40 The Times Magazinehe small rented brick bungalow
where Sarah Smith lives with
her husband and her dog is like a
house a child might build out of
Lego: two windows either side of
a front door, with a low roof and
a little patch of grass out front.
Inside, she has lined the walls
of the sitting room with family
pictures: her wedding to Miles
seven years ago; her 87-year-old father, Peter,
and late mother, Gill, holding her tightly to
them; her nieces and nephews, all seemingly
ordinary to the outside eye. But to her, each
one is a reminder of a life filled with love that
for a decade she thought was lost for good.
For ten years, between the ages of 24 and
34, Smith, now 52, was coercively controlled
by a con artist who took from her everything
she had. She was one of multiple women
defrauded of money by Robert Hendy-
Freegard. In Smith’s case, it was her entire
£180,000 inheritance, which Hendy-Freegard
(at the beginning he was just Freegard)
obtained over time by convincing her that
he was an undercover MI5 agent and that
their friendship put her family’s safety at
grave risk from the IRA.
She dropped out of her degree course, a
bachelor of science in agriculture at Harper
Adams College in Newport, Shropshire, to
go on bizarre missions with him. Slowly
her questions – why can’t I go home? Why
can’t I finish my degree? – ebbed away as he
isolated her, telling her constantly that her
family were targets and her questions were
causing trouble for him with his “superiors”.
She gradually lost contact with everybody
she loved. When she was allowed to speak
to her parents in public telephone boxes, her
mother would sob and so would Smith until
Hendy-Freegard snatched away the phone.
Red phone boxes – along with the Duran
Duran music he played on a loop in the car- are her remaining trauma triggers.
By the end, ten years on, she was sleeping
on floors and working menial jobs under
aliases, with all her money going into an
account controlled by him. He was living a
fantasy life, James Bond-style. Though Hendy-
Freegard was not and had never had been her
boyfriend, by the end she did have sex with
him in the hope of improving her fate.
When the police finally found her, in 2003,
part of a much bigger operation involving
the FBI and other female victims including a
businesswoman and a psychologist, she barely
recognised the name “Sarah Smith”. Her father
had spent years looking for his daughter,
taking on the role of private detective when
the police seemed at a loss. A map tracking
her movements was erected at the family
farm. Once he broke into a so-called
“safe house” where she was being kept.
Hendy-Freegard was always one step ahead,
spending money he stole on fast cars, watches
and suits. But Peter Smith never gave up.
Hendy-Freegard was dubbed “the puppet
master” in the tabloid press. He was tried in
2005 after an investigation that took 18 months
and cost £2.5 million. He was convicted of ten
counts of theft and eight counts of obtaining
money by deception, including every penny
Smith owned. But more important than this,
the trial in 2005 also obtained two convictions
for kidnap by fraud, relating to the lost lives
of Sarah Smith and another victim, John
Atkinson, Smith’s student boyfriend, the first
person he ensnared in the bizarre web of lies
after befriending him in a bar.
The basis of his deception rested on an
IRA gunrunner having been already exposed
in the college. The IRA were around them,
Hendy-Freegard told the unsuspecting
students. Atkinson, whose family also handed
over hundreds of thousands of pounds,
allowed Hendy-Freegard to throw darts at his
knees and beat him up in order to toughen
him up before their “mission”. Sarah Smith
was made to wear a bucket on her head when
she was moved to a “safe house”.
Hendy-Freegard was given two life
sentences to run concurrently on top of the
nine years for fraud. Justice appeared to have
been done. It was, however, temporary. Two
years later, his life sentences for kidnap were
quashed by the Court of Appeal, which ruled
that neither of the victims had been physically
detained. This ruling sent a clear message:
coercive control, in the eyes of the law, counted
for nothing in 2007. By 2009, after finishing his
sentences for fraud, Hendy-Freegard was a
free man.
“A damaged soul, yes,” Sarah Smith says
of herself today. It took her years to recover
and learn to trust, helped by the kindness of
her younger brother with whom she lived in
Wimbledon once she found freedom again.
She met her husband on the internet in 2008
and blurted out her story on the first date. It
was a good sign. He was not deterred.
“You find a way of coping with it. The
damage is definitely there, but why let that
define you? Then he really wins.”
She looks around the bungalow as she
sits in a chair, relaxed in stockinged feet. “It
grates,” she says of the fact that 30 years on
she cannot afford to buy a home.
She grew up in a large house on a family
farm, rode horses and went to boarding
school. She is neither spoilt nor bitter, but had
she not been Hendy-Freegard’s victim, there is
no question her life would have been different.
At the very least she would have finished
her degree at Harper Adams College, quite
possibly successfully pursued her ambition
of becoming a farm manager, and bought
a home. “People aspire to owning their ownhome. But not everybody can be that lucky.
Unfortunately, my money got squandered by
Robert Freegard, so that’s the way it goes.”
Sarah Smith is an extraordinary example
of the resilience of the human spirit. On
the kitchen windowsill facing out onto the
winding street of the housing estate, there are
at least ten different species of orchid bearing
varieties of white, purple and pink flowers.
Orchids are notoriously tricky to grow, but
these have strong stems and blooms that seem
perfect, each one reaching up to the ceiling,
thriving on the light and care. It is the same
with the containers in her back garden. There
are cookbooks everywhere. She loves to cook- and to eat, she says, smiling and looking at
her stomach. In the old days, when she had
to go by the name of Betty and work in a fish
and chip shop, all earnings handed over to
T
She had to work in a
chip shop, all earnings
handed to Freegard
- hunger forced her
to eat raw batter
Sarah Smith, 52PREVIOUS SPREAD: COURTESY JAKE AND SOPHIE CLIFTON. STYLING: HANNAH SKELLEY AND HARRIET ELTON. HAIR AND MAKE-UP: CAROL SULLIVAN AT ARLINGTON ARTISTS USING MAC COSMETICS. SOPHIE’S DRESS, ALLSAINTS.COM; JAKE’S JACKET, REISS.COM. THIS PAGE: COURTESY SARAH SMITH. JUMPER, REISS.COM
The conman who stole our mother Continued from page 29