The Mystery Man

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Speaker 5 I was in my room. It was all dark, and everything was just spinning away from me into like blackness.

Speaker 8 It was terrifying.

Speaker 9 It was a whirlwind romance with Mr.

Speaker 12 Wright that morphed into a mind-bending mystery.

Speaker 13 My blood run cold.

Speaker 14 She was like, I feel like I'm being watched.

Speaker 5 My phone would be followed.

Speaker 16 He said, you could be under surveillance.

Speaker 8 Followed?

Speaker 9 Surveillance? She'd step right into the Twilight Zone. Hidden codes, government agents, undercover spies.

Speaker 17 I was so scared.

Speaker 9 Who was this man she was about to marry?

Speaker 18 Your brain has got to be saying, holy cow.

Speaker 9 To learn the truth, she would launch a secret mission of her own.

Speaker 19 Testing, testing.

Speaker 9 A high-stakes game of spy versus spy.

Speaker 18 You were your own detective here. I was.

Speaker 8 He wasn't going to stop unless somebody stopped him.

Speaker 9 I'm Lester Holt, and this is Dateline.

Speaker 9 Here's Dennis Murphy with the Mystery Man.

Speaker 12 What's love got to do with it?

Speaker 22 Well, as Michelle Lewis tells it, just about everything.

Speaker 23 Love, her new guy, at long last, made her tingle as though ginger ale had filled her heart.

Speaker 27 I felt really good about myself.

Speaker 16 He was just a wonderful person.

Speaker 28 But why, oh why, should something so good and rare lead to such a dark place?

Speaker 30 A shadowy world where nothing nothing was as it seemed, where secrets became goggles blinding the truth.

Speaker 14 This is so intricate and so dark.

Speaker 12 As she was pulled deeper into the riptide of her fiancé's hidden underworld, she joined forces with a woman an ocean away to uncover the truth.

Speaker 13 He has intruded on every part of you, body, of your mind.

Speaker 37 Would Michelle be as patient at the game of revenge as she'd been in the game of love?

Speaker 22 Michelle Lewis is a born caregiver.

Speaker 39 As a little girl in southern New Jersey, she daydreamed about working somewhere in medicine, helping people.

Speaker 7 I knew I always wanted to do something medicine from when I was probably eight or nine, but it changed. I wanted to be a veterinarian, then I wanted to be a pediatrician.

Speaker 31 Sure enough, as an adult, she got her nursing degree and reported happily to the labor and delivery ward.

Speaker 18 You're with the team delivering babies, right?

Speaker 16 I do. It's wonderful every day.

Speaker 7 You connect with your patients.

Speaker 8 I'm there with them the whole way.

Speaker 7 I've cried with them. I've laughed with them.

Speaker 41 It's amazing.

Speaker 12 Fellow nurse Robin Meyer says Michelle is a natural as a nurse and as a best friend.

Speaker 14 She's a light in a dark place. She's wonderful.
She's the one trying to brighten up somebody else's bad day.

Speaker 10 But Michelle has seen her own share of bad days.

Speaker 26 For years, she struggled in a difficult marriage, eventually moving with her kids into her mother Shirley's house.

Speaker 43 She knew that she would be the single parent,

Speaker 43 and she put her best foot forward to do that.

Speaker 24 After calling it quits with her husband, she started to explore the possibility of finding new love.

Speaker 12 She went online and found a dating site called EstablishedMen.com. She liked the connotations of that name.

Speaker 47 I wanted somebody who was established, had their stuff together.

Speaker 39 And there on the website, one man caught her eye.

Speaker 25 His name was Liam Allen.

Speaker 5 He seemed to be well-traveled, well-versed. Everything that he had said was what I was looking for.

Speaker 12 They agreed to meet for coffee at the mall.

Speaker 8 I walked in.

Speaker 5 He was exactly like his photo.

Speaker 48 Very warm.

Speaker 8 Smile, very nice, very charming.

Speaker 5 I would say it was probably a good four hours, four or five hours that we just sat there and talked.

Speaker 47 So this is a long cup of coffee this day.

Speaker 8 This is a long cup of coffee.

Speaker 47 I had a really good vibe when we parted.

Speaker 12 As they talked more in the days that followed, Liam Allen opened up about his life.

Speaker 32 Never married, no kids.

Speaker 26 Like Michelle, Liam had been born in New Jersey, but was raised in the United Kingdom.

Speaker 18 Nice little lilt to the voice, huh?

Speaker 50 Yeah. Like the accent.

Speaker 10 Another bonus, he was geographically desirable.

Speaker 32 Liam had a nice house in the nearby town of Cherry Hill.

Speaker 50 He had sent me photos of it.

Speaker 7 He had sent me renovation photos of before, during, and after.

Speaker 24 All well and good, but she wanted to know more about his resume.

Speaker 18 The guy at the mall you met is nice, but I need to know more. And do you have some ID, bud?

Speaker 6 Well, I did go to the internet, typed in his name, nothing came up.

Speaker 5 I'm like, okay, so he's not like some crazy criminal with a past record.

Speaker 51 Michelle could feel herself letting go.

Speaker 49 She felt comfortable about starting to see Liam more.

Speaker 27 It felt good to be myself again, to laugh again, to be happy.

Speaker 46 But Michelle soon discovered Liam Allen came with boundaries.

Speaker 21 Notably, he told her he couldn't spend time with her outside of the hours of 9 to 5.

