Unspeakable Acts

by Sarah Weinman

  When new victims reached out to Cindi Pardini, she’d add them to the group text so they could share their stories with the other women. It was frustrating to find out about Derek’s latest escapades only after the damage had been done. His victims watched and waited, hoping he’d soon make a mistake that would take him out of action for good.

  CONSUME ENOUGH MEDIA ABOUT SCAM ARTISTS AND, strangely enough, you, too, might find yourself wanting to date one. In The Big Con, perhaps the seminal book on American con men, David Maurer calls them “the aristocrats of crime.” The writer and critic Luc Sante once wrote that “the best possess a combination of superior intelligence, broad general knowledge, acting ability, resourcefulness, physical vigor, and improvisational skills that would have propelled them to the top of any profession.” On film, they’re played with a spring in their step and a glint in their eye: Think Paul Newman in The Sting, Leonardo DiCaprio in Catch Me If You Can. The con man looks good in a suit and is in on the joke. (“Humor is never very far from the heart of the con,” wrote Sante.) And who doesn’t want to be in on the joke? Our appetite for stories about cons is, in part, a way of reassuring ourselves that we’d never be so foolish as to be taken. It’s in our own self-interest to dismiss the victim of a con as greedy (you can’t cheat an honest man, as the adage goes) or just plain dumb: if being scammed is somehow their fault, that means it couldn’t happen to us.

  One excellent way to dispel yourself of any con man fantasies, however, is to spend some time with the people they’ve hurt. Derek’s victims are negotiating ruined credit scores and calls from collection agencies. Several were so flattened by the experience, they’ve had old medical problems flare up or have struggled to go back to work.

  “You just lose days,” Linda told me. She’d plastered her wall with sticky notes mapping out Derek’s crimes: “That’s what I was doing instead of looking for a job; instead of taking care of the motorcycle, the bank accounts, the bad checks. Instead of moving on with my life; instead of living.” Saddled with the rent for a house she couldn’t afford, she’d scraped together enough to pay for all but the very last month; now she has an eviction on her record. She and her son crashed on friends’ couches while she found a place to live, and, she told me, her ex-husband began campaigning for full custody of their son.

  Even more damaging than the financial ramifications was the damage to their fundamental faith in the world, that bedrock sense that things are what they seem. “My mind was all over the place—Am I being taken or am I being overly suspicious?” Derek’s Las Vegas victim, Kelly, recalls. “It’s so far-fetched—you’re just like, there’s no way. He gets into your life, your family’s life, your finances. I didn’t know that people like him existed.” The damage rippled outward, affecting the women’s families and friends as well: “It just about killed my mother,” Linda said. “He would sit and talk with her for hours. She’s like, ‘Was all of it a lie?’”

  Many of the women I spoke with felt compelled to make the same point: that this wasn’t just a dating scam story. They reminded me that Derek had scammed hospitals and insurance companies long before he began meeting women on dating sites, and that he’d conned many people beyond just fortysomething divorcées. He won over their parents, friends, and coworkers; he convinced hotel clerks and Mercedes salesmen and bankers and real estate agents and doctors. He was able to finagle country club memberships and hospital admissions. He met actual navy veterans, who took him at his word.

  Derek’s victims kept underlining this point, I think, because they understood that crimes against women, particularly ones that happen in a domestic context, are often discounted. “It’s a he-said, she-said domestic fight” to the police, Linda said. “They lump it right in with divorce and family law.” She said an officer told her, “Well, it’s not like anyone got hurt; we have higher priorities.” They knew that some people hear dating scam and translate that to pathetic/desperate woman.

  The implication is that these women should’ve known better, or perhaps that they’re complicit in their own victimization. If a woman reports her ex for stealing from her, who’s to say she’s not just brokenhearted and vindictive? Derek himself was happy to exploit such stereotypes; when his victims uncovered his real identity, he’d sometimes threaten to expose them as bad mothers or alcoholics, crazy women who couldn’t be trusted.

