A Man’s Been Jailed For Pretending To Be In A Coma

A coma conman and his weeping wife have been given jail terms for pretending he was in a “vegetative state” to escape trial.

Knight, of Sketty, Swansea, tried to dodge trial for conning a vulnerable elderly neighbour out of his £41,000 savings after he was originally summoned to court in September 2012.

Knight posed for local newspaper photographs with Helen pretending to care for him in a coma at home – but it was all a fake, Swansea Crown Court heard.

He paid for holidays and a caravan with the stolen funds.

When Knight realised he was going to be prosecuted, he and his wife, 34, concocted a story that he had suffered a massive neck injury in a freak accident that left him unable to move and caused him to periodically fall into a comatose state.

‘In total he was in hospital for ten weeks… and he was subjected to several scans and neurological tests’.

But hospital doctors were amazed when cups of water at his bedside “magically disappeared” in the night. Mr. Davis stressed that “Knight and his wife continued to see various doctors claiming he was housebound, comatose and unable to communicate”.

After tracing the Knights’ Tesco Clubcard, he obtained CCTV footage of Mr Knight freely walking around a number of the supermarket’s stores.

Officers then followed him and found there was nothing wrong with him, even spotting him riding dodgems at a fairground.

Knight was told he would be put on trial, which prompted his wife to launch a campaign, writing to the prime minister and her local MP to claim her husband was being unfairly persecuted.

His wife was sentenced to ten months behind bars after she and her husband admitted one count of perverting the course of justice.

‘After he was eventually convicted and sentenced to four and a half years in prison, an investigation has taken place into Alan and Helen Knight and how they attempted to pervert the course of justice.

South Wales Police have now released more pictures of the Knights on holiday, in Aberystwyth and in the West Country, at a time when Helen Knight was seeking the help of Prime Minister David Cameron by letter, claiming the authorities were “forcing” her seriously ill husband to appear before a Crown Court judge when he was unfit to do so.

The judge called Knight’s deception calculated and told his wife: “All in all your behaviour was unscrupulous and selfish”.