54: Love and Lies Pt.1: The Disappearance of Sandra Clifton
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Nestled in between the picturesque cascading mountains of the French Alps lies a small roadside inn called the Buffalo Hotel. In 2002, on a warm sunny day, a car pulls up to the two-story pink and white inn and a man in a suit steps out. From the parking lot, he feels like he's back home in America.

Named after a symbolic American animal, the buffalo looks kind of like any rundown hotel on the side of any Midwestern freeway. But he's not here to stay. He wishes he were in the French Alps on vacation, but he's here on a hunt.

He's looking for information on a man he believes is dangerous. One that's been on the run from not only him and his colleagues at the FBI, but Scotland Yard and countless other international police agencies over the last few years. And more importantly, one who is most likely responsible for the recent disappearance of an American woman, Kim Adams. The FBI believes that he had been imprisoning her here for some time.

The man enters the hotel, flashes his FBI badge, and a manager takes him over to a room far down one of the hallways. He knocks on the door, though his spidey senses tell him no one's inside. Using a key, he slowly opens the door to the room, not quite knowing what to expect. Does he need to draw his weapon? The answer to that question is no.

Instead, he sees something he was not expecting. Inside the tiny rundown hotel room with blue and yellow pillowcases and sheets is hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of luxury goods. Designer shoes, high-end watches, more than what just one man would need. Who is this guy? Then, the FBI agent clocks something in the corner of the room.

a locked suitcase. He approaches it cautiously. He doesn't think it's a bomb, but anything is possible at this point. Backup finally arrives in the form of police from Scotland Yard, who are also here searching for information on this man. They hold their breath as the suitcase is pried open. Inside is full of personal documents.

Passports from different countries, bank statements, cell phones, ID cards, credit cards, train tickets, plane tickets. The first passport they see is for Kim Adams. He must have confiscated it from her so she couldn't escape him. She'd never be able to fly back to America if she didn't have her passport. But as they pick up other documents, they notice a disturbing trend. They all have different women's names on them.

Dozens of IDs, passports, bank statements, you name it. The FBI agent looks on in terror. This is not just one woman he's looking for. This man clearly has other women held hostage, potentially around the world. And the FBI agent is going to do whatever he can to find them.

Welcome to Heart Starts Pounding, a podcast of horrors, hauntings, and mysteries. I'm your host, Kaelin Moore. It's February, everyone, the month of love, so I figured what a perfect time to tell you the story of love gone wrong. Today, I want to tell you a tale of an international swindler who used love as a way to get what he wanted and about the women he duped. And

And because this story is so wild, I decided it would work best as a two-parter. So get ready to be taken on a ride over the next two weeks with me leading up to Valentine's Day.

I want you to look at your partner suspiciously when you're having a romantic dinner with them. And if you're single, I want you to breathe a big sigh of relief after listening to this story I'm about to tell you. Because as I was researching this one, I realized you can't really trust anyone these days.

If you're listening to the ad-supported version of the show, thank you so much. Our sponsors help make it possible for me to tell you crazy stories like this every week. And if you're listening on Patreon, even more amazing. Your support means the world to me, and it's been really fun welcoming new members to our Rogue Detecting Society over on Patreon.

Speaking of which, we just added a new tier with a new weekly show called Footnotes, where I talk with my producer about that week's episode and go into some details and other stories that just didn't fit.

We have footnotes up every week moving forward, and we're also going to do some older episodes. So if you're a Patreon supporter at that tier, make sure you let me know if there's anything specific you want me to revisit. New tier supporters will also get a say in the topic for each month's bonus episode that goes to all patrons. More details on that on the Heart Starts Pounding Patreon. And now we're going to take a quick break. And when we get back, I want to jump right in.

right in.

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In 2011, Sondra Clifton created a profile on a dating website. She was a divorcee living in England with her two teenage children, Sophie and Jake. Recently, she decided she was open to finding love again. Sophie and Jake were excited for their mother. According to Sophie, it was like her mom had an opening for a job for someone to love her and hopefully to love Sophie and Jake as well.

She wanted her mother to treat the online profile like a resume, include all of the important bits about her, that she was fun, loving, family-focused, but also be clear about what it was that she was looking for. Zandra had met her previous husband, Mark, when they were both just 14 years old. By 20, they were married and baby Sophie had arrived.

Not long after, Jake was there as well. It's a lot for two people in their early 20s to balance learning about themselves and the world while caring for two children and maintaining their relationship. Eventually, the two felt as though they had drifted apart enough to warrant a divorce. They did, however, remain very good friends, making sure their children felt they were supported by both parents. And for most of the kids' childhood, Sandra didn't date anyone else.

