TRUE CRIME: catching a thief, how his duped wives joined forces to corner a con man
When a Kansas woman starting blogging about her con-artist husband, she discovered he’d amassed many more victims – and wives. They joined forces with a bounty hunter to bring the swindler down. Genevieve Gannon reports.
In May 2014, a woman named Lisa, from the American mid-west, published a blog pleading with her estranged husband for money and answers. Her marriage had gone horribly wrong. The man she had pledged to love, honour and cherish had deceived her, left her with a massive debt, and then vanished.
“Scott, it has been several months since we’ve spoken,” the post began. “You said you were in counselling for the lying … I found no record of your divorce from Jennifer ... I am aware that you are currently engaged to Diana ...”
Lisa had known for a while that her husband was not who he claimed, but she was only just starting to discover how crooked he truly was. After creating the blog, she heard from women all over the United States who had also been wronged by the man she knew as Richard Scott Smith, but whom others called Mickey, Rick or Scott. Some of these women had married him. Some had incurred large debts because of him. At least one had been bankrupted.
The growing contingent of cheated women compared notes and found that Smith seemed to follow a playbook.
“I think there’s something twisted deep within this person where he feels compelled to beg for and get someone’s love and then punish them,” says filmmaker Heidi Ewing, who found herself drawn into the twisted rat’s nest of lies, predation and fraud that Smith had left in his wake, and eventually made a four-part documentary, Love Fraud.
The similarities between the women’s stories didn’t end when he vanished. Each woman who tried to report him to the authorities hit a brick wall.
“The women weren’t taken seriously,” Heidi adds. “The police’s attitude was:
‘You dated him, you married him. What were you thinking? I hope you learned your lesson, honey’.”
So the women decided to do something about it. They found a bounty hunter named Carla, who was so shocked by what Smith had done that she offered to hunt him down pro bono. And Heidi and fellow filmmaker Rachel Grady became so wrapped up in the crusade that they paid for private investigators to help Carla and the victims bring Smith to justice.
“They all started meeting one another, with the same goal,” Heidi says. “We entered the picture and we pretty much became part of this revenge squad.”
By June 2015, Lisa had learned that her so-called husband was still married to two other women and she was his sixth wife. But she was not his last.
Until debt do us part
Three years after Lisa posted her first public plea, a single mother and real estate agent from Kansas City made a promising match on a dating website. Tracy, then 47, had joined the world of online dating in the hope of finding someone to keep her company after her grown children moved out of home. A successful professional with a wry sense of humour, she felt a flutter of hope in August 2017 when she connected with a real estate agent whose interests and values
appealed to her. “I was just looking for someone to share my life with,” Tracy tells The Weekly.
Her new beau owned his own company and was very religious, which was important to Tracy, who was Christian herself. But he was daring too and had trained as a pilot. For their first date, he took her for a motorcycle ride around a lake and she allowed herself to enjoy the feeling of breaking away from her routine of working, parenting and paying bills. “It was just fun,” she says.
She had a few reservations. Before they had even met Smith had told her that he was involved in a medical malpractice lawsuit and was expecting a $7.8 million payout on November 7, and while Tracy didn’t question the truth of his claim, the litigation sounded messy and just “wasn’t too appealing”.
“I just questioned going out with him again and unfortunately made the wrong decision,” she says.
Over the following weeks he pursued her relentlessly. He said that he wanted to support her business and would pay for her son to get a college education.
“I thought, if I don’t pursue this, it would be so selfish of me,” she says.
He kept suggesting they buy a house where they could be a family. Tracy’s boss had met him and thought he was wonderful. He took her into some of the 106 units he claimed he operated in Kansas City. He drove a Porsche.
“That’s why I didn’t realise it was all lies, because he had the car, I was in his condos, I saw his apartment. It didn’t dawn on me that he was lying,” Tracy says.
Within a month, he had moved into her home.
“He just kept staying with me more and more until he moved in. It wasn’t ever talked about, it was a gradual thing where [one day] I looked up and all his stuff was there,” she says. “I was overlooking all the red flags because everything was so perfect.
