OTTAWA (Reuters)
John Warnock,
or Clarence Joyce Jr., or Wayne Hutchings -- or whoever he is --
was still in jail Thursday after criminal charges against him
were dropped because figuring out his real identity proved too
difficult.
The man with too many names -- charged as Randolph Stitt with
four counts of possessing a stolen credit card and one count of
obstructing police -- was kept behind bars because police
suspect he was a U.S. citizen who could be deported, Ottawa
police detective Paul Heagle told Reuters.
"He's a fat, strange type of guy," Heagle said.
After his arrest police found identification on him ranging from
drivers' licenses to hospital cards with 10 different names with
addresses from as far off as Australia and England.
Various birth dates made him as young as 42 and as old as 50,
Heagle said. Police became suspicious on March 12 when they
stopped him to ask for identification -- and he supplied two
cards with different names.
To prove the cards were stolen, prosecutors would have had to
show he was not actually any of those people, Heagle said, which
would have meant flying in witnesses from around the world to
testify he was not the person whose name was on the cards.
Credit cards found on him were under the name of Gerald
Demanenko, a dead man from Manitoba. "It's hard to prove in
court because you can't bring dead people back to testify they
didn't allow him to use their names," Heagle said.
The mystery man also used the names John Malishewski, Paul
Davis, Dean Oblin, Travis Bindernagel and Mike Johnston.
He will stay in custody awaiting a deportation hearing.
