The Psychopath: A True Story(7)
Glib and superficial charm
I remembered the first time I met Will Jordan in his plush Edinburgh offices – the easy way with which he walked towards me, his eyes twinkling, his hand outstretched and his huge warm smile. He never came across as arrogant or brash, always just calmly charming. Every time I introduced him to my friends or family they found him interesting and intelligent – there was often something they couldn’t quite put their finger on but he came across as harmless.
The definition of ‘glib’ is ‘fluent but insincere and shallow’. I thought about the very first emails that Will Jordan sent me – before we even met. How he seemed to be opening up to me and revealing his insecurities around being infertile due to a bout of mumps as a child. It was his ‘baggage’, as he put it, but he was dealing with it. He talked at length and easily about his coming to terms with not being able to father children as well as having focused heavily on his career because of it. And it felt good to have a man talk to me so openly about his feelings. His infertility made him that much more of a suitable prospect for me as I already had a child and wanted Robyn to have a father figure in her life – someone who would truly love her as his own. It was all easy, and it was all totally insincere. Outright lies, in fact. Whilst he was writing that first email about being infertile, not only did he already have at least six children, but both his wife, and his wife’s nanny, were pregnant by him at the time.
Score: 2
Grandiose estimation of self
The first thing that came to mind with regards to grandiosity was the time that Will Jordan and I walked into a hotel and went up to the reception desk to check in. The receptionist referred to him as ‘Dr Jordan’, to which he replied, ‘Mr is fine.’
I was surprised and rather confused – I’d been married to him for over a year and it had never been mentioned before. In the lift going up to the room I quizzed him about it. He didn’t want to talk about it but I didn’t let up and eventually he explained he had got a PhD in information technology in the early 1990s in the emerging world of computing. He didn’t use the title because the field had moved so fast since then that his knowledge had been far exceeded by other people with lesser titles. He explained that because an administrator had booked the hotel room they had used his official title in error.
Looking back I can see that whole situation was set up – just so we could have that conversation. He came across as humble rather than arrogant but often subtly demonstrated a grandiose sense of himself. For instance he said that he had a black belt in karate and demonstrated kicks – he even mentioned to me that his mother had tried to get him into a martial arts movie when he was eighteen and she still had the videos of his ‘try-out’ – she offered to send them to me via email but I never received them. Indeed, I suspect the emails I received from her were actually Will Jordan just pretending to be his mother.
Score: 2
Need for stimulation (prone to boredom)
As I read about psychopaths needing stimulation and being prone to boredom I thought about the day when, on holiday, I found a wedding ring placed on the neatly made bed. It wasn’t mine, nor was it the one I had given him. Will Jordan had left earlier to go to a meeting and was due back that night. Things had been going well for us as a family and for once everything seemed calm and settled. Then this ring appeared, and it prompted me to look in the briefcase Will Jordan had left behind – something he never did! I felt like I was betraying his trust, but the wedding band on the bed had fuelled an insatiable desire to know more. When I opened the bag I found children’s passports and a wedding certificate between Will Jordan and another woman dated 1992 – ten years before my marriage to him. I immediately phoned him and he came home to explain that this was all his cover story, the certificate was faked and the children looked nothing like him – he explained that they weren’t even remotely mixed race.
I realise now that the whole incident was engineered just to push the boundaries, to up the game. When things were going too smoothly, it was boring to him. He wanted to make it more exciting because pulling it all back from the flames was what he enjoyed. He needed the stimulation that risking everything created.
It also occurred to me that this was why he moved from job to job. His work with a large software company was incredibly lucrative – he was earning around ￡10,000 per month – but he didn’t even try to do the work he was being paid for. He just billed them and produced shoddy half measures because the work was simply not stimulating enough.
Score: 2
Pathological lying
From the very first email Will Jordan had lied to me about his marital status, his name, his background and his infertility. Over the years I was with him he lied about his work, his income, his relationships, his family, his criminal record, his location and his experiences. He told me he worked for the intelligence services as an IT expert. He lied about calling me from a war zone where children were lying dead in the street, showing me photographs of their mangled bodies. He was deceptive, deceitful, underhand, unscrupulous, manipulative and dishonest – about everything.
Just thinking about the volume and pathology of his lying made me angry. Nothing he had told me was true; nothing had been real.
Score: 2
Cunning and manipulative
This is different to pathological lying: being cunning and manipulative is defined as the use of deception to cheat, con or defraud others for personal gain along with a ruthlessness reflected by the lack of concern for the victims.