Bigamist who married six men exposed after pretending to be a doctor

After marrying a string of men and claiming to be a doctor, a British woman has been exposed as a convicted bigamist. According to a number of men, she has left a trail of emotional and financial chaos and lies in her wake.

Alisa Knight, 43, has been a bride six times with different men; and used more than 20 aliases and two dates of birth. Knight has falsely claimed to be a GP, critical care doctor and a senior nurse.

Knight, who used to be called Lisa Everard and then living in Chepstow, was convicted of bigamy in 2016 after her first husband saw pictures of her wedding to another man on Facebook. Since then she has gone on to marry a further series of men, although none of the other marriages were at the same time.

Read more: Face of vile Yorkshire man who unleashed hell on woman

Additionally, she claimed to have switched off the life support machine of her eldest daughter when she was five, despite the fact the teenager is alive and well. Knight was born Lisa Jane Davies in South Wales in 1981 and after leaving school, she worked as a care assistant, fast food server and office worker.

After being exposed for and convicted of bigamy in south Wales, she moved to northern Ireland where the mother of five has been working in admin and secretarial roles in hospitals, GP surgeries and medical centres in Belfast, Co Antrim and Co Down, on short term contracts through a number of employment agencies based in Belfast, reports Belfast Live.

Yet this isn't what she's been telling the men she married. Four years ago she stated on a marriage certificate that she was ‘senior kennel assistant’ and just last July she claimed on another wedding certificate that she was a ‘General Practitioner’ - a GP - when she married Peter Knight from Greyabbey, Co Down.

The General Medical Council has confirmed she is not and has never been a doctor or licenced medic, and her claims are now under scrutiny by the the Police Service of Northern Ireland and Police Scotland.

Alisa’s sixth ‘husband’, bus driver Peter Knight, 63, has reported her to the PSNI, Police Scotland, Northern Ireland’s Health Trust and the HSCNI. They met in September 2022 and married in July 2023.

Peter said: “Alisa came across me on a dating website and I was flattered. I was a bus driver about to retire, she was 20 years younger than me and a senior doctor working in critical care at the Ulster Hospital. I thought she was incredible.

“She told me she was a doctor from the first time we spoke. She was confident and kind at first. Around the time she moved into my house, my health started to deteriorate and she reassured me repeatedly.

“She advised me what to say to my own GP, what tests to ask for and she looked after my medication, dosing them into a plastic container for me to take every morning. Before we met I would have walked between 10 and 20 miles a day with my dog Wolfie. But my health deteriorated so badly that I could barely walk up the stairs. So I was glad of her help and support and I trusted she knew what she was doing.”

But Peter did not know that he was dating a convicted bigamist and fantasist who has no qualifications in medicine or nursing.

He said: “We met in September 2022. Alisa proposed to me on February 14, 2023 and we got married in Gretna Green on July 5, that year. I thought she was very brave after she told me about the death of her daughter 13 years ago following a head-on collision with a lorry when the little girl was just five years old.

“Having lost my own son, I was devastated for her. She said she turned off her daughter’s life support machine after six weeks. I wanted to support her and was glad when she got busy arranging our wedding, all the paperwork, all the bills and the wedding outfits.

“I thought I was in heaven - until the morning of the wedding when I got a text message from a stranger that made my blood run cold.”

The texts, which Peter received while eating breakfast before his wedding ceremony in Gretna Green, told him Alisa was a convicted bigamist, her claims to be a doctor were fake and her daughter was alive and well.

The information came from relatives of a man who believed he had also married her until he found out they had only been through a commitment ceremony and not a formal wedding. We are calling him Simon to protect his identity. His loved ones had unravelled the fantasist four months earlier after trawling her social media posts and photos.

Peter said: “I felt sick, I was upset. I thought someone was playing a really nasty game but didn’t know who or why. I wanted to protect Alisa. I can admit now I was worried but I said nothing to her.”

Hours later Peter and Alisa were married. On her wedding certificate she stated she was a GP, that her mother was dead and that she was single. None of these statements are true.

Peter said: “She spent a lot of time away from home claiming she was working nights as a doctor in critical care at the Ulster Hospital, Dundonald. One night I was suffering terrible chest pains and thought I was dying.

