In a confession which Orton wrote and sold to a London newspaper[7] years after his release from prison in 1884, he gives an account of the origin of the fraud. He says that some time before Cubitt, of the missing-friends bureau, found him and induced him to write to Lady Tichborne, he and his chum at Wagga Wagga, one Slade, had seen some of the advertisements which the distraught lady was having published in antipodean newspapers. Orton soon adopted the pose of superior station, told Slade that he was, in fact, a nobleman incognito, and finally let his friends understand that he was Roger Tichborne. The whole thing had been begun in a spirit of innocent acting, for the purpose of noting the effect of such a revelation upon his friend. In view of what followed we cannot escape the conclusion that the swinishly fat butcher undertook this adventure because he was mentally disturbed, in the sense of being a pathological liar. A talent for impersonation and imposture is one of the marked characteristics displayed by this common type of mental defective, and Orton certainly possessed it, almost to the point of genius. [7] _The People_, 1898. Whatever the explanation of Orton’s original motive, the fact remains that his friend Slade was impressed by the butcher’s tale and thus encouraged Orton to proceed with the fraud, as did a lawyer to whom Orton-Castro was in debt. He soon went swaggering about, trying to talk like a gentleman and giving what must have been a most painful imitation of the manners of a lord. His rude neighbors can have had no better discrimination in such matters than the British public and Lady Tichborne herself, so it was not a difficult feat to play upon local credulity. In the last month of 1865, when Cubitt sent an agent to Wagga Wagga, as a result of his correspondence with Lady Tichborne, the legend of Orton’s identity as Roger Tichborne was already firmly established in the minds of his townspeople, and the rumor thus gained its initial confirmation. The reader is asked to remember that Orton was known as Castro, and that his identification as Orton was a difficult feat, which remained unperformed until the final trial, more than eight years later.