uglyreal

Justin Mitchell and/or Justin McClain is Hannah Bagwell

Please save yourself! Don’t become a victim like

Natalie

• All names are changed to protect the innocent, broken-hearted (when it happened), mad-as-hell-and-rightly-so (to this day) victims.
• All of the information I am posting has been taken from contemporaneous text messages, Facebook messages, and emails, as well as from recent conversations (some taped) I’ve had with the victims to jog my memory, as they lived it so they remember it better than they would like. All that to say: everything I’m writing can be supported by a document or a person.

My brave fellow fishermen and fisherwomen,

You have waited for this day for a long time. You have been patient, allowing me to cast my net with these blog posts in hopes that one day, the right person would find my words.

You have drug your poles alongside me, and you have done so bewildered. Yet, you have been forced to trudge behind me, waiting patiently for me to reveal the biggest truth of who has made us all disgusted and captivated by pretending to be, first, Justin Mitchell, and then Justin McClain.

I am going to back up before I give you the latest news on this whale of a tale because I want to be as clear and concise as I possibly can be.

This is important.

I want every single person reading this to understand exactly how the other victims and I put all the puzzle pieces together to catch this particular catfish in the river of a million catfish.

I want you to read in their own words how they called her out by name and what happened when they did.

I don’t want there to be a single doubt left, if there ever was one, in anyone’s mind that I have the right person.

You will still have questions, but hopefully, fewer than you had before.

But sadly, you will still be left with the biggest question of all……..the why.

I hate not being able to include that massive piece of this whopping masquerade, but I can’t tell you what I don’t know.

Here is what I do:

