Nurse who posed as man to woo women online is jailed

As a single mother whose devotion to her young children prevented her from paying too much attention to her love life, Samantha Howarth thought Matthew Mancini was the sort of man she had long given up hope of settling down with.

Matthew had film-star good looks and a career as a doctor. Although still only in his early 30s, he said he’d already paid off the mortgage on his home in a wealthy neighbourhood and had a sports car.

Not only that, but for the first time in months, Samantha — who met Matthew on the dating app Tinder — felt she’d found someone who really seemed to care. ‘He said I was beautiful and listened to my deepest secrets,’ she recalls.

‘We spoke for hours getting to know each other and when he asked me for dinner I was thrilled.’

There was only one impediment to Samantha meeting the man of her dreams: he didn’t actually exist. ‘Matthew’ was, in fact, a woman called Adele Rennie who had pretended to be male throughout her two-month ‘virtual’ courtship with Samantha.

Matthew’s profile picture she’d seen on Tinder? Stolen from the internet. His lucrative job and large house? A figment of Rennie’s imagination. The lilting Italian accent that made Samantha weak at the knees? Achieved with the aid of voice-changing technology on Rennie’s mobile phone.

It was only when Matthew and Samantha were about to go on their first date last year that Rennie, knowing the elaborate façade was about to fall apart, invented an audacious excuse as to why her alter-ego couldn’t meet up.

‘The night before, Matthew told me he’d just found out his ex-girlfriend had been pregnant and given birth to their baby,’ recalls Samantha. ‘I was shocked — and never heard from him again.’

Rennie created a fake profile by using the Facebook profile of a Sunderland salesman called Craig Dunn (pictured)

This was, undoubtedly, a cyber flirtation requiring extraordinary levels of deception. Yet Samantha wasn’t the first woman to be duped by Rennie. The 27-year-old nurse at Crosshouse Hospital near Kilmarnock, the quiet Scottish town in East Ayrshire where she lived, has tricked many women with her fake online aliases over the past five years.

In addition to inventing Matthew, Rennie created two other men — David Crolla and David Graham, whom she also pretended worked as doctors — and used them to approach local women on social media and dating websites.

She sent some of the women nude pictures of men and persuaded others to send her explicit pictures in return. She pretended her aliases had relatives who were dying — to prompt sympathy — and spoke to several on the phone with voice-altering software.

Rennie was caught in 2015 thanks to model turned childcare assistant Abbie Draper, 27, from Glasgow. Suspicious that a handsome doctor she had never met had contacted her out of the blue, Abbie turned amateur detective and discovered that he and the apparently diligent nurse looking after her dying grandfather, were the same person.

Yet even after Rennie was arrested and released on bail in November 2016 she continued her web of deceit. It wasn’t until last month that her past finally caught up with her at Kilmarnock Sheriff Court, where she admitted committing 18 offences relating to ten women between 2012 and 2016.

They include stalking, sexual offences, breaching the Data Protection Act, attempting to pervert the course of justice by hiding a phone from the police, causing fear and alarm, NHS computer misuse and breaching her bail conditions.

This week, a sobbing Rennie — who offered no motive for her actions — was jailed for 22 months and put on the sex offenders’ register for ten years, after providing what Sheriff Elizabeth McFarlane declared ‘the most astounding narrative of facts I think I’ve heard in my entire judicial career’. The sheriff added: ‘I have no idea why somebody from a good family, well educated with a good job, throws it all away. Inexplicable.’

Indeed, this was a woman who, on the surface, was notable only for her utter normality. Rennie, whose mother was also a nurse at the same hospital, and whose colleagues described her as ‘friendly and quiet’, had a boyfriend and wore scrubs to work.

So why did this outwardly caring young woman from a middle-class home fly so drastically off the rails? Was she driven by confusion over her sexual identity — or a more sinister desire to control, frighten and manipulate?

