his wife. He said he didn’t seek out all of the twenty-two credit cards he had somehow ended up acquiring between 1998 and 2004. On many occasions they just arrived through the letter box in the form of “Congratulations! You have been pre-approved . . .” junk. He said he thought he owed about £30,000. There had been no spending spree, he said, no secret vices. He had just tied himself up in knots, using each card to pay off the interest and the charges on the others. The fog of late-payment fees and so on had somehow crept up and engulfed him. He got a pair of scissors from the kitchen and cut up ten credit cards in front of her.

  On January 10, 2005, Richard visited his ex-wife, Jennifer, who later told the police that he seemed “very quiet, like he’d retreated into himself, like his mind was gone.”

  She asked him how his weekend was. He replied, “Not very good.”

  Then he went missing for two days.

  “Nobody knows where he went,” says Wendy.

  On the morning of January 12, Wendy’s son Christopher looked in the garage. It was padlocked, so he broke in with a screwdriver. There was an old Vauxhall Nova covered with a sheet.

  “I don’t know why,” Christopher later told the police, “but I decided to look under the sheet.”

  Richard Cullen had gassed himself in his car. He left his wife a note: “I just can’t take this any more and you’ll be better off without me.”

  • • •

  WHO KILLED RICHARD CULLEN?

  For instance: Why did so many credit-card companies choose to swamp the Cullens with junk when they don’t swamp me? How did they even get their address? How can I even begin to find something complicated like that out?

  And then I have a brainstorm. I’ll devise an experiment. I’ll create a number of personas. Their surnames will all be Ronson, and they’ll all live at my address, but they’ll have different first names. Each Ronson will be poles apart, personality-wise. Each will have a unique set of hopes, desires, predilections, vices, and spending habits, reflected in the various mailing lists they’ll sign up for—from Porsche down to hard-core pornography. The one thing that’ll unite them is that they won’t be at all interested in credit cards. They will not seek loans or any financial services as they wander around, filling out lifestyle surveys and entering competitions and purchasing things by mail order. Whenever they’re invited to tick a box forbidding whichever company from passing their details to other companies, they’ll neglect to tick the box.

  Which, if any, of my personas will end up getting sent credit-card junk mail? Which personality type will be most attractive to the credit-card companies?

  I name my personas John, Paul, George, Ringo, Dave Dee, Dozy, Beaky, Mick, Titch, Willy, Biff, Happy, and Bernard. And I begin.

  HAPPY RONSON

  Happy is delightfully ethical. He cares about everything all the time. He has a surfeit of caring. He subscribes to the magazines Going Green, Natural Parenting, and Vegetarians International Voice for Animals. He shops at Ecozone and donates to PETA—People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals.

  “Happy! What a lovely name!” says the man in the Body Shop on Oxford Street as Happy fills out a Loyalty Card application form.

  “Thank you!” I say.

  Happy is happy for the Body Shop to pass his details to whoever they see fit. He doesn’t tick the box.

  Happy fills out many lifestyle surveys, like the one published by the International Fund for Animal Welfare that asks which animals he especially cares about. Happy especially cares about dogs, cats, elephants, gorillas, tigers, whales, seals, dolphins, and all other animals in distress from oil spills. So he ticks everything.

  Then I get worried that if anyone is really paying attention to Happy’s predilections, they might become wary of his wholesale compassion and suspect him of being
an imaginary character, created by a journalist, to trick businesses into inadvertently revealing their data-trafficking practices. So I untick tigers.

  PAUL RONSON

  I imagine Paul looks like the kind of guy you see in credit-card adverts, the kind of guy you used to see in cigarette adverts—staggeringly handsome and healthy, fooling around in swimming pools on sunny days with equally beautiful friends.

  Paul is an entrepreneur, a suave millionaire, the director of Paul Ronson Enterprises. Being a narcissistic aesthete who can’t bear being around ordinary people, he subscribes to Porsche Design (“Porsche: The Engineers of Purism”), Priority Pass (“The ultimate privilege for frequent travelers: Escape the crowds to a VIP oasis of calm. Your key to over 450 airport VIP lounges worldwide”), and so on.

