One of the UK’s top pastry chefs Graham Hornigold was shocked and delighted when he was contacted out of the blue by someone claiming to be his long-lost mother.
But the arrival of this crucial missing ingredient from his life would ultimately leave him with thousands of pounds of debt and a nasty taste in his mouth.
Netflix documentary Con Mum explores the extraordinary tale of a reunion of mother and son and the resulting anguish when it all falls apart.
The 90-minute programme, available to stream from Tuesday 25 March, was directed by BAFTA-nominated Nick Green and made by UK independent production company Forest.
Jez Lee, Forest co-founder and executive producer, said: “Con Mum is an unbelievable, never-told-before tale of love and loss.
“The formidable original journalism will have viewers on the very edge of their seat.”
Graham Hornigold is one of the UK’s top pastry chefs (Photo: Netflix)Graham Hornigold is one of Britain’s top pastry chefs, a co-founder of patisserie firm Longboys and a former judge on Junior Bake Off.
Born on a British Army base in Germany in 1974, Hornigold was fostered from the age of two for a couple of years.
Then he went to live with his father, who had been a sapper in the Royal Engineers, and his stepmother in Hertfordshire.
His upbringing, with a father who drank and had violent tendencies, was challenging. He described him in an interview with The Guardian as “ex-army, classic 1970s.”
He said he still has a scar on his head from when his father kicked him at the age of seven.
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A Saturday job at Ushers Bakery in St Albans eventually led to him pursuing a career in catering.
The owners of Ushers at the time bought him his first set of knives and chefs’ whites and sent him to catering college in Watford.
Later, he took courses at Thames Valley University in Slough before starting work under the tutelage of Lisa Crowe at The Lygon Arms in Broadway, Worcestershire and then working at The Park Lane Hotel and Mandarin Oriental, Hyde Park, London.
At the age of just 28, he became executive pastry chef at The Lanesborough Hotel.
Under his guidance, The Lanesborough’s afternoon tea won the Tea Guild’s Award of Excellence two years running and Graham was named UK Pastry Chef of the Year in 2007.
He joined the Hakkasan Group in 2011 as a consultant, overseeing pastry sections around the world until 2017.
His success in the industry saw him invited to be a judge on Junior Bake Off and appear on Masterchef: The Professionals.
Then in 2019, Hornigold launched Longboys with his partner and fellow pastry chef Heather Kaniuk.
It is a small-batch bakery specialising in finger doughnuts, using a brioche base with fillings such as raspberry rose lychee and salted caramel pretzel.
Hornigold received an email in July 2020 from a woman claiming to be his mother (Photo: Netflix)How was Graham Hornigold scammed?
Just after the Longboys business had taken off and during the Covid lockdown in July 2020, Hornigold received an email which would change the course of his life.
It read: “Hi Graham, I’m not sure if this is going to reach you as I’ve been searching for a way to contact you and found this email.”
The sender was a woman called Dionne who claimed to be Hornigold’s birth mother. After questioning her to check details, they arranged to meet in a hotel in Liverpool.
There the Asian woman in her 80s revealed she was a wealthy business owner who lived in Singapore and ran fruit farms and palm oil plantations in Malaysia and Indonesia. She also said she was the illegitimate child of the former sultan of Brunei.
Her catalyst for wanting to finally make contact with her son was, she said, because she had a brain tumour and bone marrow cancer and had just six months left to live.
The chef said “it was a bit bittersweet”, after returning to his life “now she was being taken away again”.
She checked into a five-star hotel in London to be nearer her son, who by now was about to become a parent himself with partner Heather Kaniuk.
Dionne lived a lavish lifestyle and showered the couple with expensive gifts.
Then in September 2020, Hornigold’s son was born.
His arrival coincided with an apparent downturn in Dionne’s health, she said she had started passing blood.
So Hornigold moved his mother into the family home in Kent. Months later, they travelled to Zurich to meet with her bankers and lawyers to ensure Hornigold would inherit her fortune.
But everything appeared to be held up by Covid and nothing was settled.
Heather Kaniuk was Graham Hornigold’s former partner (Photo: Netflix)While they were away Ms Kaniuk discovered Dionne’s hotel stays and gifts had, in fact, been bankrolled by Hornigold.
He was using of savings and credit cards to pay for his mother, on the understanding she would pay him back. The debts had run into hundreds of thousands.
At the same time, Hornigold’s friend Juan also raised concerns about Dionne’s intentions while they were in Zurich. He suggested she may not be dying and could be trying to scam him.
Then when the chef found red food dye in her hotel suite, he suspected she was using it to convince him of her terminal condition.
Where is Graham Hornigold now?
Just a year after she appeared on the scene, Dionne returned to Malaysia.
Attempts to involve the police in the financial matters were unsuccessful, Hornigold said: “Essentially they call it a bad business decision, because you know where the money is going and who to.”
The chef admitted in the documentary his belief in his mother was “his downfall”, adding:” “If you don’t receive [love] when you’re a kid, you have this wound you carry around.”
Hornigold said he chose to do the documentary to raise awareness about mental health (Photo: Netflix)Ms Kaniuk described Dionne’s behaviour as going “against everything you think a mother should do – loving and protecting a child”.
“She didn’t do any of that”, she said, “she effectively destroyed her child’s life.
“With no remorse.”
Ms Kaniuk now lives in her native New Zealand with the couple’s son.
Hornigold is in London and aside from Longboys, he runs a patisserie wholesale business and a consultancy firm called Smart Patisserie.
He told the magazine Restaurant that he had at one stage been facing bankruptcy and had had to work hard to recover financially.
He has also revealed he had therapy to recover mentally from the trauma of the event and its consequences and his past.
But he said he hoped the documentary would raise awareness about the importance of mental health.
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