'Royal' student exposed as sex offender

A sex offender who claimed to be an English duke has been exposed by a nifty piece of high-school investigative journalism.

According to a police report, the 22-year-old imposter visited Stillwater Area High School in Minnesota three times, telling pupils he was 17 and that he was “Caspian James Chrichton Stuart IV, the Fifth Duke of Cleveland”.

“He was pretty quiet. But he seemed to talk with a little bit of an accent,” sophomore student Frank Carlson told KARE-TV. “I ended up hearing he was a duke from England that was visiting America,” said fellow sophomore Reid Gilbertson.

At the school newspaper, the budding young reporters thought that if “Caspian’s” story were true, it would make an interesting feature. Their research led them to a page on the youth website MySpace.com for the “Earl of Scooby”, where ”Caspian” said he was British and that his goal for the year was “to not make the front page of any paper”.

The student journalists eventually found “Caspian” on another website - Florida’s register of sex offenders.

It turned out that he was Joshua Gardner, 22, who was convicted of fourth-degree criminal sexual conduct in Winona County of Minnesota in 2003, KARE reported.

The Florida website said he was from Austin, Minnesota. His connection to Florida was not immediately clear.

Principal Chris Lennox told KARE-TV there was no indication that Gardner assaulted or seriously bothered anyone at the school.

But Gardner was booked into the Mower County Jail in Austin on Monday for allegedly breaking the terms of his parole by not always registering his changes of address, not observing restrictions on his internet access, not getting counselling and having unsupervised contact with minors.

KARE said his probation officer was recommending that Gardner go back to prison for 21 months, the part of his sentence suspended after he was convicted in 2003 of coercing his young girlfriend into having sex with him.