You can choose to love somebody. As you get to know them, you can fall more in love with them, and that’s what I thought was going to happen.”
Just before Halloween, he proposed. He gave Tracy a bright, flashy diamond ring, and they set about planning a wedding. “It was fast,” Tracy says, sounding embarrassed.
He’d always been somewhat coercive, but his charisma had cloaked the strangeness of his behaviour. Once she committed to him, however, his dazzling exterior began to fall away.
“He kept trying to move the wedding date up,” she says. He grew short-tempered. They’d argue. He pressured her to put down a deposit on a house in Kansas City. They were looking at condos in Florida. It was all getting too much. “I just kept thinking, I don’t think I can do this,” she says.
Meanwhile, Lisa was still posting on her blog. In September 2017 she reported he had pleaded guilty in Johnson County Kansas District
Court to identity theft. The post ended with a warning: “Please do not get involved with this guy personally or professionally. This person is a sociopath and cannot be trusted. He will steal from you, lie and cheat. He will date, be engaged to and or married to multiple women at the same time. This guy will never change his behaviour as he is incapable of doing so.”
An engaging man
It was a year later that Ellen, an active single mother with a sharp platinum haircut, matched with a promisinglooking man on the dating website, Plenty of Fish. Ellen lived in Wichita, Kansas. She had been single for 13 years and worked two jobs at a medical clinic, arriving at 4.30am to clean the facility before starting her second shift as an assistant at seven. When this stranger with the gift of the gab entered her life, she was happily swept up in an exciting romance.
“I knew him by Mickey,” Ellen says. He presented as an educated man full of stories and enthusiasm. “He had all these goals and he just seemed real vibrant. He had a lot going on.”
Over dinners at the Olive Garden, Applebee’s and a European-style bistro called Yayas, Mickey would tell Ellen about his qualifications, his life as a chef and his many interests. However, there were a few things that struck Ellen as odd. “He would always pull out handfuls of money and make sure the waitress or the cashier saw the money,” she says.
But his quirks seemed insignificant compared to what he was offering. Mickey told Ellen that she was everything he had ever wanted. He took her to a jewellery store, where he picked out a large two carat diamond ring and proposed.
“I DIDN’T REALISE IT WAS ALL LIES, BECAUSE HE HAD THE CAR, I WAS IN HIS CONDOS, I SAW HIS APARTMENT…”
“I said, ‘Mickey how are you going to pay for it?’”
He told her he had been awarded a huge payout in a medical malpractice suit. “We were going to get $7.8 million or something,” Ellen says.
Once they were engaged, he suggested they move to Belize, in the Caribbean, and started sending her the details of houses he thought they should buy.
“He actually went so far as to personally speak to these people down in Belize about a house down there. We had pictures. We had signatures. We had paperwork. We had everything,” Ellen says.
Slowly, his flamboyant, loving behaviour morphed into surly and sometimes aggressive moods.
“He’d get up in the middle of the night and he would go and lay in a bathtub of water,” Ellen says. “There was one night where I slept in a [US pharmacy chain] Walgreen’s parking lot in the winter time because he locked me out.”
Sometimes he’d take Ellen to a fancy restaurant, and then become inexplicably angry and storm out, leaving her with the bill. She began to question who this person was. He seemed to have so many different faces.
“He was a chef. He was a scuba instructor. He was a ski instructor. There were just things about him that I knew from the start weren’t right but I really couldn’t pinpoint,” she says.
“These women aren’t stupid,” Heidi explains. “He was easy to fall for at the height of his charms.”
After Smith pressured Tracy to marry him, her daughter, Kayla, became suspicious and decided to search his truck. She found pill bottles with the labels ripped off and pieces of paper strewn all over the cab. The documents had different names on them, so she started typing them into Google and discovered Lisa’s blog.
“I cried a lot,” Tracy says. “I was in shock, I was humiliated. I think the overwhelming feeling I had was that terrible humiliation that I had to go back and tell all these people who said I was jumping the gun and warned me. I just kept thinking, there’s got to be an explanation.”
She confronted Smith and he told her he was the victim of witch hunt. Then he vanished. She never saw him again, but she was left with plenty of unpleasant mementos from their time together.