Speaker 8 He did warn me that a lot of nights and weekends he would not be available.

Speaker 18 Did you think it was a little bit off-putting?

Speaker 5 I thought it was a little bizarre.

Speaker 42 Liam explained his odd schedule was related to his nighttime work with a medical record software company.

Speaker 26 But still, it bothered her. Why could he barely send her a text while on the job?

Speaker 18 He used to talk about what, being on the map and off the map?

Speaker 5 It's kind of what I started to use, was on the map and off the map for the blackout times.

Speaker 26 When Michelle asked Liam about why he was so distant, he slowly began to reveal some jaw-dropping information. His true line of work wasn't in computers.

Speaker 54 He took out his phone and pointed to some letters at the top of the screen.

Speaker 5 And it just says UK. And he says, you know, this says UK because I work for the British government.

Speaker 37 Liam Allen went on to describe his assignment for the British Ministry of Defense as a kind of glorified chauffeur, shuttling foreign dignitaries and other VIPs back and forth between New York and DC.

Speaker 24 And as for that medical software company, well, it was real.

Speaker 5 He also was asked to obtain personal medical information on targeted people.

Speaker 18 Targeted people. So he's in the secret world.
It's a spy, Michelle.

Speaker 16 Pretty much.

Speaker 21 It was a doozy of a secret.

Speaker 46 Liam Allen, the easy-chatting, established man, turns out to be a spy for the British government.

Speaker 18 Your brain has got to be saying, holy cow, what is this guy telling me, right?

Speaker 13 I was...

Speaker 16 A little taken aback.

Speaker 18 Are you starting to drift out of your body as you're hearing this story?

Speaker 50 I was a little concerned, but he was willing to kind of hold my hand through it.

Speaker 39 And there was more.

Speaker 10 Liam told her that to date him seriously, she'd need to follow his rules, and that meant disclosing her entire personal life to the British authorities and undergoing her own government security clearance.

Speaker 7 He told me that in the coming weeks, he would bring me an application.

Speaker 47 I said, oh, I have to apply

Speaker 5 to be with you.

Speaker 8 And he said, no, he said, because I work for the Ministry of Defense,

Speaker 5 you need to be security checked.

Speaker 18 He's telling you you're going to be introduced into this secret life

Speaker 6 of British intelligence.

Speaker 47 He told me I could think about it.

Speaker 26 On the plus side, once she got clearance, Liam said there'd be no more communication blackout periods.

Speaker 12 But if she declined the vetting process, she could never meet his parents or even visit his house.

Speaker 50 I couldn't meet them.

Speaker 5 I couldn't go to the Cherry Hill home. Like we had no-go zones.

Speaker 18 So this is getting stranger and stranger, Michelle, huh?

Speaker 16 Very, very strange.

Speaker 18 Did you think this is quite cool or really kind of scary?

Speaker 5 A little both.

Speaker 9 Liam Allen, was this guy some kind of a James Bond or Jason Bourne? When we come back, the spy games begin.

Speaker 14 She was like, I feel like I'm being watched. It's starting to creep me out.

Speaker 9 What other secrets might this man of mystery be keeping?

Speaker 52 You put that name into Google.

Speaker 18 I did. What came back?

Speaker 15 Horrific, horrific news beyond anything I could have expected.

Speaker 46 The guy Michelle Lewis had been dating was shaping up to be Mr.

Speaker 55 Wright, right up to the point he told her he worked for the British government as some kind of covert operative.

Speaker 21 But she was willing to try to make things work and to field her mother's questions about him.

Speaker 43 After I kept badgering her, sort of like mother would, she finally told me.

Speaker 41 I said, you're kidding.

Speaker 41 He works for the British government.

Speaker 43 And I said, oh my gosh. And she says, mom, you can't tell him.

Speaker 24 Michelle needed to prove she could keep a secret because Liam had just given her a manila envelope stuffed with official-looking documents, the security clearance application.

Speaker 48 Everything was very personal information, background information, date of birth, social security number.

Speaker 5 And then in the pages after that, it was almost like taking the SATs. It was like an essay format.

Speaker 18 Did you do it? Did you fill out the form?

Speaker 7 I did not.

Speaker 24 But Michelle would soon find out that Liam had already passed on her name to his bosses.

Speaker 39 They were already checking up on her.

Speaker 5 In May is when I first received an odd text message from a number I didn't recognize.

Speaker 32 The person introduced himself as Tom Chalmers from the Five Star Realty Company.

Speaker 36 He said, I understand that you made an inquiry regarding one of our overseas properties located in the UK, specifically an Allen home model.

Speaker 18 Little light bulb there?

Speaker 6 Not at first. It took me a minute.

Speaker 22 She noticed the texts were coming from the 202 area code, Washington, D.C.

Speaker 5 That's when the light bulb hit. I was like, oh, these are.

Speaker 18 This is part of your security clearance.

Speaker 3 Yes.

Speaker 18 Did you ride with it? Did you play your part?

Speaker 5 I did, because I thought that's what was expected of me.

Speaker 50 So yeah, I did.

Speaker 6 I went along with the code.

Speaker 5 It was crazy.

Speaker 26 And the ride was about to get a lot crazier.

Speaker 5 He said that my phone would be followed.

Speaker 8 Like mine and Liam's phones were kind of like dots on a map.

Speaker 37 And Liam Allen even told Michelle and her mom to expect some surveillance at their own house.

