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He Wore His Real Name While Stealing Millions - The Professor Ghost · True Nightmare Stories

• 0:04
  Speaker 1: He walked into Christie's auction house in February 2002 with
• 0:07
  Speaker 1: a forged bank document claiming he could spend up to
• 0:10
  Speaker 1: five million pounds. He didn't bid on a single painting himself.
• 0:15
  Speaker 1: He sent his daughter instead, a young woman who had
• 0:18
  Speaker 1: no idea she was committing fraud on her father's behalf.
• 0:21
  Speaker 1: She won six paintings worth over one million pounds. Then
• 0:24
  Speaker 1: she mentioned casually to a Christie's employee that she planned
• 0:28
  Speaker 1: to frame one of the half-million-pound canvases in a cheap
• 0:31
  Speaker 1: frame from a local shop. That one sentence brought the
• 0:34
  Speaker 1: whole thing down. But here's what makes Robert Himes different
• 0:38
  Speaker 1: from every other fraudster you've heard about. He never used
• 0:41
  Speaker 1: a fake name. Not once. His real name was on
• 0:44
  Speaker 1: every lease, every bounce check, every court document going back
• 0:49
  Speaker 1: 15 years. He was a real scientist with a real
• 0:52
  Speaker 1: master's degree from the University of Warwick. And the detective
• 0:56
  Speaker 1: who eventually caught him admitted that during the interviews he
• 0:59
  Speaker 1: almost started to believe him. There is something in this
• 1:02
  Speaker 1: story that stayed with me long after I first read
• 1:04
  Speaker 1: through the case files. The idea that the most convincing
• 1:07
  Speaker 1: con artist isn't someone who hides. It's someone who stands
• 1:10
  Speaker 1: completely in the open and dares you to doubt them.
• 1:13
  Speaker 1: This is the story of Robert Hyams. On the 20th
• 1:16
  Speaker 1: of January 2006, a judge at Southwark Crown Court looked
• 1:20
  Speaker 1: at the man standing before him and said something that
• 1:22
  Speaker 1: had never quite been said in that room before. He
• 1:25
  Speaker 1: told Hyams that he appeared to have almost a compulsion
• 1:28
  Speaker 1: to deceive people. Not a motive. Not a method. a compulsion.
• 1:32
  Speaker 1: The judge added that Hyams didn't just profit from his crimes,
• 1:36
  Speaker 1: he enjoyed them. By that point, Hyams had pleaded guilty
• 1:39
  Speaker 1: to 10 charges and asked the court to take into
• 1:42
  Speaker 1: account 77 additional offenses. The number alone is staggering, but
• 1:47
  Speaker 1: the number isn't the most disturbing part. The most disturbing
• 1:51
  Speaker 1: part is the timeline. From 1990 to 2005, across multiple countries,
• 1:56
  Speaker 1: through multiple arrests, multiple prison sentences, and a fraud, so
• 2:00
  Speaker 1: audacious it made international headlines. He kept going. Every time
• 2:04
  Speaker 1: a door closed, he opened another one, with his own name.
• 2:08
  Speaker 1: Robert Hyams was born on the 13th of May, 1954.
• 2:11
  Speaker 1: For the first part of his life, the biography is
• 2:14
  Speaker 1: entirely unremarkable. He earned a genuine master's degree in philosophy
• 2:18
  Speaker 1: and science from the University of Warwick. He married a scientist.
• 2:22
  Speaker 1: They built what looked from the outside like a quiet
• 2:25
  Speaker 1: credentialed life. Two scientists, a family, a future with a
• 2:29
  Speaker 1: clear shape, Then, in 1990, he went bankrupt. What happened
• 2:34
  Speaker 1: in the years immediately after that bankruptcy is the part
• 2:36
  Speaker 1: that investigators would later struggle to explain. Because the shift
• 2:40
  Speaker 1: wasn't gradual. It wasn't desperation forcing him into one bad
• 2:44
  Speaker 1: decision that spiraled. By 1991, he had converted a farmhouse
• 2:48
  Speaker 1: in Essex into what he described as a laboratory. He
• 2:52
  Speaker 1: told people he was collaborating with a Russian team on
• 2:54
  Speaker 1: a cure for AIDS. He took loans of 20,000 to 30,000
• 2:58
  Speaker 1: pounds from members of the local farming community, claiming the
• 3:02
  Speaker 1: money was for agricultural machinery that didn't exist. He wrote
• 3:05
  Speaker 1: checks that bounced he vanished. In approximately 1992, he was
• 3:10
  Speaker 1: convicted on 19 counts of deception and sentenced to four years.
