WHEN Heather Templeton came into John Mook’s life, he couldn’t have been more over the moon.
Recently divorced, the dad-of-three felt he had been given an unexpected “second bite at the cherry”.
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Before long, John trusted Heather with everything – his finances, his health, his life, and his elderly mother, Freda, who had moved in to live with the couple.
But after an emergency visit to hospital in January 2007, which left him fighting for his life, everything was flipped on its head.
Only just discharged and still in a daze, his daughters sat him down and broke the news about his wife of 10 years.
“Dad – she’s gone,” they said. “And she’s embezzled your mum out of all your money, and taken your money.”
Speaking to The Sun, John, now 77, says: “Obviously I was still stunned, still half drugged up. It just didn’t register at all – for quite some time afterwards.”
Heather, who was 57 at the time, hadn’t just stolen the money. In reality, she was the very reason John was in hospital in the first place.
Just minutes before her husband had collapsed, Heather had given him a set of pills, which she claimed were on doctor’s orders.
But the pills were actually a powerful antidepressant, amitriptyline, that he hadn’t been prescribed, and tests showed that this was far from the first time she’d poisoned him.
In fact, she’d been regularly drugging him with the pills and with rat poison for months – by slipping it into his dinner.
As John recovered from the horrifying experience – with one scientist explaining he was “one pill away from death” – the astonishing web of lies that underpinned his marriage began to unravel.
His apparently loving wife, who baked him cheeky birthday cakes and whisked him away on sun-kissed holidays, was in fact a serial career fraudster who had scammed victims out of millions.
Over the course of their relationship, she had stolen tens of thousands from his vulnerable mother, hiding stacks of mounting bills while treating herself to luxuries like a secret jaunt to Dubai.
Worst of all, whenever John – who was unaware his wife had been married three times previously – grew suspicious, Heather would secretly drug him into submission, nearly killing him in the process.
Such was the grip she held over him that even when she was finally caged in 2008, it took him another TEN years to finally break free from her grasp as she love-bombed him from prison.
“Deep down, I don’t think she really gave a s*** about me,” says Yorkshireman John, who features in a new Channel 5 documentary about the shocking case.
“It was all to become the model prisoner, to get parole – to crack on and do it again, which I genuinely believe she will.”
Love in the air
Former bus driver John still remembers the first time he met Heather at the home of a mutual friend. He recalls seeing her on crutches as she returned from a visit to the physio.
A few pub quizzes and dinner invites later, and they were on their way. Their marriage in 1997 was a spectacular affair and Heather was welcomed into the family.
“It was a bit up and down – like most normal married couples,” John tells us.
“It was a bit of fun. I’d been divorced for a couple of years, and I’m thinking I might just get a second bite of the cherry here. Not many people do.
“She was a dead precious little attractive woman. And I thought yeah okay – let’s give it a crack.”
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Heather was bright, competent, and seemed to have had a successful career.
But their marriage hit its first road bump when John’s father passed and his mother, Freda, sold her house to move in with the couple in York in 2002.
“It was tense,” he said. “As far as my mum was concerned, no woman was good enough for her son.
“It seemed like a good idea at the time but it just didn’t work.”
The whole time, John recalls his mum claiming that things were going missing – a cheque here, a bankcard there.
The family – which included daughters Tracey and Helen from his first marriage, as well as a younger daughter with Heather – put it down to Freda’s old age.
But it turned out she was right the whole time.
In control of the finances, Heather was able to make things appear normal, while in fact siphoning the money away for herself.
As part of a later investigation into her deception, a shocking phone call emerged of ‘Freda’ calling the bank.
Sounding old and confused, she says she’s going to put her daughter-in-law on the line.
My legs twitched, my arms twitched and I just couldn’t concentrate on anything. We’d get halfway there and, Heather would say, ‘you all right?’
On comes Heather, sounding confident, and with full access to move Freda’s money wherever she wants.