1. In February of 2018, a family member of mine asked me to look into a guy named Justin Mitchell. She was concerned because another family member, Natalie, had met him online and called him her boyfriend. There was about a 10-year age difference between the two, as Justin told Natalie he was 28. This was concerning, so my family member wanted me to make sure Justin wasn’t a serial killer. So, I did.
2. I got in touch with Natalie, and I asked her to tell me everything she knew about him. This is what she said:
   1. They met on the dating app, Tinder.
   1. He grew up in New Albany, MS, but he now lived in Hattiesburg, MS.
   1. He is a grant writer and a program director on many of the programs that his grant has funded.
   1. His biggest grant is through Child Protective Services, and his grant funds treatment for addicted mothers and fathers.
   1. The treatment is court-ordered, so he testifies on their progress and pulls data on their progress so he can refund the grants.
   1. His whole name is Justin Andrew Mitchell.
   1. She was pretty sure he had been arrested before for fighting. She was unsure where the fight took place, but he told her he got in a fight with a man for “messing with someone he cared about, and he hurt him pretty bad.”
   1. He had a biological daughter named Kayleigh, and he was going through the process of adopting another girl named Kali at the time. (Why name your two fake kids basically the same name??? I’m still so bugged at her lack of creativity in this area. Gah.)
   1. His best friend overdosed, and the child’s mother was on drugs, so he took her in out of the goodness of his 28 year-old heart. He told her he wanted to adopt more.
   1. He had a Facebook page that was created in 2006, but he made it private (she thought) because his baby mama was crazy. She was “wrong,” and he corrected her in the text you will read below. Therefore, Natalie was not his friend on Facebook. The profile picture was of a guy lying on a beach, but you could not see a face.
   1. Both of his parents were dead. His mother passed away from cancer in 2017. His dad was abusive and passed away when he was 18.
   1. He sent Natalie pictures of his two children and his dog. There were plenty of photos sent of him with his “biological daughter,” but none of him with the adopted daughter. They were always just of her. There were also no pictures of him or either “daughter” with the dog.
   1. He always Snapchatted with her and sent her videos.
   1. He had a lot of money. He drove a G-Wagon, and he sent her pictures of things he got her for Valentine’s Day.
   1. He lived in an apartment in Hattiesburg at the moment because he was building a house. He sent her pictures of the house he was building.
   1. He said he went to Ole Miss, but he said he transferred there. She believed he transferred from Mississippi State. He told her she played baseball at one or both of those colleges.
   1. He said he taught a math class at State or Ole Miss for a semester. That would have put him attending one of those colleges in the year 2000 at the very least.
   1. He told her he turned 28 in January, and she believed he said his birthday was January 4. That would have put his birth year in 1989, if my math is correct.
   1. He mentioned a friend named Mario.
   1. She paid $1.00 to run the phone number he was using on Whitepages, and it came up with a New Albany number and a name: Hannah Bagwell.
   1. I searched the name, and I found a Hannah Bagwell who currently lived in Hattiesburg.
   1. I searched the photos she sent me of the house he was building, and I found it in a realty listing because the house was for sale. I used land records to search the address of the house, and I found the names of the owners, and it was not Justin Mitchell.
   1. I searched high and low for a Justin Andrew Mitchell whose age and residences matched the information Justin fed Natalie, and though I found a Justin Mitchell who lived in Hattiesburg, he was a different age (and I am now Facebook friends with him. He’s a big shot journalist and newspaper reporter. He’s amazing.) I also found a Justin Mitchell from New Albany, but again, the birthdates, cities, and phone number did not match.
3. After Natalie and I swapped information, she confronted “Justin” with her suspicions, and she got a long reply.
   1. It read: “This is the last and VERY last time that I will give into this. My Facebook is private. And I have never once said that it was due to my baby mama. However, we are friends on Facebook and we always will be because that’s my one chain of communication with her if something happens with our daughter. I’ve said my Facebook is private because I taught college courses and students would add me. You will also want to make your social media private when you’re applying for important jobs when that time comes. And you’re right, you did find pictures of my house because the contractor I’m using asked for pictures of what exactly I want and that’s a home I viewed prior to deciding to buy and I liked those rooms. Where’s the crime? I never once implied those were MY home. I said those rooms will be the first finished rooms in MY home because they’re almost complete. Why would you find an address of mine? I live in an apartment off of Hwy 49 in Hattiesburg. Before that, I lived in an apartment downtown prior to getting Kali. And then I lived in New Albany before that on land that my family owns. The hotel was in fact in my name and I paid for it with my MasterCard. Maybe you could call again. However, I’m doubting they can give you that kind of information. Also, I didn’t want to take interest into you. In fact, I was simply on Tinder to mess around because I was in a dark place and I didn’t want to lose anyone else in my life so the best way to do that is to go into it with no emotions. That was my plan and then I started to get to know you. I do send you videos of me, my daughter, and my dog. Sometimes on Snapchat when I have it on my phone. See, I’m 28 and sometimes social media gets exhausting when you’re working 75 hours a week job, have two kids, have a house and an apartment to maintain, and allll of these other things that a grown ass man without help of a mother to his children has to do. Also, I do monitor my statistics of my databases that I use through Sharepoint and Excel and they take up an amble amount of space (you can look into those since they’re unfamiliar to you, also you’ll see an attachment regarding the space I have left on my phone since I currently have those two apps downloaded.) I download them on my personal phone because that allows me to turn my work phone off so I can spend quality time with my daughters and talk to you with no distractions without my phone constantly ringing. The fact that you’re going over this again is simply ridiculous and at this point, and at this time, I’m not sure if this is a relationship that I want to continue. This bullshit of “you’re safe with me’ is obviously false because I’m not sure how I can be safe with you and you be doubting my actual existence. I’m a grown ass man. I get validating my woman’s feelings. And I do that when they’re logical feelings as I have done with you many times. But this isn’t logical to me.”

(WHAT MAN IN THE STRATOSPHERE WRITES A MESSAGE THIS LONG, THIS WORDY, WITH COMMAS?!?! No offense to my male readers, but I would LOVE to know if any of you out there has ever written anything semi-close to this book of encyclopedias in a text message!)