But by 2011, she and the kids were ready for her to find someone. It's important to know that online dating in 2011 hardly resembles the world of online dating today. There was no Bumble, no Tinder, no infinite swiping and Facebook groups dedicated to seeing if you can get the scoop on someone you found on an app.

No, that would start the following year once Tinder hit the scene in 2012. 2011 was more profile-based. It was OkCupid and eHarmony. It was frequented mostly by older adults, either ready for marriage or remarriage. And because of that, people were less dubious of those they were connecting with online.

So no one thought twice when in November of that year, Sondra tells her family that she's met someone. His name was David, a tall, handsome man with strong, dark, bushy eyebrows. And not only was he smart with a good job, he was exciting. He was everything that Sondra had been denied in her life. He loved fast cars and nice watches. He was well-traveled.

Not long after they started dating, Sandra and her family went outside one day to find a brand new Audi in a custom shade of blue sitting in their driveway. Sandra was starstruck and Sophie was excited that her mother was finally being treated the way she deserved. David would often tell Sandra about all the nice things he wanted to buy for her. He had a good job in the media selling ad space to large companies and he wanted to spend his money on her.

He did seem to talk about work a lot, how important he was at his job and how much they were paying him. But Jake remembered thinking that was strange because David was always at their house. He never really saw David go to work. Sure, sometimes he would leave the house for periods of time, but it didn't feel like enough for how important he made his job out to be.

Zandra didn't think that was odd, though. And Sophie was young, so she wasn't really paying attention to that. Jake had basically forgotten about it by early the next year when David announced to the family he was taking them to Spain on holiday. Gifts, trips, a stable job. David really did have it all.

So the family arrived in Spain ready to sightsee and try local food. But according to Sophie, that was not what David had in mind for them. The trip was really odd and not what they were expecting. Once they got there, David got a rental car for the family and just drove away.

Sophie had no idea where they were going, but David was driving the entire day and into the night, playing a Duran Duran CD on a loop until she had a screaming headache. Jake wasn't having any fun either. Each night they stayed in a different hotel, and each day they drove for hours and hours on end.

It was almost as if they were trying to outrun someone, though looking through the rear window, it never looked like anyone was behind them. Why couldn't they stop driving and just enjoy their time? Why did they have to be in the car the entire trip? On the way back to the UK after not enjoying Spain at all, Jake noticed that David was being really sketchy about his passport. He was holding onto it with an iron grip.

And when Jake stole a quick glance at the inside pages, David ripped it away from him. "I thought your last name was Hendy?" Jake asked. But that's not what it looked like his passport said from the millisecond he was able to see its pages. "Don't worry about it," was all David said. By the time the family got back, Sophie and Jake knew something was not right about their mom's new relationship. Not only was David acting really strange,

But now Sandra was starting to behave strangely as well. She was typically a social woman, but she had stopped seeing basically all of her friends. She didn't go out on the weekends anymore. She just stayed in with David.

She also stopped spending as much time with her family as she normally would. Sophie described it like they were all separate people going about their business in a house together. There were no more family dinners, no more gossiping with mom about what happened at school. Sandra was hardly talking to her kids now. And when she was, she was usually getting pretty angry with them.

And the strange behavior was affecting other areas of their lives. One day, Jake was visiting with Mark, his father, when he was pulled aside. Mark looked really concerned, and he let Jake know that he could talk to him about anything. Jake had been growing increasingly more concerned about his mother and thought about saying something to his dad. But before he could say anything, his dad blurted out,

You know, it's okay that you're gay. What? Jake wasn't gay. What are you talking about? He asked his dad. Mark told him that David had called repeatedly to tell him that Jake was gay, but Jake had never said anything like that to David. He actually hardly spoke with David at all. Why would he feel the need to call Mark and tell him that? He tried to explain everything to his dad, but he started getting really emotional.

Mark was understanding, though. And it's after this that Mark starts feeling skeptical about Sondra's relationship with David as well.

So Jake starts watching David closely. He sees how his mother has stopped hanging out with her friends to spend time exclusively with David. She hardly even talked to her own kids at this point. And if she did, it was to accuse them of stealing something from her. David would be standing right beside her as she berated her children for stealing a bracelet or money from her. But Jake and Sophie would never. They loved their mom.

It's not long after this that Jake arrives home from school one afternoon, puts his key in the lock, and finds that it doesn't turn. At first he thinks it's a weird mistake. Maybe his mom accidentally deadbolted the door and couldn't hear him knocking? So he leaves, and when he comes back a few hours later, it's still locked. He bangs on the door again, but no one answers.