The bank staff assumed the pair were in the room together, when it was really Heather putting on two different voices.
Unpaid bills
Eventually, in 2005 the family decided it was time for Freda to head into a care home.
Believing they still had the money from selling her house, finances were the least of their concern.
So when they started to receive letters from the bank and care home over unpaid bills, they took Heather at her word when she insisted it was the bank’s mistake.
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Speaking on the Channel 5 documentary about the case, John tells of how she always had an excuse for what was happening.
He said: “I don’t know how she dreamt them up, but they were so plausible. You just didn’t question it – it was logical, it made sense.”
The bills kept stacking up. But every time John made arrangements to speak to the bank or care home, he’d find himself feeling ill.
He said: “You could guarantee I wouldn’t feel very well. My legs twitched, my arms twitched and I just couldn’t concentrate on anything. We’d get halfway there and, Heather would say, ‘you all right?’
“I’d say no – and she’d say, ‘I’ll tell you what, I’ll ring up and cancel and we’ll come back another day.’ And so we’d come home and I’d go to bed and sleep it off.”
With Heather crushing up the pills and mixing them into John’s dinner, he was none-the-wiser he was being drugged.
He even admits she was a “bloody good cook”, despite the inclusion of what he now dryly calls her “magic ingredients”.
Spot the signs of love scammers
SOMEONE you have just met either online or in person declares their love for you too quickly.
- Many online tricksters claim to work in the military or medical profession, and need to travel, which gives them excuses why they cannot video-chat or meet in person.
- They often ask for money to help them through time-critical emergencies.
- Most will pull at the heartstrings with stories of death or debt.
- Their pictures are too perfect to believe. Try a Google image search to check whether their photo has been taken from elsewhere.
- They will tell you to be sure to keep your relationship private.
HOW TO GET HELP
- YOU can report romance scams to Action Fraud at actionfraud.police.uk.
- Anna Rowe is co-founder of a site offering advice and support for victims, at lovesaid.org.
- You can see profile pictures used by fraudsters at ScamHaters United, on Facebook and Instagram.
Near-deadly overdose
For months, John had been out of it, on one occasion even failing to notice his own daughter getting on board the bus he was driving.
By this point, more than £21,000 was owed to the care home, and John’s mother was facing eviction.
Determined to sort this out once and for all, he’d set up a meeting with the care home manager. It was on that day thart Heather gave him the almost-lethal overdose.
While John was in hospital, one of his daughter’s, Tracey, saw Heather take some pills out of her handbag and give them to him, telling her that the nurses had asked her to do it.
But Tracey was alarmed. Why – in a hospital – would Heather be doing nurse’s job?
She went to the nurses’ station, who confirmed they asked no such thing of Heather. Tracey rang her sister, Helen, who then went straight to a police station.
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By this point, Heather had legged it back home. Police found her trying to fake a suicide attempt, but she was unharmed, and arrested.
Heather was convicted in 2008 on two counts of poisoning with intent to endanger life and given an indeterminate sentence, with no possibility of parole for at least five years.
Shockingly, it emerged she’d lived the life of a career conwoman.
While the family knew she’d been to prison before, they had believed her when she said it was due to an altercation with an ex-partner.
They had no idea she’d previously duped people out of £5 million over plan to buy a hotel, and had conned friends out of £20,000 over phoney plans to invest in Scotch whiskey, for which she’d received a sentence of 3 years.
They said look – it’s either her or us.
Sickeningly, on one occasion, she’d led John’s family to believe she had breast cancer and had less than 12 months to live, before making a miraculous recovery.
She flew out to Dubai, where her surgeon apparently was – and came back breast-cancer free. But it turns out she’d just treated herself to a holiday.
The judge even revealed that in 1981 she’d poisoned her own daughter, aged six, from a previous relationship with the same drug she went on to poison John with.
Family ultimatum
With Heather in prison, the family felt able to move on. But John was the exception.
