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CHAPTER 1

The 'Spy' who Duped them

It is hard to believe that anyone could allow a chance encounter with a total stranger to turn their lives into a humiliating charade of fear, exploitation and degradation. But that is exactly what happened to the victims of Robert Hendy-Freegard. The former barman met people seeking excitement in their otherwise very ordinary existences then drove them to the brink of madness.

While he was power-mad, they became powerless. As he took charge of their every waking moment, they became more and more subservient. It was make-believe in the hands of a maniac. For ten years, Robert Hendy-Freegard carried out one of the most elaborate and audacious frauds in British history; his motto: 'Lies have to be big to be convincing.'

Like everything else about him, Robert Hendy-Freegard's name was a creation. Born Robert Freegard on March 1, 1977, he added the 'Hendy' later in life – a particularly cruel testament to one of his female victims. His humble birthplace, a small village near Whitwell, in Derbyshire, could not contain Hendy-Freegard for long. He was, he felt, cut out for a more rewarding life. And alongside the rather mundane occupations of working behind bars and selling cars, that is what Hendy-Freegard found when he added 'conman' and 'impostor' to his CV.

He excelled at both, first terrorising a group of students with claims that they were being hunted by the IRA, then seducing a series of women across Britain, all the while revelling in how easily people believed his claim to be a spy. Once a friendship was established, Hendy-Freegard would reveal his 'role' as an undercover agent for MI5, Special Branch or Scotland Yard, win his victims over, ask for money and then, quite literally, rule their lives. He even managed to get them to sever family links, abandon friends and undergo cruel loyalty tests. Evil Hendy-Freegard's mind games caused mental and physical suffering almost beyond belief.

Even before he became a professional conman, Hendy-Freegard used those who trusted him. A girlfriend, teacher Alison Hopkins, lent him £1,500 after he told her a string of stories – lying also about the qualifications he had acquired at school. It was only after the couple split up that Alison realised Hendy-Freegard had been stealing money from her account, using her cash card and memorising her PIN number.

Things took a more sinister turn when Alison was stalked by her former lover and she took the desperate step of moving to Shropshire to escape him. In 1993, Hendy-Freegard was convicted at Nottingham Crown Court of three counts of theft from Alison, with a conspiracy to kidnap charge left on file – relating to an incident in which he allegedly tried to have her snatched by two accomplices. He was given a conditional discharge.

None of this was known, of course, as Hendy-Freegard continued in his job at The Swan, the pub in Newport, Shropshire, where he had gone to pursue his fleeing former girlfriend. Hendy-Freegard charmed his customers – especially the female ones. Learning that IRA gun-runner Kevin O'Donnell had studied at a local agricultural college two years' earlier and had been killed in an SAS ambush in 1992, the callous conman hit upon the basis of his brainwashing schemes. He played on the college students' fears, telling them he was a spy. Fellow bar workers laughed at him behind his back but the impressionable young people were taken in.

Three of these students, Maria Hendy, Sarah Smith and her boyfriend John Atkinson, were amongst the pub's regular customers and Hendy-Freegard quickly fell into conversation with them. He told them he was a secret agent. Over the next few years, they endured poverty, carried out bizarre missions and lived in terror. They were told not to see their family or friends because this would put them in danger; they also could not use the lavatory before him.

Both young women were seduced by Hendy-Freegard. Maria had two children with him. Was it this cruel sense of humour that had him adding her surname to his own? What is known for sure is that Maria and Sarah were persuaded to join Hendy-Freegard on a tour of Britain along with Mr Atkinson, whom they believed was suffering from a terminal illness. Once he had them on their own, Hendy-Freegard told them there was now no going back, for they were involved in an undercover operation designed to save their lives. Contracts had been taken out because of their association with him. They had to stay on the run to avoid detection.

By now, brainwashed and confused, the three allowed themselves to be moved into a 'safe house' in Peterborough. Sarah was ordered to ring home and tell her parents she wasn't going back to college because she had been offered a job with the Commercial Union insurance company.

More temporary accommodation throughout the country followed, with Hendy-Freegard feeding the three false information about each other and their families. The conman also managed to get all three to part with their cash. By the time Hendy-Freegard's crimes were discovered, he had defrauded Sarah Smith and her family of £300,000 and Mr Atkinson and his family of £390,000.

While his victims led gruelling, isolated lives under Hendy-Freegard's control, he led a much more pleasant one, holidaying in five-star luxury and buying expensive meals and designer suits with their cash.

Sarah Smith, who remained in the cruel conman's clutches for ten years, was once so hungry that she ate left-over chip batter in the fish and chip shop he had ordered her to work in. 'My world was turned upside down,' she later said. 'When I challenged Bob on why I had to work there, he told me his bosses thought I needed bringing down to earth. I had been told my boyfriend was dying, that I couldn't see my friends and family and now I had to work in a chip shop. I coped by switching off.'

