Reading through a recent UK newspaper article, I came across a new book about a con man whose exploits I followed at the time they were first in the news and have since wondered how he could be so successful. The book is written by one of the ‘marks’ of his cons and outlines some of the dynamics and techniques that Robert Hendy-Freegard used.

I include the newspaper story below, interspersed with comments from me on what appears to be going on.

My purpose here is to uncover some of the techniques and social dynamics at play, not to increase crime but to try to extrapolate from these to wider application in persuasive communication.

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“Hello Sarah,” said one of the two men standing on the doorstep, though no one called her Sarah any more. She was Carrie Rogers now, a cleaner working in the West London suburb of Chiswick.

She had never seen these people before. How did they know her name? Her first instinct was to slam the door and run, because she feared they might be the IRA terrorists she’d spent the past decade trying to hide from.

“I’m very sorry, Sarah” said Detective Sergeant Bob Brandon of the Metropolitan Police, “but the past ten years have been one big lie. We need to take you down to the police station. There are some questions we need to ask you.”

“I was stunned,” recalls Sarah, now 37, in a remarkable new book.

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“My pulse was racing; I felt sheer panic. The words I was hearing were not registering. Nothing seemed real. In the police car, I considered the possibility that it wasn’t real – that it was a trick. My mind was in turmoil.”

- Hendy-Freegard (HF) has built in safeguards to stop the mark co-operating with the real authorities. He has conditioned her to suspect reality is false. He is the source of reality for her. Deprogramming this takes time. It shows his control over his victims. This is a pre-empting technique. I’ve used it before myself for persuasion. You tell people what is going to happen and how they will react then pre-empt that response with a counter response you suggest – to negate the mark even making the initial response. It is used by religions too! They say – some people will tell you God is not real. Beware of these people! The problem arises when you have no real way of telling if God/the event happening IS real or not. The mark finds it easier to fall back on previous training/indoctrination/installed values rather than think critically and check for evidence.

It was on that warm June day in 2003 that the ten-year charade Sarah Smith had been forced to live by ‘master puppeteer’ Robert Hendy-Freegard came to an end when police tracked her down to a house she was cleaning in Chiswick Quay.

Two years later, the former carpenter and joiner from Worksop – who’d convinced a group of people, including Sarah, that he was an undercover MI5 agent, and went on to deceive them out of a million pounds – was jailed for life.

The court heard that not only had Hendy-Freegard terrorised three students, convincing them to go on the run with him, but that a string of women had fallen for his devious charms.

- It’s interesting how HF gets compliance using Cialdini’s ‘foot in the door’ technique – he goes for smaller requests first and ups the ante once he gets initial commitment. He gets people to act on their commitments too, thereby making it harder to break from the cycle of consistency. It is one think to speak your commitment but quite another to spend energy and time on his requests. The more commitment he gets from his victims the harder it is for them to break free. It’s used by politicians too when fighting a war – we can’t withdraw the troops now or it will have all been for nothing. This commitment to previous consistency can be disastrous when build upon false initial assumptions.

At one point in 2002, the father-of-two was deceiving five different women and using their money to fund a lifestyle of fast cars and expensive suits.

The net had closed in on him after a solicitor named Caroline Cowper – with whom he had struck up a relationship – called the police when she discovered he’d fraudulently taken money from her account.

But it was Sarah Smith who was to be the key witness at his trial, when Freegard, now aged 36, was found guilty of 18 counts of theft and deception.

He was also convicted of the kidnap of Sarah and her boyfriend and college flatmate John Atkinson, after the jury had agreed with the prosecution that Freegard’s brainwashing of his victims and constant threats of terror had robbed them of their liberty as effectively as any locked door or bars on a window.

It appears HF used a strong moving away strategy – tell people they were in danger and needed to act to save themselves and their family. He does, however, seemed to have allied this to a moving towards strategy of sorts i.e. doing your duty for your country to stop terrorism.

“I was hugely relieved when the jury came back with their verdict. And delighted that justice had been done,” says Sarah in a new book, Deceived, in which the true extent of Freegard’s ‘odyssey of deceit’ is laid bare for the first time.

“I finally felt I could let go of the past and rebuild my life.”

Today, that relief has evaporated. Sarah was on a day trip to France this week when she heard that the Court of Appeal had quashed Freegard’s two convictions for kidnap.

