"John Hodgson " was the name used by a man who died after suffering a heart attack in his car, resulting in an accident. The actual John Hodgson had been deceased for years prior to the accident.
Case
Just before 1:00 PM on January 6, 2001, the man entered a shop in the Mall Of Georgia near Nordstrom, Georgia. He left the mall a short time later in his car, a silver Mercury Capri, in which he suffered a heart attack and drove a steep embankment, killing him.
Investigators found his wallet in the car, containing a driver's license with a photograph of the man, which indicated that the man's name was John Hodgson who resided in Washington D.C. However, numerous other identity documents were found in the car, including a death certificate in the car was of John Hodgson. Further investigation revealed that John Hodgson had died years prior to the accident.
More items were found in the car, items that investigators describe as, "weird stuff", such as 600 pesos, travel maps of Europe and other exotic locations, newspaper clippings of the Holocaust, and notebooks containing drawings of Nazi soldiers and the Swastika sign. It has been theorized that the man was not from the United States and possibly from Germany, with ties to World War II.
The license plate on the back of the car was found to have been registered to a John Hodgson with an address at Atlanta Mailboxes Etc. The box had gone unused for 9 months and it was never determined how he had obtained the car.
In 2015, the man's fingerprints were sent to the FBI and a few days later, the results came back, which revealed the man had been arrested four times over the years. He was first arrested in Jacksonville, Florida in 1951, and he told police he was a native Floridian. He would be arrested in Florida again in 1972 and 1982, and a final time in New York City in 1989. The offenses the man commited, including the names that he used were not released, however it was revealed that the man for the first 3 times of being arrested, he had used the same name. He had not used the name John Hodgson for any of his arrests.
Sources
- Gwinnett County John Doe at the Doe Network
- Gwinnett County John Doe at The GBI
- Gwinnett Daily Post