Who is 'Con Mom'?
New Netflix true-crime documentary 'Con Mom' streams from this Tuesday 25 March. But who is Con Mom? And what did she do?
New Netflix true-crime documentary 'Con Mom' streams from this Tuesday 25 March. But who is Con Mom? And what did she do?
This is an unusual story because if you search for details, you’ll discover it’s a crime that hasn’t previously been reported on. So what is ‘Con Mom’ about?
Well ‘Con Mom’ is a lady called Dionne.
In 2020, Dionne contacted the founder of Longboys Doughnuts, a renowned pastry chef called Graham Hornigold. Graham was very successful and had built his doughnut business into a successful chain of outlets in London, and he even appeared as a Judge on Junior Bake Off .
He’d never known is real mother, and then he received an email from Dionne.
The email read “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”.
Dionne told him that she had been searching for her son, who was taken away when he was just two years old. This tallied with what Graham had always been told, and so he had no reason to suspect Dionne wasn’t who she said she was.
The pair began getting to know one another and lived the high-life, spending some of the fortune that Graham had made through is business. Then came a rather large lie, in the form of Dionne telling him that she had six months left to live because of a brain tumour.
This wasn’t a simple case of Dionne conning Graham out of money, in-fact, she was giving him money… buying him luxury cars and all sorts. However, being the professional con artist that she was, it wasn’t her money she was spending… she was busy ripping plenty of other people off to fund her extravagant lifestyle.
Eventually, Graham started to suspect that Dionne wasn’t really his mother after-all.
This documentary film explores what really happened, what happened to Graham and what became of ‘Con Mom’.