Chrissy Handy - Seduced by a Sociopath

Certain details in this story, including names, places and dates, have been changed to protect privacy.

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First published by HarperElement 2022

FIRST EDITION

Chrissy Handy 2022

Cover layout design by Claire Ward HarperCollinsPublishers 2022

Cover photographs: Ildiko Neer/Trevillion Images (model) and Laura Ranftler/Trevillion Images (silhouetted figure)

A catalogue record of this book is available from the British Library

Chrissy Handy asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work

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Source ISBN: 9780008522278

Ebook Edition June 2022 ISBN: 9780008522285

Version: 2022-05-31

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In loving memory of Philip Travis Rawlinson 19572021.

My rock throughout my ordeal and friend to the end.

I can picture precisely where I was when my life imploded. On a warm August afternoon, I received a telephone call from my sister-in-law. I had never had the chance to properly talk with her, but now she was phoning with a warning: I hope youre not financially involved with Alexander.

Those eight words changed everything. Soon I would learn that Alexander de Rothschild, the man who had swept me off my feet nearly four years earlier, and to whom I had given my heart, was nothing but a callous conman. A conman who had taken everything I had.

It was the start of an odyssey of discovery. As I peeled back layer after layer of my new life, I slowly navigated my way to the truth. The person I knew as Alexander de Rothschild was a construct. His web of deceit was so vast and complex that even the police couldnt fully untangle it.

But he reserved his greatest con for me. He took my money, he took my peace of mind and he changed the shape of my life forever.

This is my story. It is one of betrayal, but also of the strength of the human spirit.

For all the financial loss that came to dominate my later life, my upbringing, like that of so many, was modest.

Mum was born in Tewkesbury and she met Dad while he was doing his national service at Ashchurch Army Camp; he used to visit the milkshake bar where she was working at the time. Not long afterwards, they were married at Tewkesbury Abbey on 26 December 1954. They were both young eighteen and twenty respectively but that wasnt unusual back then.

Children came along quickly too: Karen was born first when Mum was nineteen, followed three years later by Diane, then another two years later by Dawn. Mum was twenty-nine when she had me. I suspect I was my parents last attempt to give Dad the boy he longed for after first one daughter, then another. When I was older, Id often see him shaking his head in exasperation, muttering, Ive got a house full of bloody women.

Six foot tall and very handsome, Dad always wore his hair slicked back in a quiff. Like Mum, who was one of eight, he came from a big family, and they were very important to him; he had one tattoo on his arm that read The sweetest girl I ever kissed was another mans wife, my mother. For the first couple of years of their married life Mum and Dad lived with Dads parents and his three siblings at their home in Shotton, a small Flintshire town, which borders the River Dee. Karen and Di were born there, but by the time Mum fell pregnant with Dawn, Dad had managed to rent a steelworkers house in the Garden City estate. Hed been a steelworker at the John Summers Steelworks since he was fourteen. Aside from his national service, he would work there his entire life, seeing it morph first into British Steel and then Tata Steel, before retiring at sixty-five.

Both he and Mum lived out their days in the Garden City estate home, the same house I live in today. Now, though, the estate is barely recognisable from the sprawling, friendly working-class neighbourhood where I grew up. Back then everyones front doors were kept open, and we had a degree of freedom unimaginable to todays kids. There were lots of other children on the estate whose parents worked at the steelworks, and we ran around as a pack. In summer we were out all hours, scrumping apples, playing ball and building dens, coming home dirty and exhausted as dusk fell or when we were hungry whichever came first.

Our house was modest: a two-up, two-down semi-detached affair with a good-sized back garden and an outside loo. Even today, decades on and having had proper indoor plumbing installed, I can still remember the dread of waking up on a winters night needing to answer the call of nature, and having to head downstairs and out the back door and dash across the freezing yard.

Being freezing was a general childhood theme, in fact: this was long before the days of central heating and on winter mornings and not always just winter mornings it was always perishingly cold until Mum got the coal fire going in the kitchen or living room.

All four of us girls shared a bedroom, which was less cramped than it sounds as the room was reasonably large, with a bunk bed in one alcove, a single bed in another and a double bed against a wall. Besides, by the time I was seven Karen had already left home and, at the tender age of seventeen, was expecting a baby of her own. My sisters and I spent hours up in our room, playing make-believe and skating across the rug that lay on the linoleum floor. Karen was the big sister we used to enjoy winding up, Di was the one I felt the most natural connection with, while Dawn was more complicated funny and clever, but with a sullen streak. As for me, I was quite shy and withdrawn back then. But we all got on well enough, aside from the usual sibling squabbles.

There was never much in the way of money. While Mum had the odd part-time job, she was largely a stay-at-home mum, meaning we had to live on Dads modest steelworker wages or what was left once Dad had handed over the housekeeping money. Dad always provided for the family, but like many men of his ilk, his life revolved around work and going to the pub. Working in a foundry was hot and dirty labour, and the first thing the men wanted to do when their shift ended was head to the local for a cooling pint.

Dad was a big community man too, though. He was chairman of the local branch of the Royal British Legion and organised a lot of functions for people in the area, from coach trips to the coast to big family cinema trips at Christmas.