"I'm not dead yet...
Posted: Sat Nov 09, 2019 12:57 pm
There was something not quite right about the two men struggling out of Hereford bus station on a blustery day in November 2015. The dark-haired one was wearing what appeared to be military fatigues; his much older companion seemed confused and barely able to walk. A concerned passerby went to help. The younger man, who seemed to have an American or Canadian accent, explained that he had found the older man face down on a country road and was taking him to Hereford county hospital. She walked with them, doing her best to support the faltering older man, who could not move more than a couple of paces unaided. As the three of them approached the turning to the hospital, she flagged down an ambulance. The paramedics suspected dementia and assessed the older man in the rear cabin; he seemed to be smiling and crying at the same time. He had no ID and could only give his first name, Roger.
His companion, sitting opposite, told the crew the same story: he had found the man on the side of a road some distance from Credenhill, a village on the outskirts of Hereford. But he claimed he couldn’t share his own contact details because he had been working at the nearby SAS base, and soon vanished into the early evening gloom.
Little was as it seemed that Saturday. It was just the beginning of an extraordinary international mystery that for six months flummoxed the British authorities and generated headlines around the world. The truth only partially emerged earlier this year, when Simon Hayes, a 53-year-old personal trainer, was given a two-and-a-half-year sentence for his role in a plot to abandon Roger Curry, an autistic American man with dementia, far from his home in Whittier, California. Hayes had driven Roger to Hereford the day after he had arrived, with the rest of the Curry family, on a flight from the US. The 78-year-old had been stripped of anything that could identity him, and dressed in brand new British supermarket clothes.
Yet Hayes’s motivations – and indeed much of the Curry family’s backstory – remain a mystery. The judge at his trial, Daniel Pearce-Higgins, struggled to find any precedents for the case. Sentencing at Worcester crown court in April this year, he remarked: “I cannot find any case remotely similar to the facts of this case, curiously because there appears to be no apparent benefit to the defendant.”
There is no evidence that money changed hands, or that Hayes benefited in any way. Why did he go to the lengths he did to help Roger’s son, Kevin Curry, dump his father more than 5,000 miles from his US home? Is he – as the court heard – a convincing liar who stage-managed the British end of a plot to get the NHS to look after an unwanted relative? Or is he – as the court also heard – a tragic figure who took refuge in a fantasy world to protect himself from a turbulent life punctuated by loss?
Continues here....