So he leaves again. But this time when he comes back, the sun has set and it's starting to get chilly. He tries his key one more time and once again, it doesn't unlock the door. He can see his mom approaching the door as if she's coming to let him in. Only as she gets closer, he sees David round the corner behind her. Don't let him in, David shouts.

What is happening? Why can't he go inside? He runs around to the back of the house and starts banging on the door. And as he does, he can hear David calmly instructing his mother to not let him in. Sophie is upstairs in her room watching this happen, just as confused and frustrated as Jake. Still, no one unlocks the door for him. Finally, he gives up and just starts walking down the street.

Sophie opens her window and screams for him, begging him to come back. But he's gone. This is the final straw. David was turning his family against him and now locking him outside? Jake knows he's not coming back.

By 2013, it was just Sophie, Sandra, and David in the house. Sophie hadn't spoken to her father in two and a half years at that point and had minimal contact with her brother. Every day, David would say to her, you really don't ever want to see your father again, do you? Though he phrased it like a question, it always sounded more like a statement. And after months of hearing that every day, Sophie started to believe him.

Sophie was in her mid-teens at this point and started working as a hairdresser. And David decided that since she was making money, she should start paying her way a little bit more. He charged her rent that was about 75% of what she was making. She hardly had any money left over for herself. And though her mother owned the house, it was always David taking her rent money. Sophie started getting the feeling that the money was not making its way to her mother.

David also pressured Sophie into taking out her life savings of 10,000 pounds in one go and giving it to him for safekeeping. Once she did that, she never saw that money again.

Things were not sitting right with Sophie, but she saw how in love her mother was, how many nice things David was getting for her, how kindly he treated her. She kept convincing herself that she was wrong. She was overreacting. David was a nice guy. He just showed his love in strange ways. What started as death by a thousand cuts crescendoed into a final breaking point one night.

So, usually, David picked her up from work at the end of each shift. But one night, he just never showed. And she was closing. It was late. She was alone. No one was there to give her a ride. And she didn't have any money for a cab. David had taken all of her money. After calling David and her mother a dozen times, she finally gave up.

Defeated, she made herself a little makeshift cot and slept in the back of the hair salon. After that, Sophie knew she could no longer live with David. It wasn't safe. Mark came home one day to see his daughter standing in his kitchen. She didn't even have to say anything. He welcomed her in with open arms. All was forgiven. She looked fried and way too thin, a soldier returning half her weight.

Jake was relieved to have Sophie back as well. Their little family was slowly being pieced back together, but there was still a big part missing. Sondra. They knew they had to get her out of David's strange grasp. That's when they got some terrible news. Sondra and David were gone. Vanished from the house in the middle of the night.

But it was the clues they left behind that proved the situation was way worse and stranger than anyone imagined after the break. I'm Victoria Cash. Thanks for calling the Lucky Land Hotline. If you feel like you do the same thing every day, press 1. If you're ready to have some serious fun for the chance to redeem some serious prizes, press 2.

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When Sandra and David vanished from their home, Mark, Sophia, and Jake assumed the worst. Was David horrible to the kids so they would leave? Was he waiting for Sandra to have no one so that he could take her away? Well, the signs point to yes. It was clear now that this was a psychologically abusive relationship, and David was using isolation as a way to control Sandra.

Mark, Sophia, and Jake went over to the house to look for more information. And that's when they saw how bad it had gotten. First, there was a master lock on the bedroom door that locked from the outside. It was open, and when Mark went into the bedroom, he saw that the windows had newspaper taped all over them, blacking out all of the incoming light.

There were also bills. Piles and piles of bills. As they opened them, they saw that the mortgage hadn't been paid in ages. And the financing on the car that David bought Sandra — remember, that new Audi with the custom paint job —

hadn't been paid. Not only that, but it was financed under Sandra's name. The payment would have been her responsibility, not David's. And something about this clicked for Sophie. She thought back to David asking her for rent, about her savings that he had asked her for and then disappeared with. Had her mother even known about any of that? Or was David just siphoning money from the family?

There was also how he didn't really have a job. He always talked about money, but according to these documents, he didn't have any. This was beyond just being a controlling boyfriend. They had to find him. Not only were Sandra's finances at risk, but her life could be at risk as well. So that night, Mark took to the internet. David had told them his last name was Hendy.

But all searches for David Hendy came up empty. Jake realized there was probably a reason David wouldn't let him see the name in his passport. He must be using a fake name. Mark tries Googling other things. David Hendy and a location. David Hendy jail. Finally, David Hendy con man. Boom. He gets a hit.

