Robert Hendy-Freegard - Fake Spy and Conman

West London, just a few years ago. Two detectives knocked at the door of a small flat and a rather tired-looking woman, somewhere in her late twenties or early thirties, opened it. "Sarah?" asked one of the two policemen, and a look of panic passed across the woman's face. These days, she was known as Carrie Rogers. She had gone to great lengths to hide her true identity because she believed that a terrorist organisation, the I.R.A., wanted to kill her.

About ten years earlier, she and some friends had, somehow, as students, become involved in the world of an undercover Special Branch agent who, first, asked for their patriotic help and then later told them they were known to the enemy and now on a death list. Since that time, she had lived in hiding, going out only to work and then handing all her wages over to the secret agent to handle.

Now, she was in a state of deep psychological shock. The two men on her doorstep who, at first, she thought might be assassins sent to kill her, were now sitting in her living-room, having shown their police identity cards and badges, telling her that the past ten years of her life had all been a lie. The 'safehouses', the moving from place to place, the dead end jobs and giving all the money to the agent to 'reduce government costs', the death threats. It had all been lies, invented by Robert Hendy-Freegard so that he could live off her like a parasite.

Now she discovered that she wasn't the only one. She already knew that a couple of her college friends had been sucked into this bizarre delusion with her. But the police were telling her that there were others she had never met who had also given all their money to this pitiless con man. Her brothers and parents, with whom she had broken contact years earlier, came to pick her up from the police station.

It had all started for her in 1992. She was a student then, at an agricultural college. She hoped to be a farm manager someday. That year, she was sharing a house with four other students, including her good friends Maria Hendy and John Atkinson. In the evenings, they often went to the local pub. There was a new barman called Robert. He'd come down from Derbyshire to be near an ex-girlfriend who had moved there – perhaps, to get away from him.

Soon, Sarah's friend Maria Hendy was Robert's new girlfriend and, at dinner parties back at the house, Robert had told them a few harmless but improbable lies to test the water. When he said he was related to a famous pop star, they believed him. He had their trust and he was ready to try out some bigger lies.

Back then, in 1992, there had been some I.R.A. bombing activity. One I.R.A. bomber, shot dead in a police ambush, turned out to be a recent graduate of the agricultural college Sarah studied at. It was just a coincidence but it was enough for Robert to convince Sarah, Maria and John that the college they studied at was full of I.R.A. spies and that he was a Special Branch or military intelligence agent sent undercover to break up this terrorist group. He went on to explain that he wanted the three of them to be his eyes and ears in the college, reporting back to him. He made it seem like they would be doing right by their country and that it was a national emergency.

He was a very charming young man and a smooth talker and, although he wasn't offering them any money, he wasn't asking them for any – yet. They agreed to his plan and began to follow his instructions. Sometimes, the things he asked them to do were difficult or humiliating but he told them that it was a loyalty test, and they were doing very well. It was just the beginning of a very complex process that Hendy-Freegard seemed to have a genius for: breaking people down, little bit by little bit, until they were dependent and had no will of their own; until they would do anything for him.

Now, the preparation was over and the time had come for the master play that would leave these three as his slaves for years to come. He told his young 'agents' that his cover was blown and, therefore, so was theirs. The I.R.A. knew all about them, he told them, and his Special Branch bosses had told him that all their names were at the top of an I.R.A. death list and that, even as he told them this, expert assassins were coming to kill them.

They must go on the run, changing names and addresses from time to time and staying inside their homes or places of work as much as possible – there were snipers everywhere. They would have to minimise contact with their families for the sake of their relatives' safety... except to ask their families for as much money as possible because, for security reasons, the government, though aware of their problems, couldn't help just now but their money would be refunded at a later date, when things were quieter.

Highly distressed at the news and already brain-washed into Hendy-Freegard's cunning fantasy, they agreed to everything he said. There was just one moment of sanity and doubt: one of the two women asked Robert to show his Special Branch ID card or badge so that they could be quite sure he was who he said he was. Robert gave a contemptuous laugh – didn't she know that undercover agents never carry badges or cards? He then went on to tell her a number of supposedly secret details about her life. How much was in her bank account at that moment, her parents' exact address and so on.

She was convinced that he had the information from police sources and could only be a police agent like he said – where else could he get this kind of detail? In fact, going through her personal things behind her back or just paying a private detective a small amount would have got him all the information he needed. Still, she and the others were now sure he was telling the truth.

