Bounty of Captain John – credible but non-canon

Captain John sailed with the Rocks Pirates before anyone spoke of a Pirate King, and used the cover of Rocks D. Xebec's crew to build himself a private hoard he had no intention of ever sharing with anyone. Greed killed the man before the World Government ever got a chance to take an interest in him at all: his own crew, led by a man named Ganzui, murdered him to take his place — and the treasure vanished with him, never recovered since, actively hunted decades later by Buggy himself.

No portrait of the living man survives outside that same reanimated body — every image the story has ever actually shown of Captain John is, technically, already a corpse. His second existence outlasted his first one by a wide margin. Gecko Moria salvaged that corpse and reanimated it as a Zombie General at Thriller Bark, where the name Captain John resurfaced for an entire generation of readers who had no idea the man had ever actually lived at all. His Jiki Jiki no Mi, capable of bending entire magnetic fields at will, eventually resurfaced again decades later in Eustass Kid's own hands — with no source ever explaining how a Devil Fruit leaves a body that had already been dead for years.

A man killed by his own greed, resurrected as a zombie by an enemy he never once met alive, whose power resurfaces a generation later in a pirate born after his death: three separate lives, and not one official line for any of them.