New Lord Lucan suspect: 'I should be so lucky'

Glaring angrily across the fields at a neighbour's house, Roger Woodgate said: "It's them - they keep saying I'm Lord Lucan, and I'm not."

Scroll down for more...

New Zealand was alive with rumours yesterday that Mr Woodgate and the peer - who has been missing since 1974 after the murder of his children's nanny - are one and the same person.

"It's a load of old poppycock," said 62-year-old Mr Woodgate.

"For a start, I'm ten years younger than Lucan. I'm also five inches shorter. If anyone can see a likeness in me and him, I'm more than happy to let them dream on."

Scroll down for more...

Mr Woodgate, a former photographer from North London who once worked for the Ministry of Defence, says he emigrated to New Zealand five months before Lord Lucan disappeared.

Although he has a ramshackle house four miles from the North Island town of Marton, he prefers to sleep in his 1974 Land Rover, his only companion a possum called Redfern.

"This rumour is all due to a television company and a troublemaking neighbour who objects to my outdoors lifestyle," said Mr Woodgate.

"I'm just a friendly old Brit who wants to live out his days in peace and quiet."

A TV company is making a programme about nightmare neighbours and it is understood Mr Woodgate's neighbour had contacted them, claiming the Lucan connection. Other neighbours said he had an upper-class English accent and there were rumours he received money from 'property interests' in Britain.

Marton police said yesterday they had looked into Mr Woodgate's background and confirmed he had been born ten years after Lord Lucan. It is understood they have made checks with the immigration department.

"We're satisfied he is not Lord Lucan," said a spokesman.

Scroll down for more...

Since 1974, there have been countless 'sightings' of the earl. A month after his disappearance, an Englishman was arrested in Australia. He turned out to be runaway MP John Stonehouse.

In 1982, adventurer John Miller 'uncovered' a moustached man on a Caribbean island and falsely claimed he was Lucan.

In the early 1990s, a Briton living in Johannesburg - known as 'Jeff' - was wrongly named as the earl by a former member of the South African intelligence service.

In 2003 it was claimed that onetime Goa resident Barry Halpin - aka Jungly Barry - had been Lucan. In fact, he was a folk singer from Liverpool.