Footballer Manti left 'startled' by call from dead girlfriend who never was

When star college footballer Manti Te'o received a phone call from his "dead girlfriend", he knew something was desperately wrong.

It was during an awards show presentation in Orlando, Florida, in December that the Notre Dame linebacker's mobile phone rang, displaying the number of Lennay Kekua, the girlfriend who he believed had died of leukaemia three months earlier.

When he answered, the voice on the other end was hers. And staggeringly, she told him that she was very much alive.

"He became startled, shocked," said Jack Swarbrick, director of athletics at the University of Notre Dame, of the baffling saga surrounding the golden child of college football who claims to have been the victim of a gobsmacking and cruel online hoax.