1 day Ago
Graham Hornigold was left hoping that the woman he knew as Dionne Marie Hanna wasn't really his mother. Because while the celebrity pastry chef was busy being ecstatic that his mom had found him, more than 40 years after he was placed in foster care at the age of 2, he hadn't noticed that the rest of his life was coming undone. Less than a year after they made contact, according to the story that unfolds in the Netflix documentary Con Mum , Graham was upward of £300,000 in debt and wondering who this woman really was—and what kind of person would do what she allegedly did to her own son.
As detailed by Graham, his former partner Heather Kaniuk and several other people who allege they were conned, the woman they all knew as Dionne convinced them to give her large sums of money by presenting herself as a daughter of Bruneian royalty who was having trouble accessing her own vast wealth. "You believe that she is who she says she is," Graham said in Con Mum , "but she is a destroyer of lives." Contact information for Dionne wasn't immediately available.
She told Graham in a video call following the events alleged in the documentary that she was in Malaysia. (The film isn't clear on what her legal name is, as marriage certificates and newspaper clippings discussed in the doc indicate that she went by different names over the years.) Con Mum notes that Dionne did not respond to requests for comment.
Heather said in the doc that police told her it was unlikely Dionne could be charged with a crime over any money Graham gave her because she was his mother. Here is Graham's story about what happened when he finally met the mum he spent decades missing: Who Is Graham Hornigold? Graham Hornigold , 48, is a renowned U.K.
pastry chef and cofounder with Heather Kaniuk of the donut chain Longboys, which has several locations in London. They also started the pastry and hospitality consultancy Smart Patisserie Ltd. together.
You may have seen him on TV before as well: Graham served as a judge on two seasons of Junior Bake Off and guest-starred on Bravo's Top Chef: World All Stars in 2022. Graham and New Zealand-born Heather share a son who was born in September 2020—name not disclosed and face blurred in the Netflix documentary Con Mum — and the first job listed on his Instagram bio is "Daddy." As he explained in the doc, Graham was born in Germany on a British Army base and went into foster care at the age of 2.
Two years later, his father and stepmother moved him to St Albans, England, where he grew up and got his first bakery job—sweeping floors and stacking bread—at 14. Graham said he was 18 the last time he saw his dad. How Did Dionne Come Into Graham Hornigold's Life? Despite his success in life, personally and professionally, Graham always felt like something was missing.
"Obviously, it was quite painful," he said in the doc, "not knowing your mother." They tracked down his birth certificate, which noted that Graham's father was a sapper, a.k.
a. in the British Army’s Royal Corps of Engineers, while his mother was listed as Theresa Haton Hornigold , formerly Mahamud. They looked for Theresa for awhile, Heather said in the doc, but gave up after a few months.
And then, "a week or so later," Graham recalled, "we found out we were pregnant." In March 2020, London locked down due to the COVID-19 pandemic, but they remembered all that time spent together at home fondly, Graham calling it "the best time of our relationship." And then he got an email "out of the blue," he said in the doc, from a woman identifying herself as Graham's mum, Dionne .
She had him in Germany but he was taken away from her and brought to England, she wrote in the email, as read by Graham and Heather in the doc. "If any of these [details] makes sense to you and you are the Graham I've been searching for," Dionne wrote, "I would love to hear back from you. If not, I send my apologies.
" As Graham asked questions to gauge whether Dionne was the real deal, she knew key details, such as that he didn't have a middle name, not falling for the trick question of asking what his middle name was. When Graham and Heather finally accepted an invitation from Dionne to visit her in Liverpool, "The feeling I had when I first met her was not to be a baby," Graham said in the doc, "but it felt like I was somebody's baby, if that makes sense." They clicked immediately, as remembered by Graham and Heather, who said in the doc that Dionne and Graham "looked alike, they had the same mannerisms, there was just an instant connection to them.
" The day after this happy reunion, Graham said, Dionne told him that she had a brain tumor and bone marrow cancer, and had six months to live. Why Did Graham Hornigold Think Dionne Was rich? Dionne checked into a series of five-star hotels in London, where the staff knew her by name, and racked up huge bills "ordering the best champagnes" and caviar, Graham said in Con Mum . Graham detailed how Dionne explained that she was a wealthy businesswoman who lived in Singapore and had fruit farms and palm oil plantations in Indonesia and her home country of Malaysia.
She was always on the phone speaking one of "like, 18 languages," he said, and she showed him videos of her bringing food to the poor in the far-flung destinations she frequented. Graham said Dionne told him she had two sources of wealth: Her "business acumen" and "that she is the illegitimate child of the former sultan of Brunei." And he believed it, he said, especially when they went to The Dorchester in London (which is owned by the Brunei Investment Agency, a.
k.a. the royal family) and "absolutely everybody knew her.
" Dionne told him it was high time she bought him a present after 45 years, Graham said, and they picked out a Land Rover. And, not wanting Heather to feel left out, Dionne got her daughter-in-law a BMW. Not long after Heather and Graham welcomed their son, they said in the doc, Dionne asked Graham to join her in Zurich so they could tend to pressing financial matters before her imminent death.
When Did Graham Hornigold Start Giving Dionne Money? While Graham and Dionne were in Zurich, Heather—home alone with a new baby—said in the doc that she started to grow suspicious when the trip went from a few days to a month and beyond, and still no papers had been signed pertaining to Dionne's affairs. And then, Heather said, she was looking through their accounts when she noticed "a substantial amount transferred into Graham's name." It turned out, according to Graham, that Dionne had asked him before they went to Switzerland if he could help her with her £20,000 London hotel bill, because "supposedly there was an issue transferring money because of COVID.
