uglyreal

Staci

• 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.

On January 9, 2019, another email came in, which meant another catfish victim was coming forward, asking for validation, ready to share her story.

This made my number 4.

However, let us not forget Scottie’s sister and the older sister of the little girl in the pictures.

I now knew of 6 victims, all catfished by someone calling themselves Justin Mitchell.

I am typing this, but I am typing for their voices to be heard, their experiences to be shared, and their stories to be told. I’m just the vessel, the scribe, the one with a blog that you follow.

They trust me to tell it and tell it right. I refuse to let them down.

This is a juicy set of stories to us, but this is real life for them.

That isn’t a little thing.

Every woman I talked to, no matter how many years ago they encountered Hannah as Justin, is willing to talk about what she did to them so that I can lay it all out for you. They want it out. They want her stopped even more than I do.

So, Staci and I talked 5 years ago and again this summer, and thankfully, Staci is a record-keeper. She had saved a detailed text thread with another victim as well as texts between her and Justin from 2014, but her saga actually started in 2012.

Adding Staci and the other victim she knew personally, who we will call Cassie, the count moved to 7, and the time frame of how long Hannah had been catfishing has now moved to 11 years.

Staci’s story goes like this:

She attended a college in Arkansas in 2012, and another woman at the college was chatting with “Justin” on Facebook. “He” began friending her friends, and over time, Justin began “dating” multiple women, some of whom knew each other. Staci talked to him on and off for 4, count ‘em, 4 years.

Justin posted a photo of a girl Staci and Cassie knew on his Facebook page, sleeping. Because  they knew the girl in real life, that photo made him seem legit to them. No idea how that photo came to be, or if the girl knew it was there or if she was mad about that, or if she sent it to him when she, too, thought it was real, but that picture made it seem like he knew a girl Staci and Cassie knew. They had been told that Sleeping Girl and “Justin” had met face-to-face. With that information, they thought he was shady because the one and only way he would ever communicate with them was via text, but they didn’t doubt his existence.

However, when Staci and Cassie teamed up to do some sleuthing, they asked Sleeping Girl about Justin, and she flat-out told them that he wasn’t real. No face-to-face meeting took place, because, well, it couldn’t. She told both Staci and Cassie that Justin Mitchell did not exist.

This is what they thought they knew about him:

• He was from New Albany.
• He taught at Ole Miss and worked in a butcher shop.
• He had a daughter named Kay. Don’t get me started.
• He took care of another little girl whose father died of an overdose.
• He played baseball at Ole Miss at some point, but he got hurt, though he wasn’t on any roster.
• He sang in some kind of band and traveled to do shows, but he told that whopper to Beth who told Staci. He never told Staci that he was a hard-core musician until she asked him because Beth told her. The band’s name was probably The Imposters.
• He had a twin.
• He had a brother who died in a car accident, but ole brother didn’t have an obituary.
• This was before Hannah hijacked Scottie’s life, so the picture she sent was of a shirtless boy wearing a necklace like you would get at a surf shop, and he looked like he was no older than 16. She passed around the same photo of him to all the girls when they would demand one, but it had been “his” profile photo at one time.
• She sent lots of photos of Kay, making sure these girls got attached to her.
• Staci received flowers from Justin. She called the flower shop, but they would not give her any information on who sent them. Thank goodness for small-town florists who will to friends.
• Beth offered to drive to him, and he told her not to, that he would be mad if she did because “he didn’t want her to meet Kay without them meeting first.”
• Once, Staci was driving through New Albany where he supposedly lived, and he blew her off.
• Even after Cassie “broke up” with Justin because, well, she wanted a boyfriend she could actually see in person, and she found one, Justin would continue to send her photos of Kay and text her messages about how much he loved her.
• Cassie would creep on Justin’s Facebook page, a page he would sometimes keep up and sometimes delete, and she saw that he was sometimes friends with the girls to whom “he” was talking, and sometimes they would be deleted.

It was always logical to me that Hannah had multiple fake profiles set up across all of the socials, probably some she actively used, like the Haley Cook fake Snapchat account, but also some “dummy” pages that she used to make “Justin” more believable. One such account was supposed to be for “Justin’s” mother, who apparently had not died in his backstory yet. The profile photo was of two women, one blonde and one brunette. Actually, I’m not sure Justin’s mother died in his fake world until Hannah’s real mother died.

Lies are much easier to keep track of if there is some truth to them.

Staci put the number she was texting into Facebook, and it came up as Rebecca Mitchell (Cook), pretend Justin’s pretend mother. Recognize that “Cook” name? There is still a fake account up on Facebook with the same name. Coincidentally or not, Fake Mama hailed from Memphis, Tennessee, just like Hannah’s mother did. Coincidentally or not, Fake Mama was born in 1967, just as Hannah’s mother was.