The first few links that popped up are titled things like Ruthless Man Gets Life in Prison and Spy Con Man Sentenced for Decades of Lies. Wait, what? Spy? Was David pretending to be a spy? The articles all refer to David by his real name, Robert Hendy Freegard.

David was just a pseudonym he was known for using. And when Mark Googles his real name, he gets even more hits. And the results are even more menacing. Accusations of kidnapping and imprisonment, missing women all over the world, and parents begging for their daughters to be brought home.

Hundreds of thousands of pounds he conned out of people. Mark and the kids all look at each other, shocked. Robert Hendy Freegard was not just an abusive boyfriend. He was an international con artist, and he had taken off with their mom. Using love as a way to get what you want out of someone is not a new concept.

Since there's been love, there have been people trying to take advantage of it for monetary gain. And throughout history, there have been plenty of men like Robert. The 1800s were once lauded as the golden age of scamming since they didn't have the technology we have today to look into someone.

The term conman most likely originates from around the mid-century, stemming from confidence man, a man who would gain someone's confidence in order to swindle them.

I mean, think about it. Anyone could basically go from town to town, change their name, marry someone, steal their money, and then disappear into the night and do it all over again somewhere else. There were no security cameras, no fingerprint databases, and police departments hardly talked to each other. And importantly, there were no pictures.

At best, people were passing around sketches that may or may not have actually resembled the person. It's interesting. There was really only one collective source of police sketches into the late 1800s, a book of criminals compiled by one officer in New York, Thomas Burns.

He tried to keep names, aliases, descriptions, and drawings when he had them, but it would later come to light that many of the entries were actually the same people under different names. Take, for instance, the following story. In April of 1898, a single mother named Janet Spencer finally agreed to marry a man named N.H. Chalfant.

He was a superintendent of the Haute Advertising Agency near where she worked, and since he met her a year prior, he had been pursuing her aggressively. After a year of courtship, she finally agreed to marry him, selling the restaurant she owned to be with him. Two weeks later, she and her son accompanied him to a hotel in town where he told her he had a business meeting.

The two waited patiently in the lobby for Chalfant to finish his meeting, but after two hours, he didn't return. Janet got a bad feeling and took her son back to her apartment, where she saw that Chalfant had hastily moved out of her home and taken what was left of the money she had from selling her restaurant. She never saw him again.

Janet didn't know it at the time, but Chalfant wasn't her husband's real name. She was married to a man named Johann Otto Hoch.

And a year prior, he had married a woman named Maximiliana Spurl and stolen her life savings before quickly disappearing. Three months before that, he was married to a woman named Ana Maria Dess. He vanished from her life after she had given him $500 to purchase tickets for their honeymoon. And four months before that, he was married to a woman named Clara Bartels, who died suddenly from gastritis two months after their marriage.

Right before she died, he had been named the executor of her estate, and he took off with all the money she had to her name. Johan was a romance scammer that would go on to marry upwards of 50 wealthy women, killing at least 15 of them to secure their fortunes. And now that I think of it, his story is probably worthy of its own episode.

Typically, when he moved towns, he would adopt different names and backstories until he realized that he didn't need to because marrying women and stealing their money was just that easy. He did this for almost 20 years until a woman he was courting finally turned him into police after she noticed a wanted ad for him in the paper under a different name.

He was executed in Chicago on February 23rd, 1906. And yes, as police got more technology, it became harder to change your name and move to another town to keep scamming. You may be thinking to yourself that you're safe. It's easy to know who someone really is these days. We have background checks and we grew up getting oh so many scam emails, so we know when someone's duping us.

But romance scammers adapt to the times. Johan met a lot of people through personal ads in the paper, as did other scammers through the 20th century. And more recently, it seems they've adapted again. In 2021, the Federal Trade Commission published a report that claimed romance scams had hit a record high that year.

For reference, in 2017, they reported that Americans lost a collective $87 million to romance scams. In 2021,

That number was 547 million. And this is largely due to a rise in dating apps and online meeting places. Over one third of people who reported losing money to a romance scam in 2021 said the interaction started on Facebook or Instagram.

Typically, these interactions remain online. It starts with friendly chit-chat, then it turns into the pursuer asking for financial help. Sometimes they'll claim they have a sick child or need a bit of money to get out of a bind. Or if you're a young woman like me, it'll be some stock photo of an older man asking if you want $5,000 a week, no questions asked.

Or maybe you've even gotten the one I've seen a lot lately where someone says they like your photo and want to use it for a mural and that they'll pay you. Have you seen that one? I don't really get it, but maybe it's so confusing that it works. A lot of these scammers, by the way, will ask for money in cryptocurrency, which is also maybe why it rose so much in 2021 when everyone was doing crypto.