• Natalie sent off a reply defending her position, and the next update I got was that “Justin” said he wasn’t sure he wanted to be in the relationship anymore and Natalie stopped texting him. Natalie also told me that he would “get mad over things that guys get mad about when they have girlfriends and I just don’t feel like dealing with it….he tried to tell me I needed to drop my best friend because we went to a guys house last night that is friends with her boyfriend….who we were with…and he threw a whole fit” ….which is a trend, as you will see later. Possessive, controlling, demanding, gaslighty, and behaving like a stalker are the common denominators.
• This did not last long, as Natalie continued to communicate with Justin, and she still planned to meet him for lunch in Starkville that weekend. Sadly, Justin called off the “date” because he told her he was in a motorcycle wreck and was hurt badly. He even sent her photos of his wounds.
• In the meantime, I went to work on figuring out who the guy in the pictures was. It took a minute, but I was able to take tiny details out of his pictures, like logos on a shirt telling me where someone worked, to figure it out. His name is Scottie Spain. (If you have read my second blog post, you know that Scottie and I are in constant contact, and he gave me permission to use his real name. He’s so sick of his stolen likeness being used to hurt and deceive others.)
• When I showed Natalie what I discovered, she was livid. She and I both believed that Scottie was the catfisher. We could not have been more wrong.
• She immediately confronted him via Twitter, and his response was incredulous. He had no idea who she was or what was happening, but he wanted to know everything. He gave Natalie his Instagram and Snapchat handles, and he maintained that he had no reason to be anyone else. He was 20 years old, had no kids, and was on all of the socials as himself. He was furious that someone was impersonating him, and he asked Natalie to ask me to keep digging to find the real person behind the catfish. So, I did.
• Natalie sent Scottie the number she had for Justin in his phone, and he plugged it into his own. It came up. It was stored as Haley Cook (Snapchat), and he sent her a screenshot of it and said, “I knew this chick was fake!”
• A girl who went by the name of Haley Cook added him on Snapchat and sent him risqué photos approximately a year before Natalie was catfished. At that time, Scottie’s older sister was chatting with a guy online named Justin Mitchell. Justin sent his sister chocolates, food from local restaurants, and even paid for new tires for her car. Obviously, Justin was using a different person’s photographs to catfish Scottie’s sister, but that fake relationship presented Justin with an opportunity to impersonate a female to get plenty of photos of Scottie off Snapchat so that she could store and use them in the future. It didn’t take a genius to figure out that whoever was behind the Justin Mitchell persona was also behind a fake female named Haley Cook.
• Scottie told Natalie that he called Haley out on being fake, and he never got a reply, and then he couldn’t find any of “Haley’s” accounts. Therefore, she either deleted them or blocked him.
• In the meantime, I went through all of Scottie’s Facebook information. I also went through his mother’s Facebook. I found several photographs from both pages that had been snatched and sent to Natalie, including photos from that terrible motorcycle accident that supposedly happened to Justin. Instead, it happened to Scottie the year before.
• Natalie confessed to me that she had never actually Facetimed with Justin, nor had she talked to him on the phone. She HAD Snapchatted with him, though, and she was convinced that the way that went, it could not be faked. THIS is also a pattern, as you will see later. (Spoiler alert: they CAN be faked.)
• I was not completely shocked to find out that Scottie was Facebook friends with a girl named Hannah Bagwell. He had no clue who she was, but somehow, she ended up on his Facebook friends list. I have a boatload of those. So do you. It made me a bit skeptical, wondering if they actually knew each other and were somehow in on this farce together. But Scottie asked me to figure out who was using his photos to scam people, so I put any doubt aside. And y’all know what I did next. I hopped on her Facebook page.  
• At the time, except for Scottie, Natalie, and I, no one in the whole wide world knew that we were attempting to crack open the case of Fake Justin Andrew Mitchell. Hannah’s Facebook account was not completely locked down, so I could see photos and some posts. One was her mother’s obituary. Exactly like Justin’s mother, hers died in November of 2017. Hannah had a dog, a Great Dane, named Sandy. Natalie confirmed that she was sent pictures of Sandy often, but Justin was never in those photos. I found Hannah’s Youtube channel that had videos of Sandy on it. Some of those videos had been sent to Natalie, as had photographs that were taken in the same house as the videos that Hannah Bagwell had uploaded to Youtube. She recognized things like the plastic child gate in the kitchen to keep Sandy in or out of certain places. Those were photos that “Justin” sent to Natalie from Hannah’s house real-time.
• Hannah’s Facebook page showed that she graduated from Ole Miss in 2013, that she started her Master’s program at Southern in 2015, and in August of 2017, she began a new job at Mississippi Department of Child Protection Services as an Area Social Work Supervisor in Columbia, Mississippi, where Scottie was living at the time. Her profile showed that she was from Myrtle, Mississippi, which is 8 miles northwest of New Albany. She joined Facebook in December of 2006. She was 25 at the time we were sleuthing Justin Mitchell.