  Even Derek’s victims, who understand better than anyone else how these things work, repeatedly questioned one another’s choices when speaking with me: How did she let it go on that long? Why did she let him move in when she barely knew him? How did she not see through this or that obvious lie? It’s a testament to the persistent belief that cons always happen to someone else that women who had fallen for Derek Alldred’s schemes heard other victims’ very similar stories and thought, I never would have fallen for that.

  For Missi and Linda, their crossed paths have resulted in the peculiar sort of friendship that can arise from shared trauma. Derek entwined their lives without their consent, taking Missi out on the boat he’d bought with Linda’s money; showing Missi photos of Linda’s son, his “nephew.” Initially, there was some slight underlying tension between the two women due to the fact that Derek hadn’t stolen any money from Missi, while he’d drained more than $200,000 from Linda’s retirement account. Joy had floated the theory that Missi was the one Derek “really” cared for, an idea that Linda dismissed out of hand: “That man is not capable of love.”

  On a warm day last spring, I followed Linda over to Missi’s house, in the suburbs of St. Paul. We talked about Derek for four hours, dissecting his actions and puzzling over his motivations. Late in the evening, Linda told another wild part of the saga, involving a half-million-dollar house Derek was going to buy for them before the escrow money mysteriously went missing.

  “You listen to Linda, and you’re like, ‘How did you take that at face value?’” Missi said.

  “I had my other stuff going on,” Linda said, a bit testily. “He could’ve told me the sky was purple, and I would’ve been like, ‘Hmm, okay.’ I had irons in every fire at that point.”

  “And I didn’t, so I would call him out on things,” Missi said. She suddenly sounded very sad. “But I kept letting him come back.”

  ON MAY 17, 2017, RICHIE TAILOR LEFT THE TOWN HOUSE he shared with his new girlfriend, Dorie, to have dinner with his brother and sister-in-law. Dorie was idly scanning through pictures on the iPad Richie had left behind when she saw one that brought her up short. It was a screenshot of an Instagram post showing a man in a hospital bed. “A BIG THANK-YOU for everyone’s prayers and support . . . Should be out of the hospital Monday,” the caption read. The name on the account was “Derek M. Allred.” “I was like, ‘Heck, that’s Richie,’” Dorie told me. When she googled “Derek Allred” (an alternative spelling he sometimes used), she found the trove of news stories and mug shots. Suddenly, all those fraudulent charges that kept cropping up on her credit cards made sense.

  Dorie printed out the articles and brought them to the police department in The Colony, the small town outside Dallas where she lived. “I thank God to this day that it was a female officer that took my statement,” she said. “She took it seriously.” While Dorie waited to hear if the police came up with any leads, she scoured the internet for information about Derek. Like so many of the other victims, she stumbled on Cindi Pardini. The two women talked on the phone. “I heard about all the havoc he left behind,” Dorie told me. “I vowed that there was no way there’d be another victim after me.”

  Dorie made sure to show the Colony detectives pictures of Derek in his navy uniform, and the detectives contacted the Naval Criminal Investigative Service. Under the Stolen Valor Act of 2013, seeking profit by using phony military honors is a federal crime—which meant that NCIS could launch a multistate investigation.

  After Dorie caught on to him, Derek began staying with his other girlfriend, Tracie Cunningham. But it didn’t take long for Tracie, who works at a post-
acute rehab facility, to get sick of having him around all day. He was, she’d decided, entirely too whiny, constantly insisting that she drive him to the hospital for some emergency or another. “There are a lot of men out there who will get a little headache, and they think they have a massive tumor, that they’re dying,” she told me. “It’s a man thing. He had some of that. Real dramatic.”

  Just after Memorial Day, Tracie finally dumped him. A few hours later, while she was at work, she got a call from the NCIS agent, who told her that she’d been dating a con man. Derek hadn’t stolen anything from Tracie as far as she could tell (“except time and a little dignity”), but when she heard about the other victims, she immediately agreed to help NCIS capture him.

