uglyreal

Justin Mitchell and/or Justin McClain is Hannah Bagwell

Please save yourself! Don’t become a victim like

Riley

• 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.

Well.

You, my fellow fisherpeople, did not just bait a hook and wait for the fish to bite.

Y’all went handgrabbing.

I mean, y’all stuck your arms down the throat of a catfish and pulled it slap out of the river, and there are not enough blogs in cyberspace for me to tell y’all how appreciative I am to each of you. You did not just read six very long, very detailed, very confusing blog posts, but you did exactly what I asked you to do.

You shared it.

And you shared it.

And you shared it.

To help me make sure the public is protected, you took off your shoes, put on your suits, and dove in head first, fists outstretched.

THANK YOU.

After Parts 1-6 of this series exploded bigger than Mount Vesuvius over the weekend and the victims words found their way to Myrtle, Mississippi, down to Hattiesburg, and on over to Tuscaloosa, Alabama, I started getting message after message after message concerning this subject matter. I never would have gone looking for any of you, but you found me. And your stories will be the subjects of however many more blog posts it takes to adequately convey exactly how long this has been happening, how it has happened, and to whom.

So, grab your waders and head back to the bank with me.

We are fixing to get wet.

When something scandalous happens while you are in school, you remember.

When that scandal involves you, you imprint miniscule details onto your brain, and they will never leave. It wasn’t something that just happened to you; it becomes a part of you, your story. You move past it, grow up, get jobs, get married, move to new towns. You may tell some people along the way about that thing, that bizarre thing that happened to you, or you may not. But  after all of that time, if you do retell your story, you will get something out of sequence, forget the color of a shirt or the precise, exact words you said or that were said to you. You might forget if you found out about it in the morning or the afternoon, but the major events that result in you becoming part of a scintillating tale, you don’t forget.

You never forget.

Just ask Riley.

I got a message from Riley three days ago, on Saturday morning. A friend of hers who grew up in Myrtle sent her my blog and told her that the craziest story was being circulated around her hometown and invited her down the rabbit hole. She accepted.

But when she opened the link to Part 1 and read the first line, the line that read, “Justin Mitchell and/or Justin McClain is Hannah Bagwell,” it took her breath.

Her friend thought she was just sending Riley a wild tale, too good to pass up, a smoking hot pot of tea, when really, her friend was sending Riley a story that she could have written.  

Her friend had no idea that Justin Mitchell had catfished Riley, too.

In 2015, Riley transferred from Delta State University to attend the University of Southern Mississippi. She was majoring in social work, and her roommate, Harper, was getting her Master’s degree in the same field. Two of Harper’s classmates were Chloe Smith and Hannah Bagwell, and they lived in an apartment together. Chloe was from Tupelo, and Hannah was from Myrtle.

Southern isn’t a huge school, and Hattiesburg isn’t a huge town. This group of people who shared a common goal were the circle of people with whom they spent most of their time. They would not all call every person in the school of social work, friends, but they knew each other. Whether they were working towards earning a Bachelor’s or a Master’s, they had the same professors. All mentioned except for Riley had their classes together, the same schedule, the same internships, but Riley would often join her roommate Harper, Chloe, Hannah and others in a classroom to eat lunch together.

Riley was in a new town, newly single, and she collected Facebook friends like baseball cards, the same way anyone would during that era and in her situation. She was meeting new people all the time and was getting friend requests left and right. But on September 5, 2015, during the first half of the Southern v. Mississippi State football game, she got a message from someone with whom she was not friends. She remembers that detail so specifically because of that game and what he said. It was, basically, “I’ll make you a bet. If MSU wins, you have to give me your phone number.”

It came from a cute guy who looked a hella like Scottie Spain named Justin Mitchell.

The powers that be in Vegas and the world at large figured that State was going to win that game, so she declined the bet, but she was intrigued. Ole boy was easy on the eyes, so she entertained him. They kept messaging, and eventually, she gave up the digits with no bet necessary. They texted until the following January.

To continue with what we know about Justin’s fake story, she gave me the details of what she could remember him telling her about his life.

Here is the thing about that, though, and this is gonna get a little murky, so I hope you can stay with me.

Hannah did not start catfishing Scottie’s sister until the fall of 2016. She was using another guy’s photos (obviously), but she was still going by the name Justin Mitchell. Scottie’s sister found the person’s photos that Hannah was using, and the name of the guy in her photos was Kyle Hildebrand.

