10 Insane Reasons People Faked Their Own Death

9. So He Could Run Off With His Mistress

The Rise And Fall Of Reginald Perrin is a British comedy classic, a sharp satire of contemporary seventies politics and culture adapted from a series of novels by David Nobbs.

The TV series managed to have an even greater lasting influence over popular culture than the books, thanks partly to the iconic final image of the first series where the titular hero - a long-suffering middle manager played by Leonard Rossiter - undresses and leaves all his worldly possessions on a beach, wandering into the ocean as he fakes his suicide to escape his horrible life, career and family.

Not only was this a delightfully dark end to a BBC sitcom but also drew on the real-life faked death of Labour politician Jon Stonehouse. A junior minister under Harold Wilson, Stonehouse faked his death on 20 November 1974 by dumping a load of clothes on a beach in Miami, so that people would assume he'd drowned or eaten by a kraken or something.

Which is what was presumed, when in fact he had run off to Australia to live with his mistress and secretary, Sheila Buckley. He was found out when police noticed a load of money being transferred out of his bank accounts and, six months later, he was dragged back to the UK and charged with 21 crimes including fraud, theft, forgery, conspiracy to defraud.

Then it turned out he was a double agent for the Czech communist government, as if there wasn't enough going on.