The American businessman who faked his own death in a plane crash has been found alive in Florida.

Marcus Schrenker, 38, who parachuted from his aircraft shortly before it went down, then fled on a motorbike, is in custody in Gadsden County, northern Florida.

The investment adviser from Indiana, whose personal and business life was in meltdown, disappeared on Sunday after radioing from his Piper Malibu that he was in trouble. His windshield had caved in, he said, and his face was plastered in blood.

Military jets scrambled to intercept the aircraft found the door open and the cockpit dark. It eventually crashed in the Florida panhandle, but there was no sign of Mr Schrenker.

More than 200 miles away in Alabama, police officers picked up a man, wet from the knees down and carrying pilot's goggles . His Indiana driver's licence was in the name of Marcus Schrenker, but the officers believed his claim that he had been in a canoeing accident, and drove him to a motel.

From there, he made his way to a storage unit where he had hidden a red motorcycle and he sped off into the countryside in what investigators say was a desperate attempt to escape a messy divorce and an investigation into his firm, which had been accused of a multimillion-dollar fraud.

Clients of his companies Heritage Wealth Management, Heritage Insurance Services and Icon Wealth Management had alleged that he had stolen millions of dollars of their savings given to him to invest for them.

Two days before he disappeared, Mr Schrenker had buried his adored stepfather and suffered a $500,00 (£340,000) loss in the federal court. The day before he got into his aircraft, his wife Michelle had filed for divorce, telling friends that he had been having an affair.

After his disappearance, Mr Schrenker e-mailed a neighbour, suggesting that the crash was an accident, and blamed oxygen deprivation for his decision to leave the plane. "Hypoxia can cause people to make terrible decisions and I simply put on my parachute and survival gear and bailed out," he wrote.

"I embarrassed my family for the last time," he added."By the time you read this I'll be gone."

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