'My Fiancé Stole £850,000 From Me But I Found Love Again With The Partner He Conned' | This Morning

[Music] now it's one of the most jaw-dropping stories of deception you will ever hear when carolyn woods met the man of her dreams an mi6 agent wealthy businessman in 2012 she felt like the luckiest woman in the world but what she didn't know was that mark acklon was actually a notorious con man that little more than a year later she'd be left penniless he was very very attentive very flirtatious charming extremely entertaining he persuaded me to give up my job move into a very grand house um i was totally convinced that he was very wealthy that was like an adventure but um it soon turned very very sour and you have no idea how many other women he did this too i have no idea one of britain's most wanted men has been jailed for five years and eight months after stealing thousands of pounds financially i was left destitute if my injuries had been physical and not psychological i would have looked as though i had been beaten to a pulp no one could blame you if you would be frightened to love again i'd i would really feel uh terrible if he managed to change me in that way that would be the worst thing of all so i hope to regain my confidence well this story does have a happy ending but in a surprising twist of fate caroline has found love again with mark's business partner who also fell victim to his web of lies well having documented her incredible story in a new book carolyn joins us now and carolyn thank you for being here today and we'll come to the book in a moment because the whole reason for you writing this book because to act really as a warning to others who may fall fouled the same thing that you did and i think that's sort of where i want to begin with this which is you'd like to think you wouldn't fall for it so who was this man when you very first met him in 2012 what was he like and how did he kind of reel you in so much well i think the first thing to say is that he just literally appeared in my life as if by total chance i don't actually believe it was by chance um i think it was planned but he just came into my place of work started talking to me and um i felt as i'd known him all my life and we got chatting he was very easy to talk to and i think anyone could fall for that sort of thing and then as we've mentioned in the past when we've spoken to you uh convince you that he was an mi6 agent um he convinced you to uh to loan him vast amounts of money 850 000 pounds i think in the end um that you were living in a beautiful uh townhouse in in bath and that uh that in fact you were he thought it was his but you were paying for it with the money that you'd loaned him so all of all of these things at what point do you hear the alarm bells in your head i don't think i really heard the alarm bells until about a year later he was so convincing and he managed to weave a sort of web of deceit um through a strand of life that was it was totally real with using real people and he used to offset real people one against the other so um i think it wasn't until i was probably uh over a year into the relationship that i began to doubt him i hadn't seen him for a long time and uh suddenly things really were seeming very very strange but i did think that he suffered a brain tumor so that explained some of his odd behavior away and my own mental state was very fragile too well you talked about that your mental state and you said you know if these were physical wounds that you'd suffered by somebody um but these were mental scars that are still there and i wondered when you started to write the book how difficult it was to revisit those because i imagine part of your healing is leaving some of that in the past yes a lot of people think that that must have been a cathartic experience for me but actually i didn't find it so every time i revisited everything that had happened i found it very very painful i think time has been the thing that's really helped me to come through it um but if i just can raise some awareness of this kind of coercive control that i was subjected to which has been in the media quite a lot recently and save anybody from going through the same thing um i think it would have been worthwhile but it's um thankfully you've written a lot down as you were going through this for the police so a lot of those notes are a part of this this book so that you could remember it all but there is as we said at the very beginning there is a happy ending here so how how did you first meet his business partner um i think the very first time i i set eyes on him was only a few days into my relationship with aklam um when he took me to see what he said was his collection of aircraft and i think just in passing i said hello to james who was there on that occasion and then i saw him in passing a couple of other times and the first time i spent any time with him at all really was when he um took me for a flight in an aircraft that i believed belonged to mark acklam um i was a little bit surprised that acklin himself um who i didn't know as as mark atkins at that time uh that he didn't take me up in the airplane because he had said that he was a pilot um so i spent you know 10 minutes or so on that lovely flight then and then again briefly when i was in dire straits [Music] he brought james brought me a christmas tree when i was living in bath he'd been instructed to do that by mark acklam and you said i mean obviously you bonded also because he also became one of mark's victims so you had that in common were you nervous i think we still in the clip ayman was saying you know you could be forgiven for not wanting to give your heart away again and obviously you did that but were you tentative to make that step uh yeah very tentative um uh and also quite sort of very wary and suspicious but i think actually in a way it was for both of us um we were much stronger together than we were as two individuals and so really when i embarked on that relationship it was very much with that in mind i mean actually i had nothing to lose and everything to gain from that and i did i did trust james so um we've been through some very hard times but i think it's been much easier for us together and of course i understand what he's been through and he understands more than anybody what i've been through in your own words you say it's a match made in hell no i did say that um it was a match made in hell but we did find happiness in the end well that is a good way to end this that is sure yeah um this um this is carolyn's book uh sleeping with a psychopath that's what it looks like and it is out on thursday um i'm glad after all the years that we've been thanking you i am so glad that there is a happy ending me too me too thank you very much all right take care you

Channel: This Morning

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Id: FdgRubBblWQ

Length: 7min 38sec (458 seconds)

Published: Mon Apr 26 2021