His widow Martha explains how Toomey and Leonard served together in the U.S. Navy, stationed at a listening post in the Pacific where they monitored longwave radio transmissions. Most of what they heard was static, but at one point in 1988 (which coincides with the time Rousseau was stranded on the island), they picked up a signal of a human voice repeating the numbers over and over. After using the numbers to win a guessing jar game at a fair, Toomey experienced a steady stream of bad luck until he finally committed suicide by shotgun.