Hartlepool - (Moronic Mess): Death-feigning canoe man John Darwin may have obtained a false passport by stealing the identity of a dead dog according to police sources today.
The ex-Wormwood Scrubs prison guard is thought to have searched veterinary records instead of the Home Office Births, Deaths & Marriages Bureau data banks to find a name for a new ID after maritime accident in 2002.
Police believe Darwin, 57, decided on the name Rusty Barney
- a pup born five months before him but who died five weeks after birth.
"This is just like the plotline of the film The Day Of The Jackal," Hartlepool Police sources commented today.
"And as everybody knows the jackal is a canine member of the scavenging coyote family - a description that fits Mr Darwin's fraudulent moneylaundering activities down to a T.
"We were initially suspicious about him early on in 2003 when an unidentified man walked into a Grimsby vet's practice and asked to be microchipped following an anti-rabies shot.
"He then used the paperwork together with a black and white photograph of himself with a long beard to obtain the passport."
Grimsby vet sources confirmed today that Rusty Barney was born on 1st April 1950 at his grandmother's kennel in Sunderland and died from enteritis at the city's Dog Pound.
Darwin will appear in court again this Friday to answer charges related to his deception.
