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Here's Why Tim Dog Might Have Faked His Own Death

The only thing that we know for certain is that Blair was actively engaged in criminal activity shortly before his death, and with the heat seemingly coming down upon him, he had a motive to disappear.

Update: Tim Dog is dead.

If you’re unfamiliar with the increasingly odd tale of Tim Dog, let’s all get caught up to speed. On Valentine’s Day of this year, Tim Dog—the rapper whose song “Fuck Compton” provided the spark that lit the fire of the East Coast/West Coast rap feud and had remained a connoisseur’s choice for years—died. Except, maybe he didn’t. A Mississippi woman by the name of Esther Pilgrim alleged that Tim Dog, otherwise known as Timothy Blair, was faking his death in part to get out of paying her a $19,000 debt he incurred as part of his parole on a grand larceny conviction for swindling Pilgrim and many other women out of their savings. His scamming was outlined in detail in an NBC Dateline special which you can find on YouTube here. A court had ordered him to pay her back at a rate of at least $100 per month over a span of five years. If Tim Dog is indeed found to be alive, he’ll be arrested for violating the terms of his probation.

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But that won’t necessarily happen, because there’s still a pretty good chance that Tim Dog is deceased. For one, faking one’s death is an intensely fantastical act, and plain common sense suggests if it seems like Tim Dog died, that's probably what happened. He could have died out of his home state of Georgia or even out of the country, which would make producing a death certificate significantly more difficult. However, I spoke with Tim Blair’s father over the phone, and he said—with justifiable ire that a member of the press was contacting him—that his son died of a stroke, and that there’s a death certificate on file in the State of Georgia.

I placed calls to the Fulton County coroner’s office as well as the Fulton County Office of the Medical Examiner asking if their records showed that a Timothy Blair had passed through their offices. They did not. Esther Pilgrim and I have been in close contact, and she gave me Tim Blair’s Social Security Number, which I verified through the Lexis Nexis database, then ran through their database of death records. I found nothing.

Steven Jubera, the D.A. who issued the warrant, spoke with me regarding this matter over the phone. “There’s a lot of weird speculation that may or may not be based off of facts,” he told me. As for a death certificate, he said, “We don’t have one. We requested one from the State of Georgia and have not received one,” later adding, “If someone produces a valid death certificate, I’ll file a motion with the court to close the case.”

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While there might be a warrant out for his arrest, it’s not like there’s a dramatic manhunt for Tim Dog or anything. Jubera explained to me that something called a “bench warrant” has been issued for Blair’s arrest, which means that if a police officer were to find Blair and run his information, they’d find that he had violated his parole and he’d get sent to Mississippi, where he’d have to explain himself to a judge.

Whether or not a death certificate eventually turns up, it’s certain that in the months before his death, Timothy Blair had found himself in a situation that would make a disappearance advantageous. Despite owing Pilgrim $19,000, Blair had been making the minimum monthly payments ($100) for over a year after an initial payment to Pilgrim of roughly $1,300, which meant that he had four years to pay back a not insignificant $16,500 sum.

Meanwhile, it seems that Blair hadn’t knocked off with the dubious business practices. He assumed the name Tim Williams, and had moved his efforts to the Dominican Republic. Last year, he attempted to set up an import/export business called Diva Lifestyle that was to be a hybrid of a social network and an online catalogue. In other words, it was a pyramid scheme. Pilgrim put me in touch with a woman who Blair contacted on Hi5, a social network that’s popular in the Dominican Republic. Blair and the woman bonded quickly, as she hailed from Mannheim, Germany, a town that Blair had spent time in during a marriage to a German woman. Within days of contacting her, Blair had already offered the woman a job with the company.

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A flier for Diva Lifestyle

“He asked for a partnership,” the German woman said, speaking under the condition of anonymity. “He wanted me to work as a general manager for the company with a big salary. He asked me about my credibility. I said ‘I’m not putting my name on anything.’ And he said, ‘No, but if you’re gonna be a partner…’ and I said, ‘This isn’t for me. I’ll be paid for working that’s it.’ He got a bit upset.” The woman, an ex-police officer, soon realized that Diva Lifestyle, as well as Tim Williams himself, weren’t what Tim Dog had made them out to be.

My source provided me with official Diva Lifestyle literature, which suggested that Tim Dog’s scam worked like this: He would meet people over various social networks—Tagged and Hi5, mostly—and offered them membership to the Diva Lifestyle sales organization. Memberships were tiered, and the more you paid, the more imaginary stuff you could do and the more imaginary money you could make. I say imaginary because the point of Diva Lifestyle wasn’t to sell luxury goods over the Internet, it was to get more people to sign up for Diva Lifestyle and pay the membership fees. The Diva Lifestyle seminar script stresses misdirection and the collection of membership fees, and includes the command, “Make (the audience) believe that the DIVA Lifestyle is what EVERYBODY wants!!”

Speaking through a translator, Christopher Martinez—a former Diva Lifestyle employee who quit his job to work for Tim Dog—told me that Blair had been periodically visiting the Dominican Republic, registering members for Diva Lifestyle who he’d met online. The member database (which we now have a copy of) had about 100 members, but the copy we looked at indicated that only one member had paid their fee. This is because Tim Dog’s employees were on to him.

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Tim Dog had transacted a Western Union money transfer under the name of Tim Blair, which his German associate noticed. She googled his name, and found that he was a convicted felon. Then she realized the company car Blair had given her had been stolen from Alexandra Gil, another woman Tim had met online. She returned the car to the police and contacted a friend named Julio Torres in the United States, who got in touch with the producer of the original NBC Dateline segment that had exposed Tim Dog as a rapper turned con artist. Speaking to me on the phone, Torres said, “We tried to set him up. He was playing along, and we were trying to reverse the script,” attempting to sting Tim Dog under the guise of staging a second Dateline special. “He was playing along, it was working.” This was around October of last year. Unfortunately the sting didn’t work out. Before Tim Dog could technically break the law, he dropped off the face of the earth.

The last time Blair’s German associate spoke to him was in October of 2012, when he was headed back to the United States where he still lived. “I said, ‘You didn’t say goodbye,’” she said to him. “He was already at the airport, and he said, ‘Why should I say goodbye if I’m going to see you again?’” That’s when he disappeared on her, and Diva Lifestyle was no more.

In January of this year, Timothy Blair sent Esther Pilgrim the final $100 she’d be receiving from him. The money arrived in early February. On February 14th, Timothy Blair reportedly died. It's also completely feasible that Tim Dog died while on the run from those he jilted in the Dominican Republic, and no one's found his death certificate because he didn't die in Fulton County, or even Georgia for that matter. Indeed, Martinez told me that Blair did indeed seem very sick during their interactions together, and Blair’s father maintains that he’s deceased.

The only thing that we know for certain is that Blair was actively engaged in criminal activity shortly before his death, and with the heat seemingly coming down upon him, he had a motive to disappear. “He was very organized, and very organized about the way he went about his business. If someone could fake his death, he’d do it,” his former associate said. At this point, the only way we can truly know what happened to Tim Dog is if a death certificate is produced, or if Tim Dog contacts us. It’s a weird situation, and the way it’s going, things might get even weirder.

If you have any information on Tim Dog, email me at

Additional reporting by Gabriel Herrera.

Drew Millard is an editor at Noisey. He's on Twitter - @drewmillard