@Garman
Watching it now, this is just insane. Why did they believe any of this crap, and just hit the road zig zagging away from the IRA? 😂 I mean really, you'd have to be a special kind of stupid to fall for any of this.
I did think it was ridiculous at first, but have been thinking about it a fair bit and trying to put myself in their shoes, without the benefit of a modern-day viewpoint and the full story.
Sarah explains that Rob knew things about her he shouldn't have - how much money she had in the bank, where her family owned pockets of land etc which helped convince her. Add that to the arrested gunrunner from their college and the death of their friend which would have been unnerving, insistence/vouching for the story by John who was already in too deep (the show left out a lot of other things Freegard did pre 'road trip' like the escalating series of tests John was put through, which you can find in the old news articles when he was convicted), Maria was in a relationship with Freegard so more likely to trust him, the IRA bombings seemed to follow them, and the fact that Freegard is a master manipulator and abuser so presumably a convincing actor...it's a lot to hit anyone all in one go.
Like so many abusers, his whole MO seemed to be normalising dependence on him, stripping away confidence and planting self-doubt, gaslighting etc. He kept them exhausted (constantly on the road being hyper alert for IRA tails, or working/standing around waiting to be collected/'surveillance' drives before bed after a shift), off balance (isn't repeating the same song over and over a Guantanamo torture tactic?), and like with so many things, once you're on a path it's harder to get off it and question it. I imagine especially so if the person you're with is wedded to the con enough to be on the road with you for months, making you take car number plates down, seeming like he knows what he's talking about in terms of staying off grid.
His behaviour slowly escalated and became normalised, allowing him to increase the severity. He tested them to see how far they'd go, and every time they complied, it was harder to escape.
This was all before the age of internet and mobiles and online catfishing - it wouldn't really surprise me if the idea that someone in his early twenties they came across in a pub could have had the skill and the desire to do something so utterly depraved and complex like this, would have been more fantastical and unbelievable to a group of naive students than the idea that their roommate was a member of the IRA in the same cell as a recently arrested gunrunner from their college, their friend had been killed by the same cell, and they now needed to flee because John had been feeding the authorities information (which he thought he had).
Once they were running, he had them.