Choirboy at Prince Charles investiture becomes global conman

Kenner Elias Jones was a performer from a young age.

As a choirboy with “the voice of an angel”, aged 19 he carried a cross leading a procession at Prince Charles’s 1969 investiture in Jones’s Caernarfon hometown, watched by hundreds of millions worldwide.

But that flair for putting on a show helped him forge a life of deception and fraud across three continents.

Now a new film follows the life of Jones, described by one US law enforcer as the “best conman” he had ever come across.

The virtuous choirboy persona was perhaps his first con.

Another chorister should have carried the cross that day, but Jones approached the bishop and told him all the other boys agreed he should do the job in front of the world’s cameras.

“Nobody had agreed to it at all. Really sly,” fellow chorister Kevin Doughty says in Con Jones: World’s Best Conman.

Filmmaker Marc Edwards has documented Jones’s crimes for 30 years.

“I’ve never encountered a story quite like this in a novel, never mind in the real world,” he says.

Jones became involved in politics while at Sheffield Polytechnic in the early 1970s.

Described over the years as a “popular, colourful, generous, helpful character”, it was no surprise the bright and charming young man was welcomed into groups warmly.

But the early warning signs were there.

His first conviction happened in Sheffield in 1973 for obtaining money by deception. The three-year sentence was suspended for him to have psychiatric treatment in Denbigh’s North Wales Hospital,

A second fraud conviction at the Old Bailey in London in 1975 saw him enter prison for 12 months. At some point in the 1970s another spell of psychiatric treatment followed.

But a chance meeting in north Wales was to open up a new continent for his activities.

Canadian Lee McKenzie describes being fascinated by Jones when she first met him working at a tourist booth in Llandudno in 1979 during a heritage-finding trip to Wales.

“He was charming, intelligent. He came from a culture I wanted to absorb,” she says.

Their relationship, continued through fervent letters when she returned home, survived another prison sentence in 1980 when he claimed he was being falsely accused.

“I have to say that when I saw a letter in the mailbox, my heart would lift. Every letter just had those threads of ‘you are so wonderful’,” she says.

“I knew that I was hooked. I believed him. I did fall in love, yes I did.”

The pair married in Vancouver on his release, before settling in Surrey.

But Jones’s behaviour did not change.

He ran up debts, plundered her money and spun a story about a blackmailer from prison coming for them. The stress caused her to miscarry.

Lee returned to Canada but Jones wrote her a letter, pleading for forgiveness.

She says: “I called the priest who had married us and he said ‘when you promised, you said for better or for worse. Unless you can prove he’s lying, you have to give him another chance’.”

Lee sponsored him to enter the country and Jones volunteered for Canada’s Liberal Party, but money started going missing. Lee was almost arrested at her workplace after Jones forged her signature on documents and cheques.

At Lee’s insistence, Jones saw another psychiatrist who said he had a sociopathic-type personality disorder, warning: “I know he is capable of killing you emotionally or spiritually and I cannot rule out physically. You must get him out of your life.”

After Lee told Jones to “give her space”, he fled to Virginia in the United States in 1984 where he presented himself as a seasoned reporter for the BBC and the Economist to secure a local paper job.

The pattern repeated. He volunteered for the Republican Party and, again, he stole from them. But the penalty this time was much more severe.

He was sentenced to nine years in Virginia State Penitentiary.

Out on licence after just two years, he broke his parole terms and ran back to Canada in 1987, where Lee called the police when he contacted her.

He was charged with the crimes he previously committed and sent to an ageing prison.

When prisoners rioted over the conditions, their eloquent spokesman Jones was extensively quoted in the press, catching the attention of a church leader.

Nearly twice his age, Elsie Hager became his second wife on his release from prison, and a source of cash.

His debts spiralled once again. He told Elsie he had been kidnapped by one of his creditors in a bid to get money from her.

When the “kidnapper” was arrested, Jones refused to press charges.

But his deceptions prompted press reports. Canadian officials discovered he lied on his entry papers and deported him in 1991.

Or at least they tried.

They made the mistake of allowing Jones to make his own way to the flight home. Instead, he fled to California, Elsie in tow, to live on Wales Street in a town called Cambria, the Latin name for Wales.

He made the most of this connection, flying the Welsh flag and ingratiating himself with locals, who fell for the charms of “this lovely man”. He spoke of having tea with the Prince of Wales and frequently mentioned “Lady Di”.

But his fraudulent habits again caught up with him and the US authorities did a better job of making sure he really left the continent.

Back in Britain in 1993, after pretending to be a BBC journalist in the past, he tried becoming one for real.

Jones applied for a job at BBC Wales, inventing a string of career triumphs for his CV.

He might have succeeded, but an editor who had gone to school with Jones recognised him and knew of his convictions for fraud.

He had more luck with politics. He appeared on camera addressing the Liberal Democrats’ Welsh conference in March 1995 and escorting then-leader Paddy Ashdown around his constituency.

He befriended Welsh leader Alex Carlile, who sent him a headed fax, giving Jones the chance to steal the insignia and forge a letter in his name offering him a job.

Jones was convicted of 15 counts of fraud and deception, and in 1996 he was sent to prison in Dorset.

But he proved irrepressible. He took up with a Christian prison rehabilitation charity and was so successful convincing them that he was reformed that on his release he became its national director.

How did he repay them? By stealing.

This time it was Elsie’s failing health that kept him out of prison and he stayed quiet until her death in 2002 before the deceptions dangerously escalated.

Again facing fraud charges, he fled the UK for a remote part of Kenya where not only did he claim to be an Anglican deacon but also a retired cardiac surgeon.

With no medical experience, he treated hundreds of children, holding clinics for people with AIDS.

In a case that shocked Kenya, two boys who were severely mutilated came to his attention and he took them for treatment by a top-class surgeon in Spain in 2006, still pretending to be a medic in the operating theatre.

Feted in the Kenyan press for his work, he married a local woman, Florence Buyela, and adopted two boys.

But his lies caught up with him and journalists started making reports about him as creditors once again emerged.

Faking illness to avoid a court case, he fled with his family to Amsterdam in 2009, where he claimed political asylum for “witnessing political violence and human rights violations” in Africa.

After charming his way into the house of a couple who believed his tale and gave him thousands of euros, he eventually aroused their suspicions. He ran before he could be arrested.

But lured by a fake advert for a charity job in Africa devised by reporters seeking to confront him, he was filmed in Brussels in 2010 refusing to answer questions about his past.

He disappears into the crowds on film, although in fact he would surface in Portugal and Spain over the next few years.

Filmmaker Marc Edwards, perhaps for the last time, tracked Jones, by now aged 75, to a care home in Munich and his ex-wife Lee visited to find what had motivated his many crimes.

Marc says: “He’s as much of a mystery today as he was 30 years ago. He must look back at his life knowing it made no sense at all.”

The frail Jones expressed regret for his past and Lee decided to believe his repentance was sincere.

But perhaps the truest explanation was one he gave to prosecutors many years before.

“I am a copybook case of the imposter syndrome, one who lies whether he has to or not.

“Sometimes I know I’m lying but cannot stop myself. Sometimes I don’t want to stop myself. Sometimes I just don’t realise I am lying.”

Con Jones: World’s Best Conman is screened on iPlayer and S4C on 1 January.