They headed east, and eventually stopped at Boulder, Colorado, in the foothills of the Rocky mountains, partly because Gil would never think to look for them there. “I’ve always lived on the coast as I liked to be near the ocean,” she says. “He would not expect me to go inland.” They had no ID, no references, no papers linking them to who they were. In the weeks that followed, they changed their names, faked documents, found jobs, a home and a school for the girls. Palmer terms it “do-it-yourself witness protection”: she was “one person one day, and the next someone else”.