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Early one morning in late September computer hacker Bill Landreth pushed himself away from his IBM-PC computer-its screen glowing with an uncompleted sentence-and walked out the front door of a friend's home here.
He hasn't been seen or heard from since.
The authorities want him because he is "the Cracker," convicted in federal court in 1984 of breaking into some of the most secure computer systems in the United States, including GTE Telemail's electronic mail network where he peeped at NASA and Defense Department computer correspondence.
He was placed on three years' probation. Now his probation officer is wondering where he is.
His literary agent wants him because he is Bill Landreth the author, who has already cashed in on one successful book on computer hacking and who is overdue with the manuscript of a second computer book.
The Institute of Internal Auditors wants him because he's Bill Landreth the public speaker who was going to tell the group in a few months how to make their computer systems safer from people like him.
Susan and Gulliver Fourmyle want him because he is the oldest of their eight children. They haven't seen him since May, 1985, when they moved away from Poway, first to Alaska and then to Maui, where they now live.
And his friends want him because he is crazy Bill Landreth, IQ 163, who has pulled stunts like this before and "disappeared" into the night air-but never for more than a couple of weeks and surely never for 2 1/2 months. They're worried.
Some people think that Landreth, 21, has committed suicide. And there is clear evidence that he considered it-most notably in a rambling eight-page discourse that Landreth wrote during the summer.
The letter, typed into his computer, then printed out and left in his room for someone to discover, touched on the evolution of mankind, the prospects of man's immortality, the defeat of the aging process, nuclear war, communism versus capitalism, society's greed, the purpose of life, computers becoming more creative than man and- finally-suicide.
The last page reads:
"As I am writing this as of the moment, I am obviously not dead. I do, however, plan on being dead before any other humans read this....