The Psychopath: A True Story(19)
I remembered that whilst on honeymoon, Will Jordan had spent some time listening to music whilst I read a book, but now I realised that he had not been listening to music at all; he had been listening in to his wife and his client meeting at the hotel, allowing him to continue manipulating them both in his own twisted game.
The other wife told me many other stories about what he had done to her throughout their marriage which I will not relate here because she does not want her story to be made public. I suspect she still feels embarrassed and ashamed about things he manipulated her into doing. And it makes my story seem like a fairy tale. However, that is not my story to tell.
It seemed like she so desperately wanted to believe that he loved her. She wanted her children to have been loved by him and for her family to have been special to him in some way, which I suppose they were because she had not kicked him out and had given him somewhere to come back to between games. They were his base camp. Her desperation to be special to him was dangerous though, and I felt it kept her vulnerable to him. She always seemed to be in danger of being dragged back to him and I was worried what might happen to her and their children when he was free again.
I tried to keep her grounded and out of his clutches but to accept that he was truly a psychopath meant that sixteen years of her life was a lie. That is not an easy thing to do.
So day by day, and week by week, the phone calls from her came.
I was still in touch with the other victims as well and we talked regularly, sharing stories and experiences. New victims also came forwards. One woman had seen the Jeremy Kyle show and allowed me to share her story in the updated version of my book that came out in 2008.
We were all wounded but together we started to heal. Knowing there were other women out there that knew and understood what we had been through was incredibly helpful. As a group we compared dates and got a fairly good idea of where he had been and when. There were definite gaps though and it was clear there had been additional victims who had never come forward. Families, children, businesses and women whom he had violated but who either didn’t know the truth or didn’t want to be in contact with the rest of us. Through our collective knowledge, we plotted an average of three to five women that Will Jordan had been involved with at any one time but knew there were probably many, many more.
We became a source of comfort to each other as gradually our conversations moved from talking about him to just talking about life in general – how our kids were, what we were working on, normal stuff. It was a fledgling community of support and understanding, helping us all to heal.
WET CEMENT
The public response to the book was very different to the victim-shaming reaction to the newspaper articles. People started to leave reviews online saying the book had really opened their eyes to how easily a psychopath can manipulate someone. I started to get letters through my publisher and online from people thanking me for writing it. I started a Facebook page and people started to comment on that too. More and more people said something similar had happened to them and they had not felt they could speak out about it until they had read my book, thanking me for coming forward. It was extraordinarily validating.
However, not everyone was positive. One friend whom I had known for many years and helped through her own traumas had been a great support to me at one of my lowest points. She had come round for coffee one day in April 2006, just a few days after I’d found out the truth, and found me in an old and very baggy T-shirt which was slightly torn. She berated me, telling me to look after myself no matter what was happening and not to let myself go. It gave me a little emotional slap and I duly took a little more care after that to ensure that I wasn’t slipping too far into depression. However, when she found out that I was talking to the children about what was happening she was totally incensed that I had even chosen to tell them the truth at all. She felt that I should have lied to them and let them grow up idolising a dead or absent father, or just tell them nothing at all. She actually said to me that telling the children the truth was ‘tantamount to child abuse’, and then she refused to speak to me again.
I knew that she was wrong. Being open and talking about things with my children was the right thing to do. I was giving them the language and tools to express how they felt and not bottle things up. I wanted to give them the chance to understand what they were feeling and explore what that meant.
By 2007 my eldest daughter, Robyn, was already showing signs of ‘separation anxiety’, unsurprisingly. At only eight years old she had already lost three of the four most important people in her life – all in the space of a single year – and she was terrified of losing me as well.
In January 2006 her biological father, Ross, had married a lovely Japanese lady and in March he moved to Japan. Robyn hadn’t seen him much before he left; once or twice a month he would turn up and take her out.
I had stopped telling her in advance that he might be coming to see her when she was about four because he would arrange it, and then go out drinking the night before and just not show up (or cancel last minute). He didn’t have to deal with her little sad face each time. I had to tell her the trip to the zoo was cancelled or the cinema outing was off. It became easier to just have him turn up as a surprise (when he did).
He never supported her financially and I eventually stopped pushing the issue because I felt her relationship with her father was more important and we clearly weren’t going to get any financial support anyway.