March 30, 2025
by Carla Hay
Directed by Nick Green
Culture Representation: The documentary film “Con Mum” features a racially diverse group of people (black, white, Asian and Hispanic) discussing convicted fraudster Dionne Marie Hanna.
Culture Clash: Hanna, a native of Malaysia, was estranged from her British son Graham Hornigold for most of his life until she contacted him in 2020, and she proceeded to swindle him and some other people out of thousands of euros.
Culture Audience: “Con Mum” will appeal primarily to people who are interested in watching true crime documentaries about toxic family problems.
“Con Mum” is a very personal and heartbreaking story of a son who became a victim of his fraudster mother. This documentary also exposes flaws in a legal system that gives leniency to some con artists based on some fraudsters’ physical characteristics. Because the fraudster was an elderly disabled woman, law enforcement was reluctant to take action against her.
Directed by Nick Green, “Con Mum” is a straightforward story told entirely from the viewpoints of some of the victims of convicted fraudster Dionne Marie Hanna. Hanna declined to be interviewed for the documentary, which has a lot of video footage, photos and phone messages from when Hanna spent time with these victims. The main narrator is Graham Hornigold, a British chef who is Hanna’s son. The movie is told in chronological order but starts off with Hornigold telling some of his life story first as background information.
Hornigold was born on a British military base in Germany, on November 26, 1974. From the ages of 2 to 4 years old, he was put in foster care for reasons that he says he still doesn’t know about. And then, his father and stepmother took him to St. Albans, England, where he was raised for the rest of his childhood. Hornigold still lives in England.
Hornigold says he never knew his mother—not even her name. His mother was a taboo subject in the family. It wasn’t until Hornigold was an adult that he found his birth certificate with his mother’s name on it.
Hornigold says his childhood was unhappy because his father (whose name is not revealed in the documentary) had alcoholism and physically abused him. Hornigold shows a scar on his head from when he said his father stomped on him when Hornigold was 7 years old. The reason why he was viciously assaulted was Hornigold dropped a cup of tea.
Hornigold’s father is reportedly deceased, according to what Hornigold has been telling the media in interviews about this documentary. Hornigold says he hadn’t seen or talked to his father in years. He explains in the documentary that the last time he saw his father, “I was 18 years old and knocking him down,” as in, they got into a physical fight.
Despite having a traumatic childhood, Hornigold went on to having a good life as an adult. He became a successful pastry chef in London. He achieved a little bit of fame in 2015, when he was a judge on the British TV series “Junior Bake Off.” By 2019, he was in a live-in relationship and had a patisserie consulting/management business with another chef named Heather Kaniuk, who would become the mother of their son.
Kaniuk is interviewed in the documentary. She describes their romance as being two opposites attracting: She likes healthy food, while he likes not-so-healthy food. What they had in common was a passion for cooking and a desire to go into business together. They were doing a lot of chef influencer work online when Kaniuk found out she was pregnant, right before the COVID-19 pandemic resulted in worldwide lockdowns and quarantines, beginning in March 2020.
While this COVID-19 period of time brought tremendous stress and sadness for people, the lockdowns had the opposite effect for Hornigold and Kaniuk, who both say that it brought them closer together and was one of the happiest periods of their lives because of her pregnancy. The couple used their lockdown/quarantine time to improve their cooking skills and build a larger following on social media. Hornigold didn’t know it at the time, but his family life was about to change in another big way.
Shortly after the COVID-19 lockdowns began in March 2020, a woman claiming to be Hornigold’s long-lost mother contacted him by email. She identified herself as a Malaysian native named Dionne Hanna, formerly known as Theresa. She said that he had been taken away from her as a child and she looked for her him years. Hanna also said she was currently staying at a hotel in Liverpool and asked to meet Hornigold in person.
He was skeptical at first and asked Kaniuk what she thought about this situation. Kaniuk didn’t know what to think. She says she did an Internet search on Dionne Hanna and didn’t find anything at the time. In hindsight, Kaniuk says, “I wish we’d never received that email because it was the start of something which you never thought in a million years would happen.
Hornigold became convinced that Hanna was his mother when he asked her several questions where she gave the correct answers. For example: She knew that her name listed on his birth certificate was Haton Hornigold, with her maiden surname listed as Mahamud. She also knew that Hornigold was born in Germany, which was a fact that very few people knew.
Hanna also dropped another bombshell: She had a brain tumor and bone marrow cancer and had only about six months to live. Under the circumstances, how could Hornigold say no to meeting her? He and Kaniuk went to Liverpool to meet his long-lost mother. This reunion was videorecorded, with clips shown in the documentary. She is described by many of her victims as presenting a fun-loving and charming personality.
It was a bittersweet reunion that Hornigold says made him feel happy to have found his mother but also sad to know he didn’t have much time to get to know her before she was expected to die. Hornigold describes meeting her for the first time as feeling like a void in his life had been filled. He says that he and Hanna immediately bonded because they both have similar extroverted personalities.
Hornigold then got another big surprise: His mother said she was very wealthy because she was an illegitimate child of the Sultan of Brunei. Hanna said she was also wealthy because she was a successful business person in agriculture. She claimed to own several farms and plantations, mostly in Asia.
Hornigold and Kaniuk believed her because Hanna only stayed at five-star hotels. Hotel employees knew Hanna and treated her like a VIP because they said she was one of their best customers. When Hanna visited the couple for a few weeks in London, Hanna bought them high-priced gifts, including a Range Rover for Hornigold and a BMW for Kaniuk. Hanna conducted herself like an important business mogul wherever they went in public.