I will be honest: when I got that information back in July of 2018, I did not do a deep dive into Kyle. I still have a screenshot of his Instagram page from back then, but I did not work hard to find him. So, I have no idea who Kyle is or if Kyle is even real.

All that to say, Riley told me that she did not get many photos of Justin sent to her. Very few of a face. A lot of someone’s ripped abs. Lots of shots of a man’s body from the waist down wearing really nice dress shoes and dressy pants. And food. Plates and plates of food.

No one else in the world probably cares but me (and now Riley because we both seem to enjoy beating dead horses), but we are still trying to figure out exactly when Hannah started jacking Scottie’s photos from Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat and Twitter.

We know she did not start catfishing him as Haley Cook and stealing his Snaps until later in 2016, but since Hannah had just moved to Hattiesburg in the fall of 2015, she could have already seen Scottie and or his sister, around town, and she could have already been following him or them on one of the socials, beginning her morph from Fake-Justin-with-Kyle’s-Face to Fake-Justin-with-Scottie’s-Face.

But, if that was, in fact, happening, it was in the infant stages.

I asked Riley if she Snapchatted with Justin and she said: You know….. now that you mention it… we did. I don’t remember what the user name she used or anything was at the time because we didn’t use it much. I would send him a snap but he’d never really snap back. And when I would joke about him sucking at snapchat, he’d say something about being too busy to be able to keep up with Snapchat stuff too.

She tried to call him many times, and, per the usual, he would never answer but would immediately text back. He had a cooler full of excuses as to why he couldn’t talk on the phone. No Facetime.

Another thing we realized was that the little girl in the photos that Victim 2 and I found online, the little girl whose older sister had been catfished on Snapchat by a Justin Mitchell, came BEFORE Scottie. Hannah was already passing off that little girl as Kayleigh.

So, I had it backward. Kayleigh, his supposed biological daughter that he fathered at the ripe old age of 14, was invented before Scottie, and somehow, Kayleigh was never pictured in a single photo with dear ole dad. She had dark hair and dark eyes and looked the part.

Kali, sweet little adoptee-to-be, was Scottie’s real half-sister, who actually does not look very much like Scottie, but Scottie was in a lot of photos with her (obviously), and she got added to the program about the time Hannah decided, once and for all, that her creation would be, Fake-Justin-with-Scottie’s-Face.

So again, I know this doesn’t matter to any of you most likely, but it matters to me.

The timeline matters to me.

Hannah would have never known about Scottie Spain if she had not moved to Hattiesburg, and since this story starts shortly after she took up residence there, I am including it to document.

Let’s carry on….

Riley said:

• Justin was from New Albany and lived in New Albany, but he drove 4 hours to take classes at Southern to further his degree. He told her he had some family in Hattiesburg who let him stay with them when he was in town.
• No Sandy pictures because Hannah did not have Sandy yet.
• He told her about Kayleigh, and he said she was an athlete. That was most likely because the little girl in the pictures played sports, and some of the pictures she jacked were of her in a sports uniform.
• To make that truer, he told her, like all of the others, that he was a former athlete but couldn’t play because he got hurt. She thought he said it was baseball.
• He had a degree a math, and he was currently a professor teaching something math.
• He sang in a band, but it was a church band, or a Christian singing group.
• He mentioned Kali, but she did not remember him explaining about Austin’s overdose nor did she get pictures of her because, well, see above.

One day, Justin told Riley that he was at the library on campus, and she and her friend from her Spanish class headed to the library to find him. She said her head was on a swivel and she was in tracker mode when she entered, looking for anyone who looked like Justin. She made the mistake of telling Justin that they were coming to the library to find him, and all of a sudden, his messages stopped coming in. They were going through to her as green rather than iPhone blue. After about 30 minutes, she gave up and left.

When he finally texted her back, he told her his phone died at the very moment Riley was trying to find him. Probably about the same time Hannah emerged from standing on a toilet behind a locked door in the bathroom while they were wandering the stacks.