  At the agent’s urging, Tracie sent Derek a text, taking back the breakup—“I’m sorry, baby, I was hormonal!”—and made plans to give him a ride home after his next medical appointment. When Derek was ready to be picked up, Tracie alerted the NCIS officer and his team. “They hightail it over there, and I’m on my way, too, because I’m not missing this,” Tracie told me. She pulled up to the patient loading area. Through the hospital’s sliding glass doors, she spied Derek in handcuffs, flanked by two agents. “I turn on my hazards, pop out with my cellphone, start snapping pictures,” Tracie said. “The NCIS agent is like, ‘No!’ but I’m like, ‘Oh yeah, I need pictures of this. This is for justice for other people.’”

  WITH DEREK FINALLY IN CUSTODY, HIS VICTIMS CELEBRATED, texting one another grim fantasies about the future that awaited him in prison. NCIS agents interviewed victims around the country, whose stories bolstered the case that Derek was a habitual offender.

  A few days before Christmas, Derek pleaded guilty to two counts of identity theft and one count of mail fraud, charges with a combined maximum penalty of 24 years in prison. As of press time, his sentencing hearing hadn’t yet been scheduled. His victims are hoping he’ll serve long enough that he’ll come out an old man, less able to flirt his way into women’s bank accounts.

  In the meantime, they continue the slow work of putting their lives back together. Missi has finally gotten to the point where she can make jokes about Derek with her daughters. Linda has started tentatively dating again, after more than a year. The other day, when she was out to dinner with a guy, she peeked in his wallet, just to make sure the name he told her matched the name on his ID.

  Dorie, Derek’s last victim—for now, at least—recently submitted the police report and a file of articles about Alldred to her bank and credit card companies to clean up the financial mess he’d made. Citibank promptly reversed the $7,000 in fraudulent charges that he’d racked up on one of her cards, but Chase has refused to credit her for the $10,000 he spent on another. “They refused to refund me,” she told me, “because they said I knew the guy.” (When asked for comment, Chase said that Dorie had authorized Derek’s use of the card, and that she’d told a fraud supervisor that many of the transactions were valid.)

  THIS PAST SUMMER, I MADE AN APPOINTMENT FOR A video visit with Derek at the Denton County Jail, in Texas. I had so many lingering questions: Who was on the other side of the line when Derek had those hourlong conversations with his “daughter” or his “admiral”? How had he finagled his university email address and ID card? Did he have a secret stash of money somewhere? And then there was the question I imagined was unanswerable, but that I needed to ask anyway: What did it feel like to be so skilled at faking love?

  I sat in the visitation room, doodling in my notebook as the appointed time came and went. I’d resigned myself to the idea that nothing was going to happen when the screen suddenly illuminated, and I saw Derek Alldred’s angular face and blunt chin, familiar from all those mug shots. He was in an orange jumpsuit, and the camera caught him at an awkward overhead angle, like an unflattering selfie. I told him I was a journalist, and he seemed unfazed. “I was going to decline the visit, but the guard said, ‘Are you sure? It’s a pretty girl,’” he said, flashing me a smile. By the end of our conversation, Derek said he wanted to tell his side of the story to me and only me, and promised we would talk again soon. I hung up the phone feeling a particular kind of journalistic high, an I-got-my-story cockiness.

  Over the next few months, I spoke with Derek several times. He was never quite ready to reveal anything of substance in the half-hour blocks of time that the prison video-phone system allotted us. He wanted to wait until a certain court date had passed, or he needed to consult his lawyer. “Two sides to every story,” he kept telling me. “Two sides.” He professed to want to be fully forthcoming with me, but our calls always seemed to get cut off at crucial moments; sometimes, he just never answered. At first, I chalked our communication difficulties up to the institutional roadblocks of prison communication, but they kept piling up.

  It took me much longer than I’d like to admit to realize what I had felt that first day after I left the Denton County Jail and drove too fast past the hayfields of North Texas, singing along to Merle Haggard: that my future was sunny and full of promise, because I had met a man who was going to give me everything I wanted.

  Originally published in the Atlantic, April 2018; Derek Alldred was given a 24-year prison sentence in August 2018.

  Part II

  Where Crime Meets Culture

  Out Came the Girls

  By Alex Mar

  Here is an image, picked from the notebooks of an eleven-year-old girl in a suburb of Milwaukee, Wisconsin: a head portrait, in pencil, of a man in a dark suit and tie. His long neck is white, and so is his face—bald and whited out, with hollows where his eyes should be.