Samantha Howarth — an articulate blonde in her 30s who only realised she too had been duped when she read about the court case this month and realised that ‘Matthew Mancini’ was Rennie’s creation — is at a loss to explain what happened.

‘I feel sick that I had intimate sexual conversations with her thinking she was a man, and even though she’s in prison I’m still scared she knows what I look like, the street that I live on and the names of my children,’ she says.

Samantha, who is too terrified of Rennie to let us use her real name, was instantly attracted to Matthew’s dark hair and rugged good looks on his profile picture on Tinder.

It would later transpire that Rennie had taken the picture from the Facebook profile of unassuming Sunderland salesman Craig Dunn. After Samantha and Rennie ‘swiped’ each other last summer — meaning they had agreed they found each other attractive — ‘Matthew’ sent her a message. ‘He asked about my family and what I did for a living,’ recalls Samantha, herself a former nurse and now a stay-at-home mother.

‘He gave me his number and the next night suggested I call.’

They spoke for an hour. ‘Matthew had a lovely Italian accent which he said came from his mother who was a facial surgeon originally from Italy,’ recalls Samantha.

Matthew told her he lived in Newton Mearns, an affluent town near Glasgow. ‘When I told him I was a nurse he said he had a cousin who worked at Crosshouse Hospital and sent me a picture of her. I now realise the picture was of Adele Rennie, but at the time I didn’t recognise her.’

Their conversations — which lasted around an hour most evenings — quickly became intimate. ‘He started instigating sexual conversations and at the time it was fun,’ she admits, although she drew the line at sending him explicit photographs. ‘He kept asking me to send him pictures of my breasts, but I’m not that sort of woman.’

She says they frequently discussed meeting, but as a single mother it was her who struggled to find the time. Looking back, she admits there were warning signs.

Rennie’s victims included Abbie Draper who had met her when her grandfather was rushed to hospital and placed under Rennie’s care

‘One evening, Matthew told me he’d been in the area and driven past me when I was on my way to the supermarket,’ she says. ‘I now realise it must have been Rennie who drove past which frightens me.’

Then the day before they had arranged to meet in an upmarket restaurant in Glasgow last autumn, ‘Matthew’ called with the shocking news that he had unexpectedly fathered a child.

‘He sent me a picture of a woman he said was his ex-girlfriend, a picture of their baby daughter who he said was called Aria, and a screenshot of her message saying she’d given birth,’ says Samantha.

‘He said it was too complicated to meet up. I was upset but had no reason to believe Matthew was lying.’

Knowing the truth, she says, is terrifying. ‘I feel freaked out and scared she knows so much about me. She’s very disturbed and deserves to be in jail — but what she did still doesn’t make sense.’

Rennie appears to have targeted local women with whom she shared common ground. She even approached one victim on Facebook using two different names: firstly as David Crolla and two years later as David Graham

According to Rennie’s lawyer, Paul Gallagher, the nurse’s chilling alter-egos became a ‘form of addiction’ that ‘snowballed’ out of control.

Internet psychologist Graham Jones says people switching gender online aren’t necessarily motivated by sexual desire. ‘They could be assuming another role to feel more powerful or sub-consciously attempting to develop confidence,’ he says.

‘The opportunity to drastically experiment with one’s sense of identity has greatly increased with the advent of the internet and unfortunately the repercussions — from paedophilia to “catfishing” (assuming a fake profile online) — can be alarming.’

Rennie appears to have targeted local women with whom she shared common ground.

She even approached one victim on Facebook using two different names: firstly as David Crolla and two years later as David Graham, claiming Graham’s mother had died of cancer and then that she couldn’t meet up because his sister was dying. Her fraud was facilitated, of course, by our digital age in which online relationships often replace meeting in the flesh.

Another victim, a 26-year-old mother, met Rennie herself at a party before receiving an online friend request from David Graham the following day. The couple spoke for hours and exchanged intimate messages.

