The Fake Professor Who Completely Duped His Family | Conmen Case Files | Real Crime

there's a way to make an entrance my destiny it was now a conspiracy of witches download veli today [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] con men the most devious of all criminals charming cool and calculating they betray trust and devastate lives yet remain a complete enigma we are about to explore the mysterious world of these master criminals giving an unprecedented insight into the workings of the complex minds of some of the world's most cunning con men and women we will reveal the detail and the intricacies of their elaborate crimes and uncover how they were dramatically brought to justice in this show we uncover the incredible story behind one of britain's most prolific and compulsive confidence tricksters who hid behind the bogus persona of an exceptional yet eccentric cambridge university professor to habitually and compulsively try to dupe legions of victims out of millions of pounds if i had to sum up robert hims i would describe him as a parasitic con man robert hymes posed as a university professor groundbreaking scientist and even a terrorist to make money and cover his web of lies his style worked extremely well he told me he was a professor the sort of bumbling professor who's very clever but a bit a bit distracted and he uses the people's reaction to that in order to manipulate them and deceive them he had got a plausible explanation for every challenge that you put to him a con man so prolific that while on bail he even went on to con another 81 people out of their hard-earned cash he's a very very convincing liar as most con men are he was a weasley little man he is a classic con man robert hyams was born on the 13th of may 1954 and is a well-educated man with a genuine master's degree in philosophy and science from warwick university up until 1987 hayams worked legitimately as a microbiologist with his scientist wife after going bankrupt in 1990 his prolific criminal career as a con man began in 1991 hyams bizarrely hit the headlines he set up a laboratory in a converted farm building in essex and went to the press claiming that working with a russian research team he had made a breakthrough in aids research and was close to discovering a cure as these images from the time show him boasting heim's claims were unfounded but this persona of a groundbreaking scientist became heim's manipulative weapon used to disarm his victims in order to obtain goods that he had no intention of ever paying for the fact that hymns uses this persona of the university professor who's a research scientist developing a cure for aids and all the other stories that he came up with this sort of eminent scientist um creates not only a feeling in people's minds that he's an authority figure he's very clever um you know he's somebody to be respected and you know common do you use that sort of character quite often we all have prejudices and if we are looking to be ripped off then we usually expect that person to well maybe not come with a bag that says swag on it and a stripy t-shirt but we expect there to be something a little bit iffy about that person hayan presented himself as an upper-class gentleman a bit of a bumbling professor and i think that that persona was quite disarming and that persona was something that helped him get away with so much over so many years a year later the bogus professor was sentenced to four years imprisonment after he ambitiously conned 236 thousand pounds from the farming community hyams had been obtaining twenty thousand to thirty thousand pound loans from different finance companies he was claiming that the money was to buy farming equipment that either did not exist or he did not own hayams faced nineteen charges of deception in total which also involved other scams hayam's sold farm equipment he didn't own pocketing the bogus profit and also purchased goods with bad checks a staple theme of his con man career he gives the impression that he's from money and money is no object to him and it works very well when he's dealing with these people on numerous occasions he would go into normal shops and actually arrange for the delivery of items now well-off people often do that i know they will go into a shop and say can you have this delivered to my house i'll pay you you know can i create an account with yourselves he'll create an account and he'll obtain thousands of pounds worth of goods with never the intention to pay for it and then these people after a few months he'll speak to him on the phone uh they'll come to his door he'll speak to them and he'll make excuses why the payment's not been made he'll write them checks which subsequently bounce or he'll tell them money transfer has just been made from his bank to account to theirs and he can he can string them on for months until eventually they realize that he's condom i think that the kind of lifestyle that he was maintaining would have been enough to give most people a nervous breakdown and yet this was just the norm to him so that suggests to me that maybe even there was something in his biochemistry that actually he couldn't get the same level of anxiety he couldn't have that same level of arousal that the rest of us would get bogus scientist robert hymes appealed against his conviction for his 236 000 pound con and had his sentence reduced to just a