Britain's most infamous conman traced to German care home after 22 years on the run

Kenner Elias Jones was seventy-five years old and living in a German care home when investigators finally caught up with him—twenty-two years after he vanished from Britain the night before a fraud trial. The man from Caernarfon, North Wales, had spent five decades moving across continents under false names, posing as a doctor, a priest, a charity director, and whatever else the moment required. He had been married three times, served prison sentences in three countries, and managed to slip through the net repeatedly despite deportations and international pursuit.

His most audacious moment came in 1969, when he talked his way into carrying the cross at the investiture ceremony for Charles as Prince of Wales at Caernarfon Castle. By then he was already a practiced deceiver. By the time he fled in 2003, he had become what one American investigator called the best conman he had ever encountered—a man who could remake himself entirely each time a life collapsed, who could make anyone in a room feel like the most important person alive, and who could tailor any story to fit any listener.

His first wife, Donna Lee Mackenzie, met him in Llandudno in 1979 and married him three years later. They lived together in Buckinghamshire and then Vancouver, where the relationship began to unravel. She discovered he had emptied her savings account and was writing fraudulent cheques against it. Worse, he had approached her extended family claiming she was dying and extracting money from them on that false premise. When she learned about his criminal history—convictions for theft and forgery in 1975, obtaining money by deception in 1980, fraud and deception in 1996—the marriage ended. He had taken thousands of pounds from her and left her with the wreckage of trust.

After leaving Britain, Jones resurfaced in various guises. He posed as a doctor in Kenya for seven years without any qualifications and established a charity called Luke's Fund. He claimed to be a priest and lived within a Christian community. In Lisbon, he swindled a travel agent out of airline tickets worth £2,160 and was targeting local businesses. The BBC tracked him there in 2011. He had become a ghost with a talent for reinvention, always one step ahead of the authorities who pursued him across Europe, Africa, and North America.

Mackenzie never stopped looking for him. In 2017, she published a book about their life together as a way to find him and, perhaps, to understand what had happened. A documentary producer named Marc Edwards, who had been following Jones's trail for three decades, eventually located him in Germany. The new film, 'Con Jones: The World's Best Conman?', captures something extraordinary: an audio recording of Mackenzie and Jones speaking for the first time in forty years.

In the recording, Jones does not recognize her at first. He tells her he feels terrible. She reminds him of a ring on his finger—one she had given him. She mentions a fountain pen she still possesses from their time together and offers to return it. He refuses. "Whatever you brought, it's better you keep it because I am not going anywhere after this," he says. Later, she describes a night when he convinced her that a former cellmate was coming to harm them. She sat in a dark hallway with a fire poker in her hand, watching the door, crying, waiting for a man who was never coming. "I know now that he never was coming through the door," she tells the producers.

Toward the end of their conversation, Jones speaks about regret and the impossibility of living with endless what-ifs. "If I could relive my life… I don't want to go back," he says. "What's done is done. I'm sorry it happened. Life is full of regrets... but you can't live your life with lots of what ifs because it's done. If we don't meet again in this life, we've been blessed." The documentary does not show him—cameras were not permitted inside the care home—but his voice carries the weight of a man who has run out of places to run.

The film airs on S4C and BBC iPlayer, offering viewers a chance to witness how a master manipulator, now confined to a care home in a foreign country, reflects on a lifetime of deception. Marc Edwards, the producer who spent thirty years on this story, describes Jones as someone who could captivate with personality alone, who could make anyone feel singular and important. That gift for connection, it seems, was also the instrument of his crimes. In the end, it may have been the only thing that allowed him to face the woman he had hurt most.