Unspeakable Acts

by Sarah Weinman

  When Missi googled Derek Alldred, half a dozen mug shots of Richie—Derek—popped up, alongside news articles with alarming phrases such as career con man and long history of deception. Missi sat down on the couch and slowly read every word of every article she could find: Derek Alldred had posed as a firefighter and scammed hospitals out of drugs. Derek Alldred had dated a woman in California under false pretenses and drained her bank account of almost $200,000. Derek Alldred had married a woman, pretended to pay the bills on their home, then vanished after it was foreclosed on. Derek Alldred had posed as a surgeon, checked into the posh Saint Paul Hotel with a woman and her two daughters, racked up nearly $2,000 in charges, then skipped out on the bill (and the woman).

  As she read, Missi began to feel sick, as if her body was having trouble physically assimilating the idea that her boyfriend was not a scholar and war hero, but rather a serial con man. And those credit cards kept nagging at her: “There is someone else out there who is being completely fricking screwed right now,” she remembers thinking. It took a bit of detective work, but eventually Missi tracked Linda down on Facebook and sent her a message. “You’re probably going to think I’m crazy,” it began.

  WHEN LINDA DYAS, AGE 46, GOT MISSI’S MESSAGE, SHE was in the house she shared with Rich Peterson, her boyfriend of seven months. Linda, who is tall and blond and funny, had been going through an ugly divorce when she’d met Rich on Ourtime.co.uk, and he’d seemed almost too good to be true: a Christian, a military vet, a fellow conservative. On their first date, after the server set down their plates, Rich closed his eyes and said a beautiful prayer. “I was blown away by that,” Linda told me when we met at a wine bar in St. Paul over the summer. “Here I was on a first date, and he’s actually going to stop and say a prayer in a restaurant. It was touching.” Linda was smitten. “Head over heels, you know?” she said. “Within two weeks, he was at my house all the time.”

  After a few months, Linda lost her job with a financial services company, but Rich made it seem okay. He found them a house to rent in an upscale suburb of St. Paul, one she wouldn’t have been able to afford on her own, and she and her six-year-old son moved in. Linda hung her clothes next to Rich’s navy uniforms; he displayed the framed certificates for his military honors—a Purple Heart, a Silver Star—on the walls. One day she stumbled onto paperwork for a $100,000 college fund he had secretly started for her son, and her heart surged.

  Recently, though, the relationship had been rockier. Rich drank a lot, and his constant trips to the hospital—which he blamed on the persistent effects of his war wounds—were exhausting. When Linda received Missi’s message, she initially dismissed it as the rantings of a jealous ex. But for a few weeks she’d had a vague sense that things between her and Rich were askew in some fundamental way. When, a couple of days later, she finally opened the links Missi had sent, she realized why. “My first instinct was, How do I get him out of the house?” she recalled. He solved that problem for her, announcing that he was once again in so much pain, he needed to go to the emergency room. Linda dropped him off and then called the police on her way home. She sat up for hours. At three in the morning, Derek told her he would catch an Uber home, and Linda alerted the police. When she saw the red-and-blue lights through her window, she sent Missi a message, letting her know that Derek was in custody.

  Linda eventually figured out that Derek Alldred had not only been lying about his name, his job, and his past—he’d been depleting her savings to bolster his fake life. As she went over her bank statements, she said, she began to piece it together: how he had stolen her emergency credit cards out of her jewelry box and ordered new cards in her name, then used those cards to fund fancy dinners and trips to Hawaii with her and other women; how he’d siphoned money from her retirement savings to pay off the credit-card bills, and to buy a boat and two motorcycles he’d ostensibly given her as gifts; how he’d ask her to drop him off at the hospital, only to get Missi to pick him up as soon as she was gone; how her name was somehow the only one on the house’s lease, and she was now on the hook for rent she couldn’t afford.

