The true story behind Netflix's Con Mum – what happened to Graham Hornigold?

In this feature-length documentary, Con Mum explores the roller coaster Hornigold was taken on by Dionne, a woman claiming to be his mum - but was she?

It has been difficult for Hornigold to recount these moments, telling RadioTimes.com that he has also had to do his "own mental health journey".

"It is very hard [telling] stories of betrayal and loss."

Read on as Graham Hornigold speaks exclusively to RadioTimes.com about his ordeal and how he is putting his life back together in the wake of disruption placed on his life.

Is Con Mum a true story? Graham Hornigold's ordeal explained

Graham Hornigold's story began when a woman named Dionne got in touch with him, claiming to be his mother.

"Graham was born in Germany before being taken from me to England," the email read, a piece of information that Hornigold said not many people were aware of.

It concluded: "If this makes any sense to you and you are the Graham I'm searching for, I would love to hear back from you. If not, I send my apologies."

In the weeks that followed from the initial email, Hornigold responded with a number of questions for Dionne, all of which she answered correctly.

Hornigold and his partner were then invited to Liverpool to meet Dionne and an "instantaneous" mother-child bond formed between Hornigold and Dionne.

However, when they met, Dionne told Hornigold that she had a brain tumour and bone marrow cancer and had six months to live, which is why she got in touch with him.

As their relationship progressed, it became evident that Dionne lived a very wealthy lifestyle, through staying in lavish hotels and buying Hornigold and his partner brand new cars - or so they thought.

In one moment described in the documentary, Dionne confided in Hornigold about her being the illegitimate child of the former Sultan of Brunei.

When Dionne went to The Dorchester Hotel in London, which had been purchased by the Sultan of Brunei in 1985, she was met with a warm welcome by staff who worked there, which only added to the pretence.

And it still isn't clear if she was ever telling the truth.

In the months that followed, Hornigold and Dionne flew to Switzerland to meet with a banker and lawyer in order sign documents that would allow Hornigold to inherit Dionne's wealth. But what was only meant to be a few days turned into weeks.

Hornigold's partner then discovered he had transferred a large sum of money from their joint account to give to his mother and had set up credit cards in his name, all under the assumption that Dionne would pay him back, given she lived such a wealthy lifestyle.

But soon it became apparent that monthly payments were coming out of Hornigold and his partner's joint account, which in total had racked up to hundreds of thousands of pounds.

Throughout the documentary, it becomes clear to viewers that Dionne is not as she seems.

While in Zurich, Dionne met with people whose businesses she promised to invest in but she was unable to access her money to do so. She asked them if they could assist her for the time being, but they mustn't tell Hornigold.

"One of the references is don't tell Graham, so [in] a lot of the other stories you know some of the characters, but you don't know their stories, and they don't know my story," Hornigold tells RadioTimes.com.

"So I'm perceived as being bad, and a child who wants everything, that's the story that they have of me. And so their stories are sometimes fragmented, some of them don't talk to each other, so it's crazy."

Still in Zurich, Hornigold met with his friend Juan who was living there at the time, who told him that he didn't think Dionne was dying, and rather that she was scamming him.

For Hornigold, though, he doesn't know if the word "scam" fits for what happened to him.

"Everybody's going to want to know their mother and where they're from, their sense of belonging," he told RadioTimes.com. "So that's the overriding reason for me to accept, maybe more than most, and because I was privy to the meetings, the conversations, you didn't know that others had given money."

He continued: "In that sense, there's principles in play. The lawyer, the banker, you're in the bank, all of these things don't suggest that it's a scam in that sense, because that's what you're seeing. And obviously you're not privy to all the other conversations that are going on, and you're not with her all of the time either.

"There's large parts where you're in the UK and she's in another country with whoever she's with. So it's kind of difficult to say it's an overriding scam because all the time you're still thinking she's still with these people, they're doing this, and at the same time, you're gonna be there soon."

Meanwhile, Hornigold's partner began doing some digging of her own into Dionne. She spoke with a man in Indonesia who paid Dionne $40,000 for a pilgrimage to Mecca that never happened, and she hadn't paid back the money.

"Before you realise it was a scam or [that] she was pulling the wool over [your] eyes, [or] whatever you thought, the bottom line is, she's still my mum," he explained.

He continued: "So to have that trauma bond but to have that realisation that you've just met her after 45 years, and she told you that she's going to be gone within six months already, you're like, 'I just want to spend as much time as [I can],' so that's really what your focus is.

"And it's just, let's try and have the best time that we can and get to know each other, and that was essentially the overriding thought in my head, up until the point where externals had tried to tell me things that happened on the sideline, and then you had that realisation that, 'You really did do that to your son.'"

A lot of the documentary features videos and pictures of Hornigold and Dionne, which provides a visual aid to the story, something that Hornigold says would have been too "fantastical" without it.

"There's elements of it you don't want to be true, but I guess if we hadn't recorded parts when we decided that this was not 100 per cent then we wouldn't be sitting here now," Hornigold told RadioTimes.com.

"To document anyone's day is pretty easy these days. The amount of people that utilise their phone for it is incredible. So to think that it would never come out otherwise, you're crazy to think it wouldn't have come out if it wasn't me – it would have been somebody else."

When all was revealed, Dionne disappeared without a trace and just a trail of debt that Hornigold had to pay off.

That was until Hornigold received a FaceTime call from Dionne, telling him that she was in Malaysia.

"I just want to talk to my son," she tells him. "I love you, son, I'm sorry for what happened... I've done what I've done, son. I cannot change, son."

Is Dionne Graham's real mum?

As shown in the documentary, a DNA test reveals it is 99.9 per cent certain that Dionne is Graham's mother.

As per the documentary, Dionne did not respond to requests for comment and "she has never faced criminal charges for the allegations made in this documentary".

Con Mum is available to watch on Netflix now. Sign up for Netflix from £5.99 a month. Netflix is also available on Sky Glass and Virgin Media Stream.

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