Speaker 43 He says, don't be surprised if a car rides by. They're They're just checking you out.

Speaker 43 So, like 10, 15, 20 minutes later,

Speaker 43 a car would ride by with dark windows, and he says, they just seen you on the porch.

Speaker 14 She was like, I feel like I'm being watched. I feel like I'm under a microscope, and I feel like

Speaker 14 it's starting to creep me out.

Speaker 36 If Michelle's life was no longer quite her own, soon she was being asked to risk even more.

Speaker 21 Again, in coded language, Tom Chalmers instructed her to transfer some money into a certain account.

Speaker 18 Your personal money.

Speaker 48 My personal money. And what was that for?

Speaker 5 It was to basically prove that I was committed to everything.

Speaker 27 I was committed to Liam, committed to the process.

Speaker 12 The money transfers of a few hundred dollars would be returned when the security clearance was complete.

Speaker 49 Michelle followed through and held on.

Speaker 15 I had a strange gut feeling that told me I need to keep keep going, that

Speaker 7 the light at the other end will be worth it.

Speaker 18 Liam Allen would be worth it.

Speaker 5 He would be worth it.

Speaker 12 Now a few months into their relationship, Liam was decidedly on the map at home.

Speaker 21 Turned out he was great with Michelle's children, especially her teenage daughter.

Speaker 43 He related to Victoria very well.

Speaker 43 He was there for her.

Speaker 29 But behind the scenes, Michelle was starting to realize just how deep and dangerous Liam Allen's covert connections really were.

Speaker 25 There was the time he showed up late to a summer wedding wearing heavy winter clothing, only to tell her to keep her eye on the news.

Speaker 16 And the following week is when the whole Edward Snowden story broke.

Speaker 49 When she learned Snowden had sought asylum in the cold country of Iceland, she realized her boyfriend must have played a part.

Speaker 8 I knew before it was a big deal, which is a little creepy.

Speaker 48 Then the news.

Speaker 5 It's a little creepy now, Michelle.

Speaker 40 It is creepy.

Speaker 24 And it wasn't the only time, Michelle says, that Liam tipped her off about a world event before it went public.

Speaker 8 When Kate Niddleton had her baby, I had a couple hours' notice on that.

Speaker 5 Syria, I knew about the attacks in Syria before it hit mainstream media.

Speaker 18 So he was getting secret mojo from somebody.

Speaker 50 He knew somebody somewhere who knew something.

Speaker 7 And I knew too.

Speaker 12 And then came that strange early morning phone call from one of Liam's British handlers.

Speaker 47 Four o'clock on the dot.

Speaker 8 My phone starts going off.

Speaker 5 Hey, wake up, wake up. I got to talk to you.

Speaker 21 The handler felt she should be clued in about Liam's treacherous past.

Speaker 12 He was way more than a driver.

Speaker 32 After 9-11, he'd been dispatched to an elite mission in the Middle East to spearhead the takedown of top bad guys, faces from the military's infamous terrorist deck of cards.

Speaker 18 So your Liam was an operative. He was a commando, basically, in the war against terrorism.

Speaker 5 It was very, very heavy news.

Speaker 30 The question now had to be asked, how much did the terrorists know about him and the people closest to him?

Speaker 34 A chilling thought.

Speaker 22 But any fears about terrorists would be pushed aside.

Speaker 21 Because a few weeks before Christmas, Liam asked for Michelle's hand in marriage.

Speaker 18 On his knees?

Speaker 5 On his knee.

Speaker 50 And I said yes.

Speaker 54 Her family and friends were thrilled for her.

Speaker 60 Michelle came to work, and I looked and she went kind of like this and I was like, ah!

Speaker 43 This is what she wanted. So I was pleased with it.

Speaker 28 But what should have been a happy new chapter together was the start of a descent into chaos.

Speaker 51 Liam began coming around less and less, skipping Christmas celebrations with her family.

Speaker 18 Mr. Wonderful never showed.

Speaker 48 Didn't show.

Speaker 5 I was so upset. I was infuriated.

Speaker 47 I was absolutely infuriated. I was crushed.

Speaker 24 Then in January, Michelle discovered she was pregnant.

Speaker 18 And how did that conversation, I've got some news for you go.

Speaker 5 He told me he needed to process.

Speaker 18 There's a disconnect.

Speaker 5 Yes.

Speaker 1 Hurt, confused, she searched her memory for when it all went wrong.

Speaker 24 And she recalled a detail about her inscrutable fiancé.

Speaker 34 A couple of weeks before, she had nosed into Liam's wallet.

Speaker 8 Something urged me to look in it.

Speaker 5 I opened it up and I pulled out a card and it said William Allen Jordan.

Speaker 18 William Allen Jordan.

Speaker 5 And I was like, wow, this isn't him.

Speaker 27 It's close, but it's not him.

Speaker 26 At the time, she'd tucked the information away, thinking it must be an alias used for undercover work.

Speaker 46 But now, she decided to dig some more.

Speaker 52 You put that name into Google.

Speaker 18 I did. What came back?

Speaker 40 Horrific, horrific news.

Speaker 15 Beyond

Speaker 5 anything I could have expected.

Speaker 18 Enter, enter, enter, and it just gets worse and worse and worse.

Speaker 5 The more I read, the worse it gets.

Speaker 9 Coming up.

Speaker 13 This is not a surprise to me. I knew this was going to happen.