year unlike most con artists who live a solitary life hyams had a partner and four children despite his custodial sentence hayam's family stood by him during his prison term and the police believe his partner and four children had very little or no knowledge of his consistent conning but heim's conning was the key to providing for his family conning small in some cases seemingly insignificant amounts of money in order to give his family the best things in life he leased houses and never paid the rent hired top-of-the-range cars racking up bills of eight thousand pounds he had no intention of paying and duked private schools into educating his children without paying the five thousand pounds tuition fees and his family it seems were none the wiser he has a wife and a family and yet he's been able to move them around every six months or so renting houses and uh using unusual checks and methods of payments or disputes and yet he's still been able to maintain that sort of family life which is incredibly difficult and um it says a lot about his personality and the hold he has over his family that he was able to do that successfully without them actually realizing quite how he was getting his money even family holidays were the fruits of haim's criminal career a fact guest house owner roberta truin learned first hand when hymes and his family booked in for a two-week stay we had a cash payment of 300 pounds and they then owed 700 pounds and while heim stayed at the guest house he was keen to ingratiate himself with roberta he would come into my sun lounge for seven eight times or more a week about different trivialities there was something about him i didn't like he was a in my opinion a weasley little man and as the two-week stay came to an end hyams settled the bill like any other customer only it was all lies and part of his usual practice hymes had no intention of paying but it didn't stop him going through the motions and having the audacity to write the check out in front of roberta he wrote it out here and he said there we go that's 700 pound check is that correct i said that's correct that's the last i saw of them it may have been the last roberta ever saw of robert hiams but not the last she saw of his worthless check as soon as he left the guest house the con man cancelled the 700 pound check and roberto was shocked when the bank sent the worthless piece of paper back couldn't believe it i thought gosh i went straight to the police they took away the check although the complaint was logged by the police roberta never saw heims again or had her money refunded i didn't ever think maybe he wouldn't pay me i thought he would imagine how you can be conned by by people in the twisted world of confidence tricksters 700 pounds may not seem like a great deal of money but this was the key to heim's success he committed individual small-scale cons on a monumental and almost obsessive scale individually each incident seemed like a civil not criminal case but hyams was rapacious where he lived what he drove and what goods he obtained were hoodwinked from unsuspecting victims leaving trustworthy people like roberta feeling violated and out of pocket it has made me [Music] question people who are paying me a check but people are not all like hymns they're not evil they're not deceitful it really is despicable it's evil coming up heim's criminal ambition grows and he plans to duke the art world out of over 1 million pounds he nearly pulled off what would have been actually a massive heist [Music] [Applause] [Music] robert hines is very different from the sort of jack the lad type common that people associate with scams robert hyams is a calculating career con man who prolifically conned people out of goods and money by posing as a bumbling yet bogusly eccentric university professor he creates his own references his own false documents he would look straight in the eye and say i don't understand the problem took his family around britain living in million pound mansions all on the basis of forged documents and false claims there must be some communication situation between you here and there it was something i honestly didn't like about him that's just his way of life he's going to live off other people heim's prolific con man career focused on duping service industries on a vast scale renting houses and cars for six month periods and moving on without paying the police believe hayam's family were ignorant to his relentless conning but in 1998 44 year old robert heim's lies to his family proved to be his undoing hayam's family believed their academic father and husband had received a position at a leading university in california and they were moving lock stock and barrel to the usa it was all lies the job was fictional and so when the day came when the heim's family were due to set off on their new life robert hymes audaciously took a drastic action to make sure they could not travel he created a terrorist alert at heathrow airport we see actually a little crack in heim's um schemes having told his family that they're actually going to move flox and barrel over to california they're actually not he never had any plans for them to do so but ultimately things were going wrong so he decided that he would ring up heathrow airport on four occasions saves from the ira and they had to clear the airport now for a man who's very practiced at lying he couldn't