Shropshire conman Robert Hendy-Freegard has deprived us of our mother, say brother and sister

Jake Clifton, 25, and his sister Sophie, 28, believe former Newport pub barman Hendy-Freegard has manipulated their mother Sandra into cutting them out of her life.

Jake said he was just 14 years old when his mother met the conman. In a personal appeal to his mother, Jake said: "We both love you. We miss you. We want you back in our lives."

He went on ITV's Good Morning Britain to make the national appeal, saying that it had been seven or eight years since he last saw his mother.

"She's been so manipulated, she can't make her own decisions," he said.

"I would love to see her again, I would love her to see the real truth."

Hendy-Freegard, who was calling himself David Hendy when his met Mrs Clifton on a dating app, served four years of a nine-year sentence after defrauding his victims out of more than £1 million.

He was initially jailed for life after being convicted of two counts of kidnapping in 2005, but those convictions were quashed on appeal.

His trial was told how then plain Rob Freegard was working as a barman at The Swan pub in Newport, Shropshire, when he began regaling students who frequented the pub with tales about his work for MI5.

He convinced four students from Harper Adams agricultural college that their lives were in danger from the IRA. He spent the next decade coercively controlling them, persuading them to fund his James Bond lifestyle while moving them from one squalid "safe house" to another.

Jake said: "I was just 14 at the the time, I didn't understand what was going on.

"It was only looking back I realised what it was that we could look back at it and understand it for what it was."

Hendy-Freegard is the subject of a Netflix documentary 'The Puppet Master: Hunting the Ultimate Conman'.

It tells how his victims spent years in hiding, handing over their life savings to finance Hendy-Freegard's James Bond fantasy of fast cars, luxury holidays and expensive clothes.

Hendy-Freegard, who changed his name by deed poll after entering a coercive relationship with Harper Adams student Maria Hendy, regularly subjected his targets to bizarre tests. On one occasion he persuaded student John Atkinson to take a beating from him, to prove he was 'hard enough' for what lay ahead.

Jake Clifton believes his mother is now being controlled in a similar manner.

"She has been trained, controlled to do whatever Freegard wants her to say and do," he said.

Sophie added: "We were young, we were just living our lives with our mum. She did everything for us.

"We were extremely close, it was a normal set-up. She worked hard, she always did everything for us, she was extremely devoted to us, no one could ever question that, which is what makes everything that's happening now so out of character."

Sophie said she did not realise Hendy-Freegard was a convicted fraudster until she had left home. She added it was her father who stumbled upon his real identity.

Jake said: "My dad didn't understand what was going on, he spoke to my friend's mum and dad and asked if I was okay."

Sophie said she and her brother were both living in hope that she might return one day.

"We want to provide an environment that's safe and welcoming for our mum to come back into," she said.

"If we're a mess, how can we be supportive? Our whole family network and my friends are so close-knit, we stick together. We don't want this to happen anymore or to anyone else.

"The door is never shut, it never has been shut, it never will be shut.

"Any money, any nastiness that's been thrown about is irrelevant.

"She's our mother, without her there is no us."

ITV said it had received an email signed from Mrs Clifton denying that she was missing, and that her children could contact her, but they needed to accept that she loved Hendy-Freegaurd.

But Jake said the only contact he had received was via a withheld number, and that neither of them ever answered the telephone unless it was to a timescale set by the couple.