Great American Imposter Tells All

July 27, 2006 — -- In the history of con artists, hoaxers and imposters, Christopher Buckingham, aka "the Great American Imposter," is one of the most successful on record.

The threat of a jail sentence has done nothing to shake him out of character.

ABC News' "20/20" spoke exclusively with Buckingham to find out who he really was and what had made him weave a web of lies.

For more than half of his life, he allowed the people around him to believe he possessed an elite British education.

He said he went to Harrow, the same school Sir Winston Churchill attended, and the hallowed colleges of Cambridge University.

He took on the upper-class accent of a British aristocrat, saying he was a nobleman. Even his children and wife believed the story he spun that both of his parents were dead.

Now, he tells "20/20" that none of it was true.

He says he never went to Harrow or Cambridge. He doesn't carry the title of Lord Buckingham.

His father was not a diplomat in Egypt. His parents were not killed in an air crash. He wasn't an only child -- he was the eldest of nine children.

Maintaining a Life of Lies

Until recently, the imposter had sustained his deception perfectly, but a routine check last year on the French-English border set in motion the unraveling of his deceit.

The man who checked in, on a ferry crossing from Calais to Dover, said his name was Christopher Buckingham.

"I rolled up to the checkpoint in France, and, of course, they're immigration officials stationed on the French soil, who check British passports, and they just said my passport was of interest," Buckingham said.

Immigration officials were stunned. They found only one Christopher Edward Buckingham who had been born on Christmas Eve 1962.

According to records at the national registry of births, deaths and marriages in London, he had died when he was a baby, just eight months later.

Yet, this man insisted he was Lord Christopher Buckingham, a 42-year-old British citizen, computer consultant, and father of two.

Dave Sprigg had been a detective for more than 30 years. He knew the man was lying. He just didn't know why.

In his police interview, Buckingham said his father was in the diplomatic service.

Of course, the problem was that the authorities might find his parents.

"He told me that his father was a diplomat, Lord Edward Buckingham, and who had been killed in a large airplane crash in Egypt in 1982, along with his mother," Sprigg said.

Buckingham says he picked Egypt because he thought it would be "convincing."

"The records wouldn't be spot on. In actual fact, there might not be any. There might not be any investigation, knowing Egypt at the time, and that was, that was the main reason."

The ruse worked, just as it had for more than 20 years. Sprigg was befuddled and perplexed. Every question had an answer; every answer led nowhere.

When the detective started digging into Buckingham's past, he didn't seem to have one. Until he started using the name Christopher Buckingham, it was as if he had never existed.

Sprigg says they couldn't find anything under that name.

"No school records. No doctors' records. No dental records." Then, Sprigg confronted Buckingham with the birth and death certificates for the dead baby.

Ten months after being stopped at the border, Buckingham appeared in court and pleaded guilty to falsifying his passport. He was given a 22-month jail sentence, but he was released early.

Finding the Fake Identity

The one question that has not been answered yet is how he managed to get this identity in the first place.

Sprigg guessed that Buckingham had obtained the dead baby's name from his headstone. "We actually went down to the cemetery where Christopher's buried, and he has no headstone," Sprigg said.

Whoever Buckingham really was, he had taken a dead baby's identity and had been using it for 23 years.

Buckingham's strategy was planned in carefully organized stages. He began with a visit to London's archive of births, deaths and marriages.

"You go to the section of shelves that have the year that you want to be born in, and you open it up and you start looking," he said.

"Once you are satisfied that you have a name. … See if there is a corresponding entry in the books that have the deaths."

He settled on Christopher Buckingham -- a child born at the end of 1962, who had died just eight months later in 1963 -- the same year the imposter was born.

"There was a very, very short time between birth and death," Buckingham said. "There would be very little registration, if any registration, with doctors. There would be no state documents… A clean state."

Next step: He used the birth certificate to secure the British equivalent of a Social Security number that allows British citizens to work and a National Health Card that provides health care.

He says he never had to use that birth certificate to obtain those cards.

"It's like the food chain. You have to use the smaller documents to create the bigger documents, and those bigger documents then create even larger documents," he said.

He added, "It is all a matter of, of building up information about your image, your facial image with a particular name. Dentist records -- they, of course, take X-rays and mark on teeth charts, cavities and things like that, and you can use that as identification."

So now, Buckingham was a fully functioning, tax-registered citizen of the United Kingdom with a National Insurance number and a health card system number.

With all these identity documents in his possession, Buckingham was ready for his biggest coup, a full British passport.

Buckingham says that it was easy to do the first time and that he could do it again today, "mainly because nothing's changed."

Starting a Family Under Guise

In 1984, the imposter -- now fully immersed in his fake identity as British Lord Buckingham -- was in West Germany where he met Jody, a 19-year-old student from Canada.

Within six months, they were planning their wedding. Christopher and Jody had two children, Lyndsey and Edward, who grew up believing the lie, too.

When Buckingham went to jail, his daughter wrote a letter to him, saying, "I still feel love towards you, but also a lot of anger and disappointment, because you still outrightly refuse to say who you are, even to your own children."

It was Buckingham's daughter who put the pieces together and found her father's real family.

Lyndsey says she opened her MySpace.com account and found an e-mail that said, "I know your father, he's my brother, I'm a hundred percent serious, please contact me."

The man who e-mailed her had a portrait of her father's brothers and sisters with her dad stuck in the middle of the photo. That e-mail solved the mystery of her father's identity.

Identity Found

Buckingham, the fake British lord, was actually Charles Albert Stopford.

He was an American, born in Orlando, Fla., the son of an assistant Methodist minister. As a small boy, he loved playacting.

Two childhood events may help offer an explanation as to why Stopford abandoned the life he knew.

First, while in his late teens, Stopford's parents divorced.

The story of his mother facing homelessness with nine children made the local papers. Deeply humiliated by his parents' divorce, Stopford didn't show up for the picture. He soon left home.

Second, he had always been a mischievous practical joker, but one night he pushed his luck too far.

He was angry when a local Burger King manager fired his friends, so Stopford blew up the man's car with a pipe bomb. Stopford was arrested, jailed, sentenced, and put on probation.

Could these events have contributed to his disappearance?

Buckingham says the events probably did.

"If you have a lot of things that are, are still troubling you. If there are still bad experiences associated with an area or maybe even a group of people."

Soon after the Burger King bombing, Stopford left for Europe where he completed his transformation from working-class Florida boy to upper-class British lord. His Florida family heard nothing from him for 23 years.

Stopford now says that most of his childhood memories are gone because of a life-threatening event that happened four years ago.

His appearance -- and, he says, his memory -- changed completely when he was involved in a car crash that was so bad, he was pronounced dead at the scene.

Finally, this story of deceit, lies, and more than 23 years of wondering what happened to Stopford is over.

Stopford, who still insists on being called Christopher Buckingham, returns to his childhood home this week, to a family waiting with open arms.