just make up a simple lie he actually went to the extreme of phoning up the airports and saying there'd be mass death and destruction because there was a bomb in the airport heims had phoned heathrow airport adopting an irish accent and left chilling messages and death threats hayams made four calls over two hours contacting the bbc the civil aviation authority and heathrow airport claiming that there would be widespread death and destruction should the airport not be evacuated i mean i guess he did he thought well i'm trapped the only thing i could think of is this desperate measure um and most of us wouldn't do that because it's just too outrageous but if if you're a sociopath or you know with limited conscience basically that kind of thing doesn't bother you don't think about consequences or anything like that talk about just taking things a step too far this is a man who routinely lied and you have to wonder what went wrong on this on this particular occasion i think that he must have had a lapse in imagination that he couldn't think of anything convincing to say to his wife but what lengths to go to thankfully of course the the police actually trace those phone calls as they do on those sorts of scenarios and he was in fact arrested and sentenced for that crime during the trial a voice expert concluded the twisted hoax calls were made by hyams and the telephone company traced the calls to heim's address it also transpired that hyams had tampered with his phone line during the week after his hoax calls to make it seem someone else had made the calls hiams pleaded not guilty but on the 1st of july 1998 he was sentenced to two years in prison for the bogus calls as well as losing his liberty this period also saw him lose his common-law wife as his relationship ended after his bizarre and dangerous stunt supposedly his wife didn't know she actually thought he was a professor which you know testament both how convincing people can be and how willing people are to be convinced in 1999 after being released from prison early hayam simply continued conning but this time upped his game and ensured he had the tools to make his fictional con man persona of a biotechnics professor working on cures for cancer and aids completely convincing he bought a fake certificate online at some point people are going to confront time aren't they they're going to want some sort of proof of what he is now i actually he found that he could buy something that that seemed to provide a certain level of proof he bought a certificate for 200 pounds off the internet which appeared to claim that he was a professor of a university that actually didn't exist so it shows a bit of an arrogance to me but obviously that was useful to when people believed him heim started a new relationship once again heim's new partner had no idea he was a compulsive con man robert hyams criminal career focused on conning relatively small amounts from copious victims that left his scams undetected by the police each individual and isolated case appeared to be a civil not criminal matter but hyams was prolifically conning a whole host of businesses simultaneously including car rental companies and property letting agents out of thousands of pounds he would drive about in brand new mercedes four befores he would actually not pay for anything i've never known him actually pay for me he wouldn't pay his council tax he wouldn't pay his bt bills he wouldn't pay electricity or gas because he was only at these locations six months at a time he would then move on and never pay any of the utility bills but he would still maintain he would still use his same name so often he would then use his wife perhaps to create new accounts with bt without her knowledge to be fair to her she wasn't aware any of this was going on but in february 2002 four years after his heathrow bomb hoax hyum set about executing a multi-million pound con targeting the art world i'm sort of changed his tax slightly and he decides that he's going to defraud christie's the auction house and he does that by getting a forged document from the bank of california which purports to say that he is able to spend up to five million pounds i mean huge amount of money which most people think nobody would have the audacity to go in with and say and forge a five million pound credit note but basically that's what he did well i think that the christie's incident was really his downfall because up until then his scams had been frequent you know but fairly small really in the grand scheme of things the christie's scam was not dissimilar to robert heim's traditional cons hyams adopted his usual persona of the well-to-do bumbling professor who was also a wealthy art collector but this con rather than scamming six months free rent was ambitiously attempted to con christie's out of six paintings with over a million pounds the first phase of the con was to use the fake professorship and the forged american bank reference to convince christie's he was legitimate it looked like the bogus scientist was in reach of conning the world's most respected and auspicious auction house but rather than attending the auctions himself hiams bizarrely sent his eldest daughter catherine into christie's to bid on his behalf believing her father to be a successful renowned and wealthy scientist she happily sat in the auction room on the phone to hiams and enjoyed