“Stupidly I decided to drive to hospital because I thought an ambulance would take too long to reach me. I got to the Ulster Hospital and went in and asked for my wife, Dr Alisa Knight. They checked their staff details and no Dr Knight was listed. I asked them to check the nurses register in case there’d been a mistake. I was desperate for her to help me.

“But there was no Alisa Knight listed as a nurse either. I messaged her, sent her photos of where I was and begged her to come to help me.

“She responded later and said: ‘I was in ICU. If you needed urgent care you should have gone to A&E. I’ve told you I can’t treat my family."

“She also presented me with a four page document of my blood results that she got when she accessed the NHS ’ Orion system, printed them without my permission or any authorised access.”

Alisa first came to the attention of the public when she was convicted of bigamy on November 25, 2016 at Cardiff Crown Court, South Wales.

Then known as Lisa Everard, having married in Gretna Green, and already divorced once and in a legal marriage with two small children, she entered into a bigamist marriage on July 6, 2016 with Mike Hughes, an unwitting lorry driver.

He said: “We met online and she told me she was a senior charge nurse. I didn't know anything about nursing and had no reason to doubt her. She dressed every morning in green medical scrubs and wore a red metal badge that said ‘Nurse In Charge’. She claimed she worked at St Cadoc’s secure mental institution outside Newport, Gwent.

“She proposed and arranged everything from wedding rings to paperwork and the venue, and when we got married I’d no idea she was already married.

“But she was reported by her lawful husband after she put photos on Facebook and we had to come back home from holiday a day early to attend court.

“She convinced me it was just a paperwork error at the registry office. I was questioned by the judge and allowed to go. Lisa was taken into court and came out later and said very little about it, just that it was sorted out. She brushed off any questions I had. I had no idea she’d been convicted. We even went on honeymoon afterwards.

“She almost ruined my life, my health deteriorated while we were together, I was left £15,000 in debt after I was persuaded to take out bank and car loans which she said we’d pay off together. I’m still paying them off and she never put a penny towards them.”

Judge Philip Harris-Jenkins said at the time: "This was not an act of naivety. This was a deception."

While still married to Mike, Alisa invited her soon-to-be fourth husband, Neil Annis, 53, a senior nursing assistant from Worcestershire, to stay in Mike’s house.

In July 2019, she married Neil in Gretna Green, and she stated her profession on her marriage certificate as a senior kennel assistant but again, she claimed to have a nursing background.

Neil said: “She was called Lisa when I met her and she approached me on an online dating site and I suppose I was flattered. She told me she’d been a nurse and I initially believed her but something made me check her out and she was not listed anywhere as a qualified nurse.

“She worked in Subway and later got an admin job at BPAS, the The British Pregnancy Advisory Service which provides abortions, when she was married to me.

“I stayed with her one weekend at what she said was her house. It turns out it was Mike Hughes’ house and he warned me she was a bigamist. I thought he was talking nonsense. But I later found out it was true after a DBS certificate (Disclosure and Barring Service) listed her conviction for bigamy and her previous names.

“She’d told me she was attending a conference for the abortion service but I found out recently she was in fact in Ireland on a second week-long date with a man called Justin Pearson who she'd met online. She came into our marriage with £40,000 of debt and wanted me to buy her a car. I'm thankful I never did.”

After lockdown Alisa left another man she moved in with in Co Antrim and moved to Bangor, Co Down where she set up home with a man we're calling Simon to protect his identity. She claimed to be an intensive care senior nurse working in the intensive care paediatric unit at the Royal Victoria Hospital, Belfast.

Simon’s sister said: “We’re a tight knit family and got to meet Alisa shortly after she met my brother. She immediately told me and my brother and many members of our family face-to-face that she was a Band 8C nurse working at the Royal Victoria Hospital in the Paediatric ICU department. We were all impressed and convinced. My brother told me she injected him with what she said was a flu jab and she also took bloods from him at his home.

“He told me they delivered the bloods to his GP surgery in Co Down. A short time later he received a phone call claiming to be from the surgery, telling him he had severe liver disease and he must stop taking alcohol. He was devastated and worried, as we all were and he stopped drinking alcohol there and then. We believed her because we believed she was a nurse. But he doesn't have liver disease and he never had a follow-up call about treatment for the disease he was told he had.”

