Liar, Liar (Part Two)

Charlie Ronce, dubbed 'Britain's Biggest Liar', is an accomplished fantasist, frequently adopting fake identities in order to gain access to the rich and famous. In 1989 the former bus driver successfully posed as a gynaecologist for three months at an exclusive London clinic and obtained photographs of Princess Diana’s fallopian tubes, which he tried to sell to the Daily Star. One of his earliest successes came in 1981, when a Dutch magazine paid him £250 for a story that Elvis Presley was alive and well and working in a transvestite bar in Brussels. The story was accompanied by several pictures purporting to show an overweight Elvis wearing a slinky red dress, black fishnet stockings and high heels. These later turned out to be photos of Ronce’s Uncle Walter, a former Elvis impersonator who was undergoing a sex change. Flushed with this success, Ronce set about concocting another elaborate showbiz lie, this time involving claims that Janis Joplin, Jimi Hendrix and Jim Morrison had been assassinated by the CIA. Posing as an ex-CIA agent living in exile in London, he succeeded in selling the story to an American scriptwriter. It later formed the basis of low-budget movie meister Larry Buchanan’s 1984 film Down on Us (described as “absolute shite” in the 1987 edition of Leonard Maltin’s Films on TV Guide).

Ronce followed up this success by selling a story to John Craven’s Newsround, which alleged that much-loved presenter of kiddies wildlife programmes Johnny Morris was actually a practising vivisectionist in his spare time. Elaborately faked film footage apparently showed Morris carving up furry animals for kicks. Posing as an undercover RSPCA investigator, Ronce told a Newsround reporter that Morris was using his position as a presenter to steal animals from zoos and wildlife parks for use in his distasteful hobby. Sensing a major exclusive which could rocket him into serious news-reporting, John Craven sanctioned the story. However, just before broadcast the hoax was uncovered and the story replaced by an item about a skateboarding mackerel. Ronce then proceeded to sell a similar story to Le Monde in Paris; this time claiming that actress and animal rights campaigner Brigitte Bardot was actually a keen amateur taxidermist - often “rescuing” animals from sanctuaries simply so she could mount and stuff them. Ronce alleged that she was about to buy a failing zoo in Lyons not, as she claimed, to save the animals and return them to the wild, but rather to gas them all before stuffing them. Again, the hoax was uncovered at the last minute and the story pulled, but not before Ronce had walked away with £2,000.

Although forced to flee overseas in the wake of the 1993 Cliff Richard scandal, Ronce returned to Britain in 1998, using a false passport and papers. Claiming to be one Ray “Big Boy” Skaggs, a former Able Seaman, he succeeded in convincing reporters from a broadsheet daily newspaper that he had been Prince Andrew’s gay lover during the Falklands war. When the paper presented Buckingham Palace with Skaggs’ lurid tales of sharing a hammock with Prince Andrew, and of being tossed off on the ocean wave, a major constitutional crisis ensued. However, suspicions were aroused when it was found that the Royal Navy had no trace of an Able Seaman Skaggs. Ronce once again vanished before the authorities could question him, several thousand pounds better off thanks to the newspaper. Whilst Ronce has yet to resurface, it can only be a matter of time before one his lies once again graces the front-page of a national newspaper.