‘I went into his office and found his lockbox in the closet. And then I found a key, which was just laying in the drawer, and I opened it up. And inside the lockbox, I found pictures of him with a baby. And this was not my baby.’
This was the moment Donna Andersen realised her husband not only had a second family, but a second life. Many other lives, it turned out. Because, she had unknowingly married a conman – someone she describes as a sociopath – who had defrauded hundreds of thousands of dollars from various women over the course of his life.
For Donna, he took a near £200,000 from her – but more than just financially, he stripped her of everything she knew about herself and the life she had spent years building. It’s the type of terrifying story we were enthralled with earlier this year with the release of Netflix’s Dirty John. Why? Because not only are UK women obsessed with true crime documentaries, but we seem to be deeply invested in knowing how to spot abusive men and ergo, judging what we would do were we met with the same red flags.
With season two just announced - coming in early 2020 - we will no doubt be consumed by intrigue once more as the true crime series is set to introduce us to an entirely different case of marriage fraud. But to hear the story of a woman in the same situation first-hand, that is an entirely more chilling experience.
‘I met James online back in 1996,’ she tells me on the phone from her home in Atlantic City, New Jersey. ‘This was before there were real dating sites, so he had posted an advert on AOL Romance. It was pretty appealing, he seemed like a prosperous businessman who was well-connected in building Atlantic City. He said he was a widower - but had finished grieving - and that he served in the military, he was a good writer… so I responded.’
After several weeks of writing back and forth, Donna met James in their local café. And while ‘he talked a good game’, she wasn’t initially buying it – until he knew the exact right thing to say to hook her in.
‘He said “I guess I'm talking myself out of this aren’t ?” and I looked at him and said “why? Do you think we have a chance?”. He got very quiet and said “Well yes, I do.” And in my experience, because I'd been single for a long time, men don't say things like that. They're usually kind of cagey and don't come out and say that they're interested. So I decided to see him again. And that's how it started.’
By started, Donna means it was the beginning of their whirlwind romance. He emailed her constantly, sent faxes and called her all the time. At the time, she was flattered by the constant attention.
‘I now know that that's considered to be love bombing,’ she says, ‘but back then I just thought he was head over heels in love with me. From the very beginning he was talking about how I was the woman that he'd been waiting for all his life.’
Swept of her feet, Donna describes James as a ‘human dynamo’ with an energy about him that excited everyone in his presence. He was charismatic, intriguing and always knew the right thing to say. He was, she thought, the reason she had been single for so long – so that she would be available when her Prince Charming came along.
Before she knew it, he had proposed. But that was the beginning of the end, because it was only after she said yes that he began asking her for money.
‘At first he asked me to invest in his businesses,’ she said. ‘He didn't present it as if he were asking something of me, he presented it as a business opportunity. He said that he was positive the businesses would do really well, that he was looking out for me, and he wanted me to invest so it would be part of my portfolio, I would earn money.
‘Since we were planning to marry and build a life together, I agreed to give him some money and then from there, it was just constant,’ she continues. ‘There was always something I needed to pay for or put on my credit cards – for the “businesses”. We ended up going to Australia to get married, and he said “well, we'll put it on your credit cards and as soon as I get the funding from the business, I'll pay you back”. But he never got the funding for his businesses. So essentially, he just slowly started using me for money and for credit.’
This happened slowly, insidiously, over the course of two years, with Donna unaware of how he was financially manipulating her until she had invested almost all the money she had access to in his ‘businesses’. And yet, even then as she was stripped penniless with a husband who had a penchant for false promises, she questioned, ‘what kind of wife leaves her husband because the business plans aren't working out?’
It wasn’t until she came face to face with evidence she couldn’t deny that she finally realised, she had to leave him. It was one fateful day when was driving him to the airport. They were fighting because she wanted to sell some rings he had kept hidden away – at this point, Donna says, she was so broke she desperately needed the money for food. In the heat of the argument, he let slip that the rings were in a lockbox in his office.
After dropping him off, Donna drove back to his office and found the lockbox in a closet. That’s when she opened it up to find a picture of him holding a baby that wasn’t hers. ‘I found a birth certificate that indicated he was the father of the child that had been conceived and born during our marriage,’ she tells me. ‘I also found other papers showing that he was getting money from other women as well.
‘I started going through all his papers,’ she continues. ‘I found papers indicating that he had probably been involved with maybe 20 or 30 other women before and during our marriage. And a lot of these women were asking for their money back. I was just floored.’
After contacting one of the women listed in the papers, Donna found out said woman had bought him a computer. ‘I called her up and I said, “this is Donna Andersen, James Montgomery's wife, and I'd like to suggest that you don't give him any more money. And she said to me, “it's too late. I already gave him $92,000”’
Donna drove straight to their home, packed it up and left, but not before she left him the picture of his child with a note saying ‘we have a problem, I’m out of here.’
‘After I left him, I later learned he married the mother of the child, which turned out to be the second time he committed bigamy. I didn't know that this type of person even existed. He looks like a businessman. He presents himself very well. He doted on me the whole time, he kept telling me how much he loves me and how we're in this together and you know, just get over the rough patch and everything will be wonderful. We'll be living in the lap of luxury. And it was all a scam.’
Donna says she was relieved that she didn’t have to feel guilty for leaving once she had proof of all of his wrongdoings.
‘I never saw him again,’ she says. ‘Not at the divorce hearings, not during the court case about all the money he had stolen. The judge agreed he owed me money and punitive damages because he’d defrauded me, but all I got back from him was $517.’
He faced accountability in other ways though, namely, from Donna’s expose of him and her continued commitment to her business, Love Fraud, which aims to help women understand the signs of abusive men. She says she’s helped more than 10,000 people involved with con artists.
And eventually, she would get her own personal revenge finding love with a new man who helped her regain trust in marriage again. Now, if you google ‘James Montgomery, Australia’ – you won’t find an AOL Romance ad, you’ll find articles exposing his cons. And all because of Donna.
‘It was a terrible experience,’ she says, ‘but it did give me a mission in life to protect other women from monsters like him.’
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