Ray William Johnson: True Story Podcast
He Faked Being Paralyzed - The Alan Knight story
Tue, 03 Jun 2025
Alan Knight, a man from Swansea, Wales, orchestrated an elaborate fraud by pretending to be in a coma for two years to avoid prosecution for stealing over £40,000 from his elderly neighbor, Ivor Richards, who had dementia. Knight, with the assistance of his wife Helen, feigned a severe neck injury that allegedly left him quadriplegic and prone to comatose episodes. They went to great lengths to support this deception, including hospital admissions, the use of medical equipment, and public appearances portraying Knight as incapacitated.
Chapter 1: Who is Alan Knight and what did he do?
This guy pretends to be a quadriplegic to get out of going to prison. Now the guy's name is Alan, and Alan's around 42 years old, living in Wales. And bro is just a total con man, and he really wants to make money by being as shady as possible. And one day in 2008, he pulls off one of the sleaziest cons I've ever heard of. See, his neighbor is this guy, Ivor.
Chapter 2: What was Ivor Richards' situation?
And Ivor is 80 and he has dementia, unfortunately, and he needs as much help as he can get. And I guess Alan learns about this and he's like, oh, I'll just scam this guy. He won't remember. And so Alan starts getting close to Ivor. helping him with things.
And over time, he low-key starts withdrawing money from Ivor's bank account and putting it into his, also using Ivor's checks to pay himself large amounts of money. And doing this, he's clearing tens of thousands of pounds out of Ivor's account at a time. And if that isn't scummy enough, he goes so far as to forge Ivor's will to make himself the beneficiary.
Chapter 3: How did Alan Knight scam Ivor Richards?
And so over time, he funnels over 40,000 pounds out of Ivor's account. or about 60,000 US dollars. And of course, poor Ivor has dementia, so he has no idea any of this is going on. And even if he did and he told someone, they probably wouldn't believe him anyway. Meanwhile, Alan's spending all this new money on himself. He's like going on vacations and shopping sprees. Here's the thing though.
Ivor also has some social workers that help him out sometimes. And one day they're looking at his accounts or whatever, and they're like, hold up a second here. And they notice that a bunch of his funds from his life savings are missing. So someone must be stealing it. And so they call up the local police and they report it and police start investigating.
Chapter 4: What led to the investigation of Alan Knight?
And it doesn't take long before they start to zero in on the turd who recently worked his way into Ivor's life. Good ol' Alan. And Alan becomes a prime suspect. And eventually, in 2011, they have enough evidence and boom, they arrest him. And so they bring him in and they start questioning him about all this missing money. And Alan, I mean, he's a con man. He's a legendary bullsh**er.
He immediately tells them some made up story about how he has an estranged son and it must have been his estranged son who broke into Ivor's house and stole the money from him. Here's the thing though. Alan actually does have a son. So police think he's talking about him and they go and they arrest his poor son. And the son's like, what do you know? I didn't do anything. What's wrong with you?
And they investigate him, and they find that his son didn't actually do anything wrong, and so they drop the charges against him. Which means they now know that Alan was lying. And this makes him look even more guilty, and he knows he's f***ed. And so he starts to panic, until he comes up with a crazy idea. He'll just... pretend he's paralyzed from the neck down.
Chapter 5: How did Alan Knight attempt to escape prosecution?
I mean, there's no way they're gonna prosecute a quadriplegic. And so he has a bail hearing coming up and Alan decides to show up to this bail hearing in a wheelchair and wearing like a neck brace, pretending that he can't move his body.
And there he tells the court that he was in a crazy accident while he was closing his garage door and he fell down and broke his neck and now he's paralyzed from the neck down and that sometimes he has seizures and sometimes he falls into a coma. And because of all that, that they should grant him bail.
Chapter 6: What role did Helen Knight play in the deception?
And even though he's absolutely full of shit, like he's perfectly fine, I guess the court believes him and they grant him bail and now he's out free. However, it's not over for him yet because he still has his main trial coming up. And if he gets prosecuted there, he'll go to prison for years. And so Alan just keeps the lie going. He pretends to be paralyzed.
And like police are still investigating him for stealing from Ivor. And they'll like show up to his house to try and talk to him. But he'll pretend that he can't talk to them because he's in a coma. And his wife is there and she's like in on this whole scheme too. Her name is Helen. And so Helen will like tell the police, he can't talk to you because of his garage door accident. He's in a coma.
And I guess the police are just like, And of course, this also becomes Alan's excuse to not have to go to court. And so he misses court date after court date after court date. Like, I can't make it. I'm in a coma. And two years go by and Alan and Helen are still pulling this scheme.
And they keep pushing his court date back again and again and again because he knows he's going to get prosecuted and he'll go to prison. Now at this point, they're also doing other things to try and further legitimize their bull story. Like Alan will check himself into the local hospital pretending to be a quadriplegic who's all messed up from this alleged garage door accident.
And he's like pretending to be paralyzed from the neck down to the hospital staff. And of course the doctors there examine him and they never find anything wrong with him. So I assume they know that he's full of and faking it, but these hospital visits actually help him delay his trial even further.
Helen even gets the attention of a local newspaper and she brings a journalist to their house, I guess to try and get press coverage to help legitimize their case. And the journalist gets photos of Alan hooked up to a bunch of machines pretending to be in a coma. Like here's a picture of him. Here's another picture of him. Here's one of him and Helen. Here's another one of him and Helen.
So Bro is laying it on real thick. But as ridiculous as this is, it's working. He's still not in prison because they can't convict him because they can't have his trial because he's always pretending to be paralyzed or in a coma. Until. Now police, they're not stupid. I mean, they know something's up with Alan. He's a con man. He's totally not paralyzed.
And so they start going to that local hospital and questioning the staff. And I don't know what kind of HIPAA type laws they have in Wales, but the staff immediately rats him out. Apparently they're telling police that they had seen him sitting up in bed, writing things down, even feeding himself. You know, things that are hard to do when you can't use your hands.
Not only that, by this point police are investigating him hard. And they're looking for like any piece of footage they can find of him. Like any camera he's passed by, they go and get the footage. And they find footage of him doing all sorts of stuff. Like here he is on vacation with Helen. This looks like them on another vacation. Here he is shopping at Tesco. Here he is shopping at Tesco again.
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