“She wrote me a letter – and she could write a damn good letter. She wanted to see me, and I’ll be honest I wanted answers as well. So I agreed to see her,” he says.
Against his family’s wishes, John started to visit her more and more, even giving her gifts and money.
He said: “You can’t just switch straight away to disliking someone like that, or completely changing the way you feel about someone.”
John carried on visiting Heather for ten years – and even planned to get back with her properly when she was out.
In the end, his family gave him an ultimatum.
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“They said look, it’s either her or us. I went up to visit her, and just for once I manned up and said ‘l can’t go on like this’. She agreed with me, and it was then I went for the divorce.”
While Heather was finally out of John’s life, it still took him a long time to for him to finally make sense of the ordeal
To this day, he still doesn’t quite know why – despite knowing about her past crimes – it took him so long to accept the truth.
“All my friends were talking behind my back, saying things like ‘what a prat he was’. And it hurts,” he admits.
“I felt oppressed. It’s a real bitter pill to swallow, finally accepting that I was wrong, and everyone else was right. I was convinced that I was doing the right thing. But after 10, 12 years or so I’ve finally accepted it.
“It was like a big jigsaw puzzle. It was only until a few years ago that the final pieces all clicked into place and I got the overall picture of everything she’s done.
“I’ve just accepted that that’s what she was. She was showing bits of emotion towards me to make it look good – nice birthday parties and big do’s at Christmas. Look at me I’m the loving caring wife etc.”
It would not surprise me in the next two, three, maybe five years that she’s back inside again.
Despite Heather eventually spending 11 years behind bars, John is unconvinced that she will have reformed.
He said: “She often said to me, ‘you do the crime, you do the time.’ She said that a few times and I never really registered it. She just took it like an occupational hazard.
“But it would not surprise me in the next two, three, maybe five years that she’s back inside again. It would not surprise me at all.”
Stashed abroad
All in all, Heather stole £43,000 from the sale of John’s mother’s house.
The bulk of what the family have been able to recover went towards the costs of the care home – but much of it remains missing.
John believes Heather has managed to hide it overseas.
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He says: “It’s not as though she was driving around in flash BMWs and wearing Christian Dior clothes, and stuff like that.
“I think because she was well travelled, I reckon she has contacts abroad and has some money stashed away somewhere. I’m pretty sure of it.
“I’m quite surprised that the police haven’t gone down that line of inquiry, actually,” he adds.
John, now aged 77, has a new partner, Sue, and is glad to say he now has a “fantastic” life as a grandfather.
He has no intention of ever seeing Heather again. But when asked what he’d say if he did see her, he admitted he’d thought the question over many times.
One pill and you weren’t going to be there. It just echoes with me now and then – one pill
“It depends on what mood I’d be in,” he said.
“I’d say, thanks for nothing, you really did me a f***ing favour here!
“On the other hand, I’d say come on – where’s all this bloody money gone?”
While admitting he still finds it hard to trust anybody outside of his close-knit circle of family and friends, he’s managed to put the past behind him, but remains aware of how lucky he is to be alive.
To this day, he recalls the moment a scientist was interviewed and said he was just one more pill away from dying.
“It sort of ran it home to me. One pill, mate. One pill and you weren’t going to be there. It just echoes with me now and then – one pill.”
“I don’t really believe in ghosts and spirits and things like that. But I genuinely believe that somebody was looking down on me as if to say it’s not your time mate yet. And I believe that to be my dad. I really do.”
“One of my grandkids, his dad’s into bikes like me. He’s just passed his test and he says, ‘Hi there Grandad, we’re off on our bikes and going to this local bike cafe.’
“And he says, ‘I’ve waited 20 odd years for this Grandad,’
“Things like that, you just cannot buy. And that’s what really bangs it home. I’m here and I am going to enjoy life now.
“I just crack on with life. Believe you me, I am grabbing it with both hands.”
The Poisoning: How To kill Your Husband is available on My5.