Speaker 9 A revelation from halfway around the world. Another woman with another tale about Liam Allen.

Speaker 13 It was devastating. It was crushing.
It was like coming out of the matrix.

Speaker 9 When Dateline continues.

Speaker 62 Some stories never make national headlines, but stories from small towns and coastal communities deserve recognition too.

Speaker 62 I'm Kylie Lowe, host of Dark Down East, a true crime podcast that gives voice to victims through investigative journalism and powerful storytelling.

Speaker 62 Set in my home state of Maine and the greater New England area, it's my goal to dig through the archives to bring the stories of the people at the heart of these cases to light.

Speaker 62 Listen to Dark Down East, wherever you get your podcasts.

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Speaker 56 Michelle Lewis had been poring over a flood of shocking information she found online about her fiancé, Liam Allen.

Speaker 5 I was in my room. It was all dark and everything was just spinning.

Speaker 8 The hallway was going away from me into like blackness.

Speaker 50 I was literally sick.

Speaker 24 He was notorious.

Speaker 26 No better word for this William Allen Jordan, the true name on Liam's wallet ID.

Speaker 54 She saw that someone had even written a book about him, a woman named Mary Turner Thompson, who lived in Scotland.

Speaker 31 She emailed the author.

Speaker 8 I said, oh my god, I'm dating this man right now.

Speaker 13 And I immediately sent her my phone number.

Speaker 37 Mary had been expecting the call from Michelle or someone just like her.

Speaker 13 This is not a surprise to me. I knew this was going to happen.

Speaker 21 And the story Mary Turner Thompson in Scotland began to tell Michelle Lewis back in New Jersey was eerily similar to Michelle's own.

Speaker 12 It began in late 2000. Mary was a single mother living in Edinburgh when she met a man named Will Jordan.

Speaker 13 He was charming, he was tall, he was good-looking, and he just seemed to be, you know, a really, really nice guy.

Speaker 23 He told her he was from America and worked in IT.

Speaker 23 She found him highly intelligent, humble, and family-oriented.

Speaker 34 Spending time with Mary's daughter, now older.

Speaker 59 He would, you know, play games and stuff.

Speaker 26 It's him.

Speaker 60 Oh, yay, we're going to have fun today.

Speaker 33 But just as Michelle Lewis would experience years later, Mary also grew frustrated with his frequent absences.

Speaker 13 I wasn't happy with this at all, so I started digging into his background a bit and trying to find out more about him.

Speaker 55 Mary, in her private detective mode, traced Will Jordan to an address.

Speaker 21 And when she peeked over the fence into the house's yard, she saw children's toys.

Speaker 44 She confronted him.

Speaker 13 He sat down and said, I have something to tell you. And he explained to me that he was working for the ODCI, more commonly known in the UK as CIA.

Speaker 32 That house with toys in the yard?

Speaker 22 He explained it was actually a safe house for agents, only staged to look like a family lived there.

Speaker 28 A female agent on site sometimes posed as his wife.

Speaker 29 And as time passed, Will Jordan gave Mary all the proof she needed to believe him.

Speaker 63 She spoke with other agents on the phone.

Speaker 32 And when he was called away, she received his dispatches from the war on terror.

Speaker 13 I can't really complain. You know, it's rather like complaining about Superman not coming back for dinner.

Speaker 53 So Mary kept a stiff upper lip when Jordan postponed their wedding date after being sent on an assignment.

Speaker 12 But they did eventually get married.

Speaker 49 And soon after, they welcomed their first child.

Speaker 10 It was a baby girl whom they named Ailey.

Speaker 64 He was like really fun, but then like...

Speaker 64 kind of strict. It was almost like you knew he cared about you.

Speaker 28 A baby boy named Zach soon followed.

Speaker 26 But not long after, Will Jordan's work threatened Mary and the children in the most dire way imaginable.

Speaker 13 He explained to me that insurgents that he had dealt with in the past were now threatening him and that they were going to steal the children, kidnap them and rip bits off them and send them through the post unless we came up with money to pay them off.

Speaker 37 Frantic, Mary sold her house and emptied her bank account.

Speaker 13 I had nothing left and I just thought, you know, there is no further down I can go.

Speaker 38 But how wrong she was.

Speaker 33 Almost four years into her marriage to Will Jordan, the phone rang.

Speaker 13 April the 5th 2006 I got a phone call from a woman who said are you Mary Turner Thompson and I said yes and she said are you also Mrs. Jordan and I said yes and she said I'm the other Mrs.
Jordan.

Speaker 26 That's when the other Mrs.

Speaker 45 Jordan delivered the knockout punch.

Speaker 13 And she said have you been told I'm an agent?

Speaker 13 And I said yes. And she said I've been told you're an agent.

Speaker 12 If both women had been told the other was a fake wife, then in reality both of them were likely his real wives.

Speaker 25 Mary confirmed the sickening truth.

Speaker 24 Both were married to William Allen Jordan, and both had children by him.

Speaker 44 Their husband was no special agent, just a fraud and a bigamist.

Speaker 13 It was devastating. It was crushing.
It was like the whole of my... It was like coming out of the Matrix.

Speaker 37 Now it was Michelle Lewis' turn back in New Jersey to absorb the massive import of what Mary was telling her.

Speaker 40 Everything was a lie.

Speaker 7 Everything was a lie. He had been married, he had children.

Speaker 18 Are you angry, heartbroken, or somewhere in between?

Speaker 48 Oh, everything.

