8 aliases and a wedding: Fake doctor married one of her victims
She faked being a doctor and having cancer to try to steal money from a charity. Now it’s emerged that Racheal Gray was on bail for targeting a mental health patient and a man she married. Jake Kenny reports.
An accomplished conwoman who faked being a doctor and having brain cancer to dupe people also targeted a mental health patient and a man she ended up marrying. Earlier this month, The Press revealed Racheal Gray unsuccessfully attempted to host a charity event in Christchurch for the Cancer Society, with the proceeds going into her own bank account. She claimed it was her dying wish after receiving a terminal diagnosis – a tale she has often told.
At the same time earlier this year, Gray, a convicted fraudster who once burnt down her family’s home in a botched insurance fraud attempt, had been telling anyone who would listen that she was a doctor. Her “patients” included a pregnant woman and a teenage boy, who trusted her.
Now it has emerged that Gray – who is known to police under eight different names including the surnames Jones, Armstrong, Grey and Gray – was on bail at the time for a series of frauds during which she targeted a mental health patient and a man she ended up marrying.
Teresa Cousins met Gray in November 2021 when she was seemingly at her worst. Gray told her she was a trauma specialist doctor and had six months left to live. She mentioned owning properties in Auckland, one of which she claimed she was selling for $3.4 million.
Cousins agreed to help Gray during her final days. She bought Gray clothes, paid for rent for an Airbnb for her to stay at, and paid off some of her parking fines – about $800 worth. Gray said she would pay her back when the sale of her property went through.
All of Gray’s claims were false, and Cousins lost nearly $12,000.
Rosemary Ware, 65, met Gray while they were both receiving treatment at a mental health care facility – the Henry Rongomau Bennett Centre at Waikato Hospital’s campus in Hamilton.
Some time after they’d both been released from care, Gray contacted Ware, saying she had terminal cancer and nowhere to live. Ware was living with her daughter at her home in Ōtorohanga, south of Hamilton, and the pair agreed to take her in about February 2022.
“How could we turn away a person dying from cancer?” Ware’s daughter, who asked not to be named, said. She’d also known Gray since 2009 and didn’t want to reject an old friend.
Over the next month, Gray took upwards of $10,000 from Ware. She claimed she had millions tied up in a trust account that she would repay her from. To support those claims was a Hong Kong and Shanghai Banking Corporation statement with an opening balance of $4m.
The document was doctored, and the money was never repaid.
Ware later realised that Gray had also stolen her driver’s licence and used it to sign up for a Vodafone account, obtaining an iPhone 13 Pro Max cellphone in the process. The penny dropped when the bills began arriving in her mailbox.
Ware’s daughter told The Press her mother now struggled to trust or interact with anyone.
“She’s really unwell now because of it. All because she got stung by Racheal.”
She said her mother believed she’d formed a genuine companionship with Gray.
“I saw the friendship develop. They would go for coffee and to the movies together.”
The woman never expected Gray would target her mum, especially because they knew her history and that she’d been convicted of fraud before.
“[When I first met her] she was lovely. She was softly spoken, kind and didn’t have a bad word to say about anybody.
“This is wickedly horrible stuff. Why would someone lie about having cancer? I’ve got cancer myself. It’s nothing to joke about. That was a real kick in the teeth.”
In July, Gray matched with drainlayer Richard Armstrong on the dating app Tinder. They chatted a lot. Armstrong drove from Tauranga to Hamilton to visit her and soon after, they entered into a relationship.
Gray told Armstrong she was a doctor for the All Blacks and had just been offered three jobs at hospitals in the North Island. She was going to take the one in Tauranga, she told him.
She moved in with him just a couple of months after they met.
“She was just normal. She seemed pretty straight up,” Armstrong said.
Gray started complaining of having migraines and blurry vision. She would stutter and tell Armstrong something was wrong with one of her eyes. Soon after, she told him doctors had discovered a tumour in her brain and given her months to live.
“I was feeling pretty s… for her,” he said. Then, Gray mentioned she had always dreamed of being married.
