The Psychopath: A True Story(24)
For my little family it was such a huge relief. I didn’t have to look over my shoulder or worry about what he might do to the children just to manipulate or hurt me. He was out of the country. I knew it was not the end though, just the start of a new chapter, and it would only be a matter of time before I would be contacted by new victims.
OLD TRICKS
Seven months later I got the first of the emails I had been expecting in November 2009, from a woman who had been left pregnant and homeless. I immediately wrote back and we talked on the phone. She told me what had happened to her.
Within a week of being deported back to the USA, Will Jordan had joined at least one dating site and met a new victim. As a single mother in her early thirties she had tried to be very careful about who she met online and so when she was contacted by a calm and stable man she felt assured he would be a good match. The man was thirty-nine years old, called Will Allen and he had just arrived back from the UK. She had a lot of empathy for this man because he had had such a hard life. As a child he’d been severely abused by his mother, and his father had initially sent him to Canada as a toddler to prevent his mother abusing him further. After that he was adopted by British relatives in Oxford and got an education there. He stayed in Oxford to get his doctorate and then got a job working for the FCO (Foreign & Commonwealth Office). The FCO posted him to Tokyo, where he went with ‘M’ (Will Jordan’s nickname for a girlfriend whom he once referred to as Megan). ‘M’ had betrayed him though and had cheated on him, getting pregnant and having another man’s baby. He complained that ‘M’ had destroyed his life and almost ruined his career, so he went back to the UK and then finally came back to the USA to work for both the FCO and Barclays Bank. He had decided to come to terms with his mother, who by that stage was extremely sick and dying. Will Allen hated his parents but felt he needed to lay the ghosts to rest.
As a result of his experiences with his mother he had not had many relationships and not a lot of experience with women. He had never married and had no children.
Will Allen wrote long beautiful emails, had great manners, great conversation and was a fluent flatterer. He seemed very kind and loving with her child. He was excellent in bed, a good cook, and polite to all her friends, neighbours and even her ex-husband. He just seemed like the perfect man.
Once she got to know him better, she found out he was being called to serve as the Financial Attaché for the British Embassy in Washington. Plus he had a role working for Barclays Bank as the Director of Co-operative Strategies in the UK and had been asked to develop a similar team in the USA and Latin America within the next three years. She even saw his passport in the name of Will Allen, which was stamped by the American Embassy in London with some illegible text and the words ‘Diplomatic Attaché’ on it.
In June 2009 they discovered she was pregnant. Will Allen was delighted to be having his ‘first’ child and they decided to move in together. As their relationship progressed everything was going well but then things started to get a bit weird. Bills were not being paid and money started to get tight. Then money went missing from her relatively healthy bank account. Whilst she was trying to sort that out, Will Allen persuaded her to move into a new home with him and went to sign the papers. They had packed up all their belongings (mostly hers) into a van and she and her child drove it to the new house. However, there was someone already living there, and the person in the house knew nothing about selling the place and sent her packing. The real estate agent didn’t know anything about it either. Also, there was no answer from Will Allen’s phone and she had no other way of contacting him.
Finally, confused and worried, she checked her bank accounts and found that $10,000 was missing. She told me he had cashed a cheque leaving a different name on the details – the name William Allen Jordan. She immediately looked the name up online and to her horror found my website and photographs of him.
She was stunned.
She went to the police but they didn’t think a crime had been committed and so told her there was nothing they could do. Then she sent me an email.
We spoke at length and I found her to be an intelligent caring woman who was completely shaken by what had happened. At first she was frightened that he would come after her after finding out his true identity, but her fear quickly turned to anger. Finally she decided to move away altogether and get away from him and the situation. She decided not to stay in touch with me and to bring up her children with no knowledge of Will Jordan – which of course is her choice. I told her that the door is always open to her.
The next two victims came in quick succession in December 2009, with very similar stories to the last. They had all overlapped with each other. Each time, Will Jordan had met the women online, seduced them and promised a life together, taken money, then left them high and dry. He had told them that he was working for the British Foreign Office. He even showed them his passport and birth certificate, both of which now stated his name was William Allen and that he was born in 1970. (His actual date of birth is 22 May 1965.) He was passing himself off as British, or American-born but raised in the UK by foster parents (or an academic aunt). He told stories of childhood abuse by a mother who threw him down the stairs, or previous partners who had physically abused him. His stories repeated patterns that revolved around similar themes.
He was definitely up to his old tricks again and showed no sign of slowing down.