Speaker 8 I was like putting all your feelings in a blender and hitting the highest setting.

Speaker 53 And even more shocking, Michelle learned that it hadn't been just Mary and the other Mrs.

Speaker 32 Jordan in this man's life.

Speaker 39 There were others. Oh, yes, there were.

Speaker 13 He has 13 children by six different women. He had two wives and five fiancées in 2005.

Speaker 12 This baker's dozen of sons and daughters live in several different countries and range in age from 28 to 4. He had four children within one year by three different women.

Speaker 54 Mary sums up her take on his M.O.

Speaker 26 to target single mothers, get them pregnant, and then siphon away from them money and other valuables.

Speaker 13 And the thing is, he doesn't pick dim women either. He picks intelligent women because otherwise it's like playing chess with a toddler.

Speaker 38 Mary exposed Jordan in her book The Bigamist.

Speaker 26 And after realizing he'd ultimately taken her for around $300,000, she also helped put him in prison.

Speaker 23 In 2006 he was convicted in a British court of bigamy, fraud, and illegal possession of a stun gun.

Speaker 21 Mary says after Jordan spent two and a half years behind bars, he was deported to the US.

Speaker 13 And within about six months I was contacted by the first of his victims in the USA.

Speaker 39 Mary heard from a woman in the Northeast, another in Mexico.

Speaker 13 The weird thing was, after 2010, there was nothing.

Speaker 10 That is, until the call from Michelle Lewis.

Speaker 30 And once Michelle's head stopped spinning, she knew exactly what she wanted to do.

Speaker 24 Beat Will Jordan at his own game and then bring him down for good.

Speaker 27 I want to be one of his very last victims ever.

Speaker 9 Coming up, Liam Allen, British spy, meet Michelle Lewis, super spy. Testing.

Speaker 13 Testing.

Speaker 18 Does he suspect anything's going on here in this hidden camera stuff?

Speaker 9 She is going rogue.

Speaker 18 Did the authorities know that you were doing this?

Speaker 15 No, they did not.

Speaker 28 Michelle Lewis's head spun like the dry cycle on a washer.

Speaker 12 Too much to take in.

Speaker 32 According to a woman named Marion Scotland, the man she was engaged to marry was a rare breed of devious career criminal and a complete fraud.

Speaker 18 He's a phantom. He doesn't even exist.
You don't know who this person is, who this Liam Allen is.

Speaker 8 No, he certainly wasn't who he portrayed.

Speaker 5 Everything was a lie.

Speaker 18 Did you feel like the biggest fool who was ever born?

Speaker 11 Oh, yeah.

Speaker 8 I was like, oh, my God, I can't believe I fell for this.

Speaker 18 And Mary in Scotland said something to reassure you on that point, didn't she?

Speaker 5 She did.

Speaker 27 I said, you know, oh my God, I feel so ashamed. And she said, don't be.

Speaker 5 He's been doing this for three decades. She says he's very good.

Speaker 24 And of all the things Michelle learned about William Jordan, one was most chilling.

Speaker 54 In 2006, he'd also pleaded guilty to failing to register as a sex offender.

Speaker 24 Michelle found out his prior conviction involved the daughter of one of his victims, a girl around the same age as Michelle's own daughter.

Speaker 18 How awful is that?

Speaker 35 Horrible.

Speaker 18 Is this man I brought into the household? Is he targeting my daughter, possibly?

Speaker 48 Yeah, he was never alone with my kids, but I don't know what his long-term plans were.

Speaker 30 But as tempting as it was for Michelle to just crawl in a hole and make it all disappear, she couldn't.

Speaker 25 For one, she was still pregnant with this man's child and had a supremely difficult decision to make.

Speaker 8 His first wife said mental illness ran throughout the family lines.

Speaker 16 And as a nurse, I know how genetic that can be.

Speaker 7 Not only that, but it would have tied me.

Speaker 47 to him forever to have that baby.

Speaker 7 So thinking long and hard, I chose to terminate.

Speaker 18 And you know as people hear your story, they will be judgmental about you because of that fact.

Speaker 5 Oh, absolutely.

Speaker 8 But they're not walking in my shoes. It's not their life they have to live.

Speaker 5 It wouldn't be that child's life.

Speaker 16 This monster of a man would be labeled as their father.

Speaker 21 The painful decision made, she vowed to make her broken dreams his last betrayal.

Speaker 16 Now it was trying to prevent anyone else from being hurt, to stop his damage.

Speaker 1 But how?

Speaker 49 First, Michelle confronted him at her house.

Speaker 5 And I said, you know, who's Mary?

Speaker 48 And he looked at me a little quizzically.

Speaker 50 And I said, you know, your wife.

Speaker 8 And he just kind of closed his eyes and he just kind of sighed.

Speaker 5 And he said, you know. I said, oh, yes, I know everything.

Speaker 21 But instead of disappearing, Will Jordan, the international man of mystery, did something surprising.

Speaker 26 First, he came clean, sort of, explaining his misdeeds were a thing of the past.

Speaker 21 Then he tried to woo Michelle right back.

Speaker 14 He very much thought that he had his claws in her so deep that she was just going to roll over and say, okay, that's fine. I still love you.

Speaker 12 And that gave Michelle an idea. If William Allen Jordan still wanted to play, then Michelle would give as good as she got.

Speaker 54 Through Mary Turner Thompson's connections, Michelle linked up with a surveillance video company.

