What if you could leave everything in your life and start all over again?
"I just wanted it all to end. I wanted everything to end."
This is what Eric Myers, a wealthy real estate agent who had disappeared for nearly two decades, told ABC News in an extensive interview about his vanishing act in which he was missing for 16 years. Myers, a father of five, left a real estate seminar in San Diego on June 25, 1991 and never came back. At the time, he felt trapped by his Christian background and marriage that suppressed his sexuality.
"To live in a disguise is a horrible prison," said Myers.
ABC's 20/20 segment, "Escaped My Life: Runaway Family Man," details the shocking return of Myers in 2007 after he had spent much of his life in hiding living with his new husband. After he was robbed in California, Myers headed to Mexico, then to Palm Springs where he met a Canadian tourist, Sean Lung, whom he soon fell in love with. The two moved in together, adopted new identities and took odd jobs that didn't require paperwork.
At the time, police including officials in two states and a private investigator, kept hitting dead ends while trying to find him.
While Myers finally felt free from the constraints of his old life, his family back in Arizona was left devastated, traumatized in thinking that Myers was dead with no idea about his whereabouts. Myers was in fact declared legally dead in 1996.
"I cannot say anything to deny that it is the most selfish thing in the world," Eric Myers, 56, told the New York Daily News of abandoning his wife and kids. In 2007, Myers felt he needed to make peace with his parents, though he did realize his former wife and his children might never want to see him again.
His eldest daughter, 30-year old Kirsten Myers Ruggiano, has not spoken to her father since his return, as she thinks he is incapable of love.
"I know how much I love my children," Ruggiano, who was only 8-year old at the time that Myers vanished, told ABC News. "And if he loved me even half as much as I loved them, there would be no situation where he would ever think that it was okay to leave me."
"Most people grow up thinking that magic is an illusion, and that people can't disappear," Kirsten Myers Ruggiano, Myers' youngest daughter, told ABC News. "I grew up in a reality where people do disappear." Kristen turned to alcohol at the age of 11 to suppress the pain of her father's disappearance.
"I think probably because of my age - and because I was the youngest - I think it's safe to say I took it the hardest," she said.
Myers however, maintains that he has no regrets about returning from hiding after almsot two decades.