the thrill and excitement of the bidding fray he nearly pulled off what would have been actually a massive heist but i think the fact that he was batting outside of his league was actually what gave him away because of course he'd involved his daughter in the con she wasn't aware of what was going on what he did was to get his daughter catherine to unwittingly go to christie's on his behalf and using a telephone bid system make bids for six paintings which added up to huge amount of money catherine blissfully ignorant of the criminal plot she was unwittingly embroiled in sat and bid on the paintings on the phone to her father who was instructing her she first secured a painting worth over half a million pounds and further victories were to follow catherine subsequently won five more masterpieces for her art loving father as far as she was concerned catherine had successfully secured the six paintings her eccentric academic father desired even if it had cost him one million one hundred and eighty eight thousand pounds of his fortune catherine had no idea his fortune was fictional and this was just the second phase of his master plan the final stage was simply to get christie's to ship the paintings before he transferred the funds a trick hyams was a master at but his innocent daughter was not catherine turned out to be hayam's achilles heel and his manipulation of her was a huge mistake when she started to mention to christie that she was going to put one of these incredibly expensive pieces of work in a frame from a high street shop that was obviously a bit of a clue that they didn't have the means they professed to have now clearly that would raised enormous loud bells in the staff of christie's mind and they realized what was going on and as a result of that you know the scam just didn't work she had broken a cardinal rule of of scamming because of course she wasn't a con artist um which is that she'd effectively broken character she wasn't keeping up appearances um and i'm sure he would have if he'd been doing it himself he would have known better because the basic rule is you don't let your guard down like that you do find by and large that korea con men tend to be solitary they're always described as loners and that's because you need to cover all bases you know if you've got people in your life then they're people who could potentially give you away unless they are absolutely 100 on board with you that was a mistake that haye made his daughter didn't know what was going on and therefore of course she couldn't be relied upon conning on such a large scale proved to be out of highlands league not only had robert heim's daughter unwittingly exposed him as a fraud but christie's unlike so many other businesses he had duped were unprepared to hand over the goods without payment up front no matter how much the bumbling professor insisted the paintings be shipped to him with no payment from hayam's christies were left out of pocket because the paintings eventually sold for hundred and fifty thousand pounds less than hayam's bogusly bid and they needed to maintain their relationship with the vendor christie's called the police heim's con had failed and he knew it was only a matter of time until the police found him because bizarrely when executing the christie's con as with all his other scams robert hyams had used his real name certainly most common will use different identities in order to carry out their frauds and he doesn't it's almost say an arrogance that he doesn't care almost that he's going to be found out i think it is unusual for a con artist not to use an alias because most of them are pretty fluid with their names and i think that's very characteristic um about the sort of state of their identity if you like um they're cavalier with their identities they're often cavalier with their names to evade the police the bogus professor fled the country hyams with his family in tow travelled over to the usa on the pretense that he had been employed to work on groundbreaking cancer research leaving his innocent teenage daughter behind to face the music unlike the heathrow scam in 1998 they actually went and while in california the family lived in luxury initially renting a mansion worth 1.7 million pounds that hyams had no intention of paying for not content with conning people left front and center in this country of course hymes lockstop and barrow picked his whole family up and went to live in california where he went about doing exactly the same things buying stuff on the never never and putting out false checks and false credit notes and basically conning the americans the way he conned us the british police traveled to the usa in pursuit of hyams for the failed christie's con the metropolitan police actually went out there and interviewed him in america for the offences but obviously their jurisdiction there is is non-existent they have no powers of arrest the offence for which they were investigating him wasn't sufficient enough to affect an extradition order so they they were forced to return to the uk and a way for him to perhaps at some point return the uk where he would be arrested for offences so safe from british law hyams was sitting pretty in the californian sunshine conning an opulent lifestyle he had no intention of ever paying for but this wasn't going unnoticed he hadn't been arrested out there but he was being investigated