" As he put it in the doc, "We're not exactly cash rich, but I was happy to help my mum, you know?" Heather said in Con Mum that she had been under the impression that Dionne was paying for her own expenses and, when she asked Graham about the money he’d spent covering Dionne’s bills, he told her not to worry and assured her “it’s going to come back tenfold.” Dionne—who's seen and heard in Con Mum from cell phone videos, photos and audio recordings—is heard in the doc telling Graham, "I borrow money from you because you are my blood..
.I love you dearly." Graham Hornigold's Partner Heather Starts Having Suspicions About Dionne Graham barely made it back to London for Christmas, Heather recalled in the doc, as he was torn between wanting to stay with the mum he thought had months to live and being there for his partner and 3-month-old son.
But he returned the night of Dec. 24. "The more I was questioning Dionne," Heather said, "the more Dionne was trying to push me out and get me out of the picture.
" Graham, she added, did not see the "nasty undercurrent" in how Dionne was treating her. Heather said it ended up being "the worst Christmas I ever had in my life." They were supposed to go to New Zealand to introduce their child to her family, Heather said, but Graham ultimately said he couldn't go, he couldn't leave Dionne "and run the risk I didn't get back to see the passing of my mother.
" Heather said she later found out that Graham had opened credit cards in his name at Dionne's request. And, Graham said, when the hotel in Zurich presented Dionne with a roughly £25,000 bill, she told him she was still having trouble accessing her money, so he agreed to lend her some. He estimated he was down £80,000 to £100,000 by then.
Then, Heather said, she saw "two large transactions" taken out of her and Graham's joint account as car payments. According to Graham, Dionne had paid a deposit but the cars were in his name and, after she "all of a sudden" stopped making the monthly payments, he was liable for "nearly £300,000" for the Land Rover and BMW they thought were gifts. Is Dionne Really Graham Hornigold's Mother? Heather recounted in the doc reaching out to Action Fraud UK and then the police, who told her it was unlikely that what Dionne had done would be seen as a crime because she was Graham's mother.
Admittedly, Heather said, Dionne didn't fit the "typical criminal" profile as a wheelchair-bound 80-something woman in poor health. "Essentially they call it a bad business decision," Graham told The Guardian ahead of Con Mum 's premiere, "because you know where the money is going and who to." By the time he got a DNA test, he said, "part of me didn't want to be related, honestly.
" (He said he asked Dionne for a DNA test when they first met, and she had told him, "Oh no, no, no, you believe me or don't believe me.") And yet the results, as he read them in the doc, stated he was "unequivocally 99.9 percent the biological son of one Ms.
Dionne Marie Hannah." Which, Graham said, was "the hardest thing to understand." Was Dionne Sick With Cancer? Graham said in Con Mum that, right after his son was born, he got a message from Dionne telling him she had "passed blood," as well as a photo showing red liquid in the toilet (which was shown in the doc).
Months later in Switzerland, once he too was suspicious of Dionne, Graham said he found red food coloring in a drawer. Dionne denied using the dye to fake blood, according to Graham, telling him it was "a Chinese medicine thing." Dionne also refused to let him take her to the doctor when she seemingly looked to be in agony, Graham said in the doc.
And once he took a closer look at the bag of medications she had with her, he said, they were for ailments like hypertension and diabetes, but not one appeared to be a cancer drug. "In my mind," he said, "there is no cancer." Dionne also continued to insist that Graham's grandfather was the former sultan of Brunei, he said, telling him (as heard in a recording in the doc), "I don't care if you believe me or not, it's all true.
" What Happened to Dionne? About a year after she first re-entered his life, Dionne called Graham, saying she was in Malaysia. Dionne told him she was "sorry for what happened," as heard in footage of Graham on the call. She was "sorry, from bottom of my heart," she continued.
"I've done what I done, I cannot change, son. I cannot change." Whether anything Dionne told him about her life was true, Graham told The Guardian , "You can speculate, but you just don’t know, do you?" He said he hadn't spoken to her in three years and doesn't know where she is now.
Con Mum notes that Dionne did not respond to requests for comment. Where Are Graham Hornigold and Heather Kaniuk Now? Graham and Heather ultimately split up and she lives in New Zealand with their son. In her first Instagram post since September 2020, Heather shared a photo of a sunny beach on Dec.
31, 2024. Her bio still says that she's cofounder of Longboys and Smart Patisserie. "I miss them every day," Graham said in the doc, "but [my son] is happy.
" He had put his life "back together," he continued. "I've realized that you can recover, dust yourself off and keep going." Graham told The Guardian that he video chats with his son and plans to visit when he can.
He's still in debt, he said, but doesn't want that to affect his child "in the sense that he won’t see his dad. I’m going to be a big part of his life." Meanwhile, Longboys appears to be thriving, and Graham—named one of the 10 "most exciting pastry chefs in the U.
K." by Great British Chefs in 2024 —is active on his personal and business Instagram accounts, congenially sharing the inspiration behind his shop's spring flavors last month. He even posted for U.
K. Mother’s Day on March 30, captioning a photo of him holding a box of tempting donuts, "Happy Mother’s Day, to all the amazing mums out there.".
