Paul Kirby
Europe digital editor
A notorious conman who spent four years in a British jail has now been sentenced to six years in France for ramming his car into two policemen while trying to avoid questioning.
Robert Hendy-Freegard, 53, had moved to a rural area of central France to breed beagles illegally several years ago under a false name.
Neighbours had already been suspicious of him before two Netflix documentaries highlighted his activities as a conman.
Hendy-Freegard had posed as an MI5 spy to con women and students out of £1m, but he was released after four years when some of his convictions were overturned on appeal.
Representing himself at the court in Gueret, he said he had not been aggressive but he was worried sick.
“I had enough. I panicked,” he told the court, apologising to the two gendarmes he had driven into in the tiny village of Vidaillat west of Clermont-Ferrand.
“I didn’t stop because I’m a human being with emotions.”
Prosecutor Alexandra Pethieu said the rural area was not a war zone: “And yet that day ended up with a bewildering scene worthy of Mad Max.”
One officer was knocked down and another was thrown against the car windscreen for several metres.
Hendy-Freegard, who told the court his real name was David Hendy, was released several years early on appeal in the UK after his kidnapping charges were quashed.
Witnesses at his 2005 trial in the UK had described how they had been subjected to years of poverty because of the power he had over them. Coercive or controlling behaviour eventually became a criminal offence in 2015 in England and Wales.
Hendy-Freegard was released from prison in 2009, and moved to France in 2015 to start a beagle dog breeding business with his partner Sandra Clifton.
However neighbours began to suspect Clifton was under his control.
When an initial documentary came out in 2022, The Puppet Master: Hunting the Ultimate Conman, they contacted her children who had used the programme to appeal for help in finding her.
Clifton’s son travelled to the village and the beagles were being removed by a local charity when Hendy-Freegard arrived. As the two gendarmes asked the ex-conman questions he drove off, hitting the officers and escaping to Belgium.
He was later extradited and has spent more than two years in custody before going on trial for running over the two officers.
Hendy-Freegard denied that his partner had been under his coercive control, telling the court that his neighbours had a problem with him because of the documentary.
However, Martine Laporte, the mayor of Vidaillat, said that what had emerged from the trial was that “he is manipulative to the end and that isn’t going to change”.
“He really has to be stopped because if he gets out he’ll start again and that’s worrying,” she was quoted as saying by French media.