Speaker 47 He had brought me this purse, which has a camera built into

Speaker 5 this little rivet here.

Speaker 50 He fitted me with a vest that had a camera on it.

Speaker 50 Testing.

Speaker 30 Now she'd play the part of a spy and try to catch him making incriminating statements on video.

Speaker 18 Did the authorities know that you were doing this?

Speaker 15 No, they did not.

Speaker 5 They probably would have advised against it for safety purposes.

Speaker 33 She chose a public place for their first meeting, agreeing to talk over coffee.

Speaker 65 How's your parents doing?

Speaker 65 They're okay.

Speaker 24 After some chit-chat, Jordan assures her he's still the man she fell in love with, and that not everything about him is a lie.

Speaker 65 Well, that's the hard part because I'm trying to differentiate between what's true and what's not. And he really can't.
At the moment, he really can't. It's too soon.

Speaker 18 Does he suspect anything's going on here in this hidden camera stuff?

Speaker 8 I was hoping not, but I became very nervous and I started to fidget with my hands.

Speaker 7 I mean, I completely shredded a poor napkin.

Speaker 21 Jordan even wonders aloud if she's taken the story to the press.

Speaker 65 That's the worst that could happen. How could I cope with it if

Speaker 65 your next men call this to a reporter?

Speaker 65 But I'm not.

Speaker 65 Because trust me, that would expose me as well.

Speaker 28 He's the one to bring up all the allegations against him.

Speaker 65 All these

Speaker 65 horrible, horrible, horrible things that you've done and supposed to have done, and all the things that I'm supposed to have taken.

Speaker 51 He tells Michelle to put those transgressions in perspective.

Speaker 18 But he didn't deny any of the major allegations against him.

Speaker 15 No, he didn't deny.

Speaker 7 He didn't outrightly admit them, but he didn't deny, including...

Speaker 18 Including the sexual attack on a minor child, a little girl.

Speaker 50 Absolutely.

Speaker 30 Michelle shows him a picture, a montage of his own children, 11 of the 13 known.

Speaker 22 His response is a shrug.

Speaker 65 I can't connect with that because

Speaker 65 what can I do about it?

Speaker 12 Before they wrap up, Michelle gives him a piece of her mind.

Speaker 65 My perspective is: I feel like I have been

Speaker 65 amazing to you in the last year, and I feel like

Speaker 65 that would be

Speaker 65 appropriate perspective

Speaker 25 This day felt light years away from that first long cup of coffee they'd once shared.

Speaker 28 And yet when they part, it's almost as if nothing is different.

Speaker 65 You know I always love spending time with you.

Speaker 65 That hasn't changed. Hopefully it never does.
Bye, sweetie.

Speaker 18 On one of these tapes, he says, I love you, and you reply, I love you too.

Speaker 15 Yeah, I'm like, okay, I can't take that out of rotation quite yet.

Speaker 8 He may know something's up.

Speaker 34 After her first day of secretly recording William Allen Jordan, Michelle knew she had him right where she wanted him.

Speaker 53 But she wasn't done with him yet.

Speaker 5 I wasn't happy with all the answers that I had that day.

Speaker 7 I knew I needed more.

Speaker 35 It was time for Michelle Lewis to go undercover again and turn up the heat on William Allen Jordan.

Speaker 66 Because I still want answers. At the end of the day, I still want answers.

Speaker 9 Coming up, deeper undercover, but now over her head.

Speaker 17 I was so scared.

Speaker 14 I knew that she was supposed to be undercover that day. I was like, oh my gosh, did something happen to her?

Speaker 9 When Dateline continues.

Speaker 62 Some stories never make national headlines, but stories from small towns and coastal communities deserve recognition too.

Speaker 62 I'm Kylie Lowe, host of Dark Down East, a true crime podcast that gives voice to victims through investigative journalism and powerful storytelling.

Speaker 62 Set in my home state of Maine and the greater New England area, it's my goal to dig through the archives to bring the stories of the people at the heart of these cases to light.

Speaker 62 Listen to Dark Down East, wherever you get your podcasts.

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Speaker 12 After Michelle's first undercover session with Will Jordan, she was eager for more to capture any more footage of him that could be used as evidence, perhaps, in a criminal case.

Speaker 8 It was more about gaining evidence against him.

Speaker 27 Can I get him to confess?

Speaker 11 She taped him every chance she got with the purse, her phone, her iPad.

Speaker 65 One, two, three, testing.

Speaker 54 She was concerned about him detecting the camera.

Speaker 17 I was so worried wearing the shirt that he would feel it if he tried to hug me.

Speaker 65 Hello. Hey.
How you doing? Good, hurry up.

Speaker 29 And she had to worry for her safety.

Speaker 12 She had no idea who this man really was or what he was truly capable of.

Speaker 17 I was so scared.

Speaker 7 Every day I went to go meet him.

Speaker 8 I told Mary I was going. I told my mom I was going.
I told my friends I was going.

Speaker 35 Because Michelle was about to turn up the heat on William Allen Jordan.

Speaker 56 She asked him more about his prior conviction for sex assault against an underage girl, which Michelle had found out he pleaded guilty to.

Speaker 47 He denied it.

Speaker 5 I said, why would you plead guilty to it? And he said, it would have cost me more money in legal fees to get out of it. And he said, by pleading guilty, he said, I got a lesser sentence.

Speaker 56 And now, two weeks after Michelle's first undercover session, she set up another secret recording of him, this time in her car.

