The Psychopath: A True Story(9)
Not only was he callous and lacking in empathy, he was actively and sadistically going out of his way to make my situation worse just for his own amusement.
Score: 2
Parasitic lifestyle
Everything that Will Jordan does is parasitic. He intentionally and callously manipulated me and exploited me financially, taking me for every penny I had and quite a few that I didn’t as well. He convinced me that our children were in danger from blackmailers who were going to kidnap them and rip bits off my babies to send through the post if we didn’t come up with the money. He encouraged me to sell my flat to raise funds, then my life insurance policy, and then to borrow money from my family as well. Meanwhile he took out credit cards in my name and ran up bills to the tune of ￡56,000.
Score: 2
Poor behavioural controls
Will Jordan only ever once got angry with me – when I told the police my husband was driving my car. But as I started to talk to other victims, I was told about several occasions when he had ‘lost it’. Alice Kean was defrauded of ￡4,500 by Will Jordan, the man she had thought was her fiancé in 2005. She initially set up a police sting to catch him red-handed when he used her credit card to pay for his car repairs and this set the ball rolling with regards to his capture and exposure. Alice told me of a time when he drove all the way from London to her home – a journey of several hours – pounding the steering wheel in fury and refusing to speak to her, even though they had not had any cross words. Another victim told me how Will Jordan had flown off the handle and slammed her against a wall, gripping her by the throat as he yelled in her face.
Score: 2
Sexual promiscuity
The very fact that his wife and nanny were both impregnated by him when he started sleeping with me is evidence that he was sexually promiscuous. However, the more I looked into Will Jordan’s past, the more victims I found. As a snapshot, I found that in 2005 he had two wives and five fiancées, but throughout the years he was in the UK there were many women who had borne him children and women who had terminated pregnancies by him, most of their relationships overlapping with each other. After finding out the truth, I phoned up numbers I didn’t recognise from his phone bill and checked out items from credit cards to find flowers that were sent to women that none of the known victims ever received, and hotels that when interviewed told me he’d stayed in a double room with a woman resembling none of the victims I knew. So the women I actually know about are likely to be the tip of a very screwed-up iceberg: I have no idea how he managed to keep it up.
Score: 2
Early behaviour problems
I managed to track down Will Jordan’s eldest child (that I know of), whom I called George in The Bigamist. George introduced me to his mother, who had been Will Jordan’s childhood sweetheart and knew his family background very well. She told me that even as a pre-teen he had been accused of the sexual assault of a girl younger than himself.
Score: 2
Lack of realistic long-term goals
This is characterised by an inability or persistent failure to develop and execute long-term plans and goals, resulting in a nomadic, aimless existence and a lack of direction in life.
I thought about what Will Jordan was trying to achieve in his life – the women and businesses that he was manipulating and stealing money from, the constant lies and games he was playing with people’s lives. It was all living in the moment and nothing was being put in place for a future with anyone – not even his children. Instead, he flits from one woman to another, one family to the next, fathering children and aimlessly playing a game whose rules only he knows – if indeed there are any rules at all. Will Jordan used to tell me about our future. He used to entice me with the constant promise that things were just about to get better. He used our future together like a carrot to encourage me forward, but like everything else all his plans were just lies and nothing ever came to fruition. It must have been obvious that he would be caught out one day but he didn’t seem to have any contingency plan in place. It was all just about living in the moment and by the seat of his pants – I suppose that was more stimulating for him.
Score: 2
Impulsivity
I had to look up what impulsivity meant, and read that it is the occurrence of behaviours that are unpremeditated and lack reflection or planning; a lack of deliberation; acting without considering the consequences; an inability to resist temptation, frustrations or urges; foolhardy, rash, unpredictable, erratic and reckless behaviour.
Everything Will Jordan does appears to be calculated but there is an element of impulsivity to his actions, such as when he decides to ‘up’ the game. There is no thought of the consequences to his actions.
One specific incident came to mind of when Will Jordan finally met my sister, who was back on a visit from Japan. When I first met him, Will told me that he had lived and worked in Japan for a couple of years and spoke fluent Japanese, even though he knew that my eldest sister, Lisa, lived in Japan and was married to a Japanese man. Every time my sister was home, Will Jordan was called away to work at the last minute. Until one day when they finally met in September 2002 after Will Jordan and I had been together for nearly two years.
Lisa was the most suspicious of all my family, having not yet met him and having wondered if Will Jordan was a Walter Mitty-type character. She decided she would test out his language skills in Japanese by asking him a simple question that would require more than a ‘yes’ or ‘no’ answer. Lisa and her husband were staying with my mother whilst they were in Scotland and so we went to visit for lunch. We arrived and all settled around my mother’s kitchen dining table with six-month-old baby Eilidh in a high chair. Everyone was getting along very well and then my sister asked her question out of the blue, in Japanese.