A control gone wrong
That day, breeding dogs owned by a British couple in Vidaillat, a village of 180 inhabitants south of Guéret, were to be transferred to the SPA under the control of the DETSPP, responsible among other things for animal protection, and the gendarmerie.
It was then that, according to the Creuse prefecture, in full control, a man “started his vehicle then hit the two soldiers before fleeing”. The 51-year-old man was “severely injured” two constables, including one from an open fracture in the nose. They were prescribed 21 and six days of ITT. An investigation was opened by the Guéret prosecutor’s office for “attempted intentional homicide of a person holding public authority”.
A major scammer
According to the mayor of the town Martine Laporte, the man, still at large on Friday, is Robert Hendy-Freegard. But he is far from being an uneventful man. This British con man is the hero of a documentary “The Puppetmaster: lessons in manipulation”, streamed on Netflix since the beginning of the year and a fiction film, “Rogue Agent”, with James Norton and Gemma Arterton.
“We’ve known for 4-5 years that he’s a villain,” told an AFP correspondent, a neighbor of the stone house inhabited by the couple.
Convicted of kidnappings
In 2005, Robert Hendy-Freegard was sentenced by British justice to life imprisonment for kidnapping, deception, theft from students and women, from whom he had extracted a total of more than a million pounds. He pretended to be a spy for MI5, the British secret service.
He was released in 2009 after an appeals court overturned the kidnapping conviction. “He managed to take power and control over the lives” of his victims, forcing them to live in “abject poverty”, explained Bob Brandon, the police officer in charge of the investigation, during the trial in 2005.
A companion under influence
In Vidaillat, the scammer had settled with his companion in an isolated house. If he only went there “very rarely”, his companion lived there “totally reclusive” and “completely under the influence”, according to the mayor. “She lived in terrible conditions, never went out except in her little yard, she was reduced to eating raw chestnuts and croquettes”, says the neighbor who claims to have seen her like this.