- Helen Hart admitted to stealing almost £400,000 from her employers
- Hart splashed out on a Mercedes, a Range Rover and a BMW
- £4,800 went on Chelsea football tickets and £31,400 on home renovation
- Police took a year to uncover full scale of her deception
By Sarah Oliver
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After her makeover: Secretary Helen Hart arriving at Truro Crown Court in Cornwall to face her fraud charges after she admitted stealing nearly £400, 000 from her employers
When the police went hunting through Helen Hart’s home looking for the chequebook stubs, bank statements and forged financial documents that would prove her extraordinary gift for fraud, they found evidence of an altogether different sort.
Packed away in the loft they discovered a horde of plus-size clothes, stout shoes, slimming memorabilia and photographs of a young woman, uncomfortably overweight with dark spiky hair, whose only nod to style was a weakness for long, eye-catching earrings.
The items were clues to how Hart had consigned her former self to history so that she could become as glamorous as her boss’s wife â€" perhaps with an eye to moving in on the wealthy businessman.
The transformation has echoes of the chilling 1992 Hollywood movie Single White Female, in which a needy young woman tries to find fulfilment by looking and acting like her successful room-mate.
Last week Hart, of Redruth, Cornwall, admitted to stealing almost £400,000 from her employers â€" though the true figure could be more than £700,000 â€" to fund a luxury lifestyle.
She will return to Truro Crown Court on Friday to be given what the judge warned will be a ‘lengthy’ jail term.
The money enabled Hart, 46, to buy a £46,500 Mercedes, a Range Rover and a BMW X5.
She also lavished £4,752 on tickets and hospitality for a Premier League football match, invested £4,985 in fine wine and racked up a £7,816 bill at the luxury Bovey Castle hotel in Devon. Hart was quite brilliant at stealing and at spending â€" so brilliant that only one person didn’t believe her tale of an inheritance from a gangland uncle, an associate of the Kray Twins.
That was Susanne Desmonde who, together with her husband Philip, was Hart’s boss at Cornish architectural and engineering firm PDP Green Consulting.
Hart’s response was merciless: she simply tried to steal Susanne’s life.
From frump to fraud: Helen Hart before she met wealthy couple the Desmondes, left, and after her makeover in the style of Susanne Desmonde, right
Speaking for the first time of her ordeal at the hands of the fraudster company secretary who copied her clothes, her hair, her car and her hobbies, Susanne said: ‘I just faded from view until I’d almost ceased to exist.
‘Helen Hart airbrushed me out of my own life using funds she’d stolen from my husband’s company. It’s been an incredibly tough five years, it’s made me doubt my sense of identity, my marriage, even my sanity.’
Targets: Philip and Susanne Desmonde suffered at Hart's hands
Hart shopped at the designer boutique Susanne favoured, mimicking her Armani wardrobe, pearl necklaces and trademark crimson nail polish. She spent £7,000 on a pear-shaped diamond ring at the Truro jeweller’s shop where Philip had bought a similarly shaped (though bigger) diamond ring for his wife.
She travelled to London for a full head of hair extensions to imitate Susanne’s near waist-length style. Walking back into the office she picked up a photograph of her boss’s wife and asked outright: ‘Does my hair look like hers now?’
She also had her hair done at Susanne’s Truro hairdresser, where she tipped the stylist with £30 and a bottle of champagne, and booked appointments at the beauty salon Susanne used.
Hart displayed her new image at the wine bar and trendy surf beach bar around which Susanne’s social life revolved â€" and was often seen zipping around town in her soft-top sports car, just like Susanne, or in her BMW X5, the same 4x4 as Philip.
She even joined the same gym as Susanne and signed up with her personal trainer. She copied Susanne’s love of musicals and the theatre â€" although Hart’s trips to London included limousine travel and expensive post-show supper packages in smart restaurants.
When Susanne went on holiday to her second home in Portugal, Hart headed for the Algarve.
At work she combed Philip’s receipts for clues to the lifestyle he and his wife enjoyed. Such was her determination to upgrade herself in the most insignificant detail, she one day looked up from a grocery bill and asked: ‘What are vine tomatoes?’ She even tried â€" and failed â€" to convince Susanne to have her domestic credit card statements sent to the office.
She tried to give an impression of intimacy between herself and Philip Desmonde, texting him when he was on holiday with Susan ne and bringing him gifts such as his favourite aftershave, Aramis.
Gradually, Hart created an air of such tension in the office that the loving wife who had helped build up her husband’s business from scratch no longer felt welcome. Hart intimated Susanne’s mental health was suspect and, for five years, she got away with it.
Her big lie unravelled when she had all but cleaned out the company’s bank accounts and HMRC issued a winding-up order, including a demand for costs, over £271,000 of unpaid tax in May 2011.
Such was the scale of her deception that even then her employers believed it must be an error. It took police a year to investigate the extent and complexity of her crimes.
Luxury holidays: Hart spent £7,800 on staying at the Bovey Castle hotel in Dartmoor, Devon
She admitted seven charges of fraud at an earlier hearing and then last Monday pleaded guilty to a further 18. Among them was the theft of £380,000 from the firm between October 2005 and May 2011. She admitted theft but on the basis that she only stole £190,000, which prosecutors accepted on the grounds it would not affect the length of her sentence.
Susanne, who is in her late 50s, feels vindicated but not victorious as she attempts to rebuild the life Hart tried so hard to steal.
