The Psychopath: A True Story(47)
He thanked me politely and said goodbye.
Shortly after my conversation with him, I had a furious call from his mother. She asked if he had called me and as promised I told her the truth. She was incensed.
‘How would you feel if I told your children that their father was a sociopath?’ she growled at me in fury.
‘They’d probably tell you that he’s actually a psychopath and then tell you what the difference is!’ I replied.
She was not amused.
After eight years of talking several times a week on the phone, she cut ties with me altogether. She also fell out with Mischele because her son had spoken to Mischele as well. She said she wanted nothing to do with me or my children any more. After that she left our group and blocked us all on Facebook.
Every so often she unblocks me and sends a message demanding that I stop talking about Will Jordan, that I take any mention of her out of my book and let the subject drop. Sadly, she has also persuaded her children to cut ties with mine. I hope that one day they get in touch again as this is a source of sadness, particularly to Eilidh who had a good relationship with them all.
I still feel sorry for the other wife though. I don’t think she has dealt with the situation and still feels embarrassed that anyone might find out she is connected to him in any way. I don’t think her children have ever had a chance to deal with the situation at all, and they somehow feel that it is my fault that he had to leave their family. I also think she still feels he loved her and believes him when he tells her that she was special to him – something that would make her vulnerable to him again in the future.
CAN’T SAVE EVERYONE
After Mischele and my NBC Dateline episode in 2015, whilst Will Jordan was in jail, we were also contacted by a woman who was very worried about a relative. It was one of Will Jordan’s younger girlfriends/victims. The woman was distraught because her relative, Rachel, had met Will Jordan on a website called PregnantDating.com before giving birth to a daughter (apparently not by Will Jordan) in 2012. The woman asked me and Mischele to talk to Rachel to help her understand who she was involved with.
We both spoke to Rachel and introduced her to the Facebook group. Rachel was hesitant and nervous and kept saying that she wanted to reserve judgement. For a while we thought we had got through to her. She never seemed to be fully on board though and was clearly torn.
Because Will was in jail, we kept in touch with Rachel. Somehow he managed to send her flowers from prison – possibly through his parents. He would write to her and send her love letters, telling her how she was his ‘one’. Even when she moved out of New Jersey to Vermont, his letters followed.
In 2015, Mischele and I tried to get Will Jordan back on the Megan’s Law register, this time with Mischele talking directly to the New Jersey State Police while I was once more talking to authorities in the UK.
I made an appointment with my Member of Parliament, Ian Murray, and took all the newspaper articles as well as my book to the meeting. Ian sat and listened attentively to my story and at the end said with some astonishment, ‘Well, that is the first time I have had anyone use the words “CIA”, “psychopath” and “paedophile” all in one session!’
Ian was marvellous. He helped by writing to the Secretary of State, asking him to send Will Jordan’s criminal conviction record to the New Jersey State Police in order for them to put him on the Megan’s Law register as a sex offender.
Weeks later he got a reply that essentially said ‘No’. They said that under the data protection laws they could not give me his details. We replied, reiterating that we wanted the records sent to the New Jersey State Police and not to me, but got no further response.
Meanwhile Mischele got a similar runaround. No one seemed interested. The New Jersey State Police had a convicted paedophile in their area and did not bother requesting the information so he could be put on the register. It still astounds me that something so simple is not done out of sheer lack of effort. And considering that the man targets single mothers, it is very worrying.
Mischele had better luck with changing the law though. A US Senator became interested in her fight to make sexual assault by deception easier and clearer to prosecute. I have not covered much of Mischele’s story and won’t go into detail about her legal fight because Mischele is writing her own book about the experience, not just her relationship with Will Jordan but spying on him, her interaction with his parents whom she knew well, and setting up the police sting. Once Will Jordan was in jail, Mischele started a blog charting her ongoing battle to change the law whilst also being a working single mother. It is inspiring, and I’m looking forward to reading the whole story from her perspective.
PSYCHOPATH NIGHTS
Jon Ronson and I kept in touch over the years and in January 2016 he invited me to do a live show with him as the finale of Five Nights with Jon Ronson in London’s Leicester Square Theatre. The show was called The Psychopath Night and it was not only sold out but had a waiting list of 144 people, so Jon decided to take the show on tour. In November 2016 we did a two-week tour of the UK and Ireland. Every event was sold out.
The show had a simple format. Jon would talk about researching his book The Psychopath Test and then ask me on stage, where he would interview me about my story. We had a rough routine and various places where we would both inject humour into the conversation, but the interview was not scripted at all. On hearing my story, the audience usually gasped and laughed on cue. One reviewer for the York Press wrote, ‘suffice to say the collective thud of jaws dropping as one to the floor was a sound to behold.’