Three Appeal Court judges ruled that as Sarah and John had not been falsely imprisoned, not totally deprived of their liberty, the strict legal definition of ‘kidnap’ did not apply.

While this judgment may yet be tested in the House of Lords, Freegard – described by the original trial judge as “an egotistical and opinionated confidence trickster” – could now be released as early as November this year.

- Not the only egotistical and opinionate person I can think of. At what point does a person take self-deceit too far? Interesting discussion to be had there but HF surely knew what he was doing.

“I was absolutely stunned when I found out, incredibly upset, and I’ve been on an emotional rollercoaster ever since,” says Sarah.

“As far as I am concerned, the bars Freegard created in my mind trapped me as surely as any physical restraint. He has robbed me of ten years of my life.

- Fascinating. HF was able to create psychological prison bars. People do this to themselves spontaneously too e.g. people with compulsive disorders.

“Do I ever look back on my time with Freegard and think I was gullible? Of course I do. But that’s the beauty of hindsight.

“At the time, the threat felt very real – not just to me but to several other rational people. What he claimed seemed just too big to lie about. He tricked a solicitor, a child psychologist – intelligent people.

- I think it was Goebbels in World War 2 who said the bigger the lie the more people believe it. HF used scenarios that seemed to0 big, too important to be lies. It also shows perhaps that he was successful not because the people he dealt with her stupid but perhaps they were suggestible. Many of the most suggestible hypnotic clients are very intelligent because you have something to work with as a hypnotist – people go inside their minds and find meanings of their own to make your suggestions real. Also, note she mentions threat. That is the moving away strategy again to motivate the victim to take action to avoid loss.

“He is a very skilled liar and manipulator, and I have no doubt that he will do this again. I hope that when he is released, his path never crosses mine. I never want to see that man again.”

Today, Sarah lives with her parents, Peter and Jill, on their farm in Kent. She has little money, no career, no boyfriend, no children and wonders how her life might have turned out if she’d never met Freegard.

“If you thought too much about all the ‘what ifs’, you’d go insane,” says Sarah, who is now working to become a photographer.

“I am extremely lucky in that I have a very supportive family and friends. If they had turned their back on me, I would really have been in trouble, because he forced me to drop out of my degree course and I gave him every penny of my inheritance – more than £180,000,” she says.

“I never thought I was the type to be taken in by a conman. I was quite sensible. But if I can be taken in, then anyone can. I didn’t know how MI5 agents operate. How was I to know he was lying?

- HF uses a cover story that is hard to check. He pretends to be from an authority that is, by its nature, hard to verify. Authority is a key concept to notice here.

“It is impossible to describe just how strong Robert Freegard’s hold over me was, except to say he had the power of life and death. He could have made me take my own life if he’d been so inclined.”

- This is incredibly powerful influence and someone with this level of control needs regulating. ‘First, do no harm’, is a code by which doctors work. It should be the code of the ethical persuader, too. Seek for win-win opportunities and not to exploit.

You couldn’t make up many of the events described in Sarah’s book, but Freegard did – and got away with it for a very long time.

The entrapment began in October 1992.

Sarah, who shared a house with five other students – including John Atkinson and Maria Hendy – was in her final year at Harper Adams Agricultural College in Shropshire and hoped to become a farm manager.

Their house was near to the Swan pub where Robert Freegard was a barman.

- Notice HF is working in a bar. It is a social occupation which allows him to play to his strengths of meeting people and interacting with them for social influence. It is interesting to consider the chicken/egg dimension of this. Did he work in bars to get training in influence. Did working in such environments enable him get good at influence? Or did he opt for this kind of work because he was good in those situations? I suspect the latter, and being in social situations would allow him to use his powers to full effect.

A charmer with a reputation for the ladies, when he started dating Maria Hendy he became a regular fixture in their lives, regaling them over drunken dinners with tall tales of being related to Duran Duran bassist John Taylor – the first of his many lies.

- Social proof in action. He links himself to a believable social proof  authority of relevance to the people he is influencing. Also he used Maria to gain access to her housemates.

A “mummy’s boy” who’d grown up in a fantasy world of James Bond movies, he had moved to Shropshire to be near an ex-girlfriend.