  The night after Derek’s arrest, Missi came over so Linda wouldn’t have to be alone. When Linda’s dog trotted into the room, Missi laughed. “Thumper!” she said. “I thought you were dead.” (Derek’s mother, they later learned, was also still alive.) On the surface, the two women didn’t seem to have much in common—Missi is grounded and easygoing, with a yin-yang symbol tattooed on her big toe, while Linda is a conservative navy vet with a drawl that betrays her Texas roots—but they bonded over the absurdity of their shared situation.

  The next day, Washington County police were at Linda’s house taking her statement when a delivery arrived, addressed to Rich Peterson. Linda handled the package gingerly; it felt like a missive from an alternate reality. One of the police officers told her she might as well open it: “It’s not like he’s a real person.” The box contained whiskey and chocolate and a sweet get-well-soon note from a woman whose return address was just a few neighborhoods away.

  Linda texted Missi, who compiled a dossier of news articles documenting all of Derek’s misdeeds and dropped it off with the third woman, Joy (who asked to be identified by her middle name). That weekend, Joy stopped by Linda’s, and the two women split a bottle of wine, trying to piece together how they’d been taken so thoroughly. Joy, a 42-year-old IT director, had also met “Rich” on Ourtime.co.uk, in February. He’d told her he was a professor who volunteered at a homeless shelter downtown. (The women later found out that he had actually been living at the shelter before he moved in with Linda.) They’d dated for a few months, until “he started having just a ton of drama in his life,” Joy says. She broke it off with him but stayed friendly. On the Fourth of July, he sent her a picture of himself looking tan and happy, his arms around Missi and her kids on the boat that Linda had paid for. I bought a boat and took my sister and her kids out on it today, he wrote. My life has calmed down—want to try again? Joy decided to give him another chance. She later found that he’d stolen almost $8,000 worth of jewelry, her passport, and her birth certificate.

  The false life that Derek—it was still hard not to slip and call him Rich—had constructed for himself was thorough: He had a University of Minnesota email address and an ID card that allowed him to swipe into university buildings. He would FaceTime the women from UM classrooms between classes. He had hourlong phone conversations—ostensibly with his admiral, his faculty supervisor, or his daughter Sarah, three people who turned out not to exist—during which Linda could hear a voice on the other end of the line. He had uniforms and medals and a stack of framed, official-looking awards: a Purple Heart and a Silver Star, a SEAL Team One membership, a certificate of completion for a naval underwater demolition course. There were just so many props bolstering Derek’s stories that even when doubts had started to bubble up, the women had repressed them down—There’s no way it could all be fake, they’d told themselves. That would be crazy.

  The three women’s conversations had another recurring theme: “We also knew there had to be more victims,” Linda told me.

  AMERICANS LOVE A CON MAN. IN HIS INSOUCIANCE, HIS blithe refusal to stick to one category or class, his constant self-reinvention, the confidence man (and he is almost always a man) takes one of America’s foundational myths—You can be anything you want to be!—to its extreme. The con man, the writer Lewis Hyde has argued, is “one of America’s unacknowledged founding fathers.”

  Con men thrive in times of upheaval. “Transition is the confidence game’s great ally,” Maria Konnikova writes in The Confidence Game, an account of how swindlers manipulate human psychology. “There’s nothing a con artist likes better than exploiting the sense of unease we feel when it appears that the world as we know it is about to change.” The first great era of the American scam artist—the period when the confidence man got his name—began in the mid-19th century. The country was rapidly urbanizing; previously far-flung places were ne
wly linked by railroads. Americans were meeting more strangers than ever before, and thanks to a growing economy, they had more money than previous generations. All of those strangers, all of that cash, resulted in an era powered by trust, one that Mark Twain and Charles Dudley Warner satirized in The Gilded Age for its “unlimited reliance upon human promises.”

  The age of the internet, with its infinitude of strangers and swiftly evolving social mores, has also been good for con men. The FBI’s Internet Crime Complaint Center, which tracks internet-facilitated criminal activity, received nearly 300,000 complaints in 2016, reporting total losses of more than $1.3 billion. Of those, more than 14,500 were for relationship fraud, a number that has more than doubled since 2011. In 2016, relationship scams were the second-most-costly form of internet fraud (after wire fraud), netting scammers nearly $220 million. By comparison, Americans lost only $31 million to phishing scams, about $2.5 million to ransomware attacks, and $1.6 million to phony charities.

