The Psychopath: A True Story(10)
She never got an answer and at the time didn’t even notice.
The extremely well-designed and stable high chair that Eilidh was sitting in fell over backwards! With my baby’s terrified screams the conversation was immediately forgotten in favour of frantically rushing around to pick her up and check she was all right. The aftermath of checking her head for bumps and calming down a screaming baby went on for some time and unsurprisingly Will Jordan was called away to work shortly after.
At the time I thought that Eilidh must have managed to push herself away from the dining table. It didn’t occur to any of us in the slightest that Will Jordan had kicked over his own baby’s high chair simply to avoid answering a question and admitting he couldn’t say more than a phrase or two in Japanese.
Score: 2
Irresponsibility
Will Jordan had no sense of duty or loyalty to family or friends and engaged in behaviour that put others at risk. He made no attempt to manage his finances and his work was either non-existent, careless or sloppy. Irresponsibility is defined as a repeated failure to fulfil or honour obligations and commitments such as not paying bills, defaulting on loans, performing slapdash work, being absent or late for jobs, or failing to honour contractual agreements. There are so many incidences of Will Jordan being irresponsible that it is hard to pin down any one example. He was always late for work, he never paid bills, his work for a large software company and a cinema complex was slipshod at best (if undertaken at all). He failed to honour contractual agreements of any type – including a marriage contract.
As for loans, he had borrowed money from almost all of his victims right back to Devi and never paid any of it back. It’s actually very hard to think of any area where he wasn’t irresponsible!
Score: 2
Failure to accept responsibility for own actions
Will Jordan always finds excuses for his behaviour – including making up missions, disasters, deaths and illnesses to explain his actions.
One example springs immediately to mind. The man I spoke to called Malcolm was paying Will Jordan to code his websites and got frustrated with the work not being done. Will Jordan gave Malcolm excuse after excuse as to why the work wasn’t finished all the while invoicing him for more and more work. When the excuses started to run thin Will Jordan admitted to Malcolm that his wife had cancer and was not handling the condition very well. She had had a nervous breakdown and ‘lost her mind’, as he put it. As such, it was making his life very difficult, taking up his time and attention but that he was trying his best to balance that and his work. Malcolm was touched at his dedication to his wife and finally understood the reason for all the delays. Will Jordan said that she needed an operation in London but that he didn’t have the money to stay there; Malcolm lent him the funds to rent an apartment for a week in Knightsbridge. Much to Malcolm’s horror, the bill came in for the rent and Will Jordan had used it for two weeks (to have Devi and the then sixteen-year-old George come over to London for a visit from the USA). Malcolm tried everything to get the work out of Will Jordan, even tracking him down to his home in Lancashire and waiting in a hotel for Jordan to arrive and hand over the work already ‘done’. Although Will Jordan promised hour by hour that he was coming, he was on his way, he had just caught the train, he was getting a taxi, he never turned up. Instead his wife arrived at Malcolm’s hotel room at 7 a.m. the next morning, demanding to talk to Malcolm and saying that she knew he was Will Jordan’s MI6 handler. Mrs Jordan was frantic and disorientated. Malcolm believed that she was very confused and felt sorry for her, especially as he thought she was dying of cancer. It made Malcolm more sympathetic to Will Jordan as he could see he had a lot on his plate with a sick and deranged wife.
Malcolm reassured Mrs Jordan that he was not who she thought he was, and she left, only to return ten minutes later and demand that he come outside with her. He walked around the parking lot with her as she stated that she knew he was Will Jordan’s MI6 handler and that his real name was ‘Michael’. She demanded that he talk to her about what was going on. Malcolm again just tried to stay calm and treat her with kid gloves. Finally she left.
Will Jordan didn’t reply to any more of Malcolm’s messages and never showed up. Malcolm went away the next day, empty-handed, but with a deeper sympathy for everything Will Jordan was going through. All the time this was going on, Will Jordan was with me on honeymoon at Shieldhill Castle.
Score: 2
Many short-term marital relationships
This was a ‘doh’ moment. Will Jordan is a bigamist and I had already discovered at least one other marriage: to Alexis when he was twenty-three years old. He had at least two wives in 2005, as well as having been engaged to three other women at the same time. At this point, the PCL-R seemed like a personality profile specifically designed to describe Will Jordan himself.
Score: 2
Juvenile delinquency
Devi told me many stories about Will Jordan’s past. Having been his first girlfriend she knew about his misbehaviour as a child, including sexual assault, cheque fraud and going on the run to Canada by the age of eighteen. Juvenile delinquency is defined as behavioural problems between the ages of thirteen and eighteen years old that are mostly crimes or clearly involve aspects of antagonism, exploitation, aggression, manipulation or a callous, ruthless tough-mindedness.
Devi told me how she had allowed Will Jordan to use her bank card to take out $20 to $30 for food, but instead he had posted a deposit envelope stating a credit of $200 and immediately taken that out in cash on her card, putting her account into overdraft. He had flouted his parents’ rules and regulations by hiding Devi in their basement when she was kicked out of her family home and taken her on the run to Canada when he was released from prison for cheque fraud. Devi never found out what he was actually on the run from but told me that once in Canada Will Jordan had immediately started to con people. She also told me that he had been jailed for impersonating a police officer as well as for carrying throwing stars (a particularly aggressive weapon). Devi discovered she was pregnant and went home to New Jersey, where she didn’t see Will Jordan for another five years. All of this happened before 1983, when Will Jordan turned eighteen years old.