How could this highly intelligent doctor be tricked out of £168,000 by her conman lover?
WHEN Liz Todd met her internet date for the first time, two words sprang to mind. ‘ Pleasantly normal,’ she says. As the date went on, her impressions only improved.
A barrister, who seemed passionate about his work, Christopher Smith was not just charming and handsome but intelligent, too.
Finally, she thought, someone on her wavelength. For it was hard for Liz, then 28, to find romance while working long hours as a hospital doctor.
It would take more than six months for Liz, now 31, to discover dark-haired Smith was not what he seemed. In fact, he was a serial conman with a staggering 133 previous convictions for fraud, and a string of jail sentences to his name — which, in reality, is Christopher Heayns, although he has gone by 17 different aliases.
By then it was too late. Heayns, 35, had fleeced Liz of £168,000 — money he told her he was investing in their future but which he was actually spending on prostitutes and strippers.
Such was his manipulative charm he had also, unbeknown to Liz, persuaded her mother, Hilary, 60, to part with £125,000 from savings and credit cards. To say his cruelty has devastated the family is something of an understatement.
Liz has been left penniless, was forced to sell her own home and has been declared insolvent while she battles to pay off creditors. Her mother, who had retired after 30 years as a biochemist, has been forced to return to work to pay off her own debts.
It is hard to imagine a more distressing, not to mention humiliating, set of circumstances.
now, as her former lover was jailed this week for nine and a half years, Liz is still struggling to comprehend the extent to which she was duped.
‘The thought that I was once in love with him — or the person I thought he was — makes me feel physically sick,’ she says. ‘I feel violated for having had those feelings. Facing him in court was the most humiliating experience of my life. I felt everyone was judging me, wondering how on earth I could have got myself into this situation.’
It is a pertinent question; attractive and intelligent, Liz does not strike you as an obvious target for a lonely heart scam. The product of a happy middleclass childhood with loving parents (since separated) who funded her through medical school, she bought her own home in her early 20s.
By her mid-20s she was working in acute care at a busy hospital in the north-East. And like many other young professionals, Liz turned to the internet for romance and joined dating website Plenty of Fish in 2013. ‘I wasn’t in a desperate rush to settle down, but I was looking for a partner,’ she recalls.
nobody caught her eye until in June she was contacted by Heayns, who said he was a barrister.
The couple seemed to have a lot in common and chatted over email before meeting for coffee three weeks later. The date was a roaring success and sparked a whirlwind relationship. ‘I fell head over heels,’ she says.
So when, two months later, Heayns — who was living with his father after claiming to have relocated from London — asked her to help him secure a £2,500-a-month flat in a manor house in Hexham, northumberland, she agreed.
‘He said he would be able to secure a long-term lease if I first put my name on an initial shortterm tenancy agreement, because being self- employed could unnecessarily complicate things for him,’ recalls Liz.
SHE adds: ‘It did seem extravagant. I remember thinking, “Why on earth does he need somewhere like this?” At the same time he had the money, or so I thought, and part of me felt, “good on you.”
‘I did think it was too soon for financial ties, but Christopher constantly reassured me he had the funds and at that stage he wasn’t asking for money. He seemed to be planning long term for us and I told myself that in time it might be my home, too.’
His funds certainly seemed generous, with a six-figure salary, a multi- million pound rental portfolio, and an investment set to mature early the following year to the tune of £300,000.
‘He had reams of convincing paperwork for all of it — files and files of correspondence and documents,’ says Liz.
For Heayns had gone to extravagant lengths to flesh out his financial and professional persona. ‘ He had mountains of barrister case files and I heard him on the phone several times with clients and investors — elaborate, sometimes heated phone calls, although presumably there was no one else on the other end of the phone.’
on occasions Liz drove him to ‘court’ dates all over the north — Manchester, york, Edinburgh. ‘It beggars belief the lengths he went to,’ she says.
Meanwhile, Heayns had builders and decorators extensively renovating his newly-leased flat with thousands of pounds in bills soon mounting up.
yet like many accomplished fraudsters, he was careful never to specifically ask for money. ‘Instead he started saying he was worried about his cash flow,’ says Liz. ‘He was obviously distressed, saying over and again that he couldn’t pay the bills and was a bit stuck until his investment matured.
‘It was stressful — some of the contractors were getting intimidating. I didn’t have money to hand so I started to put payments on various credit cards.’
By late november, only three months after he’d moved in, Liz had spent £50,000.
Did she not see things were already out of control?
‘It sounds ridiculous now, doesn’t it? All I can say is that I wanted to be in this relationship and I thought this was something we just had to work through.
‘I had seen ample evidence he could pay me back. ultimately, I trusted him.’
This was despite Heayns, shortly after moving into the Hexham apartment, ‘ confessing’ he had been released from prison a year earlier after being accused of taking a bribe, an offence for which he was subsequently acquitted.
It was, of course, a lie. While Heayns had been in prison shortly before they met, it was for fraud. ‘It was a clever, calculated tactic,’ Liz says now. ‘ It made me trust him more because I felt he’d confided in me, shown his vulnerabilities.’
More bills followed — Heayns had employed a cleaner, handyman and PA, none of whom were being paid.
LIz says she told him to cut back on expenses but ended up paying the staff because she didn’t want them to suffer because of his financial mess.