When employed in a hotel, Miss Smith was only allowed to keep her tips. She would also be forced to wait at service stations and airports for up to a fortnight at a time, with as little as £10 to live on. She endured being driven around with a bucket on her head to keep her destination a secret, and noting down endless car number plates to make sure the IRA were 'not on to her'. She was ordered to pawn jewellery which had belonged to her grandmother and to empty her bank accounts to avoid being traced.

Miss Smith said: 'He told me so many lies using a mixture of charm and menace that I never knew which way was up. He knows what makes you tick and how to make you do what he wants. That's why he's so dangerous.'

On a rare meeting with their daughter, Jill and Peter Smith noted how subdued she was. 'She was tearful and difficult to talk to. She looked as if she had been mentally whipped into place,' said Mr Smith. 'She was in a bad state and sobbing. Time and time again, we begged her to come home but there was a hold and we couldn't break it.'

Wealthy farmer's son John Atkinson could only agree. He spent three years on the run, fleeing from imaginary Republican gangs. 'Hendy-Freegard ruined my life and many other people's too. He put me through hell. It was degrading and humiliating. He's very good at what he does but his motives were so pathetic and contrived you could never make it up.'

Hendy-Freegard led Atkinson to believe he was being recruited to fight the IRA. He was put into 'training' and forced to perform spurious jobs. Sometimes he would have to wait for days in a certain place for a nonexistent assignation. At one point, the terrified man allowed himself to be beaten black and blue to 'toughen him up'. He was then ordered to pretend he was dying from cancer and to flee his college course. Another time, he was ordered to get a job as a barman at the same Swan pub as his tormentor and to turn up for work with his hair dyed orange and wearing a dress. Like his fellow victims, Mr Atkinson had to hand his wages straight over to Hendy-Freegard.

The poor man's family were on the brink of selling their farm in Cumbria to raise even more money when Mr Atkinson returned home in April 1997 close to a breakdown. He had decided he would rather risk being assassinated by the IRA than carrying on life as it was. He finally moved to Prague to start a new life as a teacher.

When Maria Hendy eventually found out about her lying lover's affairs and confronted him, he beat her, threatened to kill her and told her she could not talk to anyone for 'security reasons'. Miss Hendy knew just what her lover was capable of; he once smashed her teeth and then forced her to tell a dentist she had fallen downstairs.

Telling her story later, Miss Hendy said her lying, vicious lover regularly beat her. 'I put up with split lips, black eyes, broken ankles and bruised ribs,' she said. 'He spent long periods away but forbade me to have a life of my own. I became depressed and gorged on chocolate. Then he said I was fat and useless and no one would love me.'

Hendy-Freegard hid Christmas cards sent from Miss Hendy's family and kept her short of money to feed her children.

Her ordeal ended in 2001 when Hendy-Freegard admitted to an affair with another of his victims, lawyer Caroline Cowper. That was the last straw for the long-suffering mother of his children. She managed to arrange for her father to collect her and returned to the safety and sanity of her family's home in Bath. But not before one final, savage attack.

'I will never forget that night. We were at his mother's house when he came home and announced he was going to take my children and go to her [his new lover Caroline Cowper],' Miss Hendy recalled. 'I knew I had to stand up to him. I was still recovering from the beating just a month before when he punched my teeth out. He just went mad again. He came at me and his hands closed around my throat. He was strangling me.'

All the while, there were other victims suffering just like Miss Hendy. For Hendy-Freegard ran a very clever balancing act, dipping in and out of people's lives. And whenever he could, he took not only their cash but their freedom and peace of mind.

Caroline Cowper had become immediately attracted to Hendy-Freegard when he sold her a car from a showroom in Chiswick, West London, in 2000. In a customer questionnaire, she cheekily said the salesman introduced himself 'in bed' and gave him '11 out of 10 for satisfaction'.

Hendy-Freegard could not believe his luck at finding such easy prey. He went in for the kill, hanging around Miss Cowper's home and pestering her for a drink. He won sympathy by spinning a story about being brought up in poverty and how his father had died. His father was, in fact, still alive.

'I felt sorry for him,' Miss Cowper said later. 'I wasn't looking for love but I suppose I was definitely bored, and boredom is a dangerous thing. I have thought a lot about how I got lured in by Robert. The one thing with him is you could never say you were bored. He did your head in but he took me all over the place. With him, it was an adventure, but he did do these disappearing acts where he would vanish with his mobile phone switched off, which used to really irritated me.'

During their early days together, Hendy-Freegard helped Miss Cowper to trade in her £6,000 Mercedes for a £20,000 Volkswagen Golf, pocketed the difference, asked for more, persuaded her to fund a leasing business they would run together and stole £14,000 from her building society account. Once, when challenged, Hendy-Freegard said he would pay back the money once he had been paid by his MI5 bosses. Although Miss Cowper's family tried to intervene, Hendy-Freegard gave Miss Cowper a £7,000 engagement ring and took her on holiday to Brazil and Madeira. She then discovered he had been paying for these love tokens by raiding her bank account. In all, Hendy-Freegard stole £50,000.