Speaker 8 I would set my iPad to record audio, and I tucked it between his seat and my center console with the microphone facing up.

Speaker 66 At the end of the day, day, I still want answers. I don't care if they're blunt, I don't care if they're mean or spiteful, but at least there'll be answers.

Speaker 25 She put Jordan on the spot.

Speaker 56 Was he really a British spy?

Speaker 9 His answer was cryptic.

Speaker 65 I never lied about what I actually did.

Speaker 65 Lied about who it was for directly.

Speaker 5 You said that he didn't lie about his job, that he did lie about who he worked for, but he didn't lie about what he did.

Speaker 18 What does that mean? That's a little ominous.

Speaker 5 It is.

Speaker 56 What part of him was the truth?

Speaker 6 He He did admit to

Speaker 14 the wives, to the kids.

Speaker 7 He denied taking the money that he took.

Speaker 5 He said they all knew what was going on.

Speaker 21 Back in the car, she pressed on.

Speaker 22 Just who was Tom Chalmers, his supposed British handler.

Speaker 13 The possibility is it could have been you.

Speaker 65 Not that I'm saying that it was.

Speaker 44 Could have been me.

Speaker 31 She wondered why she stopped hearing from the handlers.

Speaker 65 Maybe you didn't feel like keeping the charade up beyond that of three different people.

Speaker 66 I don't know. Whoa.

Speaker 65 Trust me. I mean, you cannot believe all of that.

Speaker 10 She also leaned into him about her missing money, those funds she'd wired to the handlers for the security clearance.

Speaker 66 For all I know, maybe you spent it. I don't know.
I have no answers.

Speaker 26 He said neither did he.

Speaker 32 He had nothing to do with the demands they made on her.

Speaker 65 Ranting at me about it is not beneficial because I can't do anything about it.

Speaker 31 But ultimately, ultimately, it's not about the money for Michelle.

Speaker 30 She has lost so much more.

Speaker 65 I just want to stop hurting. That's all.
I just... And that's what we're trying to do.
This is supposed to be love, love, not supposed to hurt. Love does hurt sometimes, as you well know.

Speaker 30 In the end, Jordan told her the decision about whether to stay with him was hers alone to make.

Speaker 65 You will have to reach whatever conclusions you reach.

Speaker 65 and act on them.

Speaker 63 And act she did, with the help of Mary in Scotland.

Speaker 46 Back at home, Michelle scanned through her hours of footage and fact-checked Jordan's stories with Mary.

Speaker 8 I racked up crazy amounts of cell phone bills calling her to say, hey, this is what he taught me.

Speaker 7 What can you verify?

Speaker 5 And she'd say, okay, this is the truth.

Speaker 16 This is an absolute lie.

Speaker 15 And this is what's kind of cloaked in half-truth.

Speaker 49 As for Jordan's take on the meetings, Mary Turner Thompson got the sense that her former husband was enjoying every minute of it.

Speaker 13 It's a challenge. It's the challenge that he likes.
Having let someone down and then having to pull them back under your control, that's exciting, that's entertaining.

Speaker 12 But what Jordan didn't know is how deeply Michelle was now connected to the other women from his past life.

Speaker 13 I introduced Michelle to five, six of the other victims because I'd still talk to them all. He thought she had one little puzzle piece, you know, where she actually had the whole thing.

Speaker 24 With behind-the-scenes support from Jordan's other women, Michelle forged ahead with her undercover subterfuge, right up to her emotional breaking point.

Speaker 14 Here she is trying to portray her old self in front of him where she's screaming inside, wanting to just tear him apart because of what he's done to her, what he's done to her life.

Speaker 24 And then the unthinkable happened.

Speaker 22 Michelle went missing.

Speaker 34 She hadn't checked in with family and friends all day and no one could reach her.

Speaker 43 Kept calling and calling and calling and I'm thinking, oh my gosh, where is she?

Speaker 14 I knew that she was supposed to be undercover that day, that she was supposed to be meeting him, and I got concerned. I was like, oh my gosh, did something happen to her?

Speaker 30 Had Michelle's escalating game of cat and mouse with William Allen Jordan turned dangerous

Speaker 9 coming up.

Speaker 8 I was panicked, like, oh my god, he's here, he's here.

Speaker 9 The police are about to enter the picture. Had Michelle gone missing?

Speaker 24 Michelle Lewis had been playing William Allen Jordan at his own game, spying on the fake spy.

Speaker 54 But then one day, after a hidden camera session with him, she disappeared.

Speaker 14 The hours passed by and I got really concerned. But have you heard from her? Do I need to go out and look for her? Like, what's going on?

Speaker 21 Michelle's mother had even called the police before Michelle resurfaced.

Speaker 18 And you were now a missing person.

Speaker 50 Yeah, she reported me missing.

Speaker 12 Turns out the pressures of undercover work had finally gotten to Michelle and she'd taken a much-needed mental health day off by herself.

Speaker 16 So I went home first and apologized profusely to my mom.

Speaker 5 Then I went to the police station and

Speaker 50 they said, okay, what's going on?

Speaker 30 She told them about her year of spiraling down into this enigmatic man's strange world, of discovering his lies, of her undercover hunt for the truth.

Speaker 30 Police launched a criminal investigation of their own, and then they made their move.

Speaker 21 Michelle was the bait.

Speaker 5 I said, this is where I'm going to be and this is the route I think he takes.

