The Psychopath: A True Story(34)
In January 2013, Mischele was separated from her husband and in the process of divorce. She, like many others, decided to go online to look for love. She was not interested in ‘playing the field’ or shopping around. She just wanted to find a companion and partner for life.
She met forty-eight-year-old William Jordan, posing as forty-year-old Liam Allen, a British intelligence officer working for the FCO. Initially he told her that his name was Guillaume but that Americans found the name particularly hard to cope with, so he went by ‘Liam’. He had recently returned to the USA and owned a medical records company. The conversation flowed easily and smoothly. He seemed to be everything that Mischele had ever wanted and they just ‘clicked’. Liam came across as charming, intelligent, well read as well as being musically inclined.
As he got to know her, he spun her a story about how he was born in New Jersey but was sent to England as a toddler because his mother was abusive. His father had intervened after his mother had nearly put him in a scalding hot bath and he decided that Liam could no longer live with his parents, for his own safety. His father sent him to live with relatives who were Oxford University professors. Mischele felt very sorry for this poor man who had had such a sad life. Although his distant Oxford relatives provided for him, they were not particularly caring – they had other older children and treated him rather like a charity case.
Liam spoke with a British accent and explained that he had attended Oxford University before joining the British military and flying helicopters. He then admitted that because he was cunning and smart he had been offered a job with the UK Ministry of Defence doing a job where he was to go ahead of missions to befriend locals and persuade them to act as scouts for targeting high-ranking terrorists post 9/11. The scouts would then tell his team when the coast was clear and he would personally pilot the drones remotely in order to attack their intended target.
After Liam had left the military, he had taken his pension and gone to Mexico where he had fallen in love with a single mother who had a Down’s Syndrome daughter. They were planning to get married and he wanted to take guardianship of the daughter, but then Hurricane Alex hit. After an arduous journey to the British Embassy in Mexico City he was flown back to New Jersey where his birth parents resided. Finally he was reconnecting with the parents who had sent him away. Liam had tried to arrange for his Mexican girlfriend to come to the USA but whilst he was in the process found out that she was cheating on him and ended the relationship. He was still paying for the daughter’s schooling though. Liam even proudly showed Mischele a photograph of the daughter (who was in fact Amabel’s little sister).
As with all the other women he had befriended, Will Jordan lied about his age, background, marital status, military background, parental status, income, education, job and even his name.
Mischele was love-bombed and seduced by this charming, attentive, lovely man who eventually after a couple of months opened up about his intelligence work. Liam sat her down to have a serious talk with her and told her about his ‘real’ job, working for the British government. He said he escorted embassy workers and foreign dignitaries, as well as their families, from place to place – he was a glorified bodyguard, sometimes flying helicopters and small airplanes in the line of duty.
Mischele had a lot of questions so she wrote them all down and they talked through them together, point by point.
Then in May 2013, Liam told Mischele that if they wanted to be together she would need to be vetted and get ‘clearance’, after which she’d get a secure phone to contact him on.
Mischele was duly contacted and asked to set up a ‘digital voice fingerprint’. She had to call a specific number in Washington DC and say her name for voice-recognition software. The phone was answered with beeps and blips and then she had to say her name, then again, and then a third time. After being told that the fingerprint had been accepted she was then telephoned by a man calling himself ‘Tom Chalmers’. Tom had a very English accent and initially talked to her in code about an ‘Allen Tudor house’ that she had shown interest in. Mischele was confused but pretty quickly realised it was code and carried on in the same vein. The ‘Allen’ house the man on the phone was talking about was actually Liam. Using this code, Tom discussed further details with Mischele on the phone and talked her through the vetting process. He then told her she would need to provide information and bank account details for her to be cleared, including making a payment of $1,300. This money would of course be returned to her. Mischele also had to fill out pages and pages of Official Secrets Act forms which would bind her to secrecy as well as give them all the information they needed for the vetting.
Mischele was then told there would be a series of tests. Tom said, ‘At any given time, something could be untrue. It may be a test to see if we can depend on you.’ It was vague and confusing and kept Mischele off balance. What could that ‘something untrue’ be? Mischele was not to trust anyone or anything – no matter who contacted her and no matter what she found out – because everything could be a test to see if she was trustworthy. Tom reiterated that it was important to check on and test Mischele and the details she provided so that Liam and his whole team would remain safe and uncompromised.
Like me, Mischele was privy to so-called secret information before it became public. This happened most notably in early June 2013 when they were going to a friend’s wedding and Liam arrived saying that he had been helicoptered in because he was dealing with a major situation. A National Security Agency contractor had blown the whistle on the NSA’s mass surveillance of US citizens. Before the evening was out, Liam was called back again into work as the fallout hit. Indeed, the news hit the public just days later of Edward Snowden’s activities and his whistle-blowing on the NSA.