A Sordid Little Tale of Betrayal and Deceit

Happy Thanksgiving, everyone! The weather conspired against us and kept us home instead of hanging out with family in The Big City, so I've got some time to write a post.

A very bizarre thing happened to us this last week.

I was walking home from a neighbor's house with one of my Relief Society counselors when a car pulled up near us. A woman in the car said, "Can you help me? I'm looking for [my address]."

I hesitantly said, "That's where I live. It's that house right there."

The woman in the car got all excited. "Oh! Are you Eva?"

"Yes..."

Now she was really excited.

"Oh, good! I'm just going to park my car. I need to talk to you."

She parked her car and quickly got out, followed by another woman. They came into my driveway and she started talking, fast, tripping over her words. First, she introduced herself as Nicole and then introduced her friend (whose name I have forgotten).

"I know your parents-in-law live right up the street, but they aren't home right now (I tried their house first), and your husband is a twin, right?"

I still didn't know what this woman wanted. I said, "Yes my in-laws live up the street but they're out of town at the moment. My husband has brothers who are twins, but he's not a twin."

"Oh, okay," she said. "But I know he had leukemia ten years ago, right? And you have a daughter named Sophia and a couple more brothers-in-law who live in...Ohio?"

She was wrong about where they lived, but I didn't correct her. Just then, Husband came out to put some garbage in the garbage bins. I called him over. Meanwhile, Carol, my counselor, who was freezing and wanted to go home, excused herself to go back to our neighbor's house so she could call her husband and get a ride home. Husband and I invited this woman and her friend inside because it was obvious she had something she desperately wanted to tell us and the situation didn't seem dangerous, just weird.

Over the next hour, Nicole proceeded to weave a sad and sordid tale of betrayed love and broken hearts. Without being quite as wordy as she was, I'll give you the relevant details.

Ladies, beware!

Husband has an older brother, Warren, who lives in Salisbury, England. Husband and Warren have never been close because Warren has rarely been kind to him, even when they were children. Warren is an interesting character, and by "interesting," I mean that he most definitely has narcissistic tendencies and might even be somewhere on the sociopathic scale. Certainly, he's a practiced liar, spinning tales that make him appealing to whatever audience he has at the moment. The thing is, I think he really believes the lies he tells, which is probably why he's fooled so many people. At the very least, he mixes truth with lies, which makes the lies mostly believable. But he spins the stories to put himself in the best light, whether he wants to be the poor, good-hearted victim of a conniving shyster or a warrior with a golden heart. The truth is that he has borrowed money repeatedly from his family, been a drunk and druggie for years (he says he's over a year sober now, but I have no idea if that's true), and burned all bridges with his siblings with his false accusations and threats. But he has dozens of others fooled into thinking he's absolutely wonderful--mostly women.

In this particular tale, he'd made Nicole fall in love with him.

They met online. She thought he was cute and sent him a friend request. They started messaging. They sent thousands of messages and pictures to each other. Over the course of a few months, they fell deeply in love despite never having met in person. He regaled her with his story of woe: of being a former addict and having been to the US for rehabilitation; of being the victim of a physically and emotionally abusive ex-wife; of having been beaten nearly to death by a gang of Irish gypsies after having tossed a couple of them out of an exclusive London club where he was a bouncer.

He also developed a fatherly relationship with Nicole's autistic 13-year-old son, who came to adore Warren. He helped Nicole try to mend things with her estranged daughter. Nicole told him she'd recently divorced a narcissistic and abusive husband, and Warren made her feel beautiful and confident again.

Warren called her his American Princess. He told her how lovely she was and how she made him feel like a person again.

Then he told her he loved her and asked her to marry him.

Shocked but delighted, Nicole finally accepted the proposal. She thought that her dead brother's spirit had guided her to Warren, as she'd always felt she would fall in love with a dark haired English man. Warren seemed like a dream come true.

Warren mentioned that when he was sad, he liked to watch Harry Potter movies. Nicole then started buying every piece of Harry Potter paraphernalia she could get her hands on and sending them in packages, which he sometimes couldn't afford to pick up because of the custom fees he had to pay, so she paid those for him. In one of the packages, she included a silver necklace that had been her brother's, a brother who had died eleven years previously from cancer. She adored her brother, and she had been wearing the necklace for the last eleven years. She wanted Warren to have the necklace as a token of her love and as a pre-wedding gift. She also told him she'd arranged a job for him in the States and that she even had a car for him to drive. He cried with tenderness, and when he received the necklace, he sent her pictures of him wearing it.

But then a few cracks appeared. Nicole started catching him in little lies. Though he had told Nicole he was divorced, she figured out he was living in the same house as his ex-wife. He admitted to that, finally. He just had nowhere else to go, he said. He'd had a girlfriend who'd stolen all his money and his house, he said, so he had been forced to ask his ex-wife for a roof over his head. The injuries he'd received from being beaten by fifteen Irish gypsies meant that he hadn't been able to work for over a year while he recovered.

Then, though he had promised to visit her in the States on her birthday so they could finally meet in person, he regretted he had to cancel. When she offered to come to England, he told her he was actually going to be in Spain for that month, visiting his cousin. She called him out on that, telling him she knew he didn't actually have a cousin in Spain (ironically, this was one of the very few true things he told her). She told him she'd come to him in England, but he obviously didn't think she'd actually go through with it.

