How DID a highly intelligent lawyer fall for Britain’s most despicable lonely hearts predator?
ANNEMARIE Fletcher does not seem like the sort of woman who would fall prey to an internet dating fraudster. She is outspoken, shrewd and independent — in fact, after graduating from Southampton University she worked as a litigation lawyer.
Yet she fell for the lies of inveterate conman Kris Lyndsay, who claimed to be a successful businessman with three firms in his profile on the dating app Tinder.
He also said he was a grieving widower whose wife and daughter had died two years earlier in a car crash.
The combination was irresistible: power, wealth and vulnerability. Single mum-oftwo Annemarie, 44, was hooked. Now she wonders how she was so easily duped.
Lyndsay — who changed his surname from Kinson to hide his criminal past — was exposed as a serial conman and jailed for four years at Taunton Crown Court this month after admitting three fraud charges.
He conned Annemarie and Polish-born Anna Walczak out of £13,000 between them. And police believe Lyndsay, 41, whose phone contained numbers of many women, left several other victims in his wake.
When he began preying on his latest victims he had only just been released from jail for defrauding his former employer of almost £50,000 — and the child he claimed was dead is alive and well.
Annemarie became tangled in his web of deceit just weeks after meeting him on the Tinder app, when she confided in him that her younger daughter Mia, nine, would have to leave the school she loved — the prestigious £15,000-a-year Millfield in Glastonbury — in July 2015 because her father, from whom Annemarie was separated, had stopped paying the fees.
It was then that Lyndsay made her an offer that she has lived to regret.
He pledged to fund Mia’s schooling for another year in return for a short-term loan to tide him over until some big customers paid their bills.
Overwhelmed by his apparent generosity, Annemarie handed over £40,000 worth of jewellery and a further £7,100 in cash — which she had to borrow.
She is still counting the cost, emotionally and financially, of trusting him.
‘I viewed Kris as an alpha male and a bit of a rough diamond and I felt sorry for him. I ask myself now how I was taken in, but I’d never encountered a criminal before and he seemed so plausible. ‘
HE drove a new Land Rover discovery — which was hired — and told her he was buying a £950,000 house near her in Somerton, Somerset. ‘He took me to see it and I even allowed myself to imagine a future living with him there.
‘But it was all complete fiction. And when I watched him walk into court, stripped of his bravado and fine clothes, just an overweight man carrying a reusable shopping bag, I thought how pitiful he was.
‘I feel sorry for his daughter. How anyone can say their child has been killed is beyond me. And I cannot forgive him for dragging Mia into his sick world and making her feel so happy she was staying at Millfield.’
Annemarie encountered Lyndsay on Tinder in May 2015, three years after separating from her partner of 18 years.
The couple ran a thriving restaurant together in Australia, but after the breakup she returned to her native West Country with daughters Luisa, 13, and Mia, and settled in a rented cottage in rural Somerset to begin life as a full-time mother.
Annemarie admits that when she signed up to the dating app, she was not only looking for a partner, she wanted a solvent, dependable father figure for her children, too. And as she browsed the profiles of available men in her area, she spotted Kris posing by a new vw Touareg 4x4.
They began chatting online. Enjoying his conversation and impressed by his work ethic (he claimed to own and run three prospering businesses — a water bottling plant, a string of car parks and a phone app) four weeks later she agreed to meet him for coffee in nearby Portishead, where he claimed to own a flat in an exclusive marina
development. ‘We chatted and I raised the question, “Didn’t you ever want children?”’ she recalls. ‘He told me his wife and daughter had died in a car crash. I felt dreadful and didn’t ask any more.’
Later, he claimed his wife had been hit by a drunk driver, dying in intensive care three days later, while his daughter succumbed to her injuries after six days.
‘He went on to say that he’d never been able to stay out overnight since they’d died in October 2012,’ says Annemarie. So she did not think it too odd when he seemed uninterested in sleeping with her: in the two months they were together, they had sex only a couple times.
