Robert Hendy-Freegard was working as a car salesman in Newport, Shropshire, in 1992 when he told three agricultural college students that he was an undercover MI5 officer investigating an IRA cell operating in the area.
Over the following decade he persuaded a series of people — the students, and later women he met through relationships or work — that they were in danger and that their only protection was to do exactly what he said. They abandoned universities, jobs, homes and families. They moved between rented accommodation and safe houses on his instruction, sometimes sleeping in cars, often alone in empty flats for months. They handed over savings, took out loans, and gave him control of their money and their identity documents. One woman was kept in the arrangement for a decade. Total losses exceeded a million pounds.
The distinguishing feature of this case, and the reason it sits in a guide about influence rather than a catalogue of fraud, is that the money was not the mechanism. Fear was.
Evan Stark's framework of coercive control describes what Hendy-Freegard built. The core is not violence but a pattern of isolation, surveillance, micro-regulation of daily life, and manufactured dependency, sustained by a threat that never resolves. His victims were told their families were compromised, that they were being watched, that contact would endanger everyone. They were given loyalty tests — periods of deprivation, instructions to sleep rough, demands that they cut off relatives — and told these were security procedures.
Three physiological and psychological processes follow from chronic unpredictable threat.
The stress response, sustained rather than acute, produces the HPA-axis effects described in chapter 105: impaired executive function and impaired memory, which degrade exactly the capacities needed to plan an escape.
Learned helplessness, in Seligman's sense: when actions have no reliable relationship to outcomes over a long period, the organism stops generating attempts. Victims did not fail to leave because they were unintelligent — several were highly educated. They had been in an environment where nothing they did changed anything, for years.
And intermittent approval, which is chapter 19 again. Hendy-Freegard alternated cruelty with warmth and praise, producing the traumatic bond of chapter 20, so that victims defended him to the outside world and concealed their circumstances from their own families.
It ended in 2002 when one victim's mother, in the United States, contacted the FBI, and a joint operation with the Metropolitan Police lured him to a meeting at Heathrow.
He was convicted in 2005 of kidnapping, theft and deception and given a life sentence. The kidnapping convictions were overturned on appeal in 2007 on a technical point about whether the victims had been detained, and he was released in 2009. In 2025 he was convicted in France of offenses arising from a further case.