• 3:14
  Speaker 1: The appeal court cut that to one year. The amount
• 3:17
  Speaker 1: he had taken from the farming community, 236,000 pounds. His family,
• 3:19
  Speaker 1: a partner, and four children was declared by police to
• 3:25
  Speaker 1: have no knowledge of any of it. This is where
• 3:27
  Speaker 1: the pattern begins to take shape, and it's one that
• 3:30
  Speaker 1: would repeat for the next 13 years with an almost
• 3:33
  Speaker 1: mechanical consistency. Hyams would arrive somewhere new. He would present
• 3:38
  Speaker 1: himself as a scientist, an academic, a man of resources
• 3:41
  Speaker 1: and reputation. He would rent a house, lease a car,
• 3:45
  Speaker 1: open bank accounts using false references. He would pay just
• 3:49
  Speaker 1: enough just once to establish credibility. Then the checks would
• 3:52
  Speaker 1: start bouncing. Then he would be gone. One of his
• 3:55
  Speaker 1: early victims was a woman named Roberta Truman, who ran
• 3:58
  Speaker 1: a guest house. Hyams arrived with his family. They stayed
• 4:01
  Speaker 1: for two weeks. He paid 300 pounds in cash, enough
• 4:05
  Speaker 1: to seem legitimate. He owed 700 more. On the day
• 4:08
  Speaker 1: he left, he signed a check for the full amount
• 4:11
  Speaker 1: while Roberta watched. He cancelled it before he reached the
• 4:14
  Speaker 1: end of the road. Roberta reported it to the police.
• 4:17
  Speaker 1: She never got her money back. She never saw him again.
• 4:20
  Speaker 1: What Roberta didn't know, what none of his victims knew
• 4:23
  Speaker 1: until much later, was that Hyams was running multiple bank
• 4:26
  Speaker 1: accounts simultaneously, sometimes half a dozen at once, transferring checks
• 4:31
  Speaker 1: between them and a technique investigators called cross-firing. The method
• 4:35
  Speaker 1: inflated his apparent balance to figures as high as 750,000 pounds.
• 4:39
  Speaker 1: Banks saw the numbers, banks approved the overdrafts, and then
• 4:43
  Speaker 1: the whole structure would collapse, and Hyams would be somewhere
• 4:46
  Speaker 1: else entirely. doing the same thing with a fresh set
• 4:49
  Speaker 1: of accounts and a fresh set of references. He never
• 4:52
  Speaker 1: changed his name. That detail kept surfacing in every investigation.
• 4:57
  Speaker 1: Detectives flagged it as unusual. Most fraudsters build elaborate false identities.
• 5:02
  Speaker 1: Hyams used his own. His real name appeared on leases
• 5:05
  Speaker 1: he never intended to honor, on checks he knew would bounce,
• 5:09
  Speaker 1: on court documents stretching back years. It was as if
• 5:13
  Speaker 1: the deception itself was the point, not the money, not
• 5:16
  Speaker 1: the escapes. Just the act of making people believe something
• 5:19
  Speaker 1: that wasn't true, with his own name attached to it.
• 5:22
  Speaker 1: By 1999, he was out of prison early and buying
• 5:26
  Speaker 1: a fake professorship certificate from an unaccredited university he found online.
• 5:31
  Speaker 1: It cost him 200 pounds. What he built with it
• 5:34
  Speaker 1: would cost everyone else far more. The bomb threats came first.
