‘Does she love me? No. Is she capable of love? No’: my mother, the con artist
In early 2020 life was sweet for Graham Hornigold. A pastry chef who has worked in Michelin-starred restaurants and been a judge on Junior Bake Off, he had recently launched his own small chain of high-end doughnut shops and cafes in London, along with his partner, New Zealander Heather Kaniuk, also a pastry chef. They had a baby on the way, too – a chance for Hornigold to create the happy family unit he hadn’t experienced in his own childhood.
Then, out of the blue, dropped the email that would change his life. Hi Graham, I’m not sure if this is going to reach you as I’ve been searching for a way to contact you and found this email. My name’s Dionne, formerly known as Theresa … Graham was born in Germany before being taken away from me to England.
“My first thought was: someone is taking the piss,” Hornigold tells me, over coffee at a branch of Longboys, his doughnut chain. But not a lot of people knew where he was born. Could this really be his long-lost mum?
Hornigold came into the world at a British army base in Germany in 1974. From the age of two he was fostered for a couple of years – he doesn’t know why – then he lived in Hertfordshire with his dad, a sapper in the Royal Engineers, and his stepmother. Hornigold’s birth mother wasn’t around; he didn’t know where she was, or even who. His dad – who drank and could be violent – didn’t say much about her, except that she had left.
Hornigold describes his upbringing as difficult, and his father as “ex-army, classic 1970s”. He has a scar on his head from where his dad kicked him when he was seven. The last time they met Hornigold was 18, and knocking his father down. He does know he’s no longer around.
There are a couple of ways Hornigold could have dealt with his difficult childhood. “Either you allow life to consume you and become bitter, or you utilise those challenges,” he says. He chose option B, went to college to study catering and followed his dream of becoming a chef. “The challenges are a trauma response – you advance yourself or feel a sense of acceptance.”
He has a habit of slipping into the second person: putting up a grammatical buffer between himself and difficult memories, perhaps. But that’s what Hornigold did: threw himself into his passion for pastry. He says to love someone is to feed them: “Your first meal comes from your mother. If that’s not the greatest act of love, tell me what is.” Having missed out, he did wonder about his mother. Her name was on his birth certificate, but internet searches hadn’t thrown up anything. It was she who had decided to come back into his life.
I wonder, given what happened, if he now wishes she hadn’t? “I wish she’d just come in and said, ‘Hi, I’m your mum, come up and see me every other weekend and we’ll have a roast.’ Just be a normal mum.” But that’s not what happened; nor was she just a normal mum. She was, in Hornigold’s words, “a destroyer of lives”.
* * *
Hornigold replied to the email with some questions – What was his middle name? Where exactly was he born? – all of which Dionne answered correctly. She had recently flown in from Bangkok and they met at a hotel in Liverpool. “Hello, my darling.” A beaming Asian woman in her mid-80s reached up from the sofa. They embraced, making skin-on-skin contact for the first time since he was a baby.
Hornigold is initially quite guarded, not one to pour his heart out to some bloke from the Guardian he has known for five minutes. I ask him how that was, a hug with his mum after 45 years. “It’s like if you’ve got a DIY job and you can’t find your drill for ever, then you do, it’s a bit like that.” He has another go, digs a little deeper. “I mean, it was kind of surreal, but good, yeah.” Good how? “Like you were transported, you feel a sense of belonging you hadn’t felt before, when you don’t know your roots. Everyone wants to know their history.”
Then the pragmatist returns, noting the practical advantages of knowing your mum. “Like when you’re at the doctor’s and they ask: is there a history of X, Y or Z?”
It does look as if he has been transported to childhood, the one he never had. Kaniuk filmed that first encounter; there’s footage of them getting to know each other. It has been used in a forthcoming Netflix documentary, stitched together with interviews. A friend of Hornigold’s says Graham was like a little kid with Dionne; a baby, born again. The documentary is called Con Mum.
* * *
The first bombshell dropped early, at that meeting in Liverpool. Dionne told Hornigold she had a brain tumour and bone marrow cancer, and had only six months to live – that was why she had come to find him. “So it was a bit bittersweet. I’d just had her come into my life; now she was being taken away again.”
Suddenly there was a lot to juggle in Hornigold’s life: the baby on the way, plus a new mother, who wouldn’t be around for long, and a global pandemic making logistics difficult. But having found his mother, he wanted to spend as much time with her as they had left.
