Bogus British Earl Really From Florida

A mystery detainee who allegedly created a bogus identity as an English nobleman by assuming the name of a dead baby is actually an American who went missing from Florida more than 20 years ago, relatives of the man say.

The man being held in a jail in Kent, England, goes by the title of the Earl of Buckingham, but he is really an Orlando native named Charles Stopford, his father Charles and sister Rebecca Davis say in a documentary that will be broadcast on Sky One television on Sunday.

Police in Kent declined to comment on the case.

The relatives said they saw photos of the fake lord on the Internet along with a story this week in The Times and concluded he is Stopford.

"When I first saw his photo, I cried and I was excited because I was 100 percent positive it was him," Davis said in a documentary excerpt aired Saturday.

She said she had believed that all these years Stopford was simply traveling around Europe. "I remember him saying that he loved the thought of traveling. He wanted to travel Europe."

The elder Stopford said he has no idea why his son suddenly vanished from Florida in 1983. He noted that his son had been convicted of possessing explosives after trying to blow up the car of his boss at a fast-food restaurant.

The Times reported that Stopford, who is in Elmley Prison, is believed to be a former member of a U.S. Navy intelligence unit. His real name is thought to be Charles Albert Stopford, known as Charlie, The Times reported.

British media have dubbed the man The Real Jackal, an allusion to Frederick Forsythe's novel "The Day of the Jackal," which made famous the trick of using information from a baby's tombstone to create an identity.

In this case the detainee was arrested in January of last year as he tried to enter Dover, England from Calais across the English Channel. Police ran a passport check and saw that the person with his name was supposed to be dead, The Times said.

He is alleged to have taken the name of Christopher Buckingham, who died in 1963 at the age of eight months, and used it to obtain documents to live as a British subject.

For the past decade he has been calling himself the Earl of Buckingham, a title that has been extinct for more than 300 years, The Times said.

The man served nine months in prison over the false passport incident but after completing the sentence has remained in jail because he refuses to reveal his true identity, the paper said.

He has two English children by a woman from whom he is now divorced, and all three are described as stupefied by news that he is not the man they thought he was.

Police are waiting for DNA confirmation, but in the meantime, the fake Earl still isn't talking, reports CBS News correspondent Larry Miller from London.