The spy who loved her

After Robert Freegard was arrested at Heathrow airport and Kim Adams reunited with her family, FBI special agent Jackie Zappacosta finally put the pieces together of Kim Adams’ horrific ordeal under Freegard’s spell.

Jackie Zappacosta, FBI special agent: Given that we all have vulnerabilities and we all have weaknesses, I think he was particularly adept at zeroing in on what they were. 

Dennis Murphy, Dateline correspondent: Is that what we’ve come to learn as Stockholm Syndrome? Victims come totally under the sway of their abductor?

Zappacosta: I would say it could be used as a case example.  Yes.

Kim had paid freegard $35,000 for spy school training, thinking she would marry him and join him in a life of international espionage— spying on russian submarines from a lighthouse. Freegard in turn pretended to conduct his own background checks on her, thereatening kim with brutal war stories from the spy game— all made up of course.

Kim Adams He said that he had witnessed a knee-capping.

Murphy: Where a suspect was shot through the knee cap?

Kim Adams: Yes. He reported being present when two men held another man down and drilled a drill through his head.

Murphy:  Did he tell you then that he’d killed people before?

Kim Adams: He told me that somebody had discovered his identity, and it was either kill or be killed himself.  He told me that he put a nail gun to the guy’s head and killed him.

Kim didn’t know those were just stories. But then she discovered how terrifying Robert could be. It happened when he started grilling her with personal questions about her love life— information supposedly his superiors had to have before they could clear her for spying.

Kim Adams: Any skeletons in the closet? He said, “I don’t care what it is, it doesn’t matter to me.  I just don’t wanna go into that meeting and be surprised.”

Kim sheepishly confessed when she first started dating Robert, he wasn’t the only guy in her life.

Murphy: And how’d he take that news?

Adams: Not well.  Not well at all.

Murphy: Went ballistic on you?

Adams: Uh-Hmm (Affirms).

Murphy: Had you ever seen that side of him?

Adams: Never.

Volcanically angry, Robert made a call, apparently to some secret operatives, with, he said, fatal results.

Adams: He told me that the man that I had been seeing—that his associates had picked him up and beaten him to death.

Murphy: This man you allegedly had been cheating on him with...

Adams: Yes.

Murphy: And was now dead?

Adams: Yes. And that it was my fault.

Even as a psychology Ph.D, Kim was unprepared for Robert’s psychotic behavior. And she was already in too deep.

Murphy: Kim, this is an excellent time to say, “I’m outta here”.

Adams: I thought I was to blame. I thought I was responsible.

Kim wanted to get the relationship back on track, undo whatever her perceived failure had been... anything to appease Robert.

Murphy: Kim, was that the moment do you think where you slipped into his control?

Adams: Yes.

Murphy: How did he get you?

Adams: Certainly threats and fear and guilt and I was in love with him.

Murphy: You were still in love with him at that point?

Adams: I loved him as much as I hated him. Scared to death of him.

After Freegard went nuts on her, the wedding was off and that’s when Kim disappeared from friends and family. Freegard ordered her to leave her school counseling job, and moved her to a secluded rural cottage where she was now both trapped and terrified, bewildered by her exposure to the evil side of a man she’d fallen in love with.

Adams: My reality was making sure Robert wasn’t upset. I certainly thought about my family, thought about my friends, thought about the job that I had lost, but it was distant.  It wasn’t part of my world anymore.

Murphy: He’s messed with your brain.

Adams: Independent thought or free will was nearly gone.  And if I had left, I knew he would always be able to find me.  And that he would kill me.

Murphy: Did he threaten you?

Adams: Yes.

Murphy: Said he’d kill you?

Adams: Yes.

Robert even took a shovel and dug a hole he said might become Kim’s grave.

Adams: I was at the lowest depths of clinical depression. There was some days I couldn’t necessarily get out of bed.  I cried everyday.  Every single day.

Murphy: Did you ever think about killing him?

Adams: No.  I thought about killing myself.

And maybe that’s why Kim— reduced to a zombie-like trance— found herself trying to pry money from her parents and heading to the airport in London with Robert to pick up a $20,000 check from her mom.

Adams: And the next thing I remember, I saw handcuffs. It was just chaos.

Robert Freegard went to trial and a jury found him guilty of theft, kidnapping and making threats to kill. He’ll serve at least 9 years in prison.  

So the international man of mystery, the British conman who so cruelly exploited women, was finally brought to ground himself by American women: the mother who became a little bit 00s to save her daughter from the spy who didn’t love her. And the real agent Jackie Zappacosta.

Murphy: In the end was this winning one for the female side?

Zappacosta: After it was all over, there was sweet satisfaction when we put all of the pieces of the puzzle together.

Murphy: That women with resolve finally put him out of business?

Zappacosta: Women with resolve took him out in six weeks.  Yes.

Kim Adams is still working as a school psychologist, but she's now back in Minnesota. And Robert Freegard has been moved to a new prison in England because, according to police, he was trying to con money out of fellow inmates in London.

Back in Minnesota, Kim Adams is trying to understand just what happened to her. 

Dennis Murphy: You are a doctor of psychology?
Kim Adams: Yes.
Dennis Murphy: You understand some of the intricacies of the brain.  Does the psychologist in you wonder what happened to you psychologically?
Kim Adams: It's certainly been an experience that has brought home what you read about in textbooks.
Dennis Murphy: Are you a textbook case example of something?
Kim Adams: Yes.  Of-- you know-- brainwashing, the-- abused spouse--
Dennis Murphy: Did you at one time wonder how people could put themselves in such awful circumstances?
Kim Adams: No, but I can't say that I fully viscerally understood what it was like not to be able to leave.  And I do now.

Kim Adams: I'm scared to death of him.

Scared to death, especially now because almost two years after Freegard's conviction, there is a creepy new twist of fate.  After the British appeals court decided there wasn't proof that Freegard’s victims were deprived of liberty or free will, Freegard won his appeal on the kidnapping charges. With time served, he could be released by the end of this year.

Dennis Murphy: Are you worried about your own safety?
Kim Adams: Absolutely.  Yes, I am.
Dennis Murphy: That even now he would come seek you out?
Kim Adams: Yes.
Dennis Murphy: Are you a different person now than you were before you took that plane to England back when?
Kim Adams: Yeah.  I will never be the same.

Not after the spy who never loved her took her heart, her money and much more.

Dennis Murphy: What did he steal from you?
Kim Adams: Me. He stole everything I am.

Prosecutors plan to challenge Freegard's successful appeal of his kidnapping conviction -- and that could delay his release from prison.

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