  Here is another: an androgynous kid (a girl, like the artist?) in a sweatshirt and flared jeans leaping across the page. She has huge, glassy black eyes and dark, stringy hair; she reaches out with one hand and brandishes a dagger in the other. Filling the page around her, tiny rainbows and clouds and stars and hearts—all the signatures of the little girl the artist recently was—burst in a fireworks display.

  There are cryptic messages, too: a page covered in “Xs”; another inscribed HE STILL SEES YOU. These notebooks are charged with the childlike paranoia of sleepovers after bingeing on horror movies, of Ouija boards and light as a feather, stiff as a board . . .

  What is occult is synonymous with what is hidden, orphic, veiled—but girls are familiar with that realm. We have the instinct. Girls create their own occult language; it may be one of the first signs of adolescence. This is a language of fantasy, of the desire for things we can’t yet have (we’re too young), of forces we can’t control (loneliness, an unrequited crush, the actions of our family). This invention of a private language, both visual and verbal, shared with only a chosen few, gives shape to our first allegiances; it grants entry into a universe with its own rationale—the warped rationale of fairy tales. Its rules do not bleed over into the realm of the mundane, of parents and teachers and adult consequences.

  But in May 2014, the occult universe of two young girls did spill over into the real. And within days of her twelfth birthday, all of Morgan Geyser’s drawings and scribblings—evidence of the world she had built with her new best friend—were confiscated. More than three years later, they are counted among the state’s exhibits in a case of first-degree intentional homicide.

  ON A FRIDAY NIGHT IN LATE SPRING 2014, IN THE SMALL, drab city of Waukesha, Wisconsin, a trio of sixth-grade girls gets together to celebrate Morgan’s birthday. They skate for hours under the disco lights at the roller rink: tame, mousy-haired Bella Leutner; Anissa Weier, with her shaggy brown mop top; and Morgan, the “best friend” they have in common, with her moon of a face, big glasses, and long blond hair. They are three not-so-popular girls at Horning Middle School, a little more childish than the others, a little more obsessed with fantasy and video games and making up scary stories. Morgan casts herself as a creative weirdo, and she relates to her new friend Anissa on this level, through science fiction—Anissa, who has almost no other friends and who moved down the block
after her parents’ recent divorce. When they get back to the birthday girl’s house, they greet the cats, play games on their tablets, then head to Morgan’s bedroom, where they finally fall asleep, all three together in a puppy pile in the twin-size loft bed.

  In the morning, the girls make a game out of hurling clumps of Silly Putty up at the ceiling. They role-play for a while—as the android from Star Trek and a troll and a princess—then eat a breakfast of donuts and strawberries. Morgan gets her mother’s permission to walk to the small park nearby.

  As they head to the playground, Bella in the lead, Morgan lifts her plaid jacket to show Anissa what she has tucked into her waistband: a steak knife from the kitchen. Anissa is not surprised; they have talked about this moment for months.

  After some time on the swings, Anissa suggests they play hide-and-seek in the suburban woods at the park’s edge. There, just a few feet beyond the tree line, Morgan, on Anissa’s cue, stabs Bella in the chest.

  Then she stabs her again and again and again—in her arms, in her leg, near her heart. By the time Morgan stops, she has stabbed her 19 times.

  Bella, screaming, rises up—but she can’t walk straight. Anissa braces her by the arm (both of them are small), and she and Morgan lead her deeper into the trees, farther away from the trail. They order Bella to lie down on the ground; they claim they will go get help. Lying on the dirt and leaves, the back of her shirt growing damp with blood, slowly bleeding out in the woods, Bella is left to die.

  About five hours later and a few miles away, while resting in the grass alongside Interstate 94, Morgan and Anissa are picked up by a pair of sheriff’s deputies. The deputies approach them carefully, aware that they are possible suspects in a stabbing but confused by their age. One of the men notices blood on Morgan’s clothes as he handcuffs her. When he asks if she’s been injured, she says no.