He Poses as a British Spy to Ensnare Women — and Is Still at Large

Based on The Puppet Grasp: Searching the Final Conman, Robert Hendy-Freegard is a 49-year-old British fraudster who deceives, swindles and psychologically manipulates and abuses females for his personal revenue. A reprehensible prison who poses as an MI5 agent as a way to achieve the belief—after which cooperation, and cash—of women and men, he’s spent the previous three a long time tricking quite a lot of victims into utterly giving themselves over to him, within the course of costing them their careers, households, buddies, and monetary well-being. Worse, although, is that administrators Sam Bernstead and Gareth Johnson’s three-part Netflix docuseries reveals that he’s nonetheless at giant, persevering with to prey upon the susceptible in European elements unknown.

Premiering Jan. 18 on Netflix, The Puppet Grasp: Searching the Final Conman focuses on two parallel tales involving Hendy-Freegard. The primary begins in 1993 with John Atkinson, a scholar at England’s preeminent Harper Adams Agricultural Faculty, the place he befriended a barman who glided by the identify Rob. The 2 struck up a friendship, at which level Rob apprised John that he was in actual fact a spy, and that he and his superiors had detected an imminent Irish Republican Military risk positioned proper in John’s shut circle of acquaintances. To deal with this disaster, Rob knowledgeable John that they needed to promptly go on the run—and, furthermore, that he needed to persuade his two housemates, Maria and Sarah, to affix them, all with out telling the ladies the reality about why they have been fleeing.

Shopping for this espionage narrative hook, line and sinker, John agreed to trick Maria and Sarah into pondering that he had terminal most cancers, and that he needed them to accompany him and Rob on a farewell street journey. It wasn’t till in a while this journey that Rob and John admitted that John was wholesome, and that the actual motive they have been skulking round England was as a result of Rob was defending them from impending hazard. This was additionally a giant, heaping load of bullshit. But even after Rob didn’t furnish his MI5 credentials to Sarah, she went together with this tall story, staying off the grid, shifting between quite a lot of “safehouses,” and solely briefly materializing to see her mother and pa, the latter of whom—Peter Smith—had unsurprisingly grown very involved about his daughter’s sudden, uncharacteristic conduct.

As The Puppet Grasp: Searching the Final Conman lays out this strand, it periodically fast-forwards to 2011 to deal with Jake and Sophie Clifton, English siblings whose lives have been turned upside-down much less by their dad and mom Sandra and Mark’s divorce then by Sandra’s subsequent on-line courting life, which led her into the arms of a person named David. At the same time as younger children, each Jake and Sophie may inform that one thing was off about David, similar to when, throughout a trip drive to Spain, David acted extraordinarily cagey about each his surname and his passport. Their suspicions have been quickly confirmed right, with David alienating Jake (who moved out to stay along with his dad), making an attempt to trigger a rift between Sophie and her father, and finally exerting a domineering affect over Sandra that nobody may clarify, however everybody suspected was removed from wholesome.

In putting latest footage, Mark returns to the home he as soon as shared with Sandra to seek out an industrial measurement padlock on Sandra and David’s bed room door—a positive signal that David was holding Sandra captive. Nonetheless, Mark’s discovery is just too late to alter issues, since Sandra and David have been lacking for the previous seven years, throughout which period Sophie and Jake have solely sporadically chatted with their mom, and solely seen her by way of a 2020 on-line courtroom listening to over the proper to Sandra’s deceased dad and mom’ house. The children don’t know the place Sandra is, though extra painful nonetheless is that when police did momentarily find her in 2015, she confessed that she knew who David actually was, and that she had no intention of leaving him.

David and Rob are, in fact, the identical individual: Hendy-Freegard, who satisfied Sarah to stay in his firm for nearly a decade, in addition to ensnared quite a few different girls in his dastardly rip-off. These included American Kim Adams, whose dad and mom have been informed that their daughter was enrolled in spy college. Already on Hendy-Freegard’s path, Scotland Yard detective sergeant Bob Brandon partnered with FBI particular agent Jaclyn Zappacosta to convey an finish to the conman’s schemes, which have been all predicated on convincing his lovers’ buddies and kinfolk (and enterprise associates) handy over cash for make-believe causes. Brandon and Zappacosta’s pursuit culminated—or so that they thought—on Might 23, 2003, with an airport sting to attract Hendy-Freegard and Adams out of hiding that administrators Bernstead and Johnson recount by way of thrilling surveillance footage. Hendy-Freegard was subsequently discovered responsible at trial and sentenced to life in jail, however as evidenced by Jake and Sophie’s plight, that conviction didn’t stick, a lot to everybody’s chagrin.

New interviews with these varied people lend the proceedings a first-hand immediacy, as does editors Hamit Shonpal, Tom Parsons and Julian Hart’s rapid-fire chopping, which amplifies the motion’s nervousness. Like so many up to date docuseries, Bernstead and Johnson’s investigation depends too closely on dramatic recreations to fill in gaps that might have simply as simply been dealt with by simple non-fiction means. Nonetheless, their assured stewardship largely retains issues lean and energetic. The truth is, The Puppet Grasp: Searching the Final Conman would have benefited from a bit extra materials—particularly, some questioning of Sarah and John about how they may have fallen for a ruse that, irrespective of Hendy-Freegard’s persuasiveness, will need to have invariably appeared dodgy after a couple of years of roaming round Europe attempting to evade imaginary adversaries.

If not fairly probing sufficient, their non-fiction effort paints an unnerving portrait of a conniving madman’s use of lies and isolation to dupe and management harmless targets. That Jake and Sophie (with dad Mark’s assist) are nonetheless decided to seek out and rescue Sandra from Hendy-Freegard’s clutches additionally lends it a chilling inconclusiveness that speaks to the issue of figuring out, apprehending and prosecuting villains whose maintain over their captives usually has little to do with bodily restraint and the whole lot to do with canny psychological duplicity.