And, once that last doubt was swept aside, there was really nothing to stop Hendy-Freegard taking absolute control of their lives. First, he got his victims to contact their families and get all the money they could. This would come to hundreds of thousands of pounds in savings, inheritances and loans. Next, he created an atmosphere of test and terror. Sarah, for example, was told once to hide in her bathroom and not come out for anything. This went on for three weeks. For another three weeks, he insisted that she live, with no money, in Heathrow airport, sleeping on benches and taking leftovers from cafeteria tables. All of these strange events happened against the constant threat of I.R.A. assassins.

Soon, he had them living in tiny apartments, never going out except to work, and giving every penny of their wages to him. In the meanwhile, he bought luxury cars and expensive suits which made it easier for him to find and charm other victims. The total number of his victims will never be known, but we do know that, at one point, he was controlling at least five people, mostly women.

And so it went on, for years, until Hendy-Freegard met Caroline Cowper. By now, he had moved on from bar work to being a car salesman. He had managed to do some profitable business with Caroline, a lawyer. First, he over-charged her for her new car and then he sold her old car and pocketed the money. Then, he persuaded her to be his girlfriend. They went on expensive holidays all over the world that she paid for. And he got her to take out a couple of big bank loans and give him the money. He lied to her, tricked her and manipulated her but he had not pulled her into his fantasy world like he had with some of the others. So, when he stole fourteen thousand pounds from her savings account, she went to the police. For Robert Hendy-Freegard, this was the beginning of the end.

As police began to investigate him for the theft of Caroline Cowper's savings, the details of his web of manipulation and his 'wage slaves' living in cramped accommodation started to come out. Things even took on an international angle when the FBI cooperated with the British police to catch him. One of his victims at the time was an American woman, a psychologist. He had seduced her and was now getting her to borrow more and more money from her parents to give to him.

The parents were very suspicious and contacted the FBI. At the same time, the mother of the psychologist agreed to give Hendy-Freegard yet another substantial loan on condition that he come to the airport and collect it from her, the mother, in person. He did this and was arrested as soon as he had the money in his hands. It seems he was blackmailing the family, probably over some embarrassing photos of the daughter that she had allowed him to take. This was a method he had used before with other women.

With Maria Hendy, the girlfriend from the agricultural college, he had had two daughters. He had used her surname 'Hendy'. He was known to beat her and she was still a slave to the I.R.A. assassin hoax, believing her life depended on him.

The case presented peculiar problems for the law. The victims had been fooled very cleverly and no violence (outside of his personal relationship with Maria Hendy) had been used. Yet, the victims felt, with hindsight, that they had been kidnapped. And still, they had gone to work every day and been left alone almost all the time in unlocked flats and houses. How could the law show they were kidnapped? It was the same thing with the more than one million pounds the victims had given to Hendy-Freegard. They were never forced to do so but they were trying to make choices while living in a complete delusion, carefully built around them by this ruthless con man.

Many who hear of the case imagine that the victims must have been especially stupid and naive people but, mostly, they were not. They included a lawyer and a psychologist, and they were all of above average education. These strange events are a sign of Hendy-Freegard's exceptional, innate ability to completely control certain individuals. Described as a 'mummy's boy' and a 'fantasist' when he was a child, he seems to have had an extraordinary talent for slowly but totally taking over the minds of normal, middle-class people; especially women.

Many of his tricks and psychological games had a lot in common with the methods used by pimps: first, charm the victim into falling in love with them, then the games begin. He would treat a victim very nicely one day and then terribly the next, then back to being a lovely person and so on until the victim's head was spinning. He would give the victim crazy tasks that were unpleasant and humiliating just to test their loyalty or see how far he could push them. He also used listening devices planted in bedrooms, and other underhand ways to gather information. Often, the information could be used to control a person.

Hendy-Freegard got a life sentence for the kidnappings and nine years for the theft of money and some other crimes. He went on to appeal the convictions and the appeal judges were forced to quash his life sentence because, though they knew perfectly well how evil he was, the law's description of kidnapping would not fit the facts in his case. His victims were not physically imprisoned in any meaningful sense.

This meant that, despite being a predatory fantasist, he had only to serve the nine years that he was sentenced for the other crimes.