Another day, she was in a doctor’s office, and Justin was asking her what kind of flowers were her favorite—if she liked springy or fallish—and she remembered it clearly because she thought it was very odd. She was in a doctor’s office, but someone in his family had just “died,” and he was worried about sending her flowers when he had just experienced a family death. She offered to come see him, as he was very close to Fake-Deceased-Family-Member and was all torn up about losing him or her, as anyone would be when someone who doesn’t exist kicks the bucket, but he turned her down. I mean, who wants to be consoled by a hot girl while in the depths of despair? No one I know.

She went to work later that day, and she told me that she received an absolutely stunning array of flowers. She said it was huge and had to have been expensive.

During their fake courtship, he sent her photos of Ray bans that he supposedly ordered just for her, as well as a bottle of perfume, some lotion, and a gold necklace. She would like those gifts now, ma’am. For her troubles.

Riley said that, as much as the shadiness of not ever meeting him or talking on the phone or Facetiming bothered her, the one thing that never squared with her was how he afforded life at 25 with a 14-year-old daughter, another daughter he was taking in, going to school 4 hours from home, and manage being a professor at a college. He told her he had land in New Albany, and he sent her pictures of a beautiful brick home that he said was his. And, he seemed to have plenty of spare change to buy her expensive sunglasses, jewelry, and half a garden.

What’s more, it seemed that Justin knew things about her that he should not know. One of the strangest instances was when Justin sent her a video of someone who looked a lot like him and someone who looked a lot like Kayleigh and one other person singing a song in church. The video was taken from far away and faces were not sharp, but the man who was supposed to be Justin was wearing a black suit with a white shirt and black tie, and the girl who was supposed to be Kayleigh was wearing a black dress. The song they were singing was, “Thank You Lord For Your Blessings on Me.”

What made that video strange to the point of downright stalker-town was that song was a song that Riley and her grandmother used to sing together in their church when she was 3 or 4. In another state. And there were no videos of her doing so. She doesn’t remember ever mentioning it to her friends. She knows she never told Justin. Even though there is a rational reason lying around somewhere for Justin to have known—most likely, though Riley doesn’t remember, it was said at some point in earshot of Hannah—but if there isn’t, then the creep factor just skyrocketed.

Much made Riley doubt that Justin was who he said he was, but when he started sending her super-graphic text messages about all he wanted to do to her sexually, she started to get super-duper uncomfortable. She said that the messages were heavily explicit and made her feel dirty, especially because they were coming from a man she had never seen in real life. Much less a woman she knew in real life. Who she ate lunch in the same room with quite often. Who knew her by name and greeted her and asked about her to their shared friends when she was sick. Much less that.

As I said before, Harper, Chloe and Hannah were all in the same classes, but one day Riley’s class had to combine with theirs for a shared presentation. Hannah was sitting a few seats behind Riley, and Justin began texting her.

Riley told Justin that her class had to meet with another class that day, and he asked who all was there. She named the names.

When she got to Hannah, Justin asked what her last name was.

She told him it was Bagwell.

And lo and behold, Justin told Riley that he knew of her! Either his siblings went to school with her, or he went to school with her siblings.

In short, Hannah was sitting behind Riley, asking Riley about herself, and Riley was answering her because she believed she was talking to Justin Mitchell about her classmate, Hannah. Instead, she was talking to Hannah about Hannah. Because Hannah asked. About herself.

Everything came to a head one day right after the New Year began when they had all come back to campus to start a new semester. Harper and her boyfriend had broken up, and she was now talking to someone new. He was at Harper and Riley’s apartment one day, and they were telling New Guy about Justin and how weird the whole thing was. New Guy said he had an app on his phone that he paid for monthly that let him do some kind of background checks that included reverse phone searches, so they asked him to search Justin’s number.

Riley pulled out her phone to give New Guy Justin’s number, and while she was doing it, Harper was looking over her shoulder, committing the number to memory. While New Guy was searching the number, Harper put Justin’s number into a new message on her own phone and sent Justin a silly meme.  

Justin should be texting back right about then, asking who the heck was texting his phone with dumb pictures. But he doesn’t.

New Guy announces that the number he searched came up with a man’s first name (Hannah’s father) and last name of Bagwell.

The girls recognized the name immediately as Hannah’s last name, and then Riley remembered Justin telling her that he knew Hannah, so, they figured they would ask Hannah if she knew Justin.

Neither had Hannah’s phone number, so Harper called or texted Chloe, and she sent the contact. Harper clicked on the contact to save into her phone, and then she clicked “message” to write a text to Hannah to ask if she happened to know Riley’s Justin Mitchell.