Dionne – a cuddly but frail 85-year-old with a big smile – was something of a tycoon. She told Hornigold she had been living in Singapore and had businesses – fruit farms and palm oil plantations – in Malaysia (where she was born) and Indonesia. She was on the phone the whole time, talking to people all over the world in multiple languages, and she had a taste for the high life. She suggested she come to London and checked into a five-star hotel, living on the finest champagne and caviar. There were two sources of her wealth, she told Hornigold: her business acumen, and being the illegitimate child of the former sultan of Brunei. It sounded implausible but he wondered if that was why, when they went to the Dorchester hotel, she was treated so well: he knew the Dorchester is owned by the royal family of Brunei.
Hornigold says any parent wants to be able to provide some financial security for their children, but maintains he wasn’t thinking much about the money. “I’ve just had her come into my life, and all you care about at the time was to get to know her, so I could get to know me.”
Still, he wasn’t complaining when Dionne bought him a car, a new Range Rover, to make up for all the presents she hadn’t bought him over the years. Then she bought Kaniuk a car, a BMW, so she didn’t feel left out.
In September 2020, Kaniuk gave birth to a baby boy. But then Dionne seemed to take a turn for the worse, texting Hornigold from her hotel a picture of the blood she had passed in the loo. Further juggling was required: he moved her into the family home in Kent, which caused tensions. Kaniuk says in the documentary that Dionne’s attitude changed after the birth: she started criticising Kaniuk, complaining she wasn’t getting time with her grandson. “That sense of ‘I’ve just become a mum’ was robbed from me, because there’s Dionne,” she says.
A couple of months after the birth, Dionne and Hornigold began to discuss going to Switzerland to meet with a banker and a lawyer, and sign the documents that would enable Hornigold to inherit her considerable wealth. He would need a Swiss bank account, she said.
In Zurich, her high living continued: an expensive hotel, restaurants, champagne, more champagne. There were meetings with a banker and a lawyer, but no documents were signed; apparently there were hold-ups in accessing the money, because of Covid. The days turned into weeks. Hornigold missed his new son, but at least he was spending his mother’s last days with her. They met people whose businesses Dionne agreed to invest in: a couple with a startup selling high-end products, a middle man looking for investment in a new cancer treatment. She would invest, she told them, but, again, she couldn’t access her funds right now. Could they help her out, and not tell Hornigold?
She was very good at doing that: getting money from people to bankroll her extravagant lifestyle without others finding out. But the truth was becoming clear to Kaniuk and to Hornigold’s friend Juan, who happened to be living in Zurich. Kaniuk discovered Hornigold had moved money out of their joint account to give to his mother and had set up credit cards in his own name to pay the bills – £20,000 for the Zurich hotel, the same in London, more when they came back. It turned out this had started soon after they first met. It hit Kaniuk that Dionne had made it look as if she had paid for everything when in fact they had, because Hornigold thought the money would come back tenfold, or more.
The wedge Dionne was driving between them was banged in further. “She was trying to get me out of the picture,” Kaniuk says in the documentary. And the cars? She found out monthly payments for them were coming out of her and Hornigold’s joint account. In total, he had run up debts of around £300,000.
Kaniuk had been trying to book for them to go to New Zealand to introduce their son to her family, but Dionne was trying to stop Hornigold going. Convinced his mum was about to die, he decided to stay. So Kaniuk and their son went without him. “I needed to see my family and be around people who loved me,” she says.
* * *
The penny finally began to drop for Hornigold after Juan sat him down over a bottle of wine and told him he didn’t think Dionne was dying, that she was a scammer and he needed to snap out of the trance she had put him under. Around the same time, in a drawer in her hotel suite, Hornigold came across the red food dye she must have poured into the loo to look like blood.
Had he been blinded by the prospect of great wealth? Money, and greed, are behind most scams. Again, he says it wasn’t about the money. He admits to being blinded, but “blinded by the fact that my mum had come into my life and she was going to be leaving again”.
People who are searching for love often fall for scams, and that Hornigold does admit to. “Yeah, absolutely. That was my downfall. If you don’t receive it when you’re a kid, you have this wound you carry around … Can you honestly tell me the bond between you and your mother you haven’t seen in 45 years and who is dying wouldn’t be stronger than anything else?” Hearing Hornigold’s account, it is hard to believe a mother would do that to her son. As Kaniuk says, “it goes against everything you think a mother should do – loving and protecting a child. She didn’t do any of that; she effectively destroyed her child’s life. With no remorse.”