When he went to ‘ work’, meanwhile, she gave him money for hotels and expenses.
yet the outgoings were beginning to make Liz’s own financial situation desperate. ‘I was working every hour I could at the hospital to pay all the bills. I felt stressed beyond belief.’
And never more so than when, in early December, her mother confided that she had also given Heayns £125,000 from savings and on credit cards, believing she was helping tide him over and — by extension — her daughter.
‘I was utterly mortified,’ says Liz. ‘They had formed a close friendship and he had approached her separately for help. My only consolation was that I believed she, too, would get the money back.’
When Liz challenged Heayns about going behind her back, he told her he ‘didn’t want to worry her’. But this increasingly fragile veneer of reassurance was shattered on December 23. As she
and Heayns returned from a Christmas shopping trip to Edinburgh, Liz received a text from a builder working on Heayns’ home with a link to a newspaper article from 2008. Clicking on it, she found herself staring at the headline ‘Conman Jailed’ next to a picture of Heayns.
‘I felt sick,’ she says. ‘I looked up to where he was sitting across from me on the train and thought, “I don’t know who you are?”
‘I was panic-stricken. My family were arriving to stay the next day for Christmas. I didn’t know what to do.’
Naturally, Heayns had an explanation — he had been a juvenile offender but his subsequent arrest and imprisonment was on remand for an offence of which he was not convicted. ‘He was pleading with me, saying he was desperately trying to make up for the errors of his youth,’ Liz recalls.
‘In some ways it didn’t matter — he had lied to me. In the space of a few months I had gone from being swept off my feet to feeling utterly horrified at what I had got involved with.’
Too terrified to tell her parents, Liz put on a brave face through the festive season. ‘I still thought he was a barrister. I remember thinking I just needed to hang on in there and get my money back.’
In the new year things got worse. She learned via a call from a friend that Heayns had been cheating on her for months with someone connected to their wider circle.
‘I didn’t want to believe it,’ she says quietly. ‘I couldn’t understand how he could do this to me when I was working so hard to maintain the life he wanted.
‘I confronted him and he denied it, but I knew he was lying. At that point he got nasty, screaming at me for accusing him of lying. I knew then it was completely over.’
Liz returned to her own flat in such dire financial straits that she had only £25 to live on until payday.
‘I have a good job and I work hard, so it was embarrassing beyond comprehension that I was in this situation. I confided in one close friend. She took me to the supermarket and filled my fridge with food so that I could spend the money on fuel to get to work. It was utterly humiliating.’
And while Liz wished to sever contact with her ex, she needed to maintain some sort of relationship, as she wanted her money back.
‘Nauseating as it was, I felt it was in my interests to remain cordial until his investment matured.’
THE problem being, of course, that there was no investment. The spring maturation date came and went and Liz finally grasped the truth.
When he didn’t answer calls she confronted him at his home, telling him that unless she saw proof he could repay her, she would go to the police.
Then, she says, he got really nasty and told her that in his line of work he had protection and if she even spoke to the police he couldn’t control what they did to her or her family.
‘One analogy he used was that if people crossed him in the past, if he was punched once in the face they would be stabbed ten times in the back. Despite everything he’d lied about, I felt these threats were genuine.’
In despair, Liz worked day and night to try to pay the credit card bills with their spiralling interest — and the £23,000 outstanding rent on Heayns’s home, which she learned of only when she received a countycourt judgment.
‘It was hopeless. There were so many. All I could do was try to keep my head above water. I didn’t know what to do. I felt so alone. I was a nervous wreck, terrified he might hurt my family.
‘It got to the point where I couldn’t bear not to be working, as that meant sitting down and confronting the car crash my life had become.
‘I couldn’t sleep, and felt sick from stress.’
Just when Liz thought it couldn’t get worse, however, it did. A friend of Heayns rang. ‘He told me that instead of going to work, whenever I dropped him off at various places he had been going to a hotel with a stripper. He had hosted a prostitute party at his flat while I was working a nightshift, and had countless other girls over sleeping in the bed we shared there. I thought he couldn’t sink any lower, but he had.’
It was the trigger she needed to finally go to the police — although first she told her parents the truth, after months of prevaricating when her mother asked about the money.
‘They were amazing, just incredibly pragmatic,’ she says. ‘Mum has never once blamed me, but it took me many months to be able to look her in the eye.
‘The hardest part of all this is what he has done to her and the fact I am helpless to take her debt away.’
The police revealed Heayns was a serial offender who had been jailed for fraud seven times, with 133 separate convictions.
When he first contacted Liz, he had been out of prison for just 11 days. At his trial, he was convicted of four counts of fraud and several offences under the Insolvency Act.
As he handed down the nine-anda-half-year sentence, the judge said he was ‘completely without morals’ and ‘the most dishonest person I have ever encountered’ in 40 years practising law.
Liz is grateful for the stiff sentence, but says: ‘The reality is he will probably be out in half the time and up to his old tricks while I will still be trying to repair the financial and emotional damage he inflicted.’
She will be living on the breadline for the foreseeable future, she adds.
‘Christopher took advantage of us all at every opportunity. He exploited us for everything he could get and has not shown an ounce of remorse. I won’t ever understand it.’