• 5:38
  Speaker 1: That is the detail that never quite fits the rest
• 5:40
  Speaker 1: of the story. A man who spent 15 years deceiving farmers, landlords,
• 5:45
  Speaker 1: and auction houses with a quiet professorial manner. This same
• 5:48
  Speaker 1: man picked up a telephone in 1998 and called Heathrow
• 5:52
  Speaker 1: Airport four times in two hours. He adopted an Irish accent.
• 5:57
  Speaker 1: He said the IRA had planted a bomb. He called
• 6:00
  Speaker 1: the BBC. He called the Civil Aviation Authority. And then
• 6:04
  Speaker 1: he went home and waited. The reason was almost mundane.
• 6:07
  Speaker 1: Hyams had told his family they were moving to California.
• 6:10
  Speaker 1: He had invented a job at a university there. A
• 6:13
  Speaker 1: full academic post, complete with salary and prestige. His partner
• 6:17
  Speaker 1: believed it. His children believed it. The only problem was
• 6:21
  Speaker 1: that California required a plane. And a plane required actually
• 6:24
  Speaker 1: arriving in California. And once they arrived in California, the
• 6:28
  Speaker 1: fiction would have to continue at a level of detail
• 6:30
  Speaker 1: that was becoming difficult to sustain. So he grounded every
• 6:33
  Speaker 1: flight out of Heathrow instead. A voice expert analyzed the
• 6:37
  Speaker 1: recordings and identified him. The phone company traced the calls
• 6:41
  Speaker 1: to his home address, but Hyams had anticipated this. He
• 6:44
  Speaker 1: tampered with his own telephone line before detectives arrived, physically
• 6:48
  Speaker 1: rerouted the wiring in an attempt to make it appear
• 6:51
  Speaker 1: that the calls had originated from a neighbor's connection. When
• 6:53
  Speaker 1: police searched the property, they found the modification. It was meticulous.
• 6:58
  Speaker 1: It was also completely transparent to anyone who looked closely.
• 7:02
  Speaker 1: He pleaded not guilty. He was convicted on the 1st
• 7:05
  Speaker 1: of July, 1998, and sentenced to two years in prison.
• 7:09
  Speaker 1: His partner left him while he was inside. Here is
• 7:12
  Speaker 1: the part that matters. He had done all of this
• 7:15
  Speaker 1: not to steal money. The bomb threats produced no financial gain.
• 7:19
  Speaker 1: He made them to buy time, to preserve a lie
• 7:22
  Speaker 1: that existed only to preserve another lie. The detective who
• 7:26
  Speaker 1: later investigated Himes made a note of this pattern. The
• 7:29
  Speaker 1: deception was not always instrumental. Sometimes it was the point itself.
• 7:34
  Speaker 1: He was released early, and within months he was on line,
• 7:37
  Speaker 1: browsing a website that sold academic credentials from universities that
• 7:41
  Speaker 1: did not exist. He paid 200 pounds for a certificate
• 7:44
  Speaker 1: naming him a professor. The institution printed on the certificate
• 7:48
  Speaker 1: had never held a single class, employed a single lecturer,
• 7:52
  Speaker 1: or awarded a single legitimate degree. None of that mattered.
• 7:55
  Speaker 1: What mattered was the paper, the seal, and the title.
• 7:59
  Speaker 1: He started a new relationship. His new partner knew nothing
• 8:02
  Speaker 1: about the conviction, nothing about the bomb threats, nothing about
• 8:06
  Speaker 1: the four children. and the family left behind. He introduced
• 8:09
  Speaker 1: himself as Professor Hyams. She believed him completely. February of
• 8:14
  Speaker 1: 2002 is when the scale changes entirely. Christie's auction house
• 8:18
  Speaker 1: in London was preparing a sale of significant paintings. Hyams
• 8:21
  Speaker 1: did not walk in wearing a disguise. He did not
• 8:24
  Speaker 1: use a false name. He presented a document on the
• 8:27
  Speaker 1: letterhead of the stating that he held a line of
• 8:33
  Speaker 1: credit of up to five million pounds. The auction house
• 8:36
  Speaker 1: accepted it as a preliminary reference. These things happen in
• 8:39
  Speaker 1: a world where clients of that magnitude are expected to
• 8:42
  Speaker 1: be eccentric, private, and difficult to reach. He did not
• 8:46
  Speaker 1: attend the auction in person. He sent Catherine. Catherine was
• 8:50
  Speaker 1: his adult daughter from his first relationship, the daughter who
• 8:53
  Speaker 1: had grown up believing her father was a brilliant, unconventional scientist.
