The Puppet Master: Hunting The Ultimate Conman, is a three-part docuseries about how a particularly brazen con artist manipulated his way into people’s lives over a time period stretching from the early 1990s to the present day. This true crime is compellingly told by DoP Paul O'Callaghan and directed by Sam Benstead and Gareth Johnson.
The Puppet Master tells somewhat of an open-ended story, mainly because Robert Hendy-Freegard, the con artist at the centre of the docuseries, is still at large, living with Sandra Clifton in an unknown location. He was caught and sent to prison in the mid-2000s for his MI5 scam, but he was released after only a couple of years. Directors Sam and Gareth needed to build a story with no ending. Their method of going back and forth in time to show Hendy-Freegard’s history of his elaborate scams helps to build tension in the narrative to bring us to the present day and create a shocking true-crime drama. Available to stream on Netflix now!