In the weeks that followed, some problems began to surface. Hanna had a much darker side to the personality that she presented to a lot of people. According to Kaniuk, Hanna became very rude to Kaniuk with insulting criticism, but Hanna was careful not to show this hostility in front of Hornigold. Kaniuk got the distinct impression Hanna wanted to “drive a wedge” between the couple.
Two months after the couple’s son was born, Hanna insisted that Hornigold take a trip with her to Zurich, Switzerland, to sign some paperwork for his inheritance. It was supposed to be a four-day trip, but the trip lasted for two months. Kaniuk says at first, she was relieved to have some time to herself, but as the trip to Zurich got longer, she started to feel resentment that Hornigold was choosing to spend time with his mother instead of with Kaniuk and their newborn child.
The trip to Zurich would be the unraveling of more things that are detailed in the documentary. Four other people interviewed in the documentary were victims of Hanna in the early 2020s, and they met Hanna during this trip to Zurich. These victims are identified in the documentary only by their first names—Juan, Junyan, Markus and Peng—but their faces and voices are not disguised. They tell similar stories of what Hanna did to them in her con-artist schemes.
Juan, who seems to be Hornigold’s closest friend, was with Hornigold during that trip to Zurich. He says that Hanna began calling Juan her “grandson” and offered to buy him and Hornigold high-priced homes in Switzerland. They even looked at places that were for sale. Juan declined her offer to buy him a €7 million home because he says he wouldn’t be able to afford the cost of maintaining a home with that price tag.
Junyan and Markus are a couple who met Hanna at the Zurich hotel where she was staying. Markus (who describes himself as a filmmaker) and Junyan were in the process of launching an online retail business for luxury goods. But this start-up company needed investors. Hanna signed a contract with them that promised a 20% investment in this start-up company.
Peng, who is originally from China and is currently a resident of Germany, says that he met Hanna because he works as a middle man for a company that treats cancer patients. She seemed to want to financially invest in this company too. But, of course, almost everything she told Peng turned out to be a lie, including saying that she had terminal cancer.
What all of her victims have in common is that Hanna would show off her supposed wealth to them and often treat them to fancy dinners and high-priced gifts. And then, after she gained their trust, she asked to borrow money from them. She would also make them promise not to tell anyone about these loans. In Peng’s case, she lied by saying that Hornigold stole a lot of money from her, so Peng felt sorry for her when she asked Peng for money.
Even though she presented herself as wealthy, Hanna used the COVID-19 pandemic as an excuse for why she said she couldn’t immediately get access to her money in bank accounts that were in other countries. Her victims believed her because they saw so much “evidence” that Hanna was wealthy. It never occurred to her victims (until it was too late) that the money she was using for lavish spending sprees came from victims of her elaborate con schemes.
Hornigold says that Hanna was constantly doing business deals on the phone. The people she talked to seemed to treat her like a mother or grandmother and even called her those names. In hindsight, they were more of her victims. Hanna also had bankers fooled when she would visit banks with Hornigold.
As for the money she cheated out of people by pretending it was a loan she would pay back, Hannah would keep coming up with excuses not to pay the loan. Her biggest excuse was that it was a bank’s fault for not letting her have access to her money. A friend of Hornigold’s identified only as Martin backs up his story. However, because these loans were not put into writing and there was no proof that the cash given to Hanna was a loan, a con artist such as Hanna could easily claim that these loans were gifts.
Juan didn’t fall for Hannah’s con game simply because he told her up front that he didn’t have any money to give to her. Juan says he became suspicious of Hanna as soon as she asked him for money, but he says he didn’t tell Hornigold about his suspicions at the time because he thought that Hornigold wouldn’t believe Juan and it would be the end of their friendship. Juan didn’t know at the time that Hanna was draining Hornigold of money by asking him to pay for many of her expenses while they were in Zurich.
Junyan and Markus estimate that they lost €100,000 to Hanna, just from money that they gave to her as loans—not including the money she had promised them in the investment contract. Peng says that Hanna cheated him out of €150,000. Hornigold says Hanna scammed him for £300,000.
Of course, Hanna reneged on the investment contract she signed with Junyan and Markus, who both decided to take the loss and not pursue legal action against her because they knew that Hanna probably didn’t have the money, even if they won in a lawsuit against her. Peng still has a hard time accepting how badly he was conned and still calls Hanna his “grandma.” Hornigold said he started to become suspicious of his mother when he found out that the Range Rover that Hanna “gifted” to him was not fully paid for, and he was stuck with the majority of the payments.
Kaniuk got suspicious a lot sooner than that. She says that she did a deep-dive investigation into Hannah’s background and found out that Hanna had been married three times: first, in 1970, then in 1984, and then in 1994. The name of Hanna’s father and her date of birth were different on each marriage certificate. Hanna also had a criminal record that included convictions for fraud and theft. That’s when Kaniuk says she knew that Hanna was hiding information and lying about many things.
Viewers watching “Con Mum” and don’t know the whole story will wonder if Hanna was also lying about being Hornigold’s mother. That information is revealed in the last third of the documentary, when Hornigold says that a DNA test was taken to prove if she was his biological mother or not. He says in the documentary what the DNA test found. This review won’t disclose the DNA test results, but it’s enough to say that the test results caused another change in how Hanna and Hornigold interacted.
“Con Mum” is a well-edited and riveting story about cruel lies and betrayal. The fraud put a tremendous strain on the relationship between Hornigold and Kaniuk. The documentary reveals if these two parents are still together and if Hanna faced any criminal charges for what she did to the victims who are interviewed in this documentary. Although it’s rare that long-lost mothers turn out to be professional con artists, “Con Mum” shows in harrowing ways that betrayals from loved ones are what hurt the most.
Netflix premiered “Con Mum” on March 25, 2025.