• 8:57
  Speaker 1: She had watched him move through failure after failure and
• 9:00
  Speaker 1: emerge with his confidence intact. always explaining the setbacks as temporary,
• 9:04
  Speaker 1: always promising that the real work was just around the corner.
• 9:08
  Speaker 1: She loved him. She trusted him. And so when he
• 9:10
  Speaker 1: asked her to bid on his behalf by telephone, describing
• 9:14
  Speaker 1: himself as too busy with his research to attend, she
• 9:17
  Speaker 1: agreed without hesitation. Catherine sat in a room and listened
• 9:20
  Speaker 1: to the auctioneer and raised her hand or spoke the
• 9:23
  Speaker 1: amounts and won. Six paintings, 1,188,000 pounds. The hammer fell.
• 9:30
  Speaker 1: The sale was complete. Her father's collection. She mentioned to
• 9:34
  Speaker 1: a staff member at Christie's that one of the paintings,
• 9:37
  Speaker 1: a piece worth more than 500,000 pounds, would need a frame.
• 9:41
  Speaker 1: She knew just the place, she said. A shop nearby.
• 9:45
  Speaker 1: Nothing fancy. They were practical people. That single sentence ended
• 9:49
  Speaker 1: the fraud. Christie's staff did not release the paintings. They
• 9:53
  Speaker 1: made calls. The Bank of California document did not survive scrutiny.
• 9:57
  Speaker 1: The paintings were put back to market and sold at
• 9:59
  Speaker 1: a law of 150,000 pounds to the original vendor. Christie's
• 10:03
  Speaker 1: called the Metropolitan Police. Catherine learned the truth in pieces,
• 10:07
  Speaker 1: and each piece was worse than the last. She had
• 10:10
  Speaker 1: not been a bystander. She had been in the auction room.
• 10:13
  Speaker 1: Her voice had made the bids. Her credibility, the warmth
• 10:16
  Speaker 1: of a daughter who believed in her father, had been
• 10:19
  Speaker 1: the final instrument of the fraud. She had been used
• 10:22
  Speaker 1: so cleanly that she had not felt it happen. Hyams
• 10:25
  Speaker 1: fled to the United States with his new partner and
• 10:27
  Speaker 1: their children, telling them he needed to continue his cancer
• 10:30
  Speaker 1: research in California. They rented a mansion worth 1.7 million pounds.
• 10:35
  Speaker 1: They did not pay for it. The Metropolitan Police flew
• 10:38
  Speaker 1: to California. They had jurisdiction over the Christie's fraud. They
• 10:41
  Speaker 1: did not have jurisdiction to arrest him on American soil.
• 10:45
  Speaker 1: They watched. They waited. They eventually left. In December of 2003,
• 10:49
  Speaker 1: Hyams came back to the United Kingdom on his own.
• 10:53
  Speaker 1: No one has fully explained why. He was arrested in
• 10:56
  Speaker 1: January of 2004 for the Christie's fraud. He was released
• 10:59
  Speaker 1: on bail in April of 2004. He immediately began committing
• 11:03
  Speaker 1: new offenses. What D.C. John Gibbons encountered when he opened
• 11:07
  Speaker 1: the case file was not a master criminal. The initial
• 11:10
  Speaker 1: report that landed on his desk was minor. A landlord
• 11:14
  Speaker 1: in the Suffolk area reporting a tenant who had vacated
• 11:16
  Speaker 1: a property without paying rent. Gibbons began making calls. The
• 11:20
  Speaker 1: landlord's name was Graham Smythe. Smythe had done what most
• 11:24
  Speaker 1: cautious property owners do. He had asked for references. Iams
• 11:29
  Speaker 1: had provided them. Cambridge University. A salary exceeding £ 100, 000 annually.