Robert was using a blend of old and new techniques. He met Sandra online, but he quickly moved their interactions into real life where he knew that he'd have more control. And I mention all of this to you because as Mark starts looking into Robert, he can't believe what he's reading. Some of it seems outrageous, but clearly there's a history of these kinds of scams.

Even when they sound ridiculous to us, they work. And they can work on you too. We can sit here on our high horses and think that this could never happen to us. But it can. And it does.

The first woman that came up when Mark Googled Robert was a normal American woman who had a good job and loving parents. It was Kim Adams, a woman who went missing with Robert over 10 years ago after the break.

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Kimberly Adams was an American child psychologist in her 20s from Phoenix, Arizona. She met Robert in a pub in the UK in August of 2002 while she was on a trip. And she was immediately smitten. She had the same first initial thoughts that Sandra had. He was charming. He was successful. And he was really, really into her.

Early into their relationship, Robert started showering Kim with gifts. Designer watches, trips around the world, extravagant promises for the future. And right after the two meet, Kim doesn't return to America for work. It's concerning, to say the least. And her parents try to get in touch with her, but to no avail. It seems Kim has gone radio silent. But then, her co-workers get a phone call.

There's a man's voice on the other end of the line, and he speaks with an English accent. Kim's co-workers don't recognize who it is, but he says he's calling on behalf of Kim Adams. She's terminally ill and won't be returning to work. And with that, he hangs up the phone. Kim? Terminally ill? No one even knew she was sick, and she was so young. This was devastating.

Well, yes, it would be devastating if it were true. But at the same time that Robert is making these phone calls to Kim's work, he's also calling Kim's parents. But he has something different he's telling them. Kim's parents haven't seen or heard from her in weeks, and they're terribly worried. But one day, Robert calls them, insisting that Kim is with him and she's okay.

He won't tell them where she is, but he does tell them that she needs money. They ask to speak to Kim and he lets them. You're not going to believe this, Kim tells her parents, but I'm with a man who is a spy and he wants me to join a spy training academy.

He's going to teach me what it takes to be an MI5 agent. The only thing is, the tests are really expensive. Over 2,000 pounds each time I want to take it.

Robert proceeds to tell Kim's parents that he's enrolled her in a spy training school so that she can be a spy with him. He's already invested a lot of his own money into the program, 60,000 pounds, actually, and he's running out of funds, which would be fine, except Kim keeps failing her spy tests and has to retake them.

Kim's parents can't believe any of this. Spy school? Kim never said anything about wanting to be a spy, but deep down they trust their daughter. And at the end of the day, Kim's stepfather has the money. Coincidentally, he just won thousands of dollars in a local lottery, something that Robert would have known.

This is a hard pill to swallow for Mark, who's sitting at his family computer reading about all of this, worrying about the mother of his children. What was going to happen to her? Was Robert going to do to her what he had done to Kim? Well, he decides to take action. He's not going to let some con man come in and tear apart his family. Robert Hendy Freegard may be missing, but Mark's going to find him.

At the time, though, Mark didn't know what he was signing up for. There's more to that article he was reading. A sting operation, headed by Kim's mom. The discovery of a locked suitcase full of other women's passports. Women being locked away, isolated for years. And there's a lot more to the man at the center of all this. Robert Hendy Freegard.

Next week, we're going to start at the beginning. Who is Robert Hendy-Friegard and who are the other women he's conned? I'm going to tell you about his first con, all the way up until what Mark and his kids decided to do. And I'm going to tell you about his first con,

And a reminder that we have a new after show called Footnotes only available on Patreon. At the end of this two part series, we're going to discuss it more in depth, including some scams that I've fallen for. So make sure to join us over there to talk more about this series.

This has been Heart Starts Pounding, written and produced by me, Kaylin Moore. Sound design and mix by Peachtree Sound. Special thanks to Grayson Jernigan, Travis Dunlap, the team at WME, and Ben Jaffe. And an extra special thanks to all of my new patrons. You will be thanked in our monthly newsletter, which you can sign up for by going to our website, heartstartspounding.com. Have a heart-pounding story or a case request? Check out our website for that as well. Again,

That's heartstartspounding.com. Until next time, stay curious. It's time for today's Lucky Land Horoscope with Victoria Cash. Life's gotten mundane, so shake up the daily routine and be adventurous with a trip to Lucky Land. You know what they say, your chance to win starts with a spin. So go to luckylandslots.com to play over 100 social casino-style games for free for your chance to redeem some serious prizes. Get lucky today.

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