  GEORGE RONSON

  George Ronson is a charming older gentleman. George orders from the Daily Express the CD set Sentimental Journey: “Take a sentimental journey with these 60 everlasting love songs on 4 fabulous CDs . . . Henry Mancini (‘Moon River’) * Glenn Miller (‘Moonlight Serenade’) * Perry Como (‘Don’t Let the Stars Get in Your Eyes’) . . .”

  “If you do not wish to receive offers from other companies carefully selected by us, please tick this box,” reads the tiniest of letters at the bottom of the order form.

  I imagine that George’s eyes still have quite the twinkle, but his eyesight isn’t what it once was. He is absentminded and cannot find his glasses, and so he doesn’t notice this infinitesimal print.

  For this reason, he doesn’t tick the box.

  George has also entered the Specsavers Spectacle Wearer of the Year competition (“Have You Got Specs Appeal? Our first-prize winner will be awarded a fantastic two-week all-inclusive holiday for two in the Maldives. Send a recent color photograph of yourself wearing specs to . . .”).

  I am, unlike George, an embittered cynic, ground down by the travails of life, and so I consequently wonder if this whole spectacle-wearing beauty pageant is an excuse for the company to gather our names and addresses for their database, and to sell them on to other databases.

  TITCH RONSON

  Titch is the least favorite of my personas. He is venal. He is a gullible sex maniac. He thinks about nothing but pornography, his virility, Nazi memorabilia, and extreme martial arts. Today Titch takes up an offer in the News of the World: “The original BLUE PILL. Something for the weekend, sir?”

  In this newspaper advert, a topless woman wearing a policeman’s helmet has a speech bubble that reads, “Allo, Allo, Allo. What have we here—is it a lethal weapon I see before me?” A warning covers her breasts: “IMPORTANT NOTICE. Some customers find the 100 mg Blue Pill we supply TOO EFFECTIVE. If this happens to you simply reduce usage to half a tablet.”

  I assume the Blue Pill is some kind of herbal Viagra. Titch is taken in hook, line and sinker, because he does in fact see his penis as a lethal weapon.

  He barely notices a tiny sentence at the bottom of the order form: “If you don’t wish to receive further mailings of exciting offers from us, or associated companies, please tick this box.”

  Titch spends his every waking hour seeking depraved gratification and is therefore tantalized by the promise of exciting offers, so he doesn’t tick the box. Then he reads the rest of the News of the World and is saddened to discover that Kate Moss has got back together with Peter Doherty.

  Titch also subscribes to Fighters Only, a magazine dedicated to photographs of frequently blood-splattered boxers, with captions like “Psycho Steve Tetley. Lightweight. Hyper aggressive. He’s called Psycho for a reason!”

  There is no end to Titch’s troubles. He’s also, I decide, a hopeless gambling addict, and has signed up to William Hill and the Loopy Lotto free daily Internet draw.

  Midway through my experiment I fill in a consumer lifestyle survey on Titch’s behalf, attached to a “Win a Day on a Playboy Shoot” competition. (“Get to hang out with girls like this in the flesh! There’ll be naked girls! It’s a once in an adulthood experience!”)

  The consumer-lifestyle survey is quite detailed, and so it gives me the opportunity to really flesh out Titch’s character and circumstances:

  Is Titch in employment?

  No. He is an unemployed, single, thirty-eight-year-old homeowner.

  His annual earnings are what?

  I tick the “less than £10,000” box.

  What are his annual outgoings?

  I think for a moment, then tick the “£10,000–£24,000” box. So every year Titch somehow manages to spend approximately £14,000 more than he earns. How frequently does Titch pay off his credit-card balance in full?

  Funny question, I think. Titch answers: Rarely.

  Then Titch tires of these relentless questions and instead scuttles away to order the PABO Sizzling Adult Mail Order Catalogue from their online sex shop. Titch, who thought he had seen it all, is startled by the voluminous choice on offer by PABO. Many of the items for sale involve pumps and studs and—mysteriously—“tracts” that even the grotesque Titch can’t picture aiding a sexual situation.

  I put all the things Titch subscribes to in an old picnic hamper, which I keep on a shelf in my office. Rifling through the contents of this picnic hamper is a disturbing experience. Red blood, pink flesh, green baize. Although I have to say that when I troop around the betting offices looking for loyalty schemes for Titch to add his name to, I always stop to play video roulette. It is terribly moreish.