There are unanswered questions in the documentary. The farms and plantations – was any of that true? Dionne was certainly on the phone a lot; the banker and lawyer were real. She must have had some money, though had she scammed it from other people? “You can speculate,” Hornigold says, “but you just don’t know, do you?”
Kaniuk did her own detective work: she spoke to a man in Indonesia who had paid Dionne $40,000 for a hajj pilgrimage to Mecca that never materialised. How many others had she scammed that way? Kaniuk found records of scams Dionne had committed in the UK: convictions for shoplifting and obtaining property by deception. “God, I wish I knew this before,” Hornigold says. “I can understand you’re this type of person, but to do it to your own son – that’s what I don’t understand.”
Is there a possibility Dionne really is the illegitimate child of the former sultan of Brunei and Hornigold his grandson? “We’ll never know,” he says.
When they first met, Dionne didn’t want to do a DNA test. “There’s no need,” she’d told him. “You either believe me or you don’t.” But then, after pressure from friends, Hornigold persuaded her: “Part of me didn’t want to be related,” he says.
He knew the answer before the results came through. To be honest, watching the film, I knew the answer; you can see the likeness between their faces. Sure enough, it is 99.9% certain Dionne is his mother.
Con Mum, indeed (a title Hornigold thinks is fair and accurate). But their relationship made the situation difficult legally: when Kaniuk went to the police, she was told Dionne’s activities wouldn’t be seen as fraud, because she is his mother. Hornigold has looked into it: “Essentially they call it a bad business decision, because you know where the money is going and who to.”
A little over a year after smashing into Hornigold’s life like a wrecking ball, Dionne returned to Malaysia. There’s a moment in the film where she calls him on the phone: “I love you, son, I’m sorry for what happened.”
“Really?” Hornigold says, sarcastically but, remarkably, without anger. “It was kind of life-changing, Mum.”
“I’ve done what I’ve done, son. I cannot change, son.”
“You take care, yeah? I need to go.”
* * *
That call was a while ago. Hornigold, who has become more open as we’ve talked, now describes the year when his mother came back into his life as “frenzied, anxious, mind-bogglingly painful, in the sense that your brain hurt all the time. It was just darkness.” He felt suicidal. “One minute you’ve got everything; the next you’ve got nothing, and on the spin of a knife you’re deciding whether you’re going to stay alive or not. And if you don’t seek help, you’ll keep attracting this cycle.”
Hornigold did seek help. “I’ve done the head work, sorted out the inner demons.” That’s the message he’d like to get across and partly why he did the documentary: mental health is real; get help and you can fix it.
Is he more wary now? “I’d like to think I’m a bit more clued up. I was pretty good at spotting BS before, now I’m a master at it,” he laughs.
Hornigold’s son is now on the other side of the world: Kaniuk never came back from New Zealand. He thinks if it hadn’t been for his mother, they would still be together: “She was the catalyst.”
Although he misses his son desperately, being able to pull up a picture of him on his smartwatch has kept him going through dark moments. He recognises the parallels with his own childhood, growing up without a parent – “Yeah, it’s continuing the cycle” – but this is different. He describes his mother as “a bad person at her core”; his dad wasn’t great, either, whereas Hornigold is, he jokes, “an all-round good guy”. Is he, though, seriously? “I am, yeah,” he confirms, only half-joking now. He video chats with his son and plans to visit as soon as he can afford to. He is still heavily in debt, but has his business, and a home. “I won’t let it affect him, in the sense that he won’t see his dad. I’m going to be a big part of his life.”
Hornigold doesn’t know where Dionne is now – Malaysia, Singapore, Indonesia – and when Netflix approached her for comment, she didn’t respond. He hasn’t spoken to her for three years. I wonder if he thinks that, in spite of everything, she loves him? “No.” Is she capable of love? “No.” Does he have any love for her? “Apart from the fact that she brought me into the world, no.” He refers to her as Dionne rather than Mum now; “sometimes something else”, more explicit. It hurts, but Graham Hornigold has come to accept that he doesn’t have a mother.
• Con Mum is on Netflix from 25 March.
