The Psychopath: A True Story(2)
I got a lot of support from the health visitor who had recommended the nursery place as well as pointing me in the direction of other organisations who could help. When Will Jordan, who was still my husband at that stage, was first taken to court for a preliminary hearing in April 2006, there was a lot of media interest. The crime of bigamy is quite rare in itself, and the addition of fraud, firearms offences and failure to register under the Sexual Offences Act made it a particularly juicy story for the press. Everywhere I went I took the newspaper articles with me because I was convinced people wouldn’t believe me when I told them what had happened. I was surprised when people just automatically assumed I was telling the truth and didn’t immediately ask to see the evidence. I put a brave face on things and told everyone I was fine, but really I was in a perpetual state of limbo, shuttling between shock and panic.
I held my children close and talked to them gently. My four-year-old daughter, Eilidh, used to sit on my lap and cry her heart out and I cried with her as I rocked her and we grieved the loss of our family unit together. Robyn, my seven-year-old, was less demonstrative and pushed the emotions down. She would cuddle me and she talked openly about it but didn’t cry as much. My son, who was only a year old, didn’t really know what was going on. It was all I could do to try and keep life as normal as I could for them.
I couldn’t work though. I couldn’t focus on anything else other than putting one foot in front of another. I had to register for benefits to survive financially. I was signed off on state-funded incapacity benefit or ‘sick pay’, which is usually reviewed on a regular basis to ensure you’re not scamming the system. I was called to a medical review after a couple of months and as usual I took the articles with me. I went into the doctor’s office and showed them to her. She commented that I was holding it together very well and signed me off indefinitely. I am still very grateful for that – particularly in the first year, when I had nothing and had hit rock bottom.
Once I had found my voice and started to talk to people, I found that I couldn’t stop. I had been kept silent long enough, and felt compelled to tell people about it. I told everyone I spoke to about what had happened. Not in intricate detail but I would spill out the gist before I even knew I was talking about it again. My friends were very patient with me, but I knew that eventually it would start to grate and tried hard to stop talking about it to them. Then I started to tell strangers instead, anyone that I hadn’t already banged on to about the subject. It got so I had to consciously stop myself from talking about it. I would be standing at a bus stop and someone would say, ‘Good morning’ to me – something that is quite common still in Scotland. I would smile and reply, ‘Good morning’ and then add, ‘I’ve just found out my husband is a bigamist and a con man.’ It was almost like I was rebelling against the years of silence and having been told I couldn’t tell anyone anything at all. Sometimes they would react with shock and avoid any further conversation, but sometimes they were fascinated and engage in conversation, which helped me gradually make sense of what had happened.
I also had a compulsion to find out more, to talk to other victims of Will Jordan and understand the bigger picture. I was in regular contact with Alice Kean, the woman who had been his ‘employee’, who had been engaged to him and defrauded by him. He had used her credit card to pay for repairs to his car and she had set up a police sting to catch him. Between us we found George, Will Jordan’s son in the USA, who introduced me to his mother Devi who had been Will Jordan’s childhood sweetheart when he was fifteen and she was fourteen years old. My husband’s other wife in the UK had told me about Will Jordan’s first wife in the USA, Alexis, and it was not too difficult to track her down. Alexis had married Will Jordan when he was twenty-three years old and he had defrauded her of money as well as cheated on her with both Devi and the woman who was later to become his wife in the UK.
I requested itemised mobile phone bills and went through the numbers. There I found businesses that Will Jordan had defrauded, including a man called Malcolm who told me he had been conned too. Malcolm also told me about the numerous other business people he had been in contact with when he’d investigated Will Jordan himself.
Each of the victims I tracked down and talked to added to the picture and it became clearer that this was a lifelong pattern of behaviour. The more people I talked to, the more victims I found – the bigger picture was huge.
In the summer of 2006 I wanted to read about how other people had dealt with similar situations, so at some point I walked into a bookshop and asked for a book about bigamy or being conned by a lover, telling the assistant briefly what had happened to me. He shrugged, looking astonished, and said he didn’t know of anything like that.
I have been an avid reader since my early 20s and usually read novels, but I found after April 2006 that I couldn’t read anything except true crime. For nearly a year I only read stories about domestic violence, child abuse and tales of survival in traumatic situations. I had admired Alice Sebold’s novel The Lovely Bones in 2004 and came across her memoir Lucky, which is the story of her own horrific rape and how she recovered from it – more than that, it was how her rape had affected everyone around her and I could see where the story of The Lovely Bones had come from. Something she said really resonated with me though. She talked about PTSD and how she had surrounded herself with violence to make her own past feel more normal. I realised that I was surrounding myself with horrific stories of abuse, manipulation and coercive control too. It helped normalise my own situation and made me feel less alone. However, there was nothing out there that truly matched what I had been through. Surely I was not the only one?