Famous imposters

Following a highly publicized week-long search, police caught Gerhartsreiter in Baltimore.

The 10 best impostors

A variety of circumstantial evidence linked Gerhartsreiter to the crime, and in he was convicted of first-degree murder and sentenced to 27 years to life in prison. Historians have estimated that some to 1, females masqueraded as men in order to do battle for the North or South.

• Io sto con i cani: Storie, segreti e consigli del più grande addrestratore di cani per il cinema (Italian Edition).
• Einfach Leben: Das große Buch der Spiritualität und Lebenskunst (German Edition)!
• The 10 best impostors | Culture | The Guardian.
• 10 Greatest Impostors Of The 20th Century - Listverse!

Among them was Edmonds, who was born in New Brunswick, Canada, in and fled her home as a teen to escape an arranged marriage. She eventually moved to America, where she dressed as a man and used the name Franklin Thompson in order to find work. Edmonds was employed as a traveling book salesman and living in Michigan when the war broke out. Feeling it was her duty, she enlisted in the 2nd Michigan Infantry. Entrance physicals for recruits were brief, and once a woman posing as a man was admitted to the army, she was aided in her ruse by things such as loose-fitting uniforms and the fact that troops often slept in their clothing.

Madhura Nagendra

As Franklin Thompson, Edmonds participated in a number of battles, including First Bull Run, Antietam and Fredericksburg, and served as a field nurse, mail carrier, and according to a popular memoir she wrote, a Union spy. After contracting malaria, she abandoned her regiment in rather than risk being found out as a woman by seeking treatment at a military hospital.

Following her recovery, Edmonds stopped pretending to be Franklin Thompson and, wearing traditional female clothing, worked as a nurse for the rest of the war. In , Sir Roger Tichborne, a member of an aristocratic British family, left South America on a ship that soon was lost at sea; he was presumed dead. Unfortunately, he turned out to be the only surgeon on the ship, and ended up performing more than sixteen major surgeries—with no formal training. All of his patients recovered.

George Dupre is an interesting case, in that his only real impersonation was of himself. However, the history he actually had and the history he claimed to have were so different that he inadvertently became one of the greatest Canadian war heroes in the years following WWII. After the war ended, Dupre began traveling across Canada as a public speaker, describing his missions as a spy for the Special Operations Executive, a legendary espionage organization sometimes referred to as the Ministry of Ungentlemanly Warfare.

Dupre wove intricate tales of life behind enemy lines in occupied Paris, working with the underground resistance to overthrow the Nazi Gestapo. He described his harrowing experience as a prisoner of the Gestapo undergoing weeks of physical and psychological torture yet refusing to divulge any information.

Except that none of it ever happened. With the fame from the book came testimonies from people who had actually served with Dupre in the war. The truth was, Dupre spent the entire war behind a desk in London. It turned out that Dupre had just embellished a few stories for fun, and somehow the entire thing spiraled out of control. Aside from the fame though, Dupre never benefited from the book deal and the public talks—he donated all his proceeds to Scouts Canada.

His biography was reclassified as fiction. Most of the impostors on this list got their start at a young age—few of them achieved notoriety before the age of twenty. David Hampton is now considered one of the youngest successful con artists and impersonators, and his story has since been adapted into the play and film Six Degrees of Separation.

In , at the age of nineteen, David Hampton tried to get into a Manhattan night club with a friend. Thus, an identity was born. Soon he began to target the wealthy citizens of Manhattan—including Calvin Klein and Gary Sinise, among others. Hampton would introduce himself as David Poitier , then make up a story about how he had been mugged and needed a place to stay until his father arrived the next day.

Christian Gerhartsreiter is a German who moved to the U. His plan worked—but not exactly in the normal sense. A mere eighteen years old with no money, no connections, and no legal visa to be in the States, he decided that the best thing to do would be to get married and obtain a green card through his wife.

She agreed to marry him, but the day after the wedding Christian skipped out on the honeymoon and pointed his compass towards California, where his true calling lay. His true calling, of course, was to become Clark Rockefeller—the faux multimillionaire social butterfly who spent the next two decades—from around to —claiming to be a member of the illustrious Rockefeller family. The plan worked exceedingly well until his wife Sandra Boss of 11 years we should add , began to get suspicious that he was not, in fact, a Rockefeller. And the rest, as they say, is history.

Sandra Boss discovered the lie, filed for divorce in , and left with their daughter.

The world's most famous imposters - Telegraph

As it turned out, he also killed a guy. Conway was a violent alcoholic, according to his son, and his impersonations were closer to fanatical delusions than any carefully calculated plan. Retrieved 4 April Retrieved August 15, Guardian News and Media Limited. Dunlap and Serge F. Kovalevski September 27, Retrieved September 27, Tania Head's story, as shared over the years with reporters, students, friends and hundreds of visitors to ground zero, was a remarkable account of both life and death.

A leading representative of Holocaust survivors in Spain has admitted to being "an impostor". Retrieved September 16, Scams and confidence tricks. Confidence trick Error account Shill Shyster Sucker list. Con artists Confidence tricks Criminal enterprises, gangs and syndicates Email scams Impostors In the media Film and television Literature Ponzi schemes. Retrieved from " https: Deception Impostors Lists of people by legal status. CS1 German-language sources de CS1 maint: Unfit url Articles with trivia sections from September All articles with unsourced statements Articles with unsourced statements from September Commons category link is on Wikidata Commons category link is on Wikidata using P