because he was doing the same thing he was renting accommodations and really good quality accommodations the thought you would see in in california and he never paid for anything after living in the usa for over a year heim's successful run of conning free accommodation and cars was coming to an end the authorities were circling he came back to the house and said we're we're getting the next flight out and they did and they left all their possessions behind and he told her that he would have someone arranged to have the possession sent on that was about the same time that i understand that a decision had been made that he was going to be arrested for offences over there he subsequently got came back to england so he was never actually dealt with for offenses in america coming up hyams audaciously returns to the uk and his callous desire to con ravages even more lives he would turn around and say there must be a lack of communication i cannot understand i'm waiting for the money to come from my offshore account [Music] [Applause] [Music] robert holmes is a professional combat he's a career combat robert hymes is a con artist who has due to people out of tens of thousands of pounds of goods and money but it's amazing what you can get away with people believe that you are an authority figure he will use this mad professor routine and he's fearless he was so successful at it that he even fooled his own wife he's brought up his family and they've lived successfully on money that's been stolen for years and years and years he was full of pretense the whole time no enter his folly and he is a very very convincing liar [Music] after going on the run to the usa for his failed 2002 christie's con robert hymes continued conning on the other side of the atlantic heims left the usa in 2003 to avoid arrest but it was a case of jumping from the frying pan into the fire he returned to the uk in december and attempted to buy a 2 million pound house in the cambridge area naturally hyams didn't have the money and the police became involved they caught up with the con man and hymes was finally arrested in january 2004 and charged with the christie's con in most con man case files by the trial this would be the end of the story but released on bail in april 2004 his one-man conning mission became more rapacious than ever what shows the difficulty with investigating coleman is that when hymes was actually arrested he went on whilst he was on bail to commit another 81 offenses and that shows you the difficulty that detectives have when they arrest someone for a complicated fraud takes a long time to investigate to compile the evidence and to bring a case before the court you can't keep someone in custody for an offence like that so they're out there still you know conning people in order to get money to live one of the cons heims executed while on bail for his christie's con was to audaciously enroll his two youngest daughters into a private school but in his usual style he had no intention of paying the seventeen thousand pounds for the school fees when the schools were getting a bit rated they'd never paid any school fees numbering thousands thousands and thousands of pounds he would start to write them saying i'm not happy with the service you're providing i'd like you to readdress this and once that's been addressed perhaps i'll consider paying the fees but he was never happy and eventually it would culminate in him actually withdrawing his kids from the school without any payment and placing them at another school so in its own if that was reported for police the police might say well this is not a criminal offence in isolation you're going to have to resolve that directly with him via solicitors it's only when you put them all together that you realize then he's got a very dishonest trait with regards to his deceptions but his cons did not always benefit his family awaiting trial robert hyams unbelievably targeted catherine his student daughter from a previous relationship not only had hyams already callously and cruelly implicated his innocent daughter in his doomed christie's con but he then went on to destroy her life by putting her 12 000 pounds in debt he stole his daughter's checkbook and decimated her account and overdraft she went off to university he got hold of her checkbooks from her bank account and wrote and bounced every single check from that account and it it went up to about 10 or 12 000 pounds she as far as she was concerned that bank account had been closed because she'd asked the father to close that bank account she no longer needed it and the next thing she heard was she started getting letters from the bank demanding in excess of 12 000 pounds now most of us would not do this to somebody that we love but i imagine that actually he didn't really think it was much of a big deal so what he's been in debt his whole life it obviously doesn't faze him so maybe just assume that it wouldn't phase her either she was very distressed about this as you can imagine being a student not only was she distressed about it but the banks didn't believe her that her father had stolen the money and they were pressing her they and they start pushing her with um wants and demands and bailiffs she was very distressed over that and and that went on from for many many months she doesn't speak to her father anymore you can imagine and catherine was one