“I felt guilty and, having a bit of a heart, I said yeah.”
The pair agreed to be married and began making plans.
In August, Gray went to the Ultimate Motor Group car dealership on Hewletts Rd in Tauranga and tried to buy a Ford Ranger truck worth $66,000 in
Armstrong’s name. She told the salesman she didn’t have a driver’s licence because she had cancer.
She filled in the paperwork using Armstrong’s details, including his email address, and kept him out of the loop. He had given her access to his computer, which allowed her to access his email.
After receiving the first email from the car dealership, Gray set up an “email rule” diverting any further emails from the dealership to a hidden folder without Armstrong knowing.
She sent an email purporting to be from her HSBC bank teller to the dealership, claiming she had paid for the truck.
Gray then persistently harassed the car dealer to deliver the truck to her, saying she was about to get married. The dealer advised delivery couldn’t happen until payment had been made.
After the money failed to arrive, the dealership followed up with HSBC directly. It was discovered the initial email purporting to be from Gray’s bank teller wasn’t genuine.
Armstrong was unaware any of this had happened.
Later that month, the couple got married in front of 20 to 30 of his family at his sister’s home in Tauranga. They had a great day, Armstrong said, adding insult to injury. “That’s the strange thing about it. She got on well with everyone and that’s probably what pisses me off the most, that she deceived my family even more than me.”
The couple separated two days later. Armstrong’s family found out about Gray’s past and held an intervention with him, before confronting her and evicting her from where the couple were staying.
Armstrong couldn’t bring himself to confront her.
“My anger levels were through the roof. “It’s astounding really. She was still denying it. They were showing her the evidence and she was trying to act like she was getting a migraine. She was stuttering.”
Because of the law, Armstrong can’t file for divorce until two years after the wedding. He and Gray are still technically married.
“The fact she has been using my name guts me.”
Just two months later, Gray met a man named Michael Friedrich in Rotorua and they became romantically involved. She introduced herself as Rachel Armstrong.
She told him she was a doctor at Rotorua Hospital and that she owned property in Auckland worth $9m. He lent her $2000, which she said she would pay back.
Weeks later, the money had not been repaid as promised.
When Gray made a $400 purchase at the Coachman Spa Motel in Rotorua using Friedrich’s card without his permission, he confronted her. She denied knowing anything about it. He contacted the motel, which advised the payment was made under the name Racheal Gray.
Friedrich became suspicious. He searched the name Racheal Gray on the internet, which returned a Stuff article from 2009 about her fraud and arson convictions. He told Gray his daughter and son-in-law, both of whom were cops, were coming to visit in December.
Gray became uncomfortable and kept asking for the exact time of the visit. That morning, while Friedrich was at work, she stole $5000 cash from his cupboard and disappeared, blocking all contact avenues with him. He hasn’t seen or heard from her since. While she was in a relationship with Friedrich, Gray also conned another man into giving her $2500 after they met on Facebook. She said she would pay him back but later blocked his number, and on social media.
It is believed that shortly after this, Gray travelled back to her hometown of Christchurch. It’s understood that after unsuccessfully trying to host the Cancer Society event at Clearwater Golf Club earlier this year, she handed herself in to police and has been in custody since.
For the one-woman crime wave, spanning from late 2021 to 2022, Gray pleaded guilty to 15 charges including obtaining by deception, causing loss by deception, dishonestly using a document and theft at the beginning of April.
She will be sentenced in the Rotorua District Court in June.
The total proven loss to her victims was about $30,000, but the actual figure is believed to be much higher.
These details can be revealed for the first time after court documents were released to The Press following Gray’s guilty pleas.
It’s also understood that police have fielded new complaints about her in the past few months that don’t relate to the Cancer Society event.
While Armstrong didn’t lose any money, meeting Gray had taken a different kind of toll on him.
Asked what he would say if he saw her now, he said: “I wouldn’t.
“I wouldn’t speak to her if I bumped into her in the street. I want to see her locked up for a long time. It’s pretty f…ed up what she did.
“The more people who come out and talk about her, the better.”