• 11:35
  Speaker 1: Smythe had even called to verify the reference. The phone
• 11:38
  Speaker 1: was answered by someone who confirmed the details warmly and professionally.
• 11:42
  Speaker 1: That person was Robert Hyams, speaking to himself, playing both
• 11:46
  Speaker 1: roles simultaneously on two separate lines. Smythe had pressed Hyams
• 11:50
  Speaker 1: repeatedly for the overdue rent. Each time, Hyams responded with
• 11:54
  Speaker 1: a variation of the same explanation. There must be a
• 11:57
  Speaker 1: communication problem. He was waiting for funds from an offshore account.
• 12:01
  Speaker 1: The transfer had been initiated. These things take time. When
• 12:05
  Speaker 1: the pressure increased, he mentioned his heart condition. The payments
• 12:08
  Speaker 1: never came. Smythe filed in the small claims court and
• 12:12
  Speaker 1: called the police. Gibbons pulled the thread. What unraveled was
• 12:15
  Speaker 1: not a single case. It was a network of independent
• 12:18
  Speaker 1: victims who had never spoken to one another, each holding
• 12:21
  Speaker 1: a fragment, a bounced check, an unpaid invoice, a school
• 12:26
  Speaker 1: that had educated two girls for a year without receding 17,000 pounds,
• 12:31
  Speaker 1: a car rental company, a bank that had extended a 12,500-pound
• 12:36
  Speaker 1: overdraft on a fraudulently opened account. Catherine. who had discovered
• 12:40
  Speaker 1: that her father had stolen her own checkbook, the one
• 12:43
  Speaker 1: she had handed him specifically to close the account, and
• 12:46
  Speaker 1: had written checks against it until it was £ 12, 000 in
• 12:50
  Speaker 1: the red. Debt collectors had come to her door. Banks
• 12:53
  Speaker 1: had refused to believe she was the victim. She had
• 12:56
  Speaker 1: cut off all contact with her father. Gibbons registered £ 68, 500
• 12:59
  Speaker 1: in losses for the period between 2004 and 2005 alone.
• 13:01
  Speaker 1: That figure did not include Christie's. It did not include California.
• 13:10
  Speaker 1: It did not include the farm fraud of the early 1990s.
• 13:13
  Speaker 1: It did not include the bomb threats. He went to
• 13:17
  Speaker 1: Hyams' address. He found a house that told its own story.
• 13:21
  Speaker 1: Rooms with boxes still unpacked. Furniture arranged with the provisional
• 13:25
  Speaker 1: quality of someone who had never committed to staying. And
• 13:27
  Speaker 1: covering every surface near the door. The hall floor. The
• 13:31
  Speaker 1: entry table. The mat. Months of unopened mail. Red envelopes.
• 13:36
  Speaker 1: Legal notices, demands from solicitors, final warnings. The correspondence of
• 13:41
  Speaker 1: a life lived permanently in flight. Gibbons interviewed Hyams for hours.
• 13:46
  Speaker 1: Hyams denied everything. The bounced checks were accidental. The accounts
• 13:50
  Speaker 1: were confused. Surely there had been administrative errors. He spoke
• 13:54
  Speaker 1: in the measured, reasonable tone of a professor explaining a
• 13:57
  Speaker 1: misunderstanding to a graduate student who had simply not understood
• 14:00
  Speaker 1: the complexity of the situation. And here is the thing
• 14:03
  Speaker 1: that Gibbons later admitted publicly. At some point during those hours,
• 14:07
  Speaker 1: he almost started to believe him. Not because the evidence
• 14:11
  Speaker 1: was ambiguous, the evidence was clear, but because the man
• 14:15
  Speaker 1: sitting across from him was so completely at ease with
• 14:17
  Speaker 1: his own explanation that some biological part of Gibbons' brain,
• 14:21
  Speaker 1: the part that reads confidence as credibility, began to lean
• 14:24
  Speaker 1: toward the story being told. Gibbons caught it. He nodded it.