in a long long list of victims despite the fact hyams was released on bail waiting for a trial date and almost certainly facing a custodial sentence his crimes continued hayam's criminal activities funded and supported his and his family's lifestyle and shops car rental companies letting agents hotel and guest houses were all duped by heims in the cambridge area he was obtaining their services but not paying and one of heim's victims contacted dc john gibbons i first came across robert um hiams i picked up a a small inquiry in relation to an a a non-payment where he stayed in a he rented a small house for a couple of weeks it was in our local area and he hadn't paid he basically just left without paying she reported the police we investigated it and it really began to snowball from there from a simple little job like that i was linking up with other officers from our own force who are also investigating him independently for hotel stays non-payments and i picked up all the jobs together from suffolk thinking it was a fairly small time criminal hayam's incessant conning spree was taking place while he was still awaiting trial for his 2002 christie's con which was being delayed because hyams was claiming ill health he would feign illness um check himself into a hospital the day before he was supposed to be at court and clearly the judge who who wished to stay on the case from the beginning to the end was getting quite annoyed with his um with him but ill or not he continued to con shockingly committing over 80 offenses whilst on bail this prolific spree included attempting to con a local shop out of seven thousand pounds worth of goods refusing to pay his eight thousand pound bill for a car rental and duplicitously opening a bank account with false details then spending the 12 500 pound overdraft on the surface duping relatively small amounts of money from small businesses and banks hymes was insatiable and his cons sustained a comfortable lifestyle and the appearance of a successful and groundbreaking professor he would open bank accounts using false references using his own names and he would obtain as many checkbooks as he could now most people will have one or two checkbooks running at one time he would try and he would say he'd lost his checkbook so he would end up getting five or six checkbooks with 30 30 plus checks in there and then once he'd think he thought he'd got sufficient amount of checks he would then start bouncing those checks because obviously he got sufficient checks the banks would at some point would realize that these accounts are thousands of pounds in deficit and they would shut the accounts down but at that point he's got sufficient amount of checks to continue with his deceptions this is where the losers lose out the actual uh victims because they accept the check from him if the bank account is closed they have lost there's no doubt about that they've lost their money uh because of his persona again the way he his style the way he behaves they would take big checks from him without check cards clearly they would lose a simple way to con people and it's a common way of common people and he would use that his other way which is quite common but he did it very well he would have half a dozen bank accounts running from all the major banks um and he would it's called cross-firing he would cross-fire checks large amount of cheques for half a million three quarters of a million pounds he would transfer one right check from one account for three quarters a million pound and deposit that into another account that then shows up uh on his account that of three quarters a million so on occasions if he was struggling with common people he would go into somewhere and say i've just printed this off here's my bank statement it's got three quarters of a million pounds in it i've not i'm not a problem here's a check for 10 000 pounds it's not a problem you'll get your money um soon after obviously that three-quarters of a million pound would go out as a deficit because the check would have bounced because the check that you they've account he wrote it from obviously was having sufficient funds he would contact the bank managers and keep that going for months and persuade them that there is large sums of money coming in from offshore accounts they would never arrive robert heim's appetite for living by fraudulent means was unquenchable his litany of small-scale scams continued leaving behind a long list of victims left out of pocket and feeling violated and foolish a number of people have said i saw him put up in his brand new 4x4 mercedes he appeared to have come from some money his address was a good quality address i maybe had some reservations about giving him whatever he was after but he convinced me otherwise you would hear this time after time it's all you know it's in their statements and and it it did make them feel very silly and embarrassed and there are still some who never came forward they didn't want the police for the press to know how badly they've been conned one of the problems with um with con artists and one of the reasons why it's profitable to practice it and why people do it it's very hard to police because off we're talking about relatively small sums often it's quite a sort of a gray area because they haven't actually broken in somewhere and robbed something obviously you know in the real world you are