But when she did, there was already something in the messages, under the new saved contact as Hannah.

The meme she just sent to Justin.

Enter Chloe.

Chloe told me about her roommate, Hannah Bagwell, who she met while in college at the Ole Miss, Tupelo campus. They had a mutual friend and were both going into social work. In 2015, they decided to go to USM to get their Masters degrees and room together.

They got an apartment in Hattiesburg, and Chloe was a bit homesick. She was glad she had a roommate she already knew because she wanted someone to romp around town with her. However, that didn’t happen. Chloe told me that Hannah stayed in her room a lot, and by a lot I mean, almost all of the time. Chloe liked to watch tv in the living room and always hoped Hannah would join simply so she did not have to talk to the walls, but she usually didn’t. She stayed in her room and watched her tv and texted and texted and texted and texted and texted by herself. Hannah did not want to go out much. Every once in a while, Chloe could coerce her to a restaurant or to a gathering with their social work classmates, but not frequently. They had the exact same class schedule, but they took separate cars to school.

Chloe said that Hannah was not always the easiest person to get along with. Their personalities were very different, and Chloe did not really understand Hannah’s loner behavior while they were in a new town, a new school, with all of the opportunities to meet new people and do new things awaited them.

Chloe hoped she would have a sidekick with whom to experience the new.

She did not.

Chloe said that Hannah would text a lot in class to the point that it was noticeable. She often wondered who in the world she could be talking to when she did not seem to have a whopping group of friends or an active social life. One of their classmates apparently wondered the same, and so while Hannah’s face was stuck in her phone, the classmate asked who she was texting. Hannah told her that she was texting her mother.

When they left the classroom, Hannah told Chloe that she thought what their classmate asked was rude. Chloe suggested that maybe she not text so much during lectures.

Per what is logical, that question had to have made her nervous, thus, she became defensive. She had a secret life to protect.

Someone was encroaching on her dollhouse.

Hannah didn’t go home over Christmas break, but Chloe did. A few days after they got back from their break but before classes resumed, both Chloe and Hannah were in their respective bedrooms. Chloe was lying in the bed and realized she had a missed call from Harper, but she also had a text from Hannah. Who was in her room. 4 steps away.

The text was Hannah asking Chloe to come talk to her.

Chloe thought that was odd, but she figured that Hannah was not feeling well and needed Chloe to do something for her, so she did not call Harper back right away. Instead, she went to see what she could do for Hannah.

The conversation that ensued is from Chloe’s memory, so it is not verbatim. But I don’t have to wonder and neither will you if it is most likely pretty darn close.

Some things you never forget.

Hannah: I think I need to go home.

Chloe: Home to New Albany?

Hannah: Yes.

Chloe: Why? Are you pregnant?

Chloe did not ask this because she saw Hannah with guys or knew she was dating someone, but because her life was so separate from hers, she thought if she had a boyfriend, he was a secret. Hannah had in passing mentioned guys she thought were cute, but Chloe had no idea about her sexuality. Plus, why else would you drop out of school?

Hannah: No, it’s worse than that.

Chloe: Ok, well, have you killed somebody? That made both of them laugh and lightened the mood a bit.

Hannah: No!

Chloe: Well, why would you want to go home? This has been good. School has been good. We’ve had a good first semester.

Hannah: I can’t tell you.

Chloe: You have to now that I’m involved.

Hannah: Ok, so you know the show “Catfish”? Hannah knew she knew it because Chloe watched it.

Chloe: Yes.

Hannah: Well, I’ve been catfishing.

Chloe: Wait, you were catfished by someone here?

Hannah: No, I was the one doing the catfishing.

She then had to tell Chloe that she was pretending to be a guy catfishing a girl.

Chloe: Who?

Hannah: You know Harper? Her roommate.

Chloe: Oh gosh. Ok. Are you gay? It’s fine if you are, but I just didn’t know.

Hannah: No, I’m not. I’m 100% straight.

Chloe: Ok, well, is it really that bad?

Hannah: Yeah. It is. I know we are here to learn about ourselves and all that, but I really need to go home.

Hannah told her that catfishing allowed her not to be herself, and that felt good.