• 14:29
  Speaker 1: He described it afterward as the most unsettling professional experience
• 14:32
  Speaker 1: of his career, not the fraud itself. but the moment
• 14:36
  Speaker 1: he felt the pull of it firsthand. Hyams was arrested
• 14:39
  Speaker 1: on the 27th of May, 2005. At Southwark Crown Court
• 14:43
  Speaker 1: in December of that year, he pleaded guilty to 10
• 14:46
  Speaker 1: charges and asked the judge to take into account 77
• 14:49
  Speaker 1: additional offenses. The judge sentenced him to five years on
• 14:53
  Speaker 1: the 20th of January, 2006. Before delivering the sentence, the
• 14:58
  Speaker 1: judge said something that went beyond the legal accounting of
• 15:00
  Speaker 1: the case. He said that Hyams appeared to have what
• 15:03
  Speaker 1: amounted to a compulsion to deceive people and then he
• 15:06
  Speaker 1: added something more specific, that Hyams had derived pleasure from
• 15:10
  Speaker 1: the deception itself, not merely from the financial benefit. D.C.
• 15:14
  Speaker 1: Gibbons asked afterward whether he believed the sentence would deter
• 15:18
  Speaker 1: Hyams from reoffending, said he was not convinced that it would.
• 15:21
  Speaker 1: That assessment has never been contradicted. Graham Smyth's complaint reached D.C.
• 15:25
  Speaker 1: John Gibbons as a routine missing tenant file. A house
• 15:29
  Speaker 1: abandoned mid-tenancy, a deposit consumed, a stack of unpaid rent.
• 15:34
  Speaker 1: Gibbons had seen dozens of those, What made him pull
• 15:36
  Speaker 1: the thread was something small. The fake Cambridge reference listed
• 15:40
  Speaker 1: a phone number that, when called, rang back to the
• 15:43
  Speaker 1: same address Hyams had just vacated. One man, two voices,
• 15:47
  Speaker 1: one conversation. From that single detail, Gibbons began connecting names
• 15:52
  Speaker 1: that had never met each other. Landlords in three counties.
• 15:56
  Speaker 1: A boarding house owner who had never recovered 700 pounds.
• 16:00
  Speaker 1: A private school that had chased fees for two years
• 16:02
  Speaker 1: before quietly removing two small girls from the register. Each
• 16:06
  Speaker 1: victim had assumed they were alone. None of them had
• 16:09
  Speaker 1: known there were dozens more. Hyams was arrested on the
• 16:13
  Speaker 1: 27th of May, 2005. The charge sheet ran to 87
• 16:16
  Speaker 1: counts in total, 10 to which he pleaded guilty, and
• 16:20
  Speaker 1: 77 additional offenses he asked the court to take into consideration.
• 16:24
  Speaker 1: That second number is the one that stays with you. Seventy.
• 16:27
  Speaker 1: Seven crimes he volunteered. Crimes the police had not yet found.
• 16:32
  Speaker 1: At Southwark Crown Court in December of 2005, the judge
• 16:35
  Speaker 1: did not describe Hyams as greedy. He did not call
• 16:39
  Speaker 1: him desperate, or reckless, or even calculating. The word he
• 16:43
  Speaker 1: used was compulsion. He said it appeared Hyams had almost
• 16:46
  Speaker 1: a compulsion to deceive people. And then he added something
• 16:50
  Speaker 1: that changed the texture of everything that had come before it.
• 16:53
  Speaker 1: Hyams had derived pleasure from the deception itself, not just
• 16:56
  Speaker 1: from the money. From the act of making someone believe
• 16:59
  Speaker 1: something that was not true. That reframes 15 years of
• 17:03
  Speaker 1: fraud in a single sentence. The empty laboratory in Essex.
