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Justin Mitchell and/or Justin McClain is Hannah Bagwell

Please save yourself! Don’t become a victim like

Carol-Ann

• 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.

Thanks, fellow fisherpeople, for following me to Part Two.

We left off at the point where I wrote a blog post on February 22, 2018, telling some but not all of Natalie’s story. Natalie was my relative, and she was the first victim I discovered who had been catfished by a person using the moniker, Justin Mitchell.

I wrote the blog post for one reason and one reason only.

I wanted to expose the Justin Mitchell name, hoping if anyone in the future encountered a person on a dating app with the same name using Scottie’s photos, they would know immediately that he was fake. I hoped it would save even one young woman from being duped, and though I knew it wouldn’t be read nationally or internationally, I tagged enough words and names in the post that it would at least emerge on Google if any of those words were searched.

And it worked.

At the time, I didn’t know the name would eventually be changed to Justin Mitch McClain, but when I found out, I wrote another post.

That worked, too.

But as for Justin Mitchell, enter Carol-Ann.

On July 11, 2018, someone commented on my blog. She said: This person has recently done the exact same thing to me. The story is word for word. I finally started putting it together but when I [found] this article it answered some of my questions. Is there any way I could get in contact with you and ask you a few things??

Because I was the blog owner, her comment showed up on my end with an email address attached, so even though I sent her my email address when I answered her comment, I decided to email her first.

A lot of what you are about to read is straight from texts, emails, and Facebook messages between Carol-Ann and me. No one can tell it better than the women this happened to, and they deserve to be able to do so.

So, Carol-Ann gets the floor.

[I’ve changed some spelling and punctuation for readability. Texts don’t always translate well, so I just tweaked them for y’all. I still have the originals if anyone doubts their voracity.}

She replied to my email: Thank you so much for contacting me. It’s been crazy to say the least. I matched with “Justin” on Tinder and we starting talking. He told me the exact same story about where he lived, where he was from, where he worked, about his mom dying of cancer in November, that he had a 14 year old daughter and was adopting another. Everything was the exact same. Things went on and he sent me pictures of the house “he built.” It was very suspicious and so I kept playing along. He asked me to go eat from his grandmas birthday at Harvey’s. Well the night before he bailed and said he had to [finish] a grant. Things really started [contradicting] themselves and that’s when I starting doing some research and found your article. 

Her email seemed to be completely sincere and legit, but I made her jump through a couple of hoops to verify she was who she said she was. She was willing. After all, she had just gone through a period of time thinking she was talking to Justin Mitchell and she wasn’t.

She got it, thankfully.

She told me almost right away that she knew who the person behind the profile was; she just wasn’t sure who the guy in the pictures was.

I honestly thought the hard part was figuring out who the real Justin Mitchell was, but Carol-Ann figured it out.

I asked who she thought it was and she wrote, “Hannah Bagwell is the girl. She is from Myrtle, I know her family and friends personally.”

I will tell y’all, I almost fell off my chair, though I’m not sure why. Maybe I just felt like I was a super-sleuth and now I felt a little pedestrian and amateur, but I decided not to beat myself up. Carol-Ann had a leg up. She was not from Myrtle, but she had contacts there. She knew the right people and the right questions to ask them.

I asked her how she figured it out.

She said: I ran the phone number on a reverse phone look up website. It came back to a Hannah. Me and a friend from New Albany started going through our Facebook friends to see if we had friends by the name of Hannah. She was actually friends with her on Facebook. Her cover photo was a picture of a dog and kitten that she had sent me via text 2 days before, which is how I confirmed it was her.

Yep. You read that right. Hannah sent a photo of her own dog and cat, which she made her cover photo, to Carol-Ann as Justin.

You can’t make it up.

Here is more in Carol-Ann’s own words:

• She deleted her real Facebook page after I called her out on it. I have screenshots of it though. I too was concerned about that after I read your article. I asked my friend who is a cop what to do and he told me I need to call and report her because she works with child protective services. I will call tomorrow, I promise.
• She kept sending pictures of the guy [Scottie] saying he just took these pictures and one day he had shaved his head and 3 days later he had a head full of hair. She sent pictures of a house (front, back, and side view) one of the pictures looked like a completely different house. They would call or FaceTime me, they always had an excuse. And yes, I called her out, I wish I wouldn’t have and kept it going until I got in touch with you.
• Carol Ann: She blocked me on the Justin Mitchell Facebook page

              Me: I couldn’t find the Justin Mitchell page today

              Carol Ann: She must have deleted it because I can’t find either and neither can my friend

• Me: Did you ever talk to “Justin” on the phone?

