Pauline Dakin was always aware her childhood was a long way from ordinary. Her parents, Warren and Ruth, separated when she was five – she knew her father had a drink problem and could be violent. Pauline, her mother and her little brother Ted moved around a lot. When Pauline was nine, her mother packed up a Volkswagen camper van in Vancouver for a holiday in Winnipeg, more than 1,000 miles away. When they got there, over a mug of cocoa, the children learned they were never going home.

“That summer of 1974 was the last time I thought of my family as having any relation to normal,” writes Pauline in her memoir, Run Hide Repeat. “The events that followed made Ted and I know we were different, somehow apart. Ted would sometimes, in the years that followed, refer to ‘normal families’. Not in a critical way, but in a straightforward acknowledgment that we were not one.”

Over seven years, Pauline attended six different schools. The next major relocation came when she was 13, when she was finally settled in a school she liked, had close friends and was starting to be interested in boys. This time, Ruth actually told them where they were going: all the way to New Brunswick, in the far east of Canada. Pauline and Ted were sworn to secrecy, but she broke ranks and told her best friend Wendy. When Ruth picked her up from Wendy’s house, the girls had to affect “breezy see-you-laters” so Pauline’s mother wouldn’t suspect.

Ruth promised her children that one day everything would be made clear. Why they couldn’t tell anyone where they were going on holiday. Why they couldn’t even say if they were going out for dinner. Pauline heard the brush-off, “I’ll explain when you’re older,” again and again. Then, when she was 23, her mother invited her to meet her at a motel – she was ready to talk. But the explanation would be far more complicated, and more terrifying, than she could ever have dreamed.

It was late February 1988, and when Pauline walked into the motel room with her mother, a man was waiting. Pauline knew him well: it was the Reverend Stan Sears, a minister with the United Church who had been part of their lives since her parents separated. Even when they moved, Sears was never far behind. So it was a surprise, but not a total shock, when they told her that they were in love. For many years, they hadn’t acted on their attraction – Sears was married, for one thing – but now they agreed they wanted to live together.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest ‘The thing I’ve realised is that having a secret isolates you from everybody’: Pauline Dakin today. Photograph: Riley Smith

A far more profound revelation was to come, however. Her mother and Sears explained that the reason the family had moved so often, so haphazardly, was that Warren, Pauline’s father, was a mobster, a key member of an organised crime syndicate in Vancouver. When they separated, Ruth had a contract put on her. Sears, meanwhile, had become implicated when he’d acted as a counsellor first to another repentant mobster, who he said had quickly been assassinated, and then to Ruth. He also had a contract put on his life.

Over the weekend, Ruth and Sears filled out the details. When, out of nowhere, Pauline and Ted had been pulled from school and gone bowling, or when Ruth had emptied the entire contents of their fridge into the bin, that was because Sears had received intel that the Mafia was planning an attempt on their lives. On another occasion, the family had to scrub their feet in the bath and put plastic bags over their socks. That was, she now learned, because their carpets had been sprinkled with poison.

An awful scenario

Where did his information come from? Sears explained he had a direct connection (by a beeper he kept in his back pocket) to a shadowy government agency, who had undercover officers who collected intelligence and offered protection for people under threat from organised crime. It was a lot for Pauline to take in. A young journalist, she was working for a local newspaper and had been trained to question everything. But Sears offered intricate, compelling detail. A whole new language. The organised crime soldiers were, in his terminology, “the O” . The “Weird World” was a sort of witness-protection village, where people were secreted for their safety. Sears had moved into one, deep in the wilderness in British Columbia, and Ruth would join him. The community named it “Place of Hope” or “PH”.

As much as Pauline was sceptical, these brain-scrambling stories had a twisted logic, particularly in the context of her life to that point. “As awful as the scenario might be, this explanation could mean that at least my family wasn’t just odd or crazy,” she writes. After the weekend in the motel, Pauline left with a transmitter in her car and a small transistor radio, rigged so she could call for help.

This was how life went on for five years. Pauline spent a lot of time looking over her shoulder, and Sears appeared sporadically with updates. She broke up with one serious boyfriend because she didn’t dare tell him about the Weird World. When Ted got married in 1990, Sears revealed that some of the guests were actually doubles. These doppelgängers included Pauline’s aunt Penny and even her father, who she had only seen once in the previous decade. Both sides – “the good guys” and the Mafia – used doubles, Sears told her, and plastic surgery and prosthetics ensured the disguises were perfect.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Fugitive family: Ted, Ruth and Pauline in 1969.

Doubles had a certain amount of political currency: Stalin and Hitler were famously alleged to have used decoys; then there were claims in the 1990s that Manuel Noriega and Fidel Castro, the leaders of Panama and Cuba respectively, employed them. But Pauline was deeply conflicted. She stared at a small yellow naevus that her impostor father had in the cornea of his right eye and wondered how it could be replicated. Still, when Warren asked her to come to his hotel room she wriggled out of it. She believed she would be hurt or kidnapped. And her mother seemed flustered, too, becoming fixated on the toes of her sister Penny’s double. “Even if she had plastic surgery, how could they copy her bone structure?” she fretted.

But despite these doubts, Pauline went deeper and deeper. She had met and married Kevin – neither her father nor his double attended the ceremony, and Sears gave her away – and told Kevin all about the Weird World. Eventually, the couple decided that they would join Ruth and Sears in Place of Hope. Preparations were so advanced that Pauline looked at a carpet sample for the cabin where they would live.