Cassie tried to friend Fake Mama on Facebook, but she wouldn’t accept. She searched for other fake family members, but she couldn’t find them. I guess an entire fake family worth of fake Facebook pages was just more than Hannah could handle. The victims and I feel pretty sure that Excel and Sharepoint data she bragged about to Natalie was not for Justin’s fake job, but instead to catalog all of the lies she had to keep straight. I’d sure need a spreadsheet to keep up. 10 years’ worth of fake family members, fake jobs, fake kids, fake houses, fake dogs, fake baby mama drama, fake adoptions, fake illnesses, fake military service, fake traveling music groups, fake deaths, fake addictions, real flower shops, fake baseball rosters, real sushi restaurants no one would be invited to visit, and fake tutus are bound to eat that data on her phone slap up.

In the text thread, Staci and Cassie were going back and forth with each other as to why his number came back to his mother, and now Staci knows that it did because, well, Justin and Justin’s mother were actually Hannah.

In addition, Fake Kay’s Fake Mother, Fake Justin’s Fake Baby Mama, was named “Beth Wilkerson,” and she would interfere in his fake relationship with Cassie, sending her mean Facebook messages to stay away from Justin, after sending “him” half-naked photos of herself. Cassie said the Fake Beth page was private, so she doubted that Fake Beth was real, which was good intuition because not only did Hannah create Fake Justin and Fake Justin’s Mama and Fake Justin’s Fake Baby Mama, but Hannah interacted AS fake Justin’s Baby Mama. Is this not exhausting? And does it not make you conjure the name Sybil??

To give you an idea of how gaslighty she is (for those who don’t know, gaslighting is “to manipulate someone using psychological methods into questioning their own sanity or powers of reasoning) check out this exchange between Staci and “Justin:”

Staci: So. Who are you?

“Justin”: Haha omg. Stop texting me if you actually believe I’ve lied to you about who I am. I’ve been truthful with you. Never lied once. I was extremely good to you and I don’t appreciate you coming at me like this. So if you’re going to continue to text me about bull and drama which is what it is, I’ll block your number. It’s no big deal for me to do so and throw away the friendship we’ve had for 2 years just as you have.

Staci: If this newly proclaimed “friendship” means anything to you, prove it. You can’t make me feel any dumber than I already do. So prove me wrong.

“Justin”: It doesn’t mean anything to me now. I don’t have to prove anything to anyone who wants to run to my ex girlfriends for answers. If you wanted answers you could have come to me. And if you didn’t believe me then I wouldn’t have proved it. But I’m not proving anything for the sake of you thinking I’m lying. I’ve never lied to you once. In fact, I’ve been very open with you from the start. Maybe not when we drifted apart, but before I was. Every question you had I answered. Don’t think because I don’t want to call you at night I’m so called lying to you. You know me. You’ve known me longer than Cassie has. You should know who I am and what I’m not. And lying to you is what I’m not. But I really appreciate you thinking I would do something like that to you. Above all, I valued our friendship more than anything we’ve ever have or would have.

Staci: You told her you sang around the country? What? Things you are saying don’t add up. At all. You never met Cassie, me, and who knows if you’ve ever met X. I’ve got one more move up my sleeve. And if you are who you say you are then, looks like I’ve lost a good thing. But if not, god bless you and your sick mind.

Again, if any male reading this actually writes texts this long, please tell me. That is girl-writing if I’ve ever seen it. I know because I write them that long, and every man I’ve ever sent one to usually replies with, “Ok.”

She figured it out shortly after that text thread occurred when she did what everyone else did: she used reverse phone search. She tried to contact Hannah through her real Facebook page and even tracked down some of Hannah’s relatives and sent them messages, but she never got a response. She had lots of information about Hannah, and she now knows that Fake Justin is Hannah, but Hannah wasn’t brave enough to answer to Staci.

Cassie said to Staci: my friends all told me something wasn’t right after about 4 months and I continued to talk to him for a year because I just couldn’t wrap my brain around someone actually doing that but I was wrong and should have listened….

Let me be clear: intuition and friends are powerful. They can lead us to open our eyes to see things our hearts won’t allow. But these girls were simply girls looking for companionship, a sweet text to wake up to, someone to give them attention, someone to whom they could tell their secrets.

There is nothing wrong with these girls. Staci and Cassie, Joanna, Carol-Ann, Natalie, and all the ones before and after have one thing in common: they are so normal that they couldn’t imagine anyone would take advantage of them, disregard their emotions, use them as playthings, just dolls in a dollhouse, because, well, normal people don’t.

Sociopaths, however, do.

It isn’t their fault that one found them.

That is why they are called victims, and now, the known count is up to 9.

Stay tuned to meet number 10.

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