allowed to have things on credit and and there is a delay between when you get something when you pay for it you can take a car back after a certain period of time so you're not happy with it i'm not going to pay for it and if they don't like it they can take you to court but it's not actually necessarily a crime in all of itself and um so in that sense he's a good example of why con artists are often able to practice as long as they do and get away with as much as they do because he's actually very hard to police he would approach vendors via the estate agents he would provide false reference details that he was a professor that he was a professor at cambridge university and that he'd just come back from the united states he would fabricate his salaries saying that he was only in excess of a hundred thousand pounds a year um and he would on these references he would provide a false person who would provide these references on the anticipation they would phone him up phone this person up to to confirm the references so consequently these people phoning up robert himself where he would provide his own reference and other than the initial deposit he never did pay for the rent and in march 2005 hyams did exactly this to his final known victim landlord graeme smythe the man who was vital in the con man's ultimate downfall a new tenant was found by the agent who then rang me to tell me that they had found a new tenant and they had managed to get more money for the rental than in fact um they had done before and heim's carefree attitude to money was cleverly underpinned by his appearance of wealth and the impressive trappings associated with affluence even though he had acquired them fraudulently when i met mr hyams he seemed a genuine enough person he would want to call you by a christian name want you to call him by his christian name to build up this report he explained that he was a professor in biochemistry and he was smart is smart presents a very good appearance and if you can have a top of the range car etc people look at others and appear to judge them by what they've got around them and it succeeded where the agents were concerned because when questioned the agent said he was perfectly good because he was driving a mercedes he had all the appearances of wealth but nothing robert hymes cut an affable friendly figure but his professor persona was not enough to entirely convince graham smythe robert hines and his family appeared to only have three or four lounging chairs which you could purchase from a garden center and when i went to the house and saw this amount of furniture i said well what's happened to your furniture oh well we have just come in from america and you know the furniture takes a long time to arrive so he's been here six weeks eight weeks and there's no furniture what is going on with niggling doubts graeme smythe turned detective and spoke to the letting agents so i tackle the agents and say has the rent been paid oh well yes the deposit's been paid the deposit was paid in cash which immediately starts to ring bells because you think who's running around with loads of cash have you had any further payments um no but we're expecting one have you chased up the references oh yes yes we chose the references good references um from a bank in america etc etc however it soon turned out that mr hyams had not paid his rent had no intention of paying his rent and although going round there and repeatedly asking him for the money he would turn around and say there must be a lack of communication i cannot understand i'm waiting for the money to come from my offshore account he had got a plausible explanation if you wanted to accept it for every challenge that you put to him but when you pressed him how did he earn his money where did his income come from he then started to backtrack and pull the oh i'm very ill i don't want to go into this because of my heart problems etc etc but heim's numerous excuses and attempts to sidestep graham smythe did not work started small claims court proceedings and went to the police giving them the lead they needed i decided that he was not going to get away with it coming up dc john gibbons catches up with the career con man and hayam's con man charm means he comes perilously close to walking three i was starting to wonder whether he was right and i was wrong and at some point i had to shake my head and think hang on a second [Music] [Applause] [Music] robert hiams compulsively conned on both sides of the atlantic living a luxurious lifestyle and pretending to be a leading university professor [Music] he's successful because he's got no morals he doesn't care who he's stealing from he has stolen his family including his own daughter he's playing a very dangerous game for a con artist his daughter started her college years thousands of pounds in debt even once he was caught and then released on bail he went on to commit something like 81 counts of fraud and deception he was an extraordinary con man and certainly the best one i've come across homes have been prolifically conning service industries including estate agents shops and car rental businesses hymes was residing at a property where in his usual style he wasn't paying the rent his landlord had called the police and dc john gibbons went and arrested the con man and while searching the house the shocking extent of heim's crimes became clear