She said: ‘I was angry and hurt that no one believed me and everyone believed her because she was so, so believable. It wasn’t days or weeks or months â€" it went on for years.
‘She edged me out of the company, she duplicated what I wore, what I drove, what I did at home and my social life. She even tried to manipulate my marriage. She’s a sociopath, a trophy hunter and I seemed to have what she wanted.
‘What’s more, she used my money to do all these things. There was one night I reached rock bottom, I truly believed she’d won. It was winter and I was cuddled into one of Philip’s old coats for warmth. I popped to my gym to book some sessions with my personal trainer and Helen was there, on an exercise bike.
Striving to look like Susanne: Helen Hart used the same hairdresser and beauty salon and bought the same clothes and jewelry as his boss's wife
‘She caught sight of me through the window and came marching out. “What the hell do you think you are doing here? Just take a look at yourself,’’ she yelled at me at the top of her voice. I did take a look at myself and I felt as if I was a non-person, exhausted, ugly and past my sell-by date. I burst into tears and fled.’
Philip, 62, confirms: ‘Helen tried very hard to push Susanne out of my life and out of the life of the business. She encouraged people â€" including me â€" to think my wife was intensely jealous and a bit paranoid to cover her tracks when she realised Susanne was the only one who suspected her.
‘She was envious of what she perceived Susanne had. She reinvented herself physically and seemed to think she was entitled to a new lifestyle in keeping with her new looks.
‘It’s very telling that she shut away her old self in the attic. The police told me that downstairs he r home was a world created by the slim, new upmarket Helen Hart. In the loft however the clothes and photos were from a different era. She cast around for someone to model herself on and chose Susanne. In doing so, she made both of our lives hell.’
The Desmondes married in 1973 and their son Adam was born three years later when they were living and working in the Middle East. They returned to the UK in 1981 and settled in Susanne’s native Cornwall.
They launched the business which would grow into PDP Green Consulting from one room with a single typewriter in a townhouse in Truro.
It swiftly expanded â€" clients would come to include the Ministry of Defence, English Heritage and the Scottish Government â€" and Philip hired Hart as a junior secretary.
Susanne says: ‘She was a plus-size young woman, kind of punk-looking and lacking in confidence, but she was eager and excellent at her job.
‘As the company grew, so did her responsibilities until she was head of administration. She left once, to work for a charity and, ironically, the police. But she came to us begging for her job back and we were happy to have her.’
That was in 2000. And it was in the following years that Hart completed her physical makeover and began her criminal career. She started modestly, taking sums to cover the rent on the bungalow she shared with her husband, her Marks & Spencer charge card bill, her water rates and a new kitchen.
Perhaps she was buoyed by the ease with which she managed to conceal her double accounting, or perhaps the money gave her a taste for a life well beyond the means of her £20,000-a-year salary, because it swiftly escalated.
By the time she was stopped she was forging documents from Lloyds Bank showing she had £83?million in her accounts and was interested in property development from Bath to St Tropez. She flew to Ireland after telling an estate agent she was a prospective purchaser of the £2.5?million mansion belonging to singer Daniel O’Donnell.
Spending spree: What Helen Hart used her money for
Hart also socialised with wealthy members of the Cornish ‘set’ and groomed less well-off acquaintances with pledges of sponsorship and donations. In one notably callous example, she pledged £10,000 to a children’s charity founded by parents who had lost a baby to stillbirth â€" then cancelled her cheque.
Susanne says: ‘I didn’t have to be Miss Marple to work out something was wrong. I’m no sleuth but I didn’t believe her tale of a massive inheritance. Why keep your job as a secretary if you are worth millions?
‘She hoodwinked everybody. She got past our own accountants, past HMRC and other creditors. She told my husband and his partners she wanted to buy his share of the company when he retired. It seems she would stop at nothing to recreate my life for herself.
‘I could see what she was doing but nobody else could. She told them I was going mad â€" and sometimes I felt she might be r ight. It was psychological warfare. Whenever I challenged her she’d invent some sob story â€" she had breast cancer, she was getting divorced, or that her brother had died. Her colleagues even arranged funeral flowers for him â€" but he’s still alive.
‘She doesn’t have cancer either. When I told her I didn’t believe that, she said, “You’d better be very careful when you are out in your car .??.??.??’’ I was terrified of her by the end.
One of the firm’s partners genuinely had cancer and Philip organised for him to receive a proportion of his salary for as long as he needed. She stopped one of his payments and pocketed that money too.
Where the money came from: PDP Green Consulting, an architecture and civil engineering firm run based in Cornwall, where Hart worked as company secretary
‘But what she tried to take off me went deeper â€" she didn’t want just my money but my style, my status, my relationships. It’s the stuff of a female thriller, something like Single White Female â€" albeit without the bloodshed!
‘I don’t know if it was personal, or if I was just a handy role model, but I do know she nearly got away with it.
‘It was me who opened the winding-up order from HMRC which arrived at our house that Saturday morning in May 2011. Philip couldn’t understand it but I understood immediately. I knew it was Helen.’
Susanne doesn’t know how long Hart will be jailed, or which persona will walk free at the end of her sentence. Will it be the polished conwoman or the dowdy book-keeper whose previous life was found cast off in her loft?
‘There are definitely two versions of her,’ says Susanne. ‘But neither of them is me.’
Additional reporting:Â Nick Constable
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