Carol-Ann: No. I tried to call and they wouldn’t answer but texted back immediately

• Me: What did she say when you called her out?

Carol-Ann: I told her if she was going to continue to catfish people to make sure when they                   looked up her number to make sure it didn’t come back to a females name

Me: Did she respond?

Carol-Ann: No.

• Me: Have you blocked Hannah?

Carol-Ann: I haven’t blocked her, but she has me and my best friend blocked. She did that before I even figured out who she was.

Carol-Ann is a smart girl. She was very matter-of-fact about what happened. She was mad and sad and frustrated and disgusted, but she wasn’t beaten down. She wasn’t debilitated. She was disappointed. She wanted to know who the real guy in the picture was, but I was protective of Scottie at the time, so I didn’t give her that information until I confirmed with him it was okay to do so. Eventually, she found out on her own, because she, too, is a super-sleuth.

She may be better than I.

Carol-Ann and I shared a deep concern about Hannah’s profession.

Both of us believed what she was doing could easily bleed over into her professional life and affect vulnerable children in some way. We weren’t sure how, but we knew enough to know that this type of manipulative, secretive behavior is bound to have caveats we can’t begin to imagine. Even if she used a name of a child she worked with at CPS to use in her “dollhouse,” naming a fake child, a fake pet, a fake family member: that is exploitation. It scared us, so we both reached out to law enforcement.

We both wish we had done more.

Our shared desire to untie this elaborate knot led us to discussions about Justin’s two fake children, one “he” said she biologically fathered at 14, Kayleigh; the other “he” was adopting because his best friend, Austin, died. Hannah named her Kali.

Natalie had told me the same story about the two fake kids, but Carol-Ann added the detail of the name of the supposed deceased: Austin.

In all of the pictures “he” sent to Carol-Ann, the same ones “he” had sent to Natalie, Scottie was only in photos with “Kayleigh,” who was, in real life, his half-sister. The other girl was always in photos alone, and she was nowhere to be found in Scottie’s family’s photos. She was just a random girl whose photo was being used to fill the dollhouse Hannah built. She needed a face to be Kali, so she snatched some child’s photographs and passed her off as the daughter of addicts, one who overdosed and died, and Justin was her savior.

Carol-Ann and I went on a mission to find her, and we did.

Using the same techniques, I used to find Scottie, we picked apart every inch of every photo Justin had sent to Carol-Ann. Reverse searching those inches led me to find the unsuspecting little girl, only 14 years old. It turned out that I had a mutual friend with her mother, and I got my friend to contact her and give her the bare-bones version of why I wanted to talk to her.

I got on the phone with her and explained that a girl posing as a boy to catfish women had snagged her daughter’s photos off of Facebook, and together we tried to figure out why she would pick her child. She looked like Scottie in the sense that she had dark hair and eyes, but that wouldn’t even matter because she was “adopted” in the Justin fantasy.

Then, she asked me for the name of the catfish, and I told her Justin Mitchell.

After we got off the phone, she had a conversation with her older daughter, explaining why I called, and the older daughter told her mother that someone had been Snapchatting with her and he creeped her out.

And guess what “his” name was?

You guessed it: Justin Mitchell.

Here are a few more details I got from Carol-Ann that were interesting to me:

She offered to pay for windshield wipers for her car. She told her to go to AutoZone and she would call and pay for them…with her Justin Mitchell credit card.

I hope from the other blog posts you have gleaned that Scottie was in the military. At the time I was talking to Carol-Ann, Scottie was in basic training, so I asked questions of his mother because I couldn’t get in touch with him. I don’t know if I can begin to tell you how irate Scottie is that she used his military service as part of her ridiculous stories. He takes that as a personal affront. Disrespect him; he’s not ok, but he can deal. Disrespect his uniform? Sheesh. He’s DONE.

She couldn’t have done worse to him if she burned a flag on his doorstep.

So, with that, Hannah told Carol-Ann that Justin had a heart condition called hypertrophic cardiomyopathy, and that he still got paid to be in the army by going to “drills and stuff.”

I include these seemingly minor details because they matter. Hannah used Scottie’s photos and hijacked his family and his life story, but some things are hers, from her life.

There are some people reading this who need to be convinced, and if any of these details make sense to you, then don’t ignore them, please.

I’ll talk more to that person or those people later, but I’m hoping that a foundation is being laid, a pattern is being established, and eventually, there will be no doubt left.

Justin Mitchell who will later become Justin McClain because of this blog is Hannah Bagwell.

See Part 3

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