Frankly, it’s the kind of thing an unhappy little boy who never knew his mother might lie awake fantasising about.
One day Mummy will turn up and want to make amends for all those years of hurt. Mummy will look just like me, and give the best hugs. Oh, and Mummy will turn out to be a royal princess, one of the richest women in the world, and she will say ‘let’s go buy you a car, son. What about a Rolls-Royce?’
It sounds insane, but it happened. Sort of.
Graham Hornigold, a renowned pastry chef, ex-Michelin star holder, and a former judge on MasterChef, seems a very grounded man, not one prone to lavish leaps in life.
He says he had never had a ‘decent car’ before so nearly fainted when the biological mother, who had just come back into his life after 45 years, took him to a Rolls-Royce showroom in London’s Park Lane and said she wanted to treat him.
He even took the salesman aside to clarify that he wasn’t hallucinating.
‘He told me she had bought two Phantoms from him before.’
Graham didn’t go home with a Roller but his mum Dionne – who did look like him and did claim to have royal blood – helped him pick out a £75,000 Range Rover, before they went for champagne at the Dorchester.
Graham Hornigold is one of the UK’s top pastry chefs and has been a judge on MasterChef and Junior Bake Off
‘Her exact words were “Son, I haven’t seen you for 45 years. You’ve never had a present from me. I’m going to take away 45 years of hurt”.’
If the story sounds too good to be true, that’s because it was, as the title of a new Netflix documentary, recounting the utterly extraordinary tale of how Graham and his mother came to be reunited, and what happened next, will tell you. It’s called Con Mum.
That gleaming new car was only the start of the fairytale that turned into a nightmare.
Graham thought he had ‘won the jackpot’, financially as well as emotionally, when Dionne came back into his life five years ago. This was a fabulously wealthy woman, who owned farms and palm oil factories all over the world.
She spoke 18 languages and confided in him that she wasn’t self-made, but the illegitimate daughter of the former Sultan of Brunei, which sounded crazy, ‘but it explained why everyone knew her at the Dorchester, from the doorman to the receptionist. The Dorchester is owned by the Brunei royal family’, he says.
Then came the stinger, which broke his heart. His mother was also dying. She had sought him out because she had terminal cancer, and only six months to live. And when she died, he would inherit her fortune – possibly hundreds of millions.
When she asked him to fly to Switzerland with her to meet her lawyers and bankers, Graham dropped everything – including his partner, Heather Kaniuk and newborn baby – to go.
He stresses that it wasn’t about the money, ‘it was about the fact my mother, the one person who could answer the questions about who I was, was dying’.
The Netflix documentary Con Mum tells the story of how Hornigold’s biological mother scammed him, costing him £300,000
‘It was an express train to the heart. She came back into my life and she destroyed it.’ Not only did his ordeal cost him his partner and child (Heather moved back to her native New Zealand with their son, ‘leaving me to look at an empty cot’) but he was nearly bankrupted.
Because, while making grandiose promises about making her long-lost son a multi-millionaire, Dionne was also asking him to put the odd hotel bill or bottle of expensive fizz on his credit card.
Those cars she so generously gifted? (Heather got one too). Actually, Graham’s name was on the finance agreement.
At one point he realised – to his horror – that he was in debt to the tune of £300,000. ‘Now, I’m [only] down about £100k, because the cars went back.’
Graham tells me that when he realised he had been the victim of an epic and unfathomable deception, he came close to taking his own life. ‘What she did was wanton cruelty, evil and manipulative,’ he says.
He only allowed the documentary to be made because he learned this woman had been a career criminal who, in 1982, served a two-year sentence for deception. ‘It’s what she does, and she does it very well.’
The Netflix investigation was able to unravel Dionne Mahamud’s modus operandi to a point. It wasn’t just Graham who was left out of pocket; the show also features several business people and acquaintances who handed over extraordinary sums to this seemingly frail, wheelchair-bound octogenarian.
This terrible story begins in the Covid lockdown of 2020 when Graham received an email from a woman called Dionne wondering if he was the son she had been forced to give up, in Germany, in 1974.
Hornigold pictured with his biological mother Dionne Mahamud
Graham was born in a British military hospital in Germany and had a difficult childhood. He spent two years in foster care before moving with his dad, and new stepmum, to St Albans in Hertfordshire, but his father – with whom he had a violent relationship – never spoke of his biological mum.
He grew up fantasising about her. ‘It’s quite painful, not knowing your mother,’ he says.
By 2020, he was a public figure, a respected chef and had a thriving bakery business with his partner, fellow pastry chef Heather. They were expecting their first child.
Of course he was sceptical when the email arrived and cautious, but she passed every ‘test’ he set, knowing the answer to questions that only his birth mother could know.
A few weeks later, Graham and Heather went to meet Dionne at a Liverpool hotel.
Graham can still feel the strength of their hug. ‘You’ve never had that child/mother bond, but you hold someone’s hand and, instantly you are like “this is my mum”. Bang! I was in.’
Heather was in too, at first, marvelling at how the pair looked alike, had the same mannerisms.
