Prison sex sessions, fake holidays and Spice busts… how love-bombing gangsters turn ordinary women into drug mules
WHEN Amy Hatfield started working as a prison nurse, she would never have thought she’d end up behind bars herself.
The 39-year-old had become a mental health worker at HMP Lindholme, Donacaster, with good intentions to help inmates get their lives back on track.
Instead she was love-bombed by a manipulative career crook and lured into a devastating criminal operation which would leave seven people dead.
Last year, Amy was jailed for ten years and two months, along with 13 other people related to an elaborate Spice-smuggling ring.
But at the centre of it all was her sexual fling with inmate Joseph Whittingham, 36.
Now a new documentary series, My Boyfriend Made Me Do It, analyses how Amy and other women like her have been plunged into serious illegal activity in the name of love.
And speaking to The Sun, psychotherapist Nadyne McKie says there are many tricks criminal groomers use to gain control, before making their true intentions clear.
She says: “Manipulative partners use psychological grooming, slowly building trust and using love-bombing techniques which create a false sense of what the relationship presents, before slowly introducing demands which may involve criminal activity.
“Love, trust, loyalty, and dependency are leveraged, which further isolates the victim by creating dependency.”
Within weeks of starting work at Lindholme, Amy became the intense focus of attention for Whittingham, who would shower her with compliments.
Despite the fact that he was a seasoned criminal with a string of violent convictions, they were soon having sex in her office, with infatuated Amy believing they could have a life together on the outside once he was released.
“We don’t know why she was so susceptible,” journalist Christa Ackroyd says in the Channel 5 show.
“She never really gave that explanation as to why she fell for what was obviously a career criminal.
“Maybe she was lonely, but my goodness, did she fall, hook, line and sinker to the point where all the rules were thrown out of the window.”
Whittingham had no intention of a real relationship. It was all a plan to get her to bring him contraband into prison – with devastating consequences.
Once she had been groomed and brainwashed by Whittingham, drugs soon began arriving at Amy’s home.
Crime reporter Amber Haque explains: “She would then pack them up in Ribena bottles and then smuggle them into the prison.”
Amy had worked out that she was only ever searched once – at the start of her working day. She could then return to her car at lunchtime and pick up a rucksack stuffed with drugs without fear of being searched again.
During their fake mental health appointments, as well as having sex Amy would hand over the smuggled drugs to Whittingham, along with mobile phones and sometimes even weapons.
The prison was being flooded with drugs from MDMA and cannabis to steroids and ketamine.
But one drug in particular was causing major issues – Spice, a synthetic drug designed to mimic cannabis.
“It was made illegal a few years ago because it has a really, strong powerful effect on a lot of people,” Amber says.
Christa says: “This was becoming a situation that the prison officers could no longer contain. Something was happening. They needed to find out what.”
£1m worth of drugs
Tragedy struck in September 2019 when prison gangs were making vulnerable inmates smoke Spice to test its effects.
Kyle Batsford was one of those inmates – and he sadly suffered brain injuries and died as a result.
He was just one of seven Spice-related deaths in the prison from 2018 to 2019, leading police to investigate.
South Yorkshire Police stopped and searched Amy on her way into work and she admitted to having drugs on her.
On the day she was arrested she was caught carrying drugs to the prison value of £1million.
The police investigation then focused on exposing the rest of the smuggling ring, starting with Amy’s prison boyfriend Whittingham. When police searched other cells they found all sorts of incriminating evidence.
This was not just a crime organised by two star-crossed lovers – it was a huge organised criminal operation.
It took police four years to unravel the entire enterprise, which became England’s most sophisticated prison smuggling scheme.
On October 27, 2023, Amy Hatfield became one of 17 people convicted for her part in the illegal operation.
She pleaded guilty to charges of supplying with Class A and Class B drugs. She was jailed for 10 years and two months.
But Amy was not the first woman to be groomed and manipulated into crime by the man she loved – and believed loved her.
Fake romantic holiday
On the other side of the world in Toronto, Canada, entrepreneur Emily O’Brien spent four years behind bars convicted of drug smuggling – after being fooled by her boyfriend Noah.