- Again psychologically interesting – did his upbringing influence his skills? He was a person with a good imagination, vital for making up stories. Also he moved to follow a girl – shows he is a determined person who is willing to take action to get what he wants. Or/And that he is needy?

But despite the students’ high spirits, these were troubled times in Britain. Some IRA bombs had recently gone off in Shrewsbury and a former Harper student, Kevin Barry O’Donnell, later discovered to be an IRA gun runner, had been shot dead in an ambush.

- HF uses a believable scenario from which to leverage his influence. At first, this may seem to contradict the earlier idea of the bigger the lie, the more believable it is but I think these two ideas can be reconciled. HF takes a believable scenario i.e. the IRA attacks and links that to a bigger lie. Again this might be seen as getting people to go for the foot in the door then amping it up. Gain access with a verifiable opening gambit, leverage from there to a personalised lie linked to the opening gambit. Then use fear and loss strategies to increase influence. Get people to take action and get them to qualify themselves (see below for more on that aspect).

So perhaps one cannot blame John Atkinson for being too gullible when Freegard – who seemed so much more worldly wise than him – confided in the pub one night that he was really an undercover policeman for Special Branch, trying to flush out IRA students at the college.

- He confides in his mark. HF goes for sympathy and help? Again the believable scenario linked to the bigger lie involving his own role. Small lie with bigger lie.

“Everything I am about to tell you is top secret. Just knowing it is a death sentence,” he said, before telling John how he could help him with his mission.

- Recruiting someone to take action on the con man’s behalf. Did this start out as a joke by HF and get out of hand or was it planned from the outset as a way of ripping people off for money and riches? How much was the exerting of power for its own sake?

So convincing were his lies that John agreed to be trained by Freegard, enduring a beating in the pub cellar to “toughen him up” and proving his trustworthiness by following his every command.

- Qualifying his mark by putting him through an ordeal. This is used a lot in persuasion more generally in a psychological way – get someone to prove they are good enough for what you are going to give them. Also the recruiting has a moving towards aspect – he is helping his country. This is something an adventurous man might go for – secret agent missions. People pay good money to do risky extreme sports and to live on the edge. It makes people feel alive. HF taps into this and offers the ‘real’ (fake) experience to his victims.

It was Freegard who suggested John should ask out Sarah Smith – thus drawing her into the web of deceit.

- Puppet master tchnique. Using others to attract new marks.

Yet two weeks after they’d started dating, Freegard had a new set of commands. He wanted John to tell Sarah that he, John, had liver cancer and that he wanted her to join him, Freegard and Maria on a “farewell tour” of Britain during college holidays.

- Lies upon lies. Again, always getting people to act on their persuasion, increasing compliance exponentially each time it works. Is the trick to grade these demands so each one builds on the previous?

And so the two couples set off at Easter 1993 for their tour, travelling by rail from one end of the country to the other, staying in the cheapest B&Bs they could find.

It was a disorientating experience for Sarah, already reeling from John’s apparent cancer diagnosis.

Days before they were due to go back to college, Freegard took them to the beach in Bournemouth and told them they were never going home.

“There’s a reason I’ve been placed at the Swan,” he told them. “We’ve identified an IRA cell at Harper and it’s my job to root it out. The college is thick with Provos, and John’s been helping me.

“We’re not just here because of John’s illness, but because we need to lie low for a while. Our cover has been blown. Mine and John’s.

“Unfortunately, by being associated with us there are contracts out on your lives as well. Going home won’t be allowed until some arrests have been made. We hope this will happen in the next few weeks.”

- Cutting off his victims from their support network. Now he is taking things farther. Once cut off from their family and friends people become hugely more dependant on the persuader. A classic brainwashing and interrogation technique.

Sarah recalls in the book: “I felt dizzy, as if I was standing on a cliff edge. I could picture armed men in balaclavas positioned around my home, while Mum busied herself with the church calendar and Dad examined his cauliflower seedlings.”

- Is HF deliberately taking control of his victims’ internal submodalities i.e. how they picture things to themselves? Another persuasion technique.

Sceptical at first, Sarah asked Freegard to show her some identification. Scoffing, he told her undercover agents didn’t carry ID – then proceeded to reveal personal details about her life, family and even how much she had in her bank account.

- He scoffs and doesn’t even try to buy into her frame. Strong frame control here.

Believing he couldn’t have known this information unless he was who he claimed to be, Sarah believed him.