Speaker 8 Catch him.

Speaker 28 Then she set up a date with Jordan to run some errands, telling him she'd pick him up in town.

Speaker 8 I got there about two minutes before our meeting time and for once he was on time.

Speaker 26 She rolled down the window to hear him say he had to pop into the pharmacy, but he'd be back in a jiffy.

Speaker 8 I get on the phone with the police and I'm like, oh my God, he's here. He's here.
They need to come like right now.

Speaker 15 I was was panicked at that point.

Speaker 8 I was hyperventilating on the phone.

Speaker 57 Her frantic thought, if Jordan jumped into her car before the cops nabbed him, what would he do as soon as they were surrounded?

Speaker 25 And now Jordan was done with his errand.

Speaker 8 At that point, time just stopped.

Speaker 5 He came out of the pharmacy, was about to cross the street back over to me.

Speaker 26 Every step he got closer was terrifying.

Speaker 34 But then police swarmed in.

Speaker 5 They came in and intercepted him and arrested him.

Speaker 18 He took a good long look at you at that point, didn't he?

Speaker 40 He did.

Speaker 8 I wanted to stare him down so that he knew I was the one who took him down.

Speaker 11 But when the time came, I was unnerved by it.

Speaker 52 Relying in part on evidence Michelle provided them, authorities booked Jordan on charges of theft by deception, impersonating a law enforcement officer, and a third offense that may be surprising to some.

Speaker 53 sexual assault.

Speaker 12 Michelle Lewis claimed she was a victim of a crime that's only just starting to be recognized in U.S.

Speaker 52 courtrooms, called sexual assault by fraud.

Speaker 16 Because nothing that I knew about him was true.

Speaker 22 She says she was sexually assaulted by Jordan, not by force, but by his lies.

Speaker 8 I really couldn't give him knowing consent to any kind of a sexual relationship because I had no idea who on earth I was sleeping with.

Speaker 33 But Michelle's case suffered a setback months later when a New Jersey grand jury failed to indict him on the sexual assault charge.

Speaker 5 They said that

Speaker 47 I couldn't prove

Speaker 5 that he was a harm to me, basically because he hadn't physically hurt me.

Speaker 46 As her case against Jordan moved through the court system, Michelle wanted to know, were there other victims out there?

Speaker 5 I don't know if there's another victim in New Jersey, Pennsylvania, New York, D.C., Baltimore, anywhere in between.

Speaker 45 Michelle wondered, Was he living with another woman and her children in his Cherry Hill house, just as he'd once had two wives and two lives in Scotland.

Speaker 45 Dateline found out more about that Cherry Hill property.

Speaker 18 Maybe you don't know this.

Speaker 18 The landlord of that property says that he indeed lived there, but he was evicted for failure to pay rent.

Speaker 18 No, I didn't know that. Had never known it.
And he lived there with a woman.

Speaker 18 Identity unknown and a child.

Speaker 11 Wow.

Speaker 16 That's shocking.

Speaker 16 That is shocking.

Speaker 8 So there was someone else, at At least one someone else.

Speaker 16 God knows.

Speaker 8 I don't know if that was his child, her child.

Speaker 4 Wow.

Speaker 34 Perhaps that woman who lived with Jordan at Cherry Hill was still out there somewhere, possibly still in the dark, thinking her man was off on some secret mission instead of sitting in a New Jersey jail.

Speaker 61 If there are other children of Jordan's out there, Mary Turner Thompson's girls are ready to welcome them into their unusual family.

Speaker 33 Jordan's daughter Ailey Skypes with some of her many siblings.

Speaker 64 We're all really good friends and we all look exactly alike.

Speaker 24 Still, Ailey says many of Jordan's children feel hurt by all he's left behind.

Speaker 64 I know loads of them who are like really damaged by it, like really, really damaged by it.

Speaker 37 The girls were glad to hear that Jordan had been arrested.

Speaker 59 As nice as it would be to have more siblings, it would be easier for everyone if he just like just took a break and stopped.

Speaker 21 And after his his arrest, Mary and her children were rooting for Michelle Lewis as she faced him in a New Jersey courtroom.

Speaker 70 Okay, this is the matter of the state of New Jersey versus William Jordan appearing.

Speaker 52 In 2015, he pleaded not guilty.

Speaker 69 It's laughable that he pled not guilty.

Speaker 69 I have so much evidence on it. I don't even know if he realizes how much evidence I collected on him.

Speaker 32 But after negotiations between attorneys, William Allen Jordan accepted a plea deal of three years in state prison for theft by deception.

Speaker 55 Then two years later, Jordan was free.

Speaker 55 In October 2016, Jordan was granted early release from prison with credits for good behavior, his work in prison, and the time he'd already served in county jail.

Speaker 56 Through his attorney, Jordan has declined to speak with Dateline.

Speaker 69 This is going to impact my life for years to come.

Speaker 26 Michelle says she's disappointed with the news, but is moving on with her life.

Speaker 54 Family and friends know that whatever happens, Michelle Lewis will have a bright future ahead of her.

Speaker 23 One she'll meet with arms and eyes wide open.

Speaker 14 She'll get her happily ever after and

Speaker 14 she can rest knowing that, you know, Will Jordan is not going to have a happily ever after. Not with her anyway.
And hopefully not with anybody ever again.

Speaker 9 That's all for now. I'm Lester Holt.
Thanks for joining us.

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