A 200-something-pound Australian butcher convinced a grieving aristocrat's mother — and half of Victorian England — that he was her long-lost, once-slender son.
In 1854, Roger Tichborne, heir to an English baronetcy, disappeared when his ship sank off the coast of Brazil. He was presumed dead by everyone except his mother, Lady Tichborne, who refused to give up hope and placed advertisements in newspapers around the world for years, seeking any information about him.
In 1866, a butcher living in Wagga Wagga, Australia, named Thomas Castro answered one of her advertisements, claiming to be her missing son. He bore almost no physical resemblance to Roger — Roger had been slim and covered in distinctive tattoos, while Castro was enormously overweight with none of the tattoos — but Lady Tichborne accepted him anyway and began paying him an allowance.
The claimant moved to England, and after Lady Tichborne's death, launched a civil suit to formally claim the family title and fortune. The 1871–1872 trial, Tichborne v. Lushington, became a national sensation covered obsessively by the press, drawing enormous public sympathy for the claimant as an ordinary man being denied his birthright by the aristocracy.
The civil jury ultimately rejected his claim after evidence mounted that he was actually Arthur Orton, a butcher's son originally from London's East End who had spent years at sea and in Australia before reinventing himself. He was immediately arrested for perjury.
His 1873–1874 criminal trial ran even longer than the civil case and became the longest criminal trial in English history up to that point. His flamboyant defense lawyer, Edward Kenealy, tried to argue the whole case was an aristocratic conspiracy — a strategy so aggressive and unprofessional that Kenealy himself was disbarred once the trial ended.
The jury convicted the claimant, confirming he was Arthur Orton, and sentenced him to 14 years in prison. Kenealy, despite being disbarred, rode the public's sympathy for the case all the way into a seat in Parliament.
Released in 1884, Orton lived out the rest of his life in poverty. In 1895, he sold a signed confession admitting he was Arthur Orton to a newspaper for money — then publicly recanted the confession almost immediately after. He died destitute in 1898, and his coffin was allowed to bear the name 'Sir Roger Tichborne' anyway.