Then, in 1993, aged 28, her world came crashing down for a second time. Exhausted by the ever-present fear and suspicion, and sensing that Sears’s stories weren’t quite stacking up, Pauline set up a sting. She told her mother that her house had been broken into. Ruth in turn informed Sears, and Sears came back with an involved story of how two people from the O had forced entry into her house, looking for a present from her father. Of course, the burglary never happened. In the moment after this revelation, Pauline was furious, but also bereft.

“All the moves and disappearances; all the running; all the sick, terrifying stories; all the upheaval; all the isolation,” she recalls in Run Hide Repeat. “It was all because of a lie. A fucking lie. All made up. All the layered creation of the brilliant, twisted imagination of this man whom I’d chosen to love and trust as a father. I was shattered.”

Delusional beliefs

It’s an unseasonably sunny April morning when I catch up with Pauline on Skype. She is 53 now and has long, silvery-blonde hair and intense blue eyes; Ashley Jensen’s agent should keep an eye open for the inevitable film adaptation. She sits in her light-filled kitchen in Halifax, Nova Scotia, and her dog noisily eats breakfast in the background. Much has happened in the 25 years since she began to have doubts about the Weird World. She’s had two daughters, now 21 and 19. The Reverend Stan Sears died in 2005, her mother followed in 2010.

Pauline’s manner is brisk, no nonsense. When she wrote Run Hide Repeat, she feared readers would think that she and her family were fools: “I was sure people would say, ‘God, you were so naive. How could you be so gullible?’” she says. Instead, she comes across as very level-headed and sensible. For most of her professional life, she has worked as a reporter, mainly on radio and TV for the national broadcaster CBC. In later years, she has chosen to specialise in health and medical stories – facts and evidence are important to her.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest ‘He was a very compelling guy’: Pauline on her wedding day with the Reverend Stan Sears.

Since she exposed Sears’s extraordinary fraud, Pauline has had therapy, but she believes the greatest impact on her recovery has been working on her book. “Really, it’s the best thing I ever did for myself, to say: ‘Let’s go back and look at this.’”

For a long time, Pauline blamed her mother: for so faithfully believing Sears; for failing in her parental responsibility to protect her and Ted. Ruth could never let go of the alternative world that he created. She and Pauline eventually settled on an unspoken pact not to discuss what had happened. This held until shortly before Ruth died from ovarian cancer. Then she said: “Oh, Pauline, if you think I’m crazy for believing, how you must have hated me.”

Considerable solace came when Pauline was able to put a name to what Sears was suffering from. At different points, she had considered and rejected psychosis, schizophrenia, paranoia and folie à deux, where delusional beliefs are passed from one dominating person to another more submissive one. Then, one day about four years ago, she read about a rare condition called delusional disorder. This typically comes on later in life and – unlike many other psychiatric conditions – the sufferer experiences delusions, but in many other ways behaves entirely normally. This, Pauline believes, perfectly sums up Sears, who was a well-respected, pillar- of-the-community type.

“He was a very compelling guy,” she says. “He was just so intelligent, but also funny and he really connected with people. When he talked to you he really listened. You felt very heard.

“In many ways, Stan was quite brilliant,” Pauline goes on. “He had an amazing mind and that allowed his delusion to become that much more complex. There was an entire cast of characters. It was like a Rolodex and he always knew who they were and the stories that were related to them. It was quite remarkable – I could not do that.”

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Before the flight began: Pauline, Ted and Ruth on Vancouver Island in 1968.

Can she forgive Sears? Pauline goes silent for a few seconds before answering. “The discovery of delusional disorder just unlocked everything for me, and allowed me some understanding of why all this crazy stuff had happened,” she says. “But also it let me realise that Stan was not malevolent, he wasn’t trying to hurt us. We just got caught up in his illness. I didn’t have to be so angry and bitter. I could move on with my life.”

There has, though, clearly been considerable collateral damage from Sears’s fantastical inventions. Pauline and Kevin have divorced, and she accepts that their experiences with the Weird World made their life together very difficult.

“The thing I’ve realised is that having a secret isolates you from everybody,” she says. “It means you can never truly be known by somebody and there is always this barrier between you. You feel as if you are fooling people – and that doesn’t feel good.”

Pauline did eventually re-establish a relationship with Warren, her father, but she never told him about the hoax that he had unwittingly been caught up in before he died. “I was afraid to tell him for his own health. And I just couldn’t see what was to be gained.”

‘My mother believed she was protecting us’

Run Hide Repeat has been a hit, especially in Canada, and Pauline insists that life is good now. There are early-stage discussions about adapting her memoir for the screen but Pauline fears her story might be turned into a schlocky soap opera.

“I feel as though somebody would look at Stan and say he’s the evil bad guy without acknowledging that in many ways he played a really supportive role in my family’s life,” she says, and then pauses. “I understand the irony of that statement. And my mother was a complex and really smart person, too. I don’t want to ever see her portrayed as some wacky woman that fell for a guy.”

Now, Pauline says there’s nothing she would change about her childhood. “I have a great appreciation for my mom. She caused a lot of chaos, but she really did believe she was protecting us. She was gullible to this situation but in many ways she was very wise. Right now, I’m very happy and I have these two great kids, so I can’t imagine wanting to change.” Then, a very rueful smile. “But it’s taken some work to get that point.”