Cruel mother and 'Britain's sickest child'

Cruel mother and 'Britain's sickest child'
Saturday, October 24, 2009, 10:00
A CRUEL mother made her healthy son appear so ill that he won a courageous children award and she was able to lead a celebrity life.
Lisa Hayden-Johnson forced the boy to undergo surgery, use a wheelchair and breathe from an oxygen cylinder as part of her evil ruse. She also claimed more than £130,000 of benefits.
Doctors, celebrities and charity fundraisers were taken in by the 35-year-old mother-of-two's lies for six years. The mother and son met Tony Blair in Downing Street and Camilla, the Duchess of Cornwall, in a ceremony at Westminster Abbey.
The boy won an award for courageous children at a ceremony in London and later, Hayden-Johnson made money giving numerous TV and magazine interviews with her son. She even obtained free tickets to ITV's X Factor show after writing to Simon Cowell about their plight.
The Western Morning News can today finally reveal the identity of the woman behind one of the most shocking tales of deranged motherhood, after successfully overturning a court order banning her from being named.

We have also learned that Hayden-Johnson abused the boy's sister – her daughter – exaggerating a real medical condition so that she received more treatment than was actually required. It is also understood that she took both children on a cruise holiday paid for by a charity after she convinced staff that the two children were sick and would benefit from the trip.
She is currently on bail awaiting the results of psychiatric tests before she is sentenced. She appeared at Exeter Crown Court last Friday.
Detective Constable Mark Uren, who helped investigate the case, described Hayden-Johnson as a "cruel, manipulative mother".
He added: "She has continually lied to medical experts and people of high importance that her son is the most unwell child in Britain."
The boy, who cannot be named for legal reasons, repeatedly attended Torbay Hospital, Bristol Children's Hospital and Great Ormond Street Hospital in London for treatment, despite being healthy.
But Hayden-Johnson claimed he had cerebral palsy, cystic fibrosis, the throat disorder dysphagia, and was allergic to wheat and gluten-based foods.
She even faked blood samples to convince medics her son was diabetic. Such was the power of her lies that the boy's sibling believed he was not going to live.
Hayden-Johnson pleaded guilty at Exeter Crown Court last week to child cruelty and perverting the course of justice by claiming she had been sexually assaulted in a bid to throw increasingly suspicious police officers off the trail of her deceptions. Charges of benefit fraud will stay on file.
Police say Hayden-Johnson lied to medical experts for six-and-a-half years about her son's fictitious illness.
Doctors were never able to make a diagnosis, but the boy needed a gastroscopy tube inserted into his stomach under general anaesthetic.
The boy had to take a trolley or portable rucksack around with him to pump-feed him, had oxygen regularly administered and was made to use a wheelchair when he was at school.
Detectives say his bedroom looked like a "TV medical drama", with medical equipment, including a tube, attached to his body at night.
His mother exaggerated her own training as a nurse, to impress medics, and complained her son was not receiving good enough care.
She also claimed around £20,000 a year in disability living allowance and a specially adapted car. There were also suspicions that she had faked urine tests to pretend he had diabetes and she tried to claim that he had cerebral palsy and cystic fibrosis.
An investigation was first launched in 2007 after Dr John Broomhall, a consultant paediatrician at Torbay Hospital, raised concerns with colleagues that the boy was receiving too much treatment.
Only weeks before, Hayden-Johnson feared she was about to be discovered and lied to police she had been pinned to the ground and sexually assaulted by a motorcyclist.
She even successfully asked that her specially adapted car was replaced with a new one, because she said the sex offender would recognise her old one and stalk her.
A time-consuming police investigation was launched and police were looking at potential suspects when she admitted her lies.
The defendant, wearing a silver crucifix necklace, black dress and jacket, wrung her hands and dabbed her eyes with a tissue, during the court hearing.
She was released on conditional bail to live at her Torquay address until she is sentenced on a date to be set next year.