• Upon doing some more digging, I found that a girl named Haley Cook existed, and she had addresses in New Albany and Myrtle, Mississippi. My research showed that she was 20. If back then I discovered that they were related or knew each other, I don’t recall, but at the very least, it made sense that Hannah knew a girl named Haley Cook and used that name to catfish Scottie on Snapchat. The only way it could have been the real Haley Cook is if she and Hannah, 5 years apart and living in two different cities that were 4 hours away from each other, shared the same phone number. I’ll go out on a limb and say that’s not just improbable, but impossible.
• if I remember correctly, Scottie defriended Hannah on Facebook, and shortly after, the Justin profile disappeared on Snapchat. It’s more than clear that Hannah was getting suspicious that Natalie could be getting close, so she started doing damage control. (Actually, I had forgotten one little piece of important information that Natalie reminded me of today. You will see this at the very end. She wasn’t just suspicious. Without understanding the impact or magnitude, Natalie told her we were on to her.) Luckily, I had screenshots of EVERYTHING I had discovered.
• Natalie told me that Justin had sent her flowers, not once but twice. So, I asked her if there was any way that she could contact the flower shop to see if they would send her any information, minus the credit card number, of the person who sent them. She did, and they obliged.
  • Name on Credit Card: Justin Mitchell
  • Credit Card Billing Address: Apartment Building in Hattiesburg, no apartment number
  • City, State, Postal Code: Hattiesburg, MS, Postal code of Myrtle, Mississippi (tiny detail, but I missed it. I was given that information this summer)
  • Phone number: the number that Natalie was texting Justin on, the number that Scottie had in his phone as Haley Cook, the number that came back on my background check as Hannah Bagwell
  • Name of caller: Justin Mitchell
  • Email address: justinamitchell2@hotmail.com
• I had some amazing software back then that a lot of lawyers have. It allows you to run background checks, similar to BeenVerified and the like, but it costs a lot more, and it is more accurate. It isn’t as good as what law enforcement uses, but it is head and shoulders above what the average citizen can subscribe to from the major ones most people use. The software allowed me to put in a street address, and it would pull up every person who was associated with that address. If you ever lived at a particular address and/or got a bill sent there, you were on that list. The address on the credit card was an apartment building, so as you can imagine, there were a zillion names to go through. No Justin Mitchell had ever been associated with that address, but a Hannah Bagwell had. It was listed as her current address.
• You may wonder how she paid a credit card bill for a card with a bogus zip code. Great question. I have come to believe (and I could be completely wrong, and there may be 7,000 creditors trying to get money from fake Justin Mitchell) that Justin’s card is simply a second user on Hannah’s card. For example, I could have a credit card that I opened using all of my information, and then I decide to allow my child to have one of his own to keep in his wallet, so I don’t have to share. If he makes a purchase, it still is charged to me.) Therefore, if charges are made on the fake Justin Mitchell card, it still is attached to Hannah’s, and the bill is automatically sent to Hannah, the main user. However, after the fact, I did contact as many Justin Mitchells as I could find and gave them a short synopsis of why they may want to check their credit just in case Hannah stole their identity. No stone unturned, y’all. None.)
• After getting the credit card information, I was convinced that I knew who was behind the Justin Mitchell fake profile, but because it was WAY early, I wasn’t completely letting Scottie off the proverbial hook, so I wrote my first blog post on this subject. If you read it or go back to read it now, you will see that. To see that post if you are unfamiliar, click here: https://uglyreal.com/2018/02/22/will-the-real-justin-mitchell-please-raise-her-hand/ But I should have never doubted that he had anything to do with it. I know that now. Scottie is a victim. Period. End of story. He got catfished by Hannah posing as Haley, and then, Hannah used everything she stole from Scottie AND Scottie’s sister AND Scottie’s mother, melded it with her own life experiences, and made a hybrid of Scottie and Hannah to be Justin.

But as I would come to find out, Scottie’s sister was not the first victim, and Natalie would not be the last.

I’ll leave you with this for now. As I was writing, I texted Natalie today and asked her if she remembered what happened when she called out Hannah by name, since apparently, she told me this story over the telephone and it was not documented back then. I remembered it happening, but I wanted it in her own words.

She said: So, at first I paid $1 to look up her phone and it gave me her name on the white pages and I asked if she knew who that was and she said no. Well, after that when you figured it all out I brought it up and then she tried to deny it at first and then basically said she wasn’t doing anything wrong just using a different name. I remember that part cause I was like UR A GIRL !!!!! lol

See Part 2.

If you or someone you know has been catfished by Justin Mitchell or Justin McClain, feel free to email me at mwstaceylaw@gmail.com