'A lot of my friends told me there was something very weird about this chap – the fact that he was telling me he had some mysterious past,' confessed Miss Cowper. 'It did eventually begin to drive me bananas.'

Simon Young worked in a jewellery shop in Sheffield and was behind the counter when the conman called in one day. A friendship soon developed and after socialising together on a number of occasions, Hendy-Freegard 'came clean' about his espionage work. He persuaded the watchmaker to provide temporary accommodation for Sarah Smith, implying she needed a safe house.

Mr Young recalled: 'He tried to enrol me into an organisation as well as certain training. Yes, I was interested in doing government work like this, of course I was. It was every schoolboy's fantasy. Later he sent me on the training. It involved numerous different tasks.'

These included going to Manchester to buy a £1.25 can opener from a particular shop. Mr Young was given detailed instructions about which buses and trains to catch, the doors and escalators to be used and warned he would be under constant surveillance. Then he was ordered to buy a copy of Gay Times and openly read it on the train to London. Sheffield coach station had sold out of the magazine but Mr Young headed to the capital anyway. In his possession was the can opener. Following his orders to the letter, Mr Young went to a West End pub and asked the barman for a particular person. When told there was no one of that name there, Mr Young handed the man behind the bar the can opener and said: 'Well, when you see him, give him this.'

It was only noting Hendy-Freegard's mirth at all this that Mr Young realised he had been conned. This was confirmed when Mr Young demanded a meeting with MI5 bosses and only Hendy-Freegard turned up.

Renata Kister, a Polish company director, was seven months' pregnant and had just separated from her partner when she walked into Hendy-Freegard's London car showroom. After becoming friendly, the fraudster told Miss Kister that his MI5 bosses had ordered him to watch someone within the car dealership. He persuaded Miss Kister to buy a better car, kept the £10,000 he made on her old one and encouraged her to take out a £15,000 loan for him. Whenever she asked him for the money, he said he was awaiting payment from his secret agent bosses.

Hendy-Freegard again asked for temporary accommodation for Susan Smith, saying she was on a witness protection scheme, having fled her violent husband. He told Miss Kister that Miss Smith was Spanish and spoke no English. In turn, he told Miss Smith, whom he had convinced was being hunted by the ITA, to pretend, for security reasons, that she could not understand anything said to her.

Incredibly, the two women did not exchange a word in three months. And when Miss Kister was originally questioned by police, she refused to co-operate, believing them to be staging an MI5 loyalty test.

Leslie Gardner gave Hendy-Freegard £16,000 over a period of six years, after meeting him in a Newcastle nightclub when she was 28. She even sold her car because he needed cash to 'buy off some killers' whom he said were IRA bombers released under the Good Friday agreement. Civil servant Miss Gardner was also conned into believing Hendy-Freegard needed money to pay off IRA blackmailers: buy himself out of the police: start a new life as a taxi driver and to help his seriously-ill mother.

Three months after Hendy-Freegard gave Miss Gardner a Volkswagen Golf, she found out she owed the finance company three £260 monthly payments. Hendy-Freegard had pocketed his salesman's commission, too.

Elizabeth Bartholemew was a 22-year-old personal assistant and sales administrator at a Vauxhall car dealership in Sheffield when she met the man who would ruin her; he even managed to wreck her six-month-old marriage. Mrs Bartholemew became a regular customer of Hendy-Freegard, looking after his two daughters by Miss Hendy, while he test-drove a string of top-of-the-range cars. He gave Mrs Bartholemew expensive perfume but more importantly the attention and affection she said she did not get at home. He was, she was later to admit, 'very good in bed'.

Out of bed, Hendy-Freegard reserved some of his cruellest treatment for this victim. He took naked photographs of her, threatening to show them to her husband if she disobeyed him. Already suffering from her lover's savage temper, Mrs Bartholemew agreed not to speak to or see friends and family because of his 'threats from the IRA'. She even agreed to change her name to 'Miss Richardson', telling the deed poll officer it was because she had been molested as a child.

As 'Miss Richardson', she had to endure loyalty tests, supposedly to convince MI5 she was suitable wife material for Hendy-Freegard. These included becoming a blonde, going without make-up and sanitary protection, sleeping in Heathrow Airport several nights at a time and living on park benches for weeks during winter. 'Sometimes I could not sleep, so I would just walk around to keep out of danger,' she recalled sadly in court.

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Excerpted from "Crafty Crooks and Conmen"
by .
Copyright © 2009 Nigel Blundell and Susan Blackhall.
Excerpted by permission of Pen and Sword Books Ltd.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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