Charles Calthrop

Charles Calthrop matters because the manhunt’s most consequential apparent identification is also its final false lead: The Jackal has used Calthrop’s name, but the real Calthrop is elsewhere. His late appearance at his own flat, followed by a verified Scottish alibi, separates the living Englishman from the assassin and leaves the police confronting the question of who The Jackal actually was.

Identity and the investigation

At the outset, Claude Lebel is trying to identify a political contract killer without even a name and with only a poor description. He approaches senior police colleagues abroad cautiously: the request is not yet an official enquiry between forces, but the person sought, if he exists, must be a professional assassin with several political killings behind him. Lebel expects that description to narrow the field, since France has only one target likely to interest such a killer. Calthrop’s name enters the investigation not as an established identification but as part of the shifting identity under which the unknown assassin is believed to have travelled.

The discovery of Calthrop’s supposed transformation into Alexander Duggan makes that identity problem concrete. Comparing photographs, Lebel concludes that the man could add height with high-heeled shoes, lose several kilos, alter his eye colour with contact lenses, and change his hair with dye. The point is not merely that Duggan resembles Calthrop: the physical changes show how readily one person can be made to fit another name. Lebel therefore warns the investigators against assuming that a suspected disguise has been used only once.

A name within a moving timetable

Lebel’s central difficulty is that the assassin alone knows his timetable. The police have been investigating for seventy-two hours, but they cannot tell where in the planned sequence of events their intervention has occurred. They know the killer has learned that the plot is exposed in principle; they do not know how much of the plan remains to be carried out. Identifying him under a new name and locating him under that name might still allow them to catch him unaware.

The investigation’s reasoning about Calthrop and Duggan also turns on the assassin’s escape from Gap. Lebel suspects that paint bought there was used to transform the car before it was driven overnight toward Ussel. If enquiries confirm the purchase, he reasons, the man must have received a warning about the discovery of the Duggan identity and moved quickly before police could reach him or his car. The suspected leak may have come through the chain of operators and officials who relayed orders, or from an OAS agent within it; Lebel also suspects the assassin’s single clandestine contact, Valmy. The inference adds urgency but does not settle whether Calthrop himself is the fugitive: the name is one point in a trail that the killer can alter.

The suspected identities and the manhunt

As the investigation develops, Lebel treats disguise as an essential part of the assassin’s professional method. A killer able to avoid official suspicion despite a record of assignments must, in his view, have worked under false names and changed his appearance. When the authorities reconstruct the sequence, they describe three changes: from Calthrop to Duggan, from Duggan to Pastor Jensen, and from Jensen to Marty Schulberg. The names give the police a working chain, but each apparent identification also demonstrates how easily the trail can be displaced.

At a tense conference, Lebel stresses that The Jackal could already be in France, even in central Paris. The officials fear that the attempt might be imminent, while Colonel Rolland considers the possibility that the suspect has disposed of weapons and ammunition to return to his own police looking unconnected to the plot. Later, Lebel questions why the fugitive did not leave Gap immediately for Paris or promptly assume the Pastor Jensen identity. His answer is that the delay reflects a chosen day for the attack, not a lack of purpose. This timetable-based reasoning culminates in the police distributing details of Marty Schulberg, wanted for murder, and preparing to circulate a photograph.

The real Calthrop appears

The decisive separation comes only after The Jackal has been killed in Paris. Superintendent Thomas receives word that the assassin has been caught and asks an inspector to go to the flat associated with Calthrop. While the inspector is sorting through Calthrop’s belongings, a burly man enters, challenges the search, and identifies himself as Charles Calthrop, saying the flat is his. His arrival turns what had looked like a completed identification into a direct contradiction: the genuine Calthrop is alive, and the authorities have been examining his possessions after mistaking his name for the killer’s.

The police hold Calthrop for twenty-four hours. They release him only after three separate confirmations arrive from Paris that The Jackal is dead and five landlords in the far north of Sutherland County, Scotland, testify that Calthrop spent the preceding three weeks climbing and fishing, staying at their establishments. The number and independence of these witnesses matter: his innocence is not accepted simply because he says the assassin was someone else, but established against the timetable and movements attributed to the fugitive.

Exoneration and the unresolved identity

Calthrop’s clearance does not identify The Jackal. Instead, it exposes the gap at the centre of the case: if the assassin was not Calthrop, then the name that seemed to anchor the sequence was only another disguise. The next day, the Metropolitan Police Commissioner insists that the British Government cannot concede that the killer was English. The official account says the assassin posed as an Englishman using a falsely issued English passport, as well as posing as a Dane, an American, and a Frenchman with stolen passports and forged French papers. It confines the trace under the Duggan name to Gap, then declares the case closed.

That public closure sits beside Thomas’s unanswered question about the assassin’s real identity. Calthrop leaves as a free man, his Scottish travels confirmed, but his name remains embedded in the official story because it was one of the masks used to pursue the killer. His role is therefore less that of a suspect whose guilt or innocence drives the plot than of a living correction to the investigation’s chain of aliases: the apparent identity was convincing enough to organize a nationwide search, yet the man behind the name was never The Jackal.