Fake CIA agent exposed multiple families – any of
I meet Mary for a cup of coffee in a cafe near where we both live. I haven’t seen her for years, not since we were fellow school mums passing the time of day outside the playground at pick up time. She looked as frazzled as the rest of us, juggling the incessant demands of small children and jobs.
Little did I know then that this ordinary mother of three was living a life that hid an extraordinary secret.
Back in 2002, Mary Turner Thomson believed she was married to her soulmate, a loving and charismatic American who she’d met online. William Jordan said he was a CIA agent and why would she not believe him? He claimed his constant absences were because he was travelling the world on dangerous missions.
Thinking back now to that playground chat, I realise she often must have been worried sick about her husband, but of course she wasn’t able to share that with anyone. As far as we were all concerned, he was something in computers.
Then, with one phone call, her world fell apart. Devastatingly, she found out that the man she’d been married to for six years, father of her two children, was a bigamist and a conman. Far from being in hotspots like Iraq and Afghanistan, he’d been just miles away with another wife and family in East Lothian.
Mary’s story is now the subject of a remarkable three-part documentary called The Other Mrs Jordan – Catching the Ultimate Conman. It shows the staggering scale of his deception, which included being married to three people at the same time and having 13 children with various wives and fiancees. He’d also conned friends, business contacts and landlords out of hundreds of thousands of pounds.
“He’s a pure psychopath,” Mary tells me. “It was all about control with him. It was like a game of Sims, what can I make her do?” He once rang and asked her to meet him later that afternoon in the centre of Edinburgh. She waited and waited for hours. Repeated texts said he was on his way, but he never appeared. Mary later found out that he’d been in Oxford. He had simply been trying to manipulate and control her.
How grotesque. And how awful to think that a big part of your past has been a sham. Mary describes that period as “like living in a movie – exciting but terrifying”.