Many are the excuses for not appearing in court, writes James Morton.

When my clients were at Old Street Magistrates’ Court, they would take one look at who was sitting and promptly vanish.

Half an hour later their mothers would appear with a spurious medical certificate.

It did them no good.

There was always a gaoler who would say, ‘saw him in the foyer at 10.15, sir’ and a warrant would be issued.

I don’t know who wrote these certificates. One read ‘his wife has just given birth to a pair of twins’.

My clients’ exploits never matched those of Johnny Martin, though.

He escaped from a work gang while serving a one-year sentence for failing to pay child support.

In 1979, when he was due to face a family court in South Carolina, a family member rang the court saying he had died following a bar brawl in Alabama.

Following a tipoff by an ex-wife, Martin was arrested in January 2006 around 150 miles away in Myrtle Beach, where he had been living under his own name for about 20 years.

Since his death he had remarried twice and had a third child.

The maintenance arrears now totalled more than $30,000, and there was also a charge of escaping from custody.

But even Martin was not in the class of the Iowa woman Kimberly Du, who faked her death in 2005 to avoid paying parking fines.

She wrote her own obituary, making it look like a page from the Des Moines Register website, and sent a letter to the judge (apparently written by her mother) saying she had died in a car crash.

The scheme unravelled when she was given another parking ticket a month after her death.

In 2006 she was sentenced to two years suspended and fined $500.

Deaths were not only faked for the purpose of avoiding court.

In 1916, Alfred Chapman killed off almost his entire family as a means of wringing some cash from his employer.

First, he told his employer that his son had died in hospital.

Then that his wife died and the money willed to the boy reverted to the eldest daughter, who had died of shock at her mother’s death.

Finally, his youngest daughter died after hearing of the death of a soldier brother in Malta.

His employer was so distressed he gave Chapman a wreath to put on his wife’s grave.

He took the flowers off and brought them home, telling his family they were table decorations from a dinner given by the firm.

He received three months’ hard labour.

James Morton is a writer and former criminal defence solicitor