Ray William Johnson: True Story Podcast
He Faked Being Paralyzed - The Alan Knight story
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.
Full Episode
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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