The Times Magazine 41her captor, hunger forced her to eat raw
batter. When she was found by the police, she
had a stale crust in her bag.
When Smith was released, she received
neither adequate therapy nor compensation.
She was entitled to nothing from the Criminal
Injuries Compensation Authority because of
the lack of physical scars. “I fell through the
cracks on every category of compensation
or assistance,” she explains. “They told me,
‘Because there was no physical injury you
are not due anything. Sorry.’ I was a bit
devastated by that one.”
Smith has a cheerful manner. She was an
innocent young woman when she fell victim,
prone to shyness. She says she learnt to cope
by training herself to expect nothing. She learnt
to flick a switch internally so her predisposition
for optimism was replaced by pessimism.
“I found if I expected nothing, it was easier.”
Thirty years on, the old self is back. There
is something deeply upsetting about the way
she does not want to sound like a moaner, as
if the unfairness and horror of what happened
to her might sit in the same bracket as being
flogged a dodgy car. Latterly, while Smith was
kept at various different addresses, Hendy-
Freegard did in fact operate as a car salesman
to ensnare other wealthy women.
Smith understands how strange her
story sounds. “You can’t actually say, ‘Oh,
I’d never fall for it,’ ” Smith says, “because
these people are actually very convincing.
“How would Freegard have managed to
con the range of people he did?” she says. “He
knew everything about me. My bank account,
my trust fund. I thought, ‘How can he not be
MI5 with that knowledge?’ And how would
I even know what an MI5 officer looked like?’’
She has a point. There was also a strong
element of fear and, crucially, respect.
Initially, she says, she thought she would
return. But when she asked why she couldn’t
see her parents, “He would say, ‘This car is
bugged. You’re getting me into trouble with my
superiors. You’re threatening the operation.’ ”
The power Hendy-Freegard wielded over
the law-abiding students was successful because
he played on their innocence, their love for
their families, their fear of the IRA and their
ingrained respect for those in authority. (The
same deference that Wayne Couzens abused
to lure Sarah Everard into his car.) He twisted
all these things and manipulated the students,
separating them off, to the extent that before
long they lost the power to fight back.
If Sarah Smith’s early adult life was shaped
by deceit and loss, she has ensured that it is
now defined by love. Her family welcomed
her back after she was found, despite the
appearance over the years that she only
wanted money from them.
She begins to cry when she revisits their
pain, particularly that of her late mother, who
died four years ago. “There is still a lot of guilt
around the money,” she says. “There is still a
massive amount of emotion. I’m sorry.” Her
misplaced guilt is painful to witness.
“I’ve had moments where I’ve been very
angry and bitter but, at the end of the day, it’s
a waste of energy and I can’t do anything to
change it.”
She works part-time on the family farm,
doing the paperwork. It is a simple life, as she
tells it, but rich in ways except the material.
“He didn’t manage to break my spirit. He tried.”
Revisiting the decision to quash Hendy-
Freegard’s conviction for kidnap is the only
time she becomes animated. “The judge at our
hearing said he was giving those sentences
because he believed Freegard to be a risk to
people – not [specifically] men or women, just
people in the future. How did I feel when he
got let out? Pretty shit. He’d served less time
than I did [with him]. Which was no justice.”
Over the years there has been the inevitable
media interest, including interviews and a
co-authored memoir, Deceived: A True Story
(2007), which she did not enjoy working on.
She did not court any of this publicity, and
would certainly not be talking to me now had
the story of Robert Hendy-Freegard not taken
a disturbing twist.
Last year Smith was contacted by the
production company Raw, which was workingon a series for Netflix called The Puppet
Master: Hunting the Ultimate Conman, which
will be aired this month.
Since 2014, the family of a woman named
Sandra Clifton, who was in a relationship
with a man calling himself David Hendy, have
been unable to locate her. The man had come
into her life in 2012 (three years after Hendy-
Freegard was released from prison) via a dating
app and bought her a flashy car. He told her
he sold advertising space, although he never
seemed to go to work. Slowly, her previously
loving relationship with her two children
became fractured beyond repair despite her
having always been a doting and loving mother.
The man insinuated that her son, Jake, was
gay, and alleged that jewellery had been
stolen. Jake Clifton, then 16, left the house to
live with his father, devastated and confused
about what had happened to his mother. His
sister, Sophie, later became estranged from
both Jake and her father, Mark.
Eventually, Sandra Clifton disappeared
with “David Hendy”.
These children, Jake and Sophie Clifton,
now 25 and 28, with the help of their father
(Sandra’s ex-husband), were now searching for
their lost mother. They had finally found out,
via a Google search, that David Hendy was
in fact Robert Hendy-Freegard, the convicted
fraudster. Sarah Smith was a known victim.
Could she help with some background?
Almost 30 years had passed since Smith
had climbed into Hendy-Freegard’s car, not to
return for 10 years. Her own father had never
given up. This time, despite all the pain that
it would reopen, it was her turn to help – a
second profound act of bravery.Sophie and Jake Clifton met Sarah Smith in
a café. Sophie was nervous, she remembers,
“because I’d read bits of her book and she was
this story to me”.
Jake Clifton, a quiet, sensitive young man,
did not know much at all of Sarah Smith’s
story, only that she too had once been a victim
of the man who had disappeared with his
mother. Smith remembers talking the young
adults through the extent to which she had
been controlled. “I wanted to help them to
be able to think back and, where they had
blamed their mother for her strange and
unfair behaviour, to firmly point the blame
where it truly lies, at Freegard’s feet, not hers.”
The meeting was an emotional one for
all of them. Hearing what had happened to
Smith, Jake began to cry. “And he hardly ever
cries,” remembers Sophie. “On the drive home
he sat quietly. I knew he was trying to process
what Sarah had said.”
“My hope for them is that at some point
Sandra is brought to reality, as I was,” says
Smith. “I want her to be delivered back to the
arms of her loving children, but I fear theyFrom top: Daily Mail, 2007; John Atkinson,
Smith, Maria Hendy and Freegard in 1993