Nicole's father had saved up enough money for Nicole's birthday that she could take a trip to England and meet her fiance. She got a hotel in Salisbury, and on her birthday, she showed up at his doorstep and rang the bell.

Nicole said that when he opened the door and recognized her there, he would have shot fire out of his eyes if he could have, he was so angry.

"What are you doing here?" he demanded. He pulled the door mostly shut behind him, but not before she saw one of his teenage sons sitting in the living room, watching the exchange.

"I told you I was going to come to you on my birthday, since you couldn't come to me," she said.

"Well, you can't come in. My ex-wife is at the store right now but she'll be coming back and she'll be mad you're here."

I guess he kissed her there on the stoop. She says it was a pretty solid French kiss. I tried not to feel ill when she said that. Then he sent her away and promised to contact her and meet with her at her hotel.

Over the next few hours, Nicole started realizing she'd been lied to. Warren is, in fact, married, for one thing. She was horrified. She never would have tried to develop a relationship with him if she'd known he was married. Warren never did show up at her hotel, and when she finally asked for her necklace back, he refused and told her he would mail it to her. She said that was ridiculous, as she was there in England, so he should give it to her now, even if he didn't want to see her in person.

She tracked down Warren's wife by doing some social media sleuthing. Then she showed up at Julie's place of work (a hair salon) and asked to speak to her. She even offered to pay her ten pounds for a few minutes of her time. She wanted Julie to know that she had been duped and that she would never have tried to break up a family and that she just wanted the necklace back. But Julie had been warned by Warren that a crazy lady was heading over to see her and that she should call the police. Julie wouldn't listen to Nicole at all, so Nicole left.

Nicole actually did call the police once she returned to her hotel. She explained that she had been catfished and that she just wanted her dead brother's necklace back. They were shocked, as catfishing isn't very common in the U.K., I guess. But though they were sympathetic, there wasn't much they could do. She'd sent him the necklace as a gift, even if it was under false pretenses, so they couldn't arrest him or demand it back.

Through a series of texts, Warren told Nicole he was no longer interested and wasn't attracted to her at all. When she questioned him about the French kiss on the doorstep, he said it was just a friendly kiss. She  disagreed that putting your tongue into someone else's mouth is what just friends do, even in France.

Nicole did say she also got to see London, and she enjoyed her stay in England as much as was possible under the circumstances. In Salisbury, she made a lot of new friends, and she told everyone about Warren and his deceit. There's even a picture of him in a tattoo parlor wearing the necklace so that people might be able to identify him and demand he send Nicole the necklace back. As an outgoing American with a solid sob story, she gathered quite a bit of sympathy and help. Salisbury isn't that large of a town, and because it was the off-season, she was probably the only American around, and she's memorable.

It was about her necklace that she was at our house. That was all she wanted back, and she was asking for our help.

By this point, we were sympathetic to her plight. We cleared up a few other things Warren had lied to her about. For one, while Warren was, indeed, beaten nearly to death by Irish gypsies, it wasn't because of a bar bouncer job (though he did, at one point years before, work as a bouncer at a London club). What really happened was that he was drunk and crossing a field where a carnival was being set up. The carnival workers told him he needed to leave the field, and, smart-mouthed as he is (and drunk), he told them to get lost, it was his field, he lived there and crossed it all the time, so step off, curly. I don't know if it was just his belligerence or the fact that he called one of them "curly" that set them off, but they beat him and beat him until they thought he was dead. Then they dragged him into the woods and left him for dead under a bush, where he was later discovered, unconscious and barely breathing, by a woman walking her dog. He survived, but I've seen the pictures of his injuries. There's no faking those. He's lucky he's alive. The Irish gypsies were never arrested.

He also has never been to the States. He is scared of flying.

His wife is literally too small to ever manage to physically beat him. If she's emotionally abusive, I wouldn't know, but she has every reason to be disgusted with his behavior over the years as he's cheated on her time and time again.

As we continued to straighten out some of Warren's other lies, Nicole put her face in her hands, realizing she'd been even more duped than she thought. This woman has had her life turned upside down because of the self-serving lies Warren has told. For Warren, it's all about getting adoration and recognition. He craves attention, but he doesn't consider the feelings of the women he's deceiving. He desperately wants everyone who meets him to think he's the best thing ever. He's obviously willing to say whatever he needs to to accomplish that. And when his family members expose him, he threatens them--sometimes threatens their lives, as he's done to Husband's sister and her husband. The sister, by the way, has been vindicated. She's been trying to tell their parents for years that Warren is a nut job, and I don't think any of us actually realized how bad he truly is until now.

It's a sad story. I feel bad for Nicole, and I'm glad she seems to be strong enough to get her life back together again, and I hope we can get her the necklace back. After a flurry of phone calls to family members, however, the consensus seems to be that Warren (who likes the finer things in life and likes to show off his excellent taste in fashion, even if he doesn't admit he's just really good at finding things at thrift stores) probably has pawned or sold it, and that is why he refused to give it back to Nicole. And none of us know why Julie hasn't divorced him. Even Warren's parents have asked her that.

At least Nicole got to go to England, something she's wanted to do for a long time. She took her friend's 25-year-old daughter along, who appears to have met the love of her life there. They are still corresponding and plan to get together as soon as possible. At least she's met him in person! I need to keep in contact with Nicole and see if that relationship works out, because it would be a bit of brightness in an otherwise terrible experience.