- Using apparently unknowable information. Magicians and psychics use this technique a lot. It pulls her back into his frame/reality.

And so began a life on the run, living in “safe houses” all over the country – sometimes leaving them no sooner than they had arrived because “the IRA were onto us”.

Sarah and John were forced to live in dingy attic rooms with no heating, while Freegard and Maria – by now pregnant with his child – took the more sumptuous living quarters.

- Gurus the world over preach the simple life while living it up at the expense of their followers!

He ordered Sarah to cut her long dark hair and dye it blonde as a disguise, and controlled every area of their lives.

- Reminds me of some religious gurus who set weird rules for their followers – Manson? Jones?

Issuing a set of rules – which, he said, could risk their lives if broken – Sarah was not allowed to talk to anyone, or even open the door. He rationed her food and insisted she hand over every penny she earned.

Setting rules. His rules. Powered by a moving away strategy – the fear of loss. Why did he go so far? Was he experimenting with how far he could push? A power trip?

One night, before they were sent to separate safe houses, Sarah recalls saying to John, with staggering understatement, “Something is not quite right” – to which he replied: “This is too insane to be a con.”

- The bigger the lie…

The next morning Freegard menacingly told Sarah her room was bugged and he’d heard every word.

“You make life difficult for me and I’ll make life hell for you,” he warned.

“I believed him,” says Sarah. “It was as if I was totally brainwashed and had become his human puppet.

Sarah and John – who is now a teacher in Europe – have spent many hours in recent years wondering about Freegard’s motivation.

John believes it was initially spurred by his jealousy of these naive, middle-class students from wealthy families. Perhaps he got his kicks from the power he could exert over them.

- Seems likely a combination of motivations – power trip, greed, sexual influence, feeling of importance.

When Freegard realised just how successfully he could con them, he upped the stakes, enjoying their terror while hatching an audacious plan to fleece them of money.

This, he told them, would be given to police handlers to fund their new lives once the IRA threat was over. He promised they would get it back.

- Presenting their handing over of money as an investment. Something that would ultimately help the victim and not be lost. After all the other compliance measures he’d gained, the money seems an easy request to go for!

And so John went to his parents, Russell and Margaret, who, like their son, genuinely believed the threat to their lives was real and were eager to help. Over the space of 18 months, they handed over almost half a million pounds – every penny of which was given to Freegard.

-Social proof influence at work again. Using one family member to gain access to others.

This money was used by him to buy nine luxury cars in the space of a year – casually losing £150,000 of it in repeated trade-ins.

Then it was the turn of the Smiths.

Freegard would march Sarah to a phone box and order her to read out a script detailing some sob story about a damaged car or rent money, to persuade her parents to give her money.

- He got her to read a script. Why was this? It seems likely Sarah was not much of a con artist and needed prompting to say the required lines. HF could not say them himself because he needed Sarah for the social proof weapon of influence to say his words to her parents.

Then she would tell them she was setting up a new restaurant business, or any other story which might encourage them to let her have more of the money which was held in a trust for her.

Sarah had a joint trust fund account totalling £76,000 with her brother Guy, and also an inheritance from her late grandmother of £44,000.

Her father Peter, however, had the good sense to be deeply suspicious. Convinced from the outset that Freegard was a conman, he phoned the police. He was told Freegard was known to them and a complete fantasist.

- So HF had form. I wonder what the police knew of him previously. What had brought him to their attention?

However, every time the Smiths begged their daughter to come home and talk to them, Freegard would end the phone call. When they did manage to snatch a few words, Sarah seemed zombie-like – a complete stranger.

-A typical brainwashing victim description.

Reluctantly, but believing that her life would be worse if they refused, they gave Sarah access to her inheritance. Added to the money they lent her to set up a new business, it totalled a staggering £188,931.

- A business is the reason for the money. The handing over of money is presented as an investment and not a loss.

When Peter Smith announced there would be no more money, Freegard prevented Sarah from speaking to her family and friends for four years. Consumed with misery and shame at having lied to her parents repeatedly, she became increasingly isolated.

- Punishing for failure to comply? Seems strange when she did all she could. But I suppose he couldn’t risk letting her return to normal life in case she gave information, even inadvertently, to the police.