The victim was so convinced by ‘David’ she sent him naked pictures of herself which he threatened to post online if she didn’t keep replying to his messages. She eventually collapsed with stress.

Rennie also accessed medical records, by abusing her NHS position, and, after her arrest, broke bail conditions by accessing websites and contacting one victim.

An unscrupulous woman then, and one who might never have been caught were it not for Abbie Draper, who first met Rennie in June 2014, when her grandfather John, 79, was rushed to Crosshouse Hospital after a stroke and placed under Rennie’s care. ‘I drove to see him and met Adele straight away,’ says Abbie. ‘I was immediately struck by how pleasant and hard-working she was.’

The next day Abbie, a former Miss Scotland finalist, received a Facebook message from David Graham whose ‘handsome’ profile picture was the same as that of Matthew Mancini.

She says: ‘He asked if my grandfather was John Draper. I said yes, “how come?” He said he’d seen his name while at the hospital and “put two and two together”. I thought it was strange but my grandad had friends of all ages so I assumed he must have been one of them and didn’t reply.’

Having ‘befriended’ David on Facebook in order to read his message, she noticed fragments of David’s life emerge on his Facebook page: ‘He posted comments about going on business trips and pictures of himself practising yoga. He seemed popular and successful.’

Then, she says, he started posting pictures of medical paraphernalia, such as a stethoscope and an NHS card, and updated his Facebook profile to say he worked at NHS Ayrshire and Arran — the NHS Trust Crosshouse Hospital belonged to.

Rennie also accessed medical records, by abusing her NHS position, and, after her arrest, broke bail conditions by accessing websites and contacting one victim

‘I decided he must work at the hospital my grandad was at and was worried I’d been rude before,’ she says. ‘I messaged him to ask if he worked for the NHS. He said he was my granddad’s physiotherapist. It stupidly didn’t occur to me that even if that were true, he shouldn’t have been disclosing confidential medical information on Facebook.’

That October, David posted an advert for an NHS charity ball he was organising on Facebook for which he required dancers. Abbie, who that week had posted pictures of herself dancing for a promotional event, is convinced David’s post was targeted at her. ‘He knew I’d get in touch and I did, messaging with an offer to dance for free as it was for charity,’ says Abbie.

When she ‘shared’ the ball information on her Facebook page, a friend of Abbie’s said she, too, had been asked by David to help promote the event. ‘Neither of us had met him which we thought strange. Kilmarnock is a small town and David was incredibly good looking. I felt sure we would have seen him around,’ says Abbie.

When her mother said her grandad didn’t have a physio called David Graham, her suspicions were raised further: ‘I called the hotel where the ball was due to take place, but they said they’d never heard of David or the ball. I called my grandad’s hospital ward and they said they knew no David Graham.’

Then another local woman contacted Abbie to tell her a doctor called David Graham had contacted local girls in 2009, arranged to meet them and not shown up — and it eventually transpired the doctor’s number had belonged to an Adele Rennie. ‘She sent me a picture of Adele and I realised she was my grandad’s nurse.

‘I was horrified — if this was “David” and she’d made up this many lies, who knew what she could be capable of as my grandad lay ill in hospital?’

Furious, she sent David Graham a Facebook message. ‘I said I suspected he was Adele and that he should delete this page or he’d get into trouble. He said he was a real doctor and denied knowing Adele. But it emerged David had told other girls that Adele was his cousin. When I told him this, he said he did know Adele and she was a “lovely lass”.’

Abbie reported Rennie to the police and hospital, which suspended her. Abbie’s grandfather — who died the following February — was transferred away from his ward and, after a hospital investigation, Rennie was arrested in November 2016.

Rennie’s lawyer Paul Gallagher says: ‘Adele Rennie has accepted and pleaded guilty to all the offences that she has committed. She accepts that her behaviour was bizarre and she is extremely sorry for the harm and humiliation that she has caused her victims.’

Whether she will ever explain why she acted in the way she did remains to be seen.