Fake English Lord's Identity Revealed

July 10, 2006 — -- Many of us dream of living a different life -- a life of great wealth, the best education and higher status in society.

One American made the transition almost overnight.

He simply told people that he was a British aristocrat -- a Lord of the Manor -- who had inherited the title from his father who, he said, was a former diplomat.

A routine border check set in motion the unraveling of more than 20 years of deceit.

A man holding a suspicious passport was detained in Calais, France, in January 2005. When the man passed through immigration, he said his name was "Christopher Buckingham."

But immigration officials found out only one Christopher Edward Buckingham, born on Christmas Eve 1962. According to police records, that Buckingham died when he was a baby.

In this age of terrorism, the discovery put the border guards on high alert.

Even stranger, the man claimed to be a British lord, but there was no current record of any Buckingham with that title. The last Lord Buckingham died over 100 years ago, and the title became extinct.

Under questioning, the man continued to insist he was Christopher Buckingham, a 42-year-old British citizen, computer consultant and father of two.

"It's all a very good cover. It could be a very good cover for a con man. It could be a very good cover for somebody that's mentally ill. It could be a very good cover for somebody whose sinister motives have yet to be uncovered," said Prof. Anthony Glees, an intelligence and security specialist.

Sleeping With a Stranger

Dave Sprigg, the former Kent, England, chief of police and a detective for more than 30 years, said he knew the man was lying but didn't know why.

The man's background story was full of holes, and the detective thought his accent could provide a clue.

"I don't think for a moment that he's British. I definitely think he's a foreigner," Sprigg said.

It was Sprigg's last case before retirement and he was determined to solve it.

He tracked down the man's ex-wife in Northampton, England. The couple was together for 12 years and had two children together, Lyndsey and Edward, before their marriage ended in divorce.

Yet the man's ex-wife, Jody, who didn't want her full name used, said he was just as mysterious to her.

When Sprigg told Jody that her ex-husband was impersonating someone else, she says the news "blew me out of the water."

"I can understand an individual wanting to run away from their past," she said. "What I find really really difficult was him... just becoming this whole different person... applying for a passport and then keeping your family and your wife in the dark.

"I feel incredibly stupid, really incredibly stupid that somehow I could not have put all of these things together."

There's an event in Buckingham's history that helps solve the mystery. Back in June 1983, a man walked into a London job center and asked for the British version of his social security number.

The following year, the same man turned up in West Germany and met 19-year-old Jody, a student from Canada.

She recalled her first impressions of him. "I thought he was quite cute. He was very tanned, he was very blonde at the time and he was generally quite a pleasant person," Jody said.

Soon he became Jody's first steady boyfriend. Christopher Buckingham seemed like a good catch: handsome, educated and the inheritor of a title, Lord Buckingham.

Buckingham specifically targeted Jody, according to Raj Persaud, psychiatrist at the Bethlem Royal and Maudsley Hospitals.

"He was looking for some specific things. First of all she's a relatively isolated individual, she was quite far away from her home, she didn't have many friends or family around her," Persaud said.

Within six months of meeting, Christopher and Jody began planning their wedding.

Could He Be a German Spy?

The couple settled in Northampton and had two children, Lyndsey and Edward. Buckingham said he specialized in security systems, a career that took him away from his family for long periods.

Even after she and Buckingham had kids together, Jody still hadn't met a single member of her husband's family.

And the outrageous claims kept coming to friends and family: his father was a foreign diplomat in Egypt; his parents had died in a plane crash; he attended Cambridge; he was sitting on a fortune.

"It requires a certain arrogance to assume you can pull the wool over everyone's eyes that you're going to meet from now on, for the next few decades," Persaud said. "You must have a strong sense of superiority that you can do that. And you must have a certain contempt for people around you."

In 1997, the year after Jody and Chris split up, Buckingham disappeared altogether. His daughter Lyndsey, who was 11 years old then, missed him greatly.

"I'd call him, I think it was every day for the whole year, and he wouldn't pick up his phone and he wouldn't, he wouldn't call us or anything," Lyndsey said. "I just didn't understand why he wouldn't return the calls."

With the mystery no closer to being solved and the police out of leads, Lyndsey Buckingham decided to become her own private investigator. She figured it wasn't only her dad's identity in question, but her own.

So Lyndsey went to the post office to gain access to her father's mail box -- where she gathered her first clues.

Lyndsey says she found mail addressed to Lord Buckingham, but also another name: Alexei Romanoff. "That's the first I've ever seen of that name," she said.

Lyndsey says she found a passport application, German study cards, and a gun -- James Bond's weapon of choice, an air pistol, a replica Walther PBK.

A number of clues suggested that Buckingham could be a spy. Secret agents and spies were everywhere, many of them planted by the East German secret police, the Stasi.

Intelligence and security specialist Anthony Glees says in the early 1980s, the Stasi were extremely active. "The Stasi were past masters at identity change and identity theft," said Glees. "The man who fell to earth, it would be like that."

Even his own daughter, Lyndsey, wondered if he could be a spy. She said he had all the "gadgets" and cameras mounted outside his house, as if someone were after him.

"He wouldn't answer the door. He wouldn't answer the phone. He'd have his curtains drawn all the time," she said. "I would say he's an incredibly paranoid person."

Another Life in America

When Buckingham appeared in court in November 2005 to face charges of passport fraud, he refused to reveal his identity. He was sentenced to 22 months in prison.

Meanwhile, a bigger clue came to Lyndsey in an e-mail, which read: "I know your father, he's my brother ... I'm a hundred percent serious, please contact me."

Attached to the e-mail there was a decade-old portrait of a family with her father in the middle of the photo.

Christopher Buckingham, the fake British lord, is actually Charles Albert Stopford, an American born in Orlando, Fla., the first of nine children. As small boy, he loved play-acting -- a way to escape the world around him.

From his earliest years, Charles was learning the skills of an imposter, acquiring a convincing British accent listening to the Beatles and watching Monty Python's Flying Circus.

"Anything my brother did, he performed, did it well," said Eric Stopford, Charles Stopford's estranged brother. "He could sell, you know, ice water to somebody in Alaska. You know? He was very convincing about what he did."

Persaud says that because Charles Stopford was from such a large family, he may have suffered emotional neglect from his busy parents.

"As a result, he might have ended up feeling bad about himself," Persaud said. "The need for attention leads him to decide, maybe if I was a different person I can solve the problem of not being someone I like and I can also therefore solve the problem of getting some kind of attention, so maybe that's why he becomes an imposter."

When Lyndsey found out she had many more relatives in America, she and her brother Edward traveled to Florida to visit to Stopfords. They met their father's real mother, Barbara McKay, and they found they had 23 new cousins, two aunts and six uncles.

The meeting finally provided clarity for the Buckingham family and the Stopfords after so many years of deceit and uncertainty.

After the trip to visit the Stopfords in Florida, Lyndsey surmised that her father just got into a web of lies, and he loved the family too much to tell them that he had lied.

"We are a forgiving bunch," she said. "Nobody is perfect. We just want to forgive him and start fresh."

Stopford Recalls Little of Buckingham Identity

British authorities are preparing to deport Charles Stopford back to America. He says he's lost his memory since a car accident in 2002 that left him near dead, and he can't remember much about his former life.

At the end of it all, the prodigal son has returned without any recriminations, even from the daughter he betrayed.

Given the families response, maybe now for the first time in decades, he'll be able to be himself -- plain, old Charlie Stopford.

Perhaps, he'll learn one simple lesson -- that what you already have is often much better than what you dream of.