She recalls: “I found out I was going to be carrying 2.2kg of cocaine into Canada.”
It was 2013 and 24-year-old Emily was flying high running her own successful social media business.
She liked to party, but managed to keep it under control until her parents announced they were getting a divorce.
Emily spiralled into a world of drink and drugs. She says: “I went from celebrating to medicating. I stopped being passionate about my business. I was like doing cocaine at 12 in the afternoon then starting my drinks at 2pm and then doing more cocaine.
“Cocaine was like botox for the soul. It just made you not have one. And I knew that where my life was going was not where I wanted to be, I had lost a lot of passion for things in my life.”
In the weeks after her parents announced their divorce, Emily took on a new paying client called Noah.
They hit it off straight away, and soon their relationship moved from business to pleasure. Noah told Emily he had had problems with drink and drugs, and was now sober, so she began to see him as a support network.
She says: “He started you know buying me gifts, getting me nice things. But it was like the really simple things like walking the dog when you know I was having a bad day with the drinking or something like that. And so I was like, I really, really like this guy.”
But while Emily saw Noah as a supportive boyfriend, he was establishing her dependency on him. A few months into their relationship, he stopped paying for her social media services.
“I was still doing all the daily tasks required to help him grow his online following,” she explains. “But then his cheques started bouncing, at this point he owed me around 800 bucks. And so I actually start to become kind of irritated.”
What is synthetic cannabis?
By Phoebe Cooke and Guy Birchall
THE synthetic cannabinoids collectively known as Spice are made up of a range of amphetamines and other laboratory-created chemicals that vary wildly from batch to batch.
Users smoke, drink or eat Spice, often in tea.
Before the ban on psychoactive substances in 2016, it was being sold either over the counter or online under a variety of brand names such as Annihilation and GoCaine.
It is highly addictive with withdrawal symptoms said to be worse than coming off crack or heroin.
Users can suffer vomiting, seizures, terrifying hallucinations and severe psychotic episodes after consuming the drug.
Spice appears particularly rife in Birmingham and Manchester, where a number of users have been hospitalised after taking the drug.
The substance is sometimes dubbed the “zombie drug” because of the effect it can have on users, who are often seen staggering around.
An ex-spice addict has described the sensation to Metro, saying: “You just feel brain dead half the time. They say people look like zombies, and that’s how it feels.”
Noah eventually paid Emily what he owed, but he soon had a new financial proposition.
One day Noah told Emily that his friend was selling a nice car for $15,000 – he would pay $5,000 of it and Emily would just have to pay $10,000.
So she handed over the $10,000 – and then didn’t hear from Noah.
She says: “Just these excuses came up as to like problems with the car. Oh it needs this, now three or four weeks go by. So at this point I’m like livid because it had been just like excuse after excuse after excuse.
“And my desire to kind of hang out with him because he helped me feel safe is now kind of being taken over by, okay, I want my $10,000 back.”
Emily refused to make contact – until Noah really started to apologise and suggested a trip to Puerto Rico – but with a clause.
She says: “So he comes over and brings a bottle of wine and he’s like, I’m really excited to go on this trip with you. I also have this idea, I don’t know if you need money or not but we can actually bring drugs back and I’ve done it before and we can both make like eight grand. And I was like, what? Like it came out of left field. I was just like so shocked.
“This guy that’s sober is bringing me over a bottle of wine and is asking me to smuggle drugs and is like trying to incentivise me.”
A few hours later Noah apologised and said he should never have asked Emily that – but would still love for them to go on the trip, no strings attached.
Thinking about all the good things Noah had done for her, she gave him the benefit of the doubt and decided to trust him. But the holiday was soon going to be over for Emily.
Tumultuous trip
When they got to the airport, Noah handed her her ticket – which said they were going to St Lucia, not Puerto Rico.
Noah tried to placate Emily by saying she had got confused when she was drinking. So she got on the plane.
The first three days of the holiday were bliss. But one day when Emily decided to head to the pool as normal, Noah turned to her and said ‘you are not going to the pool today’.