With Smith gone, she couldn’t afford the house she’d put the deposit on.
“It was terrible,” she says. “They wouldn’t return my money. Plus, it was my career. It was my name and my reputation. What real estate agent does that? It was horrible.”
She went to the police and was baffled when they wouldn’t act.
“He stole the engagement ring he gave me. He wrote a bad cheque for that. He stole the Porsche, he wrote a bad cheque for that. I said to the police, ‘I don’t know why you can’t prosecute him’.” The police officer said it was a victimless crime. She believes the Porsche dealer didn’t press charges because he was embarrassed he had been conned so easily, and didn’t want to draw attention to it.
“There was absolutely a chauvinistic approach,” says Heidi.
“If a man brought charges of identity theft and forgery before the police, I think it would be taken a lot more seriously.”
Then Tracy received a call from a bounty hunter named Carla and suddenly things didn’t seem so bleak.
A year later, Ellen had a similar awakening. She was still dating Mickey when her son phoned her and asked why she’d been ignoring his calls. She discovered Mickey had been turning her phone off, and when she confronted him, he became aggressive.
“He started saying some choice words. Some very bad words. I said, ‘You’ll never get the chance again to call me names’. That’s when I said, ‘You know what, I’m gone. I’m out of here. Something’s not right’. And I left Kansas with $86.”
Ellen is grateful he didn’t get away with any of her money, but she lost her job because of him. “He was just evil. He’s done bad stuff,” she says.
“That’s when I tried to start getting in touch with these other girls who had issues with him.”
Revenge squad
Gradually a posse of wives, girlfriends and ex-fiancées came together to track Smith down. They supported each other and looked out for potential victims that were in his path and warn them. But their ultimate goal was bringing Smith to justice for bigamy, fraud, theft and domestic abuse.
“The core revenge squad was Sabrina, Tracy, Sandy, and then Jean,” says Heidi who was by now following events with her documentary team. Ellen moved back to Arkansas, but she was “all about it”. And then there was Carla, the wise, chain-smoking bounty hunter who offered to try to track Smith down.
“I hate men that abuse women in any way shape or form. The first guy I ever lived with beat me a lot and I took it and I took it and I took it,” she says in the film.
The one-time cocktail waitress was recruited into her current line of work after another bounty hunter saw her wrestle a patron who’d slapped her girlfriend. Using the tools of her trade, she discovered Smith had a whole list of different names and aliases, along with eight or nine social security numbers.
“I think we assume con artists go for rich widows, but someone like Richard Scott Smith can get his needs met by having four women at a time and all of their credit cards,” Heidi says.
Heidi, Rachel and the revenge squad were able to confirm that he had 10 wives in total and at least 25 victims. He bankrupted three women and left one wife, Jean, with a $700,000 debt. Plus, there were the businesses he ripped off, and the tenants and real estate agents who got tangled up in his corporate rental scheme.
“The story has stories within the story,” Tracy says. “There are so many layers of what happened – more than the documentary could cover. The businesses he scammed and the apartment complexes and the furniture stores … It wasn’t just about women, it was businesses too.”
Nevertheless, she’s determined not to let what Smith did mar her whole life.
“I’ve gotten so much smarter. I’m not as naive as I used to be,” she says. “I’ve tried to take the good out of it and know that my family was beside me the whole time and I’m really lucky I didn’t lose what the other girls did.”
“It could happen to anyone,” Heidi says. “All the women we met and talked to had jobs and careers and businesses and families and desires and degrees.”
Did the team manage to put
Smith behind bars? That would be telling. Certainly they backed him into a corner but none of them believe he has yet paid a just price for the havoc and heartbreak that he has caused.
On the phone to The Weekly from her office in the United States, Heidi pauses before she drops her final bombshell.
“Seventy-two hours ago,” she says, “I was contacted by a woman on Twitter who saw the documentary trailer and realised her sister was living with him …” AWW
“WE ENTERED THE PICTURE AND WE PRETTY MUCH BECAME PART OF THIS REVENGE SQUAD.”