There were times, she admits, when she felt suicidal. Freegard would drop her off and pick her up from work, sometimes leaving her waiting hours for him to arrive. She was not allowed a key to her own door, and would stand in the street knocking for 20 minutes before he let her in.

- More cruel, punishing behaviour. It seems based on a power motive rather than for any practical (unethical) persuasive purpose.

Once he drove her to Gatwick airport and left her there for three weeks with virtually no money. She had to sleep on benches in the departure lounges, and scrounge for food. Another time he locked her in a bathroom for several weeks, appearing only intermittently.

So why didn’t Sarah just run away when she had the chance?

“After ten years in his world, there was no one in mine but him.”

Their relationship seems to have gone beyond the Stockholm syndrome, where kidnap victims develop a sympathy for their kidnappers.

“I depended on him for everything,” says Sarah.

“I had no degree, no money, and he’d completely alienated me from my family. He treated me appallingly and my life was so miserable I didn’t care if I lived or not, but I didn’t want to put my family at risk.

- Despite all he has put her through, she is still able to think of protecting her family. And HF uses this to keep his power over her.

“That’s why I stayed. I never felt any love for him. I loathed the man from almost the first day we met, but on some occasions I had sex with him.

- Was she attracted by his power yet hated him on a personal level? A strange combination here. Or did she hope the sex would change their relationship and empower her? Very complex.

“By that stage he had pretty much mentally beaten me. My world had been turned totally upside down. I even thought he might be nicer to me if I had sex with him – but he wasn’t.”

- This supports the idea that the sex might change him.

In the final four years with Freegard – just before her final re-incarnation as Carrie Rogers – Sarah was working as a night porter at the Royal Berkshire hotel in Ascot.

There she was known as Maria Hendy – the name of her former flatmate – and every penny of her earnings went into her former friend’s account, to be used by Freegard.

By then, he had changed his name by deed-poll to Hendy-Freegard and was working as a car dealer.

- Another social occupation that allows him to meet and influence people. I wonder what his sales targets we like. I bet he sold well!

His relationship with the real Maria Hendy, who was by then mother to his two children, had in latter years become marred with violence, and on one occasion she had to call the police.

- Not a wise move on HF’s part.

The row had been sparked by Maria’s suspicions that Freegard was cheating on her – which he was, with a string of women from whom he borrowed or stole money.

It was this brazen lust for cash that would prove to be his undoing, when one of his lovers, Caroline Cowper, went to the police.

When Freegard was arrested, he was already planning to flee to France. Police suspect he was going to take his wage-slave Sarah with him, for her passport and birth certificate were found among his belongings.

Luckily for Sarah Smith, she was at last free from his clutches – although all she had to show for her ten years with him was in the two plastic bags of clothes she had with her when her brother Guy picked her up from the police station to take her home.

“My parents and brothers Guy and Ian are the most amazingly supportive people,” she says.

“My whole inheritance has gone, but they have never uttered a single angry word to me.

“They don’t blame me – they blame Freegard. That is why we are so devastated by the Appeal Court decision this week.

“I did not go with him of my own free will. He deprived me of my liberty through lies and psychological control. He may as well have kept me in a locked room.

- Perhaps the law needs to change here. Kidnapping is of a physical nature usually but HF is so adept at manipulating people that he gets suggestible people to do his bidding in ways akin to ‘psychological’ kidnapping. Such cases, by their nature, are going to be very hard to prove.

“After my ten-year ordeal, liberty is still a daily surprise for me. Simple freedoms, like going to the shops, still have the power to startle me.

“But just below the surface I am still in huge turmoil. People who meet me probably think I’m quite ordinary, reasonably confident even, but the damage wrought by his mental cruelty is not visible from the outside.

“Taking decisions is a struggle, and making choices can leave me in tears. For a long time I didn’t trust myself to make decisions about anything or anyone.

- Was she always the type who was easily influenced and HF took advantage of that or has he left her in this state as a result of his treatment of her?

“My life ‘undercover’ now has an unreal quality to it, a fuzzy outline.

“I have so very many regrets, but I am trying to pull my life together again. Now I just want to make sure that no other woman goes through the same torment Freegard put me through.”

• Deceived: A True Story by Sarah Smith with Kate Snell is published

Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/femail/article-451275/The-conman-stole-life.html#ixzz0p41PqMOf

- I hope his persuasive skills extend to keeping himself safe in the shower room.