Burn that wedding dress! No conman is worth your tears Carolyn
CAroLYn Woods looked pained leaving court in Bristol on Wednesday, perhaps even a little embarrassed. She is the woman who was fleeced of more than £800,000 by her supposed boyfriend; a bad hat and serial conman called Mark Acklom.
Pretending to be a millionaire Swiss banker who was also an MI6 agent (ahem!), he promised to marry Ms Woods after a whirlwind romance, but defrauded her of her life savings and fled the country instead.
He has now been condemned to nearly six years in jail, whereas her sentence has no end.
For people will be forever saying to her: Carolyn, didn’t you see the signs? Carolyn, how could you not have guessed? Carolyn, he pretended to have a brain tumour, he claimed having a heart attack was ‘fun’, and said he could shut down the entire UK economy with one phone call.
He also explained his frequent absences by saying he had been called away on dangerous espionage missions, often in Syria.
For God’s sake, Carolyn, they will clamour, how could you be so stupid?
Well, I think I know exactly how. At the time they met in 2012, Carolyn was an attractive 54-year-old divorcee starting a new life in the Cotswolds. She had money in the bank and two grown-up daughters but she didn’t have a man in her life.
Being lonely can make a woman vulnerable, especially when someone like Acklom bowls into her life. He was handsome, two decades younger and presented himself as a rich James Bond-a-like who had fallen for her hook, line and stinker.
LIKE Tinkerbell, he existed because she believed in him. And when he needed money because of ‘cashflow problems’ she believed in that, too. In the end, she was left with nothing but the wedding dress he bought her. She had even cashed in her pension.
Yet she was a victim of his cruelty, not of her own lack of guile. Habitual swindlers like Acklom home in on emotions, not intelligence.
Even smart people can fall for elaborate deceptions such as his because the most successful con artists thrive in a realm beyond logic. They identify desire, then pretend to supply what the heart most wants.
He took Carolyn on shopping trips to Harrods, installed her in a fancy home, told her he’d never felt this way before. Carolyn didn’t ask too many questions. If it seemed too good to be true, that is because it was.
For Mark was not the Prince Charming of her dreams. He was a career criminal and a psychopathic liar; a man who had been in and out of jail on fraud charges all his life, someone who was already married with two children.
To add insult to injury, he even used some of Carolyn’s money to pay their school fees. That detail would have killed me. I’m not surprised she felt suicidal when the extent of his deceit was revealed.
Yet she has nothing to be ashamed of. I don’t know Carolyn but I certainly know lots of older women like her; golden girls who are good-looking, single and with so much to offer. Practical, smart
women who can run a business, make a perfect dinner, keep a wonderful home, know how to grow roses, paint a room, manage a portfolio.
You meet them and think, why on earth aren’t men queueing up to take them out, cherish and love them? Because they are too busy queueing up farther down Peachy Bottom Lane, where all younger women live, that’s why. For me, that was the loose thread that would have instantly unravelled this sick tapestry of lies. For if super-spy millionaire international man of mystery Mark Acklom were real, he would have been with a 24-year-old, not a 54-year-old.
WHICH is a sad (but true) reflection on men in general, not women in particular. It has taken six years to bring Acklom to justice. In court he changed his plea to guilty at the last moment, admitting five charges of fraud that amounted to £300,000 of Ms Woods’s money. Prosecutors will try to recover some of her cash. Good luck with that.
In the meantime, Carolyn Woods must try to piece her life back together. She has been brave in helping the police track down Acklom and bringing him to justice. Let’s hope that for her there is some salvation in this public mortification and that Hollywood buys the rights to her story soon.
In the short term, she has to get on with the rest of her life. Perhaps she should start by burning that wedding dress, putting on some lipstick and pulling herself together. And beware of unlikely strangers bearing gifts.