Messages from Alisa’s number to Simon's daughter who was looking for medical help while suffering severe bleeding, prompted a response from Alisa saying, ‘Crack on, you’re talking to the woman who has seen decapitations and then gone on lunch.’

Simon’s daughter said: “She told us she had several serious and life threatening illnesses herself and that her eldest daughter had died in a collision between a car and a lorry, and that she had turned off her life support machine after six weeks.

“We felt awful for her. I bought her a bracelet with her daughter's name on it to wear on her wedding day to my dad. But after a while as a family we started to feel that something wasn’t adding up. She met my dad online on April 6, 2021, proposed to him in Venice in April 2022 and arranged a beach wedding ceremony in Bali on October 11, 2022, then changed her name by deed poll to Hennessey.

“We later found out that the ‘marriage certificate’ was just a certificate of commitment. My dad thought he was married."

Simon's daughter explained: “We were so worried about all the stories she was telling that we trawled her social media and discovered her daughter was alive and well and in her late teens.

“We found out her mum was alive too, even though she said she was dead. Then we discovered the newspaper reports of her being convicted of bigamy. My dad changed the locks on March 23, 2023 and we were relieved to see the back of her. We discovered she had already been dating Peter Knight, and we warned him on what turned out to be his wedding day.”

Three weeks before the ceremony with Simon in Bali, Alisa had met Co Down bus driver, Peter Knight.

Peter says she told him from the outset that she was a doctor and explained her absence for two weeks from Northern Ireland in October 2022 by claiming she would be in Birmingham attending an international medical conference.

Peter, 63, said: “Looking back I feel like an absolute fool. I felt so happy to have her attention, to have someone to share my life, that I accepted everything she said. I believed wholeheartedly that she was a doctor. She had all the gear, the surgical scrubs, the language and she talked a lot about her work. But I know now it was made up.

“I believed that she was in demand and was required to attend a top medical conference in England with hundreds of other doctors. Alisa told me it was so important and she really needed to concentrate on the lectures that she wouldn’t be able to contact me for two weeks and I wasn’t to contact her.

“Looking back I don’t know how the alarm bells weren’t ringing. I was impressed by her when in reality I was being groomed by her. I found out in March 2024 that she’d been nowhere near a medical conference. She had been getting married on a beach in Bali. That explained her tan.

“Alisa presented herself to me as a doctor, she presented herself as a senior, experienced and qualified doctor who was busy saving people’s lives. She had letters and parcels sent to my house addressed to Dr Alisa Knight and under another surname of her fifth husband.

“On our wedding certificate she states she’s a General Practitioner. She told me about her patients, she told me about lives she’d saved. I trusted her, I wanted to trust her, I believed in her even when I was warned she was fooling me, and then I found out she was a fraud and a fake.”

Alisa’s first husband told the Mirror: “She was a care assistant when we were married and told me she started a course in phlebotomy, taking people’s blood. She had no nursing qualifications.

“My daughter is alive and well, and thankfully she was never involved in a head-on crash. Sadly she knows from various sources that her mother tells people she switched off her life support machine when she was five. My daughter is a beautiful, happy, balanced young woman now and I’m very proud of how she has managed all of this. We don’t discuss Lisa any more.”

Alisa Knight was approached by the Mirror and had claims and questions put to her. She responded: “These accusations are untrue.”

In a statement the GMC said: “To confirm, we cannot locate a doctor by the name of Alisa Knight or Alisa Hennessey on the medical register.

It is important to note the GMC’s regulatory powers, as set out in the Medical Act, only extend to individual doctors who are on the UK medical register.

“The title Doctor on its own is not a protected title as it can be an academic qualification, not always linked to the practice of medicine. Therefore a person can legitimately use the title without needing registration with us, as long as they are not undertaking the duties of a licensed medical practitioner.

“However, it is illegal to falsely use protected titles such as doctor of medicine, general practitioner, and physician. If an individual is giving the impression they hold registration or a licence with us, when they don’t, or there is evidence they are carrying out a privileged activity while unlicensed, then this is a criminal offence in the UK and should be reported to the police.”

A spokesperson for the PSNI said: “On 21st March 2024, police received a report that a woman had entered incorrect information on a marriage certificate.

“To date, the Police Service of Northern Ireland has not received a report from the South Eastern Trust in respect of any possible further offences.”

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