Neither did she worry that his visits were brief and erratic, assuming his thriving businesses kept him busy.
‘He was a smooth talker,’ she says. ‘He seemed assertive, successful. He engaged with the kids. And I wanted it to work. I wanted to be with someone. Of course you do.’
Only later did she realise he was juggling a series of complex and interlinked parallel lives.
Annemarie, meanwhile, was struggling with her own problems. While Luisa attends a private school that caters for her special needs — because of her learning difficulties the local authority pays for her tuition — she had come to the conclusion that Mia would have to leave her school. ‘I was distressed on Mia’s behalf,’ she says. ‘And I’d have done anything to make it better.
‘When I look back now, I see Kris as a predator waiting until I was at my most vulnerable to pounce.
‘I told him, reluctantly, about the fees, and he said that he’d stretched himself to buy his new home, but hadn’t yet been able to sell his flat in Portishead. So he asked for a loan for a month while he waited for some bills to be paid. In return, he said he’d pay Mia’s school fees for a year. I didn’t feel entirely comfortable about allowing him to help, but I’d been praying for a miracle and it seemed it had come. Kris even emailed the school bursar to say he’d be responsible for the fees.’
Annemarie had little ready cash, but her family owns a prospering Bristol shipping company and she had a valuable jewellery collection.
She gave Lyndsay her £22,000 Cartier watch and an £18,000 diamond ring to pawn, suggesting he took them to a broker she knew in Hatton Garden, London — but he then claimed that he’d been unable to secure loans against the jewellery because of its high value, and asked for a further £5,000.
Annemarie was so desperate to secure Mia another year in school that she borrowed the cash from a friend. Even then, Lyndsay asked for £2,100 more, claiming that without it he would lose his £50,000 deposit.
‘I told him he shouldn’t be buying a house he couldn’t afford, but he said he’d gone too far to pull out. Reluctantly I agreed to find the money — which he wanted in cash.’
She got the money by borrowing from Luisa’s savings and Mia lent her birthday money.
Lyndsay promised to return the loan within a month, giving the impression that funds would come from a big car parking contract he had landed at Glastonbury Festival.
When it still hadn’t turned up days after he claimed it would, Annemarie decided to look at the property site Rightmove — and the house Lyndsay was supposedly buying had been put back on the market.
The estate agent told her the seller had got tired of Lyndsay’s refusal to exchange. Contacting his solicitors, she was told they were pursuing him for a £4,000 bill he had racked up for the fictitious house purchase. There was one more vital part of Lyndsay’s story she wanted to verify. She rang the independent school his daughter had attended before, supposedly, she had so tragically died.
There she learned that the little girl was alive and well, and only left because her fees weren’t paid.’
Also, in the school’s records, Kris’s surname was recorded as Kinson, not Lyndsay.
After a quick Google search she learnt that the man she knew as Kris Lyndsay had been released from prison for defrauding his former employer, a car park owner, of almost £50,000 just weeks before he met her.
‘I felt utter disbelief,’ she says. ‘I realised I’d been manipulated and exploited and made to feel I was going mad. How could he have told such despicable lies?’
SHE alerted police and they went on to gain the evidence that helped convict him. Her jewellery was reclaimed, but she did not get her money back.
Mia, meanwhile, has had to leave the school she loved and now attends a state school in their village.
‘I felt so terrible; the irony isn’t lost on me that if I hadn’t given Kris that money, she could have stayed another term — maybe by then my circumstances would have improved.’
She is now writing a book about her experience, The Secret Behind The Gift. ‘The thing I find hardest to forgive was the upset he caused Mia,’ she says. ‘She felt so happy she was staying at Millfield.’
Among all of his deceptions, crushing an innocent child’s hopes was, perhaps, the worst.
HAVE you been conned by dating fraudster Kris Lyndsay/ Kinson? Email your story to femailreaders@dailymail.co.uk