The Psychopath: A True Story(35)
After all this, Mischele’s security clearance application was handed to another operator called Marcus, who sounded a lot younger than Tom.
Marcus was more open and friendly with Mischele than Tom had been, and far more chatty. One day Marcus called her at 4 a.m. and let Mischele know the real reason Liam had left the British military years earlier. Marcus said that Liam had flown drones and his job was to kill terrorists. On one particular assignment, the targeted terrorist was among a group of innocent women and children, who would also have been killed by the drone strike. Liam’s scout had recommended scrapping the mission but Liam’s superior disagreed. Liam had refused the ‘kill order’ and instead flew the drone into a barn. Liam’s superior was furious and called him undisciplined and unpatriotic. They even got into a physical fight over it. Both of them were discharged from the service with pensions that they’d accrued to that date.
Marcus and Tom were in contact with Mischele all through the summer, but in September 2013 their calls suddenly stopped even though the process wasn’t complete.
Mischele was concerned but Liam gave her a quiet nudge and said, ‘It could be a test to see how you react to being out of touch.’
Mischele felt overwhelmingly stressed by the whole process, not least because she was going through a divorce at the same time. She held it together though because above and beyond everything that was happening with Liam, she was a single working mother with children to look after and she had to stay strong for them.
By October 2013, Liam was talking about having a family together and was getting to know her mother, grandmother and children. The family pulled out all the stops to give Liam his first ever (as they had been led to believe) Thanksgiving dinner. At the same time Liam introduced Mischele to his newly reconnected parents. His father and mother both appeared delighted to meet her – neither said or did anything to refute the stories Liam had told her.
Shortly after that, Liam said he had never known what a ‘soulmate’ was until he had met Mischele. He said her family were wonderful and that he was falling in love with her children. On 8 December 2013, Liam proposed to Mischele and she accepted.
Liam didn’t show up on Christmas Eve as promised, and on Christmas Day they waited for his imminent arrival. The children ran to the window, excited to be seeing him every time they heard a car drive past. Mischele and her family were disappointed as again he didn’t show. Liam eventually arrived on New Year’s Eve and spent the day with them but disappeared before the new year turned.
By January 2014 Mischele was growing very disenchanted with the relationship. She was debating ending things with Liam but then life threw her a curveball when she found out she was pregnant.
Liam had asked Mischele to have children with him and had talked about it for months, so she was confident that he would be delighted by the news. However, he wasn’t. He distanced himself from her, saying that he needed time to ‘process’ the information. He left Mischele reeling at his reaction as he went to the bathroom. However, when he left the room he also left his wallet behind – something he’d never done before.
Mischele stared at the wallet for a while before deciding to look inside. Some instinct nagged at her that something was very wrong. She opened the wallet and found a bank card inside with the name ‘William Allen Jordan’ on it. Initially Mischele did nothing with this information. She shrugged it off as part of his work. After all, he had told her that he sometimes had to use false identities. For the baby’s sake, Mischele tried to make the relationship work one last time, and the couple made plans to move in together and get married.
A few weeks later, after her fiancé and the father of her unborn child had stood her up on Valentine’s Day, she decided to Google the name that she’d not managed to shake from her head. What she found made her physically sick. The first article was the story on Lovefraud.com titled ‘Will Allen Jordan, AKA Will Allen, convicted sex offender and bigamist, deported from the UK, returns to New Jersey’.
Mischele read that article and then several others. She saw reference to my book and downloaded it on her Kindle. She read it all in one night. In the morning she contacted me via my website.
That was when I called her: we talked for two hours.
TURNING THE TABLES
The day after our first telephone call, Mischele confronted Will Jordan (as she now knew him to be called). Initially she didn’t tell him that we had spoken but just that she’d seen articles about him.
Mischele thought that he would deny the articles were about him, or excuse them as lies, undercover exercises or something like that. He didn’t.
‘I was a bastard,’ he said. ‘I did terrible things.’
He also said that he’d put all that behind him and wanted to be a better man. Meeting Mischele had changed everything for him.
Mischele listened to what he said, fully aware that it was all lies. She knew William Allen Jordan – this stranger who had wormed his way into her life – was a psychopath and as such was not interested in change. As a nurse she was also aware that psychopathy can be genetic and there was a chance her baby could also have the personality disorder. Someone with a strong maternal instinct, Mischele made the heart-breaking decision to terminate the pregnancy.
Overnight, Mischele’s future – her fiancé, her new baby, her life – was wiped out and replaced by the knowledge that she had been in love with a paedophile psychopath.