Previous ‘missing’ men cases
Former Labour MP John Stonehouse left a pile of his clothes on Miami Beach on November 20 1974 to create the impression he had drowned while swimming.
But a month later, he was picked up by police in Melbourne, Australia, where he had gone to start a new life with his mistress and former secretary, Sheila Buckley.
Civil servant Thomas Osmond, 46, left a suicide note in March 1995 on the day he was due to stand trial for sexual offences.
He wrote that he was going to kill himself by jumping off a river bridge.
Detective Constable Ken Price never accepted Osmond had killed himself and, after searching for three years, traced him to Bristol where Osmond was working as a telesales clerk.
Osmond was later jailed for six years for sex offences involving young boys.
Karl Hackett, from Barking, Essex, pretended that he had died in the Paddington rail disaster so he could assume a new identity.
He was later given a suspended sentence of five months after a court heard that he had wasted more than 30 hours of police time with his hoax.
An investigation revealed how for nearly 20 years Hackett — who has previous convictions for indecent assault and a series of minor crimes — had been leading a double life, passing himself off as Lee Simm.
For his double identity, he used the forename of a friend and the surname of a former girlfriend.