“I look up at him and he has this like look, that’s like there’s no one inside him and it’s, he’s like, we’re here to work. Did you really think this was all just fun and games?’”
A car carrying two men arrived at the hotel to pick them up. “I had a huge sense of uneasiness, but he was the only one I knew down there so I had to trust him,” says Emily.
After a 30-minute drive they stopped at a house in the middle of the island where a woman came out to greet them and said ‘thank you so much for doing this.”
Cocaine was like botox for the soul. It just made
She says: “He said, hey listen I’m so sorry, but we have to do this. They already have your passport information. And I was in a lot of debt and I’m sorry. At thus point I put two and two together. I knew why we were there and I knew that he had actually lied to me again.”
Amy was to smuggle the drugs through the airport by wearing a pair of cycling shorts holding the packages underneath a loose dress.
They made it back to Canada and started walking through customs where they were stopped, separated and questioned.
Emily admitted she was carrying drugs, hoping that would be the end of her ordeal. But it was just the beginning.
She pleaded guilty and was jailed for four years for her part in smuggling four kilos of cocaine into Canada. Noah received the same sentence.
But going to prison gave Emily an enforced detox and helped her get her life back on track. And she came up with a new business idea while still in prison. The prisoners used to cook to pass the time – and one of their most popular snacks was popcorn.
She now sells her popcorn in 600 outlets across America and employs five former inmates, as well as campaigning to help other women who have been through the criminal justice system.
She says: “I’m a firm believer in justice after wrongdoing, but some of these offences, the punishments are designed to punish the most vulnerable. Like in the drug trade, they’re putting women at the bottom of the barrel into prison for a long time.”
Why it happens
Psychotherapist Nadyne McKie has worked with women in abusive relationships and says there are many reasons why some women, like Amy and Emily, may be more susceptible to manipulation.
She explains: “Women coerced into criminal activities often have a history of trauma which shape their attachment styles, making them more vulnerable to manipulative partners and abusive relationships.
“Trauma and insecure attachments within the family home, especially stemming from past abuse, can lead to a tolerance for distress in relationships, where discomfort, violence or volatility may feel “normal.”
“They may even feel they deserve this type of relationship as they had to become ‘comfortable’ to endure the pain and constant anxiety/trauma involved in the abusive cycle.”
She adds of the perpetrators: “Threats and intimidation, sometimes very subtle, making them hard to distinguish or even believe, maintains the control, making the victim feel that leaving is impossible or dangerous.
“They also create self-doubt and fear, ensuring the woman stays compliant in the relationship and even causes her to doubt herself as she may believe she has no choice, and she is doing the best for the relationship.”
My Boyfriend Made Me Do It is available to watch on My5.
Female drug mules
The Peru Two
In 2013 Michaella McCollum and Melissa Reid were arrested at the airport in Peru with 12kg of cocaine in their luggage.
The 20-year-old British women had flown from Ibiza where they were on holiday and initially claimed they had been forced to smuggle the drugs worth £1.5m by gangsters.
But they later pleaded guilty to drug smuggling (in exchange for a financial pay-off) and were sentenced to over six years and eight months of jail time in the notorious Ancon 2 prison. They served three years before being released.
Michaella returned to her home in Northern Ireland and wrote a book about her experiences. She is now a mum of two.
Melissa is back in her native Scotland and was working at a homeless shelter helping people to kick their drug and alcohol habits.
Kim Hall
Beautician Kim, 28, is currently facing up to 60 years behind bars in America for allegedly bringing £3.5million worth of cocaine home from a holiday in Mexico.
She was detained at Chicago’s O’Hare airport as she was waiting for her connecting flight to Manchester.
Homeland Security investigators swooped after finding 43kg of cocaine in two suitcases.
But Kim, from Middlesbrough, insists she was forced to carry the bags for two men who had offered her a free holiday to Cancun but threatened her once she was there.
And her desperate family back home in Britain insist that all she is guilty of is “stupidity and naivety”.
She has already made a number of court appearances and and is being held in Chicago awaiting trial, which could be a year off.
