Puppet Master Turned Illegal Beagle Breeder Says He Ran Over Cops Because of “Emotions”
Wow, there's way more going on in this story than I expected, I guess partly because I have yet to watch The Puppet Master: Hunting the Ultimate Conman," a Netflix documentary.
The subject of that documentary, Robert Hendy-Freegard, was just sentenced to six years in prison by a French court for violence against public officials." That sort of thing used to be quite popular in France, of course, mainly in response to a host of crimes committed against the people by an unaccountable government cabal of upper-class morons. But luckily that's all a thing of the past.
Here, though, the public officials were cops just doing their jobs who did not deserve to be hit and dragged by the Audi of a hyphenated conman.
As you presumably know if you've watched the documentary, in 2005 a UK court sentenced Hendy-Freegard to life in prison based on an unbelievable odyssey of deceit" against multiple victims over a 10-year period. According to that report, he generally posed as an MI5 agent, sending his victims on bizarre missions" that often involved collecting money to give him so he could protect them from non-existent threats. The article says his motto" was lies have to be big to be convincing," and that prosecutors described him as evil." And it's hard to think of another word to describe someone who poses as a government official in order to benefit financially from telling enormous lies about non-existent threats. Don't you think? Anyway, Hendy-Freegard was convicted on multiple counts including kidnapping, but was freed in 2009 after an appeals court held that crime requires physical restraint, not just psychological manipulation.
Now let your mind drift forward from there to 2015 and southeast to the village of Vidaillat, France. While there, your mind is thoroughly irritated by dozens of barking beagles running amok on a local property. Neighbors who are also irritated look into the owners' backgrounds, only to learn that one of them is none other than Robert Hendy-Freegard, once a famous puppet master but now an illegal beagle breeder, living under an assumed name.
Eventually, authorities arrived to shut down the beagle farm. Hendy-Freegard turned up in his car, and police began to question him. For reasons not clear to me (maybe he faced animal-cruelty charges), he suddenly started the car and fled, hitting two police officers. One ended up on the hood of the Audi for a while, which is something I probably shouldn't find amusing but definitely do in the absence of serious injury. See Looks Like There's No Ten-Code for Officer on Hood of Moving Car'" (Dec. 12, 2018).
Hendy-Fregard spent a while on the run after this. According to the report, he got as far as Belgium," though that is literally right next to France, sending texts along the way to sort of explain his actions. I just wanted to say," he told a French gendarme he knew, that I apologize to your colleagues who jumped in front of me," something they did not do. I'm horrified that they thought I wanted to murder them," he continued, presumably meaning that at worst he wanted to commit vehicular manslaughter.
In court after being caught and extradited to France, Hendy-Freegard said he was sorry he didn't stop for the officers but blamed Netflix. I made mistakes that day," he told the court, getting a year off his sentence for at least using the active voice, but you have no idea what I've been through." What was that, exactly? I had to face three trials before I was convicted," he clarified, and then later had to suffer the embarrassment of being the subject of a Netflix documentary that made it seem like he had committed some unbelievable odyssey of deceit or something. None of this would have happened if the Netflix documentary hadn't aired," he insisted. I didn't stop [for the officers] because I'm a human being with emotions." Case dismissed? Non.
In handing down a six-year sentence, the court was influenced by a psychiatric assessment concluding that Hendy-Freegard had, among other problems, a pathological personality that seeks to control others and always places himself in the position of victim." Terrible. And following a conviction, there's no place for such a person other than prison.
Don't you think?
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