it was obvious that they were in transit because one of the bedrooms was full of boxes you would say that they would never intend to stay there for any great length of time because clearly they hadn't unpacked and there was stacks and stacks of mail and it was all red letter mail all demands from solicitors companies um there was a dozen to 20 letters arriving as we as we were there uh all demands we took all the paperwork from his house we began to research everything that we got from there and then i realised at that point that this was a fairly major criminal in relation to financial misconduct awaiting trial and on bail for his failed 2002 christie's con robert hymes audaciously committed a further known 81 offenses in the uk during 2004 and 2005 scamming an alleged total of 68 500 pounds from his prey but in spite of proof that hymes was guilty he was still not prepared to admit it when arrested on the 27th of may 2005 by dc john gibbons he was in complete denial we interviewed him for a couple of hours about what we knew him about he was in denial he's saying that where he'd bounce checks it was accidental he wouldn't accept any of the allegations to put him at that stage and despite the overwhelming evidence even when facing police questioning robert hymes was still a master manipulator even the most seasoned police personnel found themselves in danger of becoming bewitched by his twisted web of lies each time i interviewed him there was at some point where i was starting to wonder whether he was right and i was wrong and at some point i had to shake my head and think hang on a second he has done this despite what he's telling me i know he's done it because i've got all these witness statements and as a detective trying to sort of piece together movements over several years and with somebody who's a consummate liar it's very difficult and you can find yourself almost getting drawn in is you know quite understandable his whole life is built on lies he's just a parasite that goes from flower to flower picking up whatever he can and then he moves on he probably himself doesn't really know what is reality and what isn't so he's probably quite convinced himself of some of the lies that he told in my experience people will deny offences and continue to deny them until the evidence is so overwhelming they will reach a point where they will say okay fair enough hands up i did do it it took a long time before he actually conceded he had committed offences and then it was on the proviso well i must have done if you said i did but that wasn't good enough for me eventually he did fully admit to all the offences d.c john gibbons hard work had paid off he had heims in custody and ended his conning rampage the 81 offenses john gibbons painstakingly investigated were added to the christie's case hyams was still yet to stand trial for and in december 2005 hymes finally faced his many charges at southwark crown court he accepted and asked for virtually all those offences to be taken to consideration and which included his daughter offenses against his daughter and he was convicted accordingly he the judge accepted accepted the charges and he received a lengthy custodial sentence hyams pleaded guilty to 10 charges and asked for a further 77 offenses to be taken into consideration these combined the charges for the christie's con and the crimes dc john gibbons tirelessly investigated hyams was sentenced to five years imprisonment for his prolific crimes and before he was sent down the judge said you seem to have almost a compulsion to try and trick people out of their money he also made note that hayam's aim wasn't purely financial it's interesting the judge's comments at the end of heim's trial because he did say he felt that heims was getting not only financial benefit from these crimes but also he got quite a kick out of it and that's not unusual from common power and authority and being able to manipulate people is something that obviously gives them a great thrill now we're at the stage really with heims that his family deserted him you know he's implicated his daughter in a con she sort of saw him for what he was his wife has abandoned him um it'd be interesting he's obviously at a crossroads now as to what he can do with his life robert hymes started his five-year sentence on the 20th of january 2006. this is not his first custodial sentence and those who have encountered the con man fear that this is a story without redemption i got to know robert quite well when interviewing him and dealing with him he quite enjoyed the actual cons that he was doing i'm not saying he didn't need him because he wasn't working he needed to carry on to continue with his standard of living his lifestyle and he quite enjoyed it and i'm not convinced that time spent in prison will prevent him from doing it again

Channel: Real Crime

Views: 194,524

Keywords: Real Crime, clever swindler, con artist profile, con artist tactics, conman tactics analysis, crime documentary series, criminal behavior analysis, criminal psychology, deception methods, documentary series, financial fraud, financial manipulation, fraud investigation, fraudulent activities, heist documentary, legal fraudster, legal manipulation, real crime stories, scammer tactics revealed, true crime channel, true crime expose

Id: 9m5OQDp6mI4

Length: 46min 24sec (2784 seconds)

Published: Tue May 24 2022