Patricia Cahill and Karyn Smith
In 1990 the two teenage girls from the Midlands were arrested for drug smuggling in Thailand.
Patricia, 17, and Karen, 18, were stopped by customs officials at Bangkok airport trying to board a flight to Amsterdam.
They found nearly 32kg of powdered heroin with a street value of about £4million hidden in shampoo bottles and coffee and biscuit tins.
The girls claimed they did not know what was in the containers, given to them by a third person.
Patricia’s dad didn’t even know she had left the country – he thought she had gone on holiday to Scotland.
They were both found guilty of drug smuggling and served three years in prison before being given a royal pardon after pressure from the British Government.
Monique Zollner
21-year-old Monique, from Manchester, was caught smuggling 30kg of cannabis into the UK but was spared jail earlier this year after a court heard her 16-year-old brother was shot dead in a gang war when she was four.
She was arrested with £180,000 worth of the drug last April after she arrived in the UK with it stuffed into two suitcases following a flight from Canada to Manchester.
She faced up to three years in jail after she admitted importing cannabis but was freed with an 18-month suspended sentence when a judge ruled she was ‘vulnerable’ to her age, drug habit, lack of convictions and history of ‘family trauma’.
Zollner was aged just four when her brother Louis Braithwaite was gunned down during one of Britain’s bloodiest turf wars.
The schoolboy was killed when two hitmen shot him while he played slot machines with friends at a betting shop.
Police inquiries revealed his killing was linked to two other murders of young men who died in gangland shootings at the height of gang warfare in South Manchester between the rival Gooch Close, Doddington gang and Longsight Crew.
Manchester Crown Court heard Zollner had become addicted to nitrous oxide and owed £2,000 to her mother Sophia.
She eventually fell under the spell of a drug trafficker who promised her £16,000 if she embarked on the 4,000-mile journey from Toronto to Manchester via Frankfurt bringing the haul of cannabis with her.
Her brother’s killers have never been caught and a £50,000 reward has been offered for information leading to the convictions. The teenager was not a member of a gang but was friendly with another youngster who was the intended target in the shooting on January 24 2008.
Lucy Adcock
Adcock was jailed in July for her ‘pivotal role’ in a gang that dropped more than £1m of drugs and contraband into UK prisons via drone. The 47-year-old, from Ruislip, Greater London, was caught with a drone in the boot of her car at a hotel near Bridgend’s HMP Parc, south Wales.
Using software, South Wales Police were able to view its previous flights – 22 missions to drop drugs and mobile phones worth a potential £1,420,000 into British prisons.
Merthyr Tydfil Crown Court heard HMP Parc staff found a package of cocaine, spice, cannabis, mobile phones and chargers in the exercise yard.
Adcock admitted attempting to conspiracy to convey both List A articles – such as drugs – and List B articles – such as mobile phones – into prisons between 12 April and 13 May last year.
The mother-of-five wiped away tears as she was jailed for six years.
Megan Woodham
The 30-year-old prison healthcare assistant is now behind bars herself after being caught smuggling drugs into the jail she worked at.
Woodham, 30, from Wigan was jailed for six years in 2023 after being found guilty of conspiracy to supply class A drug cocaine, as well as conspiracy to supply class B drug ketamine by smuggling it into HMP Risley, where she worked.
The court heard she used her job to conceal the shipments of drugs which she handed over to inmate Daniel Doran, who was serving time at HMP Risley between December 2021 and February 2022.
Doran had access to a mobile phone while behind bars and “organised the moving of cocaine from location to location” from his cell “under the noses of authorities”.
Woodham was said to have “formed some sort of relationship” with Doran, and would “willingly assist him by allowing her home address to be used for the storage of parcels” of drugs.
She was one of three people jailed for a total of 34 years on the same day at Liverpool Crown Court after an investigation into drug dealing. Daniel Doran, 32, of Hall Lane, Tower Hill in Kirkby, was jailed for 15 years and Kelsey Higgins, 26, of Ridgewood Way, Bootle, was sentenced to 13-and-a-half years imprisonment after also being found guilty of conspiracy to supply class A drugs.