  • • •

  EVERY MORNING for three weeks I walk the streets of London in the guise of one or other of my personas. I inevitably spend slightly less time being Titch because I find the prospect of being spotted slouching into sex shops incredibly embarrassing. But by the time three weeks are up, I believe I’ve been fair and signed each Ronson up to a similar number of lists. And then I wait.

  It takes three months for the first unsolicited-loan offer to arrive. And then, suddenly, I am bombarded. And which Ronson is inundated more than any other? Which Ronson receives the first and, in fact, all the credit-card junk mail?

  It’s Paul: the handsome, high-achieving, aesthetic, sagacious millionaire Paul. No, I’m joking. Paul doesn’t receive any credit-card junk mail at all.

  It’s Titch: stupid, superstitious, venal Titch.

  Titch has so far been offered loans by Ocean Finance, Shakespeare Finance, Blair Endersby, e-loanshop.com, TML Mortgage Solutions, loans.co.uk, and easy-loans.co.uk, and an MBNA Platinum card, and an American Express Red card.

  What—I wonder—is Titch’s most attractive personality trait for the lenders? Is it his sex addiction, his gambling addiction, his—surely not—interest in bare-knuckle boxing and Nazism? It has to be something. And then I find the culprits! They are in Shoreditch, East London. And they are called Loopy Lotto.

  • • •

  IN A SPLURGE of gambling addiction back in April, Titch signed up for the Loopy Lotto free daily Internet draw (top prize £1 million). I remember the occasion well because I had to pick six numbers for him, and so I became—on Titch’s behalf—a superstitious fool, choosing numbers that intuitively felt special to me. Last night, as I examined the e-mails offering Titch “up to £75,000 for almost any purpose” (loans.co.uk) and “We will consider all applications, no matter what your credit rating” (Ocean Finance), I noticed the small print explaining that they came via Loopy Lotto.

  And so I telephone them.

  Dan Bannister, the company’s director, sounds lovely and very surprised to hear from me. He says journalists usually have no interest in what people like him do, because it’s terribly boring. But I’m welcome to come over if I like.

  The whitewashed loft-style offices of Loopy Lotto could belong to an advertising agency or a TV production company. Boho-yuppies with wire-framed glasses beaver glamorously away as Dan and I sit in the lounge area.

  “Who is the average Loopy Lotto subscriber?” I ask him.

  “People who are looking for something for nothing and a
re into instant gratification,” Dan replies. “It’s not a massively upmarket list.”

  Dan says they have six hundred thousand registered players. I say one of them is Titch Ronson.

  I tell Dan about my experiment. I explain that my fancy, upmarket personas received no junk mail at all, yet Titch was bombarded, primarily through Loopy Lotto.

  Dan nods, pleased and unsurprised. He explains that Titch sounds classically, enticingly “subprime.”

  “Subprime is the golden egg,” Dan says. “If, as a direct marketer, you can identify subprime characteristics, you can do very well.”

  Dan says the vast majority of all junk mail—be it loans or otherwise—is directed at the subprime market: “The best thing you can tell a client is that you can accurately identify subprime individuals. Which is why, when people are asked to fill in lifestyle surveys, they’ll often see questions like ‘Have you ever experienced difficulty getting credit?’ or ‘Have you ever missed a mortgage payment?’ Those are the sorts of triggers that will identify you as potentially subprime. It’s valuable information.”

  It is slightly chilling to realize there are rational, functional people up there employed to spot, nurture, and exploit those down here among us who are irrational and can barely cope. If you want to know how stupid you’re perceived to be by the people up there, count the unsolicited junk mail you receive. If you get a lot, you’re perceived to be alluringly stupid.

  • • •

  THIS DOESN’T SOLVE the Richard Cullen mystery. In the weeks before his death, he insisted to his wife that there had been no secret vices, nothing like that at all. If that was true—if there was nothing Titch Ronson–like about him—why was he, in particular, bombarded?

  I have coffee at Portcullis House with the Labour MP Chris Bryant. He’s a member of the Treasury Select Committee, a group of MPs who are trying to investigate the credit-card industry.