That same day, however, Dionne told Graham she had six months to live. ‘It was a whirlwind. I was trying to deal with all the emotions, the childhood trauma, knowing that I was going to discover who I was – but at the same time knowing that I was going to lose her.’
Hornigold with Dionne Mahamud and former partner Heather Kaniuk
With hindsight you can scoff: 18 languages? Sultan of Brunei? But Malaysian-born Dionne had lived in Singapore and Indonesia and certainly the constant phone calls, from associates all over the world, supported the idea that she had business interests everywhere. Graham was in awe. ‘I remember thinking “this is my mum. Just wow”. She was amazing.’
Then the gifts started. Prada suits, shoes, designer bags. Cars.
He knows it all sounds money-grabbing, but he says it made her happy because she had got her son a present.
There are several poignant moments in the documentary, captured on film, where the grown-up Graham becomes a child again in his mother’s presence.
There’s Dionne singing Happy Birthday to him, and feeding him birthday cake.
‘Mummy put in your mouth,’ she insists, as he goes all bashful, as if he was four years old.
‘Once, we were in Hyde Park and she wanted me to ride a bicycle,’ he tells me.
‘I said “are you nuts? Why would you want me to ride a bicycle?”. She said “because I’ve never seen you ride one”. I knew that for her that would be like watching a child take his first steps.’
Two months after meeting Dionne, Graham became a dad. He had barely got home from hospital, however, when he received distressing news from his mother (in a five star hotel elsewhere in London). She had found blood in her urine. He even received a photo from her of the toilet pan full of scarlet water.
He dashed to her side. The trouble was Dionne increasingly wanted him at her side.
At a time when he should have been on nappy duty, Graham was flying to Zurich to sign papers about inheriting his mother’s empire.
At first Heather was on board with it, because the trip was supposed to last four days. Then it became another four days. Then it turned into weeks.
By now, Graham had slipped into another world.
In the documentary, those around him call it ‘brainwashing’, yet he just thought life had taken a particularly surreal turn. Then, an alarm bell sounded. Heather, back home in London, opened a credit card statement to discover they owed £20,000.
Graham tried to put her mind at rest. During one of his mother’s expensive hotel stays there had been a brief problem transferring money – Covid was blamed – and she had asked him to pick up the tab, until she could reimburse him.
‘I was happy to,’ he says. ‘I was happy to help my mum.’
Yet other people were ‘helping’ her too. In Zurich there was another couple. Dionne promised she’d invest £2million in their company. In return they all went shopping. The couple bought Dionne a £6,686 coat, and spent £8,357 on champagne. They claim she asked them not to tell her son she was having trouble accessing money ‘at the moment’.
Also in the Netflix exposé is a businessman called Ping who handed over around $150,000 to Dionne and believed her claims about royal connections – until he checked with representatives of the Brunei royal family. Dionne was being rumbled.
At first Graham did not want to believe he had been part of a con. It took Heather turning detective – unearthing marriage certificates where the three-times married Dionne had named different men as her father, and given different dates of birth – to make him listen to her pleas that this woman was not who she purported to be.
Then money started coming out of their joint account for car payments. Heather discovered Dionne had paid the deposits for both cars but they were liable.
It was only when Graham – still in Zurich – went through his mother’s medication that he discovered there were no drugs there for cancer treatment.
And when he opened a drawer to find red food colouring the penny dropped. He called up the picture his mother had send him of the scarlet urine in the toilet – ‘and I felt sick’, he says.
There was no cancer.
This, coupled with evidence from the business associates who said they had given money to Dionne took him to a point of collapse. He can still barely comprehend it. ‘Oh I was played. Because of a cellular-level need for a mother, I walked right into it. I did not stand a chance.’
There is a question that niggles all the way through the documentary: is Dionne actually his mother or has he been targeted by a stranger? He demands a DNA test. The results are another stab to the heart, showing it is 99.9 per cent likely Dionne is indeed the woman who gave him up at birth.
‘And this is the hardest part – something I now have to wrestle with,’ he says. ‘What sort of mother does this to their own child? Why?
‘I want to say to her “you could have come back into my life and I could have seen you once a month for a Sunday roast. You didn’t have to do all this to get my attention. You didn’t have to destroy everything that we had built. Why?” ’
And then, just as suddenly as his mother had swept into his life, she removed herself from it – surely aware that the truth would out.
To date, no charges have been brought over what she did to Graham. ‘I’m not sure there could be, because I gave her the money. She was my mother.’
She refused to answer any questions put to her by Netflix.
Where is Dionne now? He doesn’t know. ‘There has been one video call since, where she said, “I’m sorry, son. I done what I done. I cannot change, son”.’
Graham’s relationship with Heather did not survive.
He says he is trying to maintain a relationship with his boy ‘because being a good father is essential for me’.
So was being a good son, though. I ask if he came to love his mother. ‘Love, want, need. I don’t know how to answer that,’ he says.
‘I don’t call her Mum now, because no mum would do that to her own child.’