Chloe knew that this was a big deal, or it would be, but she did not have all of the details yet, and she genuinely did not want Hannah to quit school and go home. She was kind to her about what she had just been told, even though it shocked the pants off of her. She convinced Hannah that she would still be her friend and stand with her, and that it would probably be fine.

But it wasn’t fine.

After Riley had time to process the fact that her acquaintance, Hannah, was really her online romantic interest, Justin, Riley sent Hannah a text that said something like: “I don’t know why you felt like you needed to do what you did, but I’m glad the truth is out. I wish you nothing but the best.” Riley told me that she was way nicer than she had to be, way nicer than she probably should have been.

But she and Hannah never spoke again.

Chloe and Riley both told me that the entire little friend group circle knew what Hannah did, and this changed Hannah’s personality. She didn’t sit with them anymore. She didn’t look Riley in the face. Never having been the social butterfly, she isolated herself even more, or, as much as she could while still having to take all of her classes with the roommate of the girl she was catfishing.

Chloe and Hannah did not talk about the catfishing at length, and Chloe did not continue to ask questions, but Hannah let her know that she was terribly anxious that Harper was going to approach her in person. They had a seminar during the first few days of school of the new semester. Chloe said that Hannah left the seminar one day early because she was so very nervous that she was going to be confronted.

She never was, but she was well aware of the gossip all around her.

Harper asked Chloe if she knew what had been going on. She told Riley that she had absolutely no idea, that Hannah kept her at arm’s length. She told her about how much time Hannah spent alone, in her room. And then, Chloe started locking her own bedroom door. She wasn’t exactly sure why, but the whole situation scared her a bit. She was unsure of who her roommate was and what she would and wouldn’t do.

But, Chloe said that because she made sure Hannah knew she had not deserted her, it did bring them a bit closer together. Hannah opened up to her more about her home life. She acknowledged that her family wasn’t the Brady Bunch, but she had not lived an 11-foster-home-traumatic childhood.

Hannah continued in her reclusive ways. She isolated and didn’t talk much between being outed and Spring Break, but she went home for that week and when she came back, Chloe noticed a smidgen of a change in her. She seemed to be in better spirits, a bit happier. She laughed a little more.

Shortly after Spring Break, Hannah asked Chloe if she minded if she got a cat. Chloe agreed as long as it was declawed. She said the cat was good for Hannah. She named it Hattie, after Hattiesburg, and the cat made her come out of her bedroom more. But, the cat also caused a rather large fight between the two when it chewed up a charger to Chloe’s computer, and Hannah refused to pay for it.

Hannah made a couple of new friends that she ended up hanging out with toward the end of the semester, and it kept her and Chloe from seeing each other as much. Around March of 2017, Hannah sent Chloe a text saying that she was moving out. She didn’t give Chloe much notice at all, and Hannah moved into another apartment by herself. It was when she moved into that apartment that she finally got Sandy.

The last time Chloe saw Hannah was at their graduation in May of 2017.  

Hannah stayed in Hattiesburg after graduation and began her job as an area supervisor for Child Protective Services. Her mother would pass away that fall, and she would begin to catfish Natalie a few short weeks later.

Victim 12’s story is important.

Riley wasn’t a patient of Hannah’s, so the betrayal wasn’t nearly as egregious as what was done to Victim 11. Hannah did not cross the ethical boundaries of her profession with Victim 12.

She crossed a totally different boundary: friendship.

Crossing that invisible wall from acquaintance to stalker was what got her caught.

After hearing the stories of Victims 1-11, if you were on the fence, wondering if I was going to get sued into oblivion because I’m spreading vicious lies about a woman I don’t know, have never met, have no reason to care about, because I don’t do my homework and throw rumors out into the ether with abandon, passing them off as fact and truth, intent on making this woman’s life miserable for the sheer heck of it because I’m a mean-spirited gossip who tries to wreck careers for sport, then quit wondering.

She got caught by someone who knew her, and she confessed as much to her roommate who knew the victim.

When scandals happen on small campuses, within small departments, within small friend groups, they live forever.

They never quit being told. They never quit being discussed. There is always, months or years later, the inevitable, “Remember when that classmate of ours catfished our friend pretending to be a guy? I wonder what she is doing now.”

Never in their wildest could they have imagined the answer to that question would be: the exact same thing.

Stay close to the riverbank, friends.

There is more.

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