  The FBI warns that the most common targets of dating scams “are women over 40 who are divorced, widowed, and/or disabled.” In many cases, women are courted online by men who claim to be deployed in Afghanistan or tending an offshore oil rig in Qatar. After weeks or months of intimate emails, texts, and phone calls, the putative boyfriend will urgently need money to replace a broken laptop or buy a plane ticket home. Some, like Derek or “Dirty John” Meehan—whose romance scam was exposed last year by the Los Angeles Times—escalate an online relationship to an in-person con, going as far as living with their victims or even marrying them. Derek stands out for how remarkably prolific he was: He often had two or three separate relationship scams going at a time. When one woman discovered the truth, he’d quickly move on to another.

  According to the Department of Justice, only 15 percent of fraud victims report the crimes to law enforcement, largely due to “shame, guilt, embarrassment, and disbelief.” “You feel really crappy about yourself,” Missi told me, then slipped into a tone that sounded like the mean voice that lives inside her head: “I’m a stupid woman; I’m a dumb, dumb dumbass.”

  But Derek’s victims didn’t let their shame stop them from coming forward. Many of them did report him—only to discover that by drawing them so deeply into his con, he had paradoxically made it less likely that he’d face consequences.

  THE POLICE RELEASED DEREK AFTER 48 HOURS, TELLING Linda they wanted to build a stronger case. (A police spokeswoman told me the county attorney had concluded that fraud charges probably wouldn’t have held up in court. Because Linda’s and Derek’s lives were so entwined, it would have been too difficult to determine which credit card charges were fraudulent and which were authorized.) Seven months later, the police department finally issued a warrant for Derek’s arrest, on one misdemeanor charge of impersonating an officer. By then he was long gone.

  While Linda sorted through her finances, her sister-in-law delved into old news articles about Derek, looking for any information that might be useful in bringing him to justice. Most of the women quoted were anonymous, or referred to only by their first names. A woman named Cindi Pardini, however, had used her full name. A tech professional living in San Francisco, she said Derek had stolen hundreds of thousands of dollars (and 660,000 airline miles) from her over the course of a few months in 2013. Linda sent Cindi a Facebook message and soon learned that Cindi was a kind of unofficial point person for Derek’s accusers. Because her name was one of the only searchable ones linked to his, women who’d been scammed by Derek reached out to Cindi through Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn. She was in touch with about a dozen victims.

  Cindi wasn’t always easy to deal with. On the phone with the other victims, she’d ramble for hours about Derek and the trouble he’d brought into her life, how he’d drained her bank account, ruined her credit score, and undermined her sense of reality. “I was not in a good place,” Cindi admits. “This has taken over my life for the past five years. My friends and family are like, ‘Why are you still going after this? It’s killing you.’”

  But Cindi’s single-mindedness also made her the case’s most diligent detective. She kept careful track of news reporting on Derek’s exploits and made sure police were informed. She also contacted Derek’s college-age daughter, who Cindi learned was estranged from her father. (The second daughter, Sarah, was a fabrication.) And she talked with one of his childhood friends, who said that Derek, who had grown up in a wealthy suburb of San Francisco, was trouble from an early age. He’d often discussed his family with Missi, and at least some of what he told her appears to have been true. “He’d talk about how they were such good people, and how he was such a black sheep in his family,” Missi says. Cindi was in touch with one of his earliest victims, a woman who had met Derek in the early 1990s and had been convinced that he was a medical student conducting important cystic fibrosis research.

  Cindi added Linda to a group text with several other victims, and Linda found some comfort in swapping stories with them, and in seeing that they were far from stupid. If anything, Derek seems to have preferred intelligent women; his victims included a doctor and a couple of women who worked in tech. Linda herself was an engineer at a nuclear power plant. But the other women’s stories of trying to hold Derek to account for his crimes were not encouraging.