• 17:07
  Speaker 1: The bomb threats delivered in a borrowed accent. The Christie's
• 17:10
  Speaker 1: auction where six paintings sold for more than a million
• 17:13
  Speaker 1: pounds and never left the building. Every one of those
• 17:16
  Speaker 1: acts had a financial angle, but the financial angle was
• 17:19
  Speaker 1: not the whole story. The performance was the point. The
• 17:22
  Speaker 1: moment someone looked at Robert Himes with his genuine master's
• 17:26
  Speaker 1: degree and his professorial manner and his name, always his
• 17:30
  Speaker 1: real name, and decided to trust him. That moment was
• 17:34
  Speaker 1: what he was after. There is something in that finding
• 17:36
  Speaker 1: that no sentence of five years can fully address, and
• 17:40
  Speaker 1: Gibbons knew it. When asked after the verdict whether he
• 17:42
  Speaker 1: believed prison would deter Hyams from re-offending, Gibbons said no.
• 17:46
  Speaker 1: He did not qualify it. He did not say he
• 17:49
  Speaker 1: hoped otherwise. He simply said he was not convinced. The
• 17:52
  Speaker 1: man who had spent months reconstructing every layer of the fraud,
• 17:56
  Speaker 1: who had sat across from Hyams for hours in an
• 17:58
  Speaker 1: interview room, and had at one point almost believed him.
• 18:01
  Speaker 1: That man walked out of the courthouse without confidence that
• 18:04
  Speaker 1: it was over. The offenses committed in the United States
• 18:07
  Speaker 1: were never prosecuted. No extradition was sought. The California mansion.
• 18:12
  Speaker 1: The research into cancer pretense. The family installed in a
• 18:15
  Speaker 1: property worth 1.7 million pounds with no intention of ever paying.
• 18:19
  Speaker 1: All of it remains. Legally. Unresolved. Catherine never got her
• 18:23
  Speaker 1: checkbook back. What she got instead were letters from debt collectors,
• 18:27
  Speaker 1: court orders issued in her name. and banks that initially
• 18:30
  Speaker 1: refused to believe her own father had done it. She
• 18:33
  Speaker 1: had stood in Christie's auction house two years earlier, phone
• 18:36
  Speaker 1: pressed to her ear, bidding on paintings she genuinely believed
• 18:40
  Speaker 1: her father could afford. She had offhandedly mentioned a bargain
• 18:43
  Speaker 1: picture frame to a member of staff. That single remark,
• 18:47
  Speaker 1: the kind of thing anyone might say, warm and practical
• 18:50
  Speaker 1: and entirely innocent, was what unraveled a million pound fraud.
• 18:54
  Speaker 1: She cut all contact after the checkbook. The loop Planted
• 18:57
  Speaker 1: in an earlier episode asked why Hyams returned voluntarily to
• 19:01
  Speaker 1: the United Kingdom from California in December of 2000, and three,
• 19:05
  Speaker 1: despite knowing an arrest was likely. No explanation has emerged.
• 19:10
  Speaker 1: The police could not compel him to return. He came
• 19:13
  Speaker 1: back anyway. Whether that was financial exhaustion, a calculation about
• 19:17
  Speaker 1: UK versus US legal risk, or something closer to what
• 19:21
  Speaker 1: the judge later identified, a man who needed the game
• 19:24
  Speaker 1: to continue. and needed an audience capable of playing it.
• 19:27
  Speaker 1: No one has said. The question remains open because the
• 19:31
  Speaker 1: man at the center of it has never answered it.
• 19:33
  Speaker 1: Robert Himes was sentenced to five years on the 20th
• 19:36
  Speaker 1: of January 2006. His partner left. Catherine did not attend
• 19:41
  Speaker 1: the sentencing. Somewhere in that courtroom, a judge put a
• 19:45
  Speaker 1: name to what 15 years of evidence had been circling,
• 19:48
  Speaker 1: not desperation, not ambition. Not even greed in its ordinary form. Pleasure.
• 19:53
  Speaker 1: Derived from the act of making people believe. The professor
• 19:57
  Speaker 1: who never taught a class. The scientist who dismantled a
• 20:00
  Speaker 1: laboratory that had never run an experiment. The man who
• 20:03
  Speaker 1: called Heathrow Airport four times in two hours in a
• 20:06
  Speaker 1: borrowed Irish voice, then went home and rewired his own
• 20:09
  Speaker 1: telephone line to point at his neighbor. He always used
• 20:12
  Speaker 1: his real name. This show is made by Oba Media.