The Psychopath: A True Story(43)
One story really hit me though, and demonstrated a darker side to Will Jordan’s actions. A woman called Belle contacted us after our NBC Dateline episode. Extraordinarily, she had sat down on the remote control whilst changing her clothes for work, and the channel had changed to NBC. There on the screen was the man who had disappeared from her life two years earlier with no explanation or comment. She thought he had committed suicide.
BELLE
Around about the same time as Mischele was starting to get to know Will Jordan in February 2012, Belle was thirty-one and living in Philadelphia. It was then that Belle met Guillaume Jones-Jordan, a thirty-seven-year-old paediatrician from New Jersey.
Belle had already had a challenging life. Her father died when her mother was eight months pregnant with her and then her mother died of stomach cancer when she was still young. Orphaned at such a tender age, she was sent away to her mother’s best friend in Australia and shipped off across the world to a whole new life. As if this wasn’t enough to deal with, Belle was also a victim of abuse at the hands of the man she thought of as her grandfather.
At sixteen she came back to the USA and sought emancipation (emancipation of minors is a legal mechanism in the USA by which a child before attaining the age of majority is freed from control by their parents or guardians, and the parents or guardians are freed from any and all responsibility toward the child) so that she could live by herself without a legal guardian. She fell in love with her high-school sweetheart and married him whilst still only sixteen years old. She had twins when she was seventeen, a daughter at eighteen years old, and then her fourth child in 2002 when she was twenty-one.
Belle was a stay-at-home mum but when the children started school she put herself through college and became a nurse. She told me that her marriage was not a happy one though. Her husband was verbally abusive and then became violent. When he finally got another woman pregnant, Belle filed for divorce and by the time she was thirty-one had been single for a year and was feeling a bit lonely.
Belle tried to keep busy but was persuaded by her friends to go online to find ‘love’. She went onto Craigslist to see what was out there. A picture came up of a decent-looking guy wearing hospital scrubs and stating his name was Guillaume Jones-Jordan. He seemed to have a good job and came across as a nice normal man. Feeling she had something in common with this chap because he too worked in a hospital, she messaged him.
They messaged back and forth for three weeks and he seemed really genuine. They talked on the phone and via text, every day and all day. Belle found Guillaume’s name difficult to say so he told her to ‘just call me Gee’.
Finally they decided to meet and arranged to have coffee. Belle’s cousin lived with her and the children so she didn’t have to worry about childcare arrangements. Her children were now fourteen, thirteen and ten so she was able to have some freedom, as long as she was back in time to get them up in the morning.
On the day they met in person, Gee drove from New Jersey to Philadelphia to pick her up and they went to a café. Things just seemed to flow so naturally. They talked for hours and he shared his background with her. He told her how his dad worked and his mother was bipolar, and when he was a toddler she had punished him in bad ways. Once she had plunged him into boiling water scalding his groin – he still had the burn scars all around his groin and upper thighs. Another time she had put him outside in the snow with just a shirt and a nappy on and a neighbour had found him and reported it to his father. His father had been so worried that he had sent Gee to England to live with relatives there in Oxford. Belle asked him why he had never got skin grafts for the burns and he answered that his father had just wanted to get him away and safe to England, so the scars just healed on their own.
Gee said that Oxford was OK and he liked it, but the other kids in the household didn’t like him. It made him study more and he received a good education, getting his medical degree and specialising in paediatric trauma. He had had relationships – in fact he had married young with an older woman who didn’t tell him she was infertile and couldn’t have children. When that marriage failed, he travelled a lot and did internships at different hospitals. He spent a year working for SMILE, the charity that provides operations for disadvantaged children. He had had a relationship with a girl in Mexico but when he moved back to the USA, she didn’t want to come with him nor continue the relationship long distance, so that had ended too. He had had another relationship with a girl in Texas but she was ‘crazy’ and so he had ended that. As for work, although he was a medical doctor and a surgeon, Gee’s degree and qualifications were from the UK and not the USA so he had to work at the hospital as a ‘nurse practitioner’ until he had completed 200 hours of service and passed an assessment.
Belle bonded with Gee, having a similar background. She knew what it was like to lose family and be sent away overseas. She recognised this ‘damaged’ man as someone similar to herself, someone who had risen above the difficulties put in his way.
They were getting along so well over coffee that Gee said he would take her to his favourite restaurant for something to eat – just over the state line in New Jersey. They set off in his car, but the ‘favourite place’ was closed. He said he knew a hotel nearby with a bar.
Belle said, ‘No, I am not going to a hotel,’ but Gee reassured her that they were just going there for a drink and nothing else, so she agreed. He seemed so gentlemanly and safe that she didn’t think too much of it.