  JoAnn, a 43-year-old from Minneapolis who asked that her last name not be used, met “Derek Allarad” on Match .com in August 2014. He told her he was a lawyer with a big downtown firm; in reality, he was hiding out from a warrant for defrauding the Saint Paul Hotel. Derek racked up about $23,000 on JoAnn’s credit cards during the three months they were together. When she reported him to the police, she was told that legal action would likely be a waste of her time and money. “The fraud detective told me it would cost me way too much money to get a lawyer and sue him in civil court,” JoAnn says. “He said they’d say I was just blaming my ex-boyfriend because I’m bitter. He said, ‘If I were you, I’d let it go.’” Six months and many phone calls later, the credit card company finally reversed the charges. But JoAnn still regrets not taking Derek to court. “Just because of how many women he hurt since me,” she says.

  All together, Derek seems to have scammed at least a dozen women out of about $1 million since 2010. He used different names and occupations, but the identities he took on always had an element of financial prestige or manly valor: decorated veteran, surgeon, air marshal, investment banker. Con artists have long known that a uniform bolsters an illusion, and Derek was fond of dressing up in scrubs and military fatigues. He tended to look for women in their 40s or 50s, preferably divorced, preferably with a couple of kids and a dog or two. Many of his victims were in a vulnerable place in their lives—recently divorced, fresh out of an abusive relationship, or recovering from a serious accident—and he presented himself as a hero and caretaker, the man who would step in and save the day. Even women who weren’t struggling when they met Derek soon found their lives destabilized by the chaos he brought—they lost jobs, had panic attacks, became estranged from family members.

  Yet, as far as the growing group of Derek’s victims could ascertain, he had never been charged for a crime against any of the women he’d scammed, only for defrauding businesses. Derek seems to have counted on the fact that credit card abuse is often not taken all that seriously by law enforcement when the victim and the perpetrator know each other. Even in instances where the police pursued Derek, he’d typically serve a short sentence. Or he’d just skip town—like he did in November 2014, after he was caught racking up thousands of dollars in fraudulent charges at luxury hotels. When he was finally captured and brought back to Minnesota, prosecutors lobbied to escalate the charges and hold him on $100,000 bail.

  “That’s a little harsh, don’t you think?” the judge asked.

  “Judge, if I may,” the assistant county attorney replied, “the defendant is a con man. He conned a number of victims within the state of Minnesota. He’s been all over the world pretending to be people h
e’s not, and taking money from people who don’t have money to spare.”

  The judge denied the motion. About six months later, Derek was released. Shortly afterward—and despite the fact that his parole mandated that he stay in Minnesota—he was sitting on a beach in Hawaii with another woman who thought she’d met the perfect man.

  FOR YEARS, DEREK HAD EVADED PUNISHMENT BY MOVING around; local police had limited ability to chase him across state lines. But the women he’d victimized had no jurisdictional limitations. They began tracking his progress across the country, using social media to share updates and information—and to warn others.

  Missi reached out to her former coworker at the airline, Vicki, who was Derek’s cousin-in-law—that part of his story, at least, wasn’t a total lie. After Missi explained what Derek had done, Vicki agreed to pass on any information she learned. Through a family member, Vicki heard that Derek had left Minnesota and was hiding out with his mother in Sedona, Arizona—where, lo and behold, he had an outstanding warrant for an old DUI. Urged on by Missi, Vicki alerted the local police, who picked him up in early September 2016 and held him in the county jail for a few days. It wasn’t much, but the women took satisfaction in seeing him face at least some consequences.

  Still, Derek had a remarkable ability to keep perpetrating the same scam. After his release for the DUI, he began dating a new woman, posing as Navy SEAL Richard Peterson. She soon discovered that he had stolen and pawned some of her jewelry. He was arrested, pleaded no contest, and was taken back to jail, but was bailed out and never showed up for his sentencing. By January 2017, he’d popped up in Las Vegas, where he met another woman and joined a country club, racking up charges before skipping town in April.