The Psychopath: A True Story(52)

I signed Robyn up to a nursery three days a week, meaning he only had to look after her two days a week (as I was home at the weekends). But things just got worse from then on. Ross became less and less engaged and more aggressive as time went on.

I would still have to get up at night when Robyn woke up and cried, even if Ross was awake and watching TV. He insisted that I had the night shift and he had the day shift even though I was working all day and now doing overtime at the weekend to pay for the nursery hours.

Ross became more and more nasty and unpleasant until one day I was so incensed at his insults that I hit him over and over again. He just laughed at me and didn’t even hold his hands up to defend himself. When I stopped he said, ‘Don’t you realise, Mary, that I am never going to leave you. I will never let you tell our daughter that I walked out. When will you realise that things are just going to continue getting worse until you throw me out!’

It snapped me awake. I had believed so strongly that I had to keep my little family together, that I hadn’t seen he was deliberately trying to make things difficult. I realised I was wrong, that I had been teaching my daughter the kind of relationship she should look for, just like Ross had been taught.

Robyn was only just nine months old and I wanted to give her a better life than that, so I told Ross to leave.

He went willingly.

Ross was a sporadic father at best after he left, but I found life a lot easier without him. Although I had to do everything myself, at least I didn’t feel angry at having to do so. I just got on with it and found being in control was better. Robyn was a delight and I very quickly got used to it being just the two of us.

I vowed that I would never let a man be aggressive towards me again, nor would I allow anyone to raise their voice to me like Ross had. I was happy. I had a good job, my own home, money in the bank and a loving family. I didn’t mind being single – once I got past my own old-fashioned prejudice against single parents.

Having a daughter had taught me what real love was and from now on I was going be the good example for her to follow. If I wanted her to be happy I had to show her the way. I stayed single and happy for a year, then a friend suggested I try Internet dating – a very new innovation at the time. I was intrigued and prepared to dip a toe in the water, but was not desperately craving a new relationship. Unlike before, I didn’t feel the need to have a man around. I felt whole for the first time in my life. It would, however, be nice for Robyn to have a good, kind, loving and attentive stepdad, if one could be found.

That is when I met Will Jordan.



I told Will Jordan about my abuse as a child, about my journey of discovery and about my forgiveness of my abuser. I told him all about my relationship with Ross, how I had found his aggression intolerable and would never stand for anyone raising their voice to me like that again. As a result Will Jordan became the epitome of calm around me. He became everything that Ross was not: calm, gentle, loving, attentive, seemingly selfless and kind, self-assured and emotionally intelligent.

He used every detail about my past to manipulate me, including telling me that as part of an intelligence operation, he had gone undercover to infiltrate a sex offender prison and catch a particular paedophile ring that was operating in the UK.

I had given it all to him on a platter by telling him so much about me early on.

I’m an empathic person. I can tell when others are in pain; I notice body language and speech patterns which tell me if someone is hurting or damaged. I not only understand other people’s pain but can actually feel it in my body. It was that empathy that made me open up and talk to other victims about my abuse. I had empathised with and forgiven my childhood sexual abuser, and I empathised with Ross, even when he was actively trying to make things bad for me. And it was my empathy that made it so hard for me to comprehend that a person like Will Jordan could be so wholly without conscience, remorse or emotional response to others.

That word kept coming back and back into my head. Empathy.

I had thought I knew what it meant – the ability to understand and share the feelings of another – and more importantly I thought that everyone but psychopaths had it! But then I started to look a little deeper. There is research done on empathy but not as much as done on psychopathy, I suppose because empaths are not dangerous to society per se. However, there are tests you can do to measure your empathy level and each one I did came out showing I was ‘highly empathic’.

I started to think about the other victims and suddenly realised that something we all had in common was that we are all empaths. A lot of the victims are in caring or nurturing jobs – nurses, social workers, teachers – and a lot of them had come through previous abusive relationships, childhood abuse or emotional trauma. But they had come through it and risen from the ashes – just like I had done.

Empathy explains why the victims fell for Will Jordan’s stories about being infertile, or his lies about having been abused as a child himself. It explains how he can rationalise away some of the things he does by making it sound like he is in distress, or even inflicting pain and damage on himself.

I had spent so long researching psychopaths that I had missed something vital; I had assumed everyone who was not on the scale of psychopathy was empathic. But that’s not the case. There’s a scale of empathy just like there’s a scale of psychopathy. And I suspect that the more of an empath you are, the more of a psychopath you might be targeted by – as they say, ‘opposites attract’.