THE FIRST MYRTLE EDITION
- 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.
Welcome back, my fellow trawlers!
I had to sit on some dry land for a bit, but it is time to get back to the water because there is more fishing to do.
But before we set our hooks, let’s talk victims for a minute.
When I began writing about this fishing expedition, I started with the story that made me pick up a fishing pole in the first place. I was directly involved in Natalie’s story, so she was my ground zero, and I labeled her Victim #1. However, as we all know now, she was nowhere near the first.
I did not put a lot of thought into numbering the victims. I just counted each one as the story unraveled, therefore, because Carol-Ann came to me next, she was Victim 2, then Joanna, who became my Victim 3, and then Staci, who got the title of Victim 4. Staci unveiled Victims 5, 6, and 7 in the text conversation she sent to me, and I counted Victim 8 as Scottie’s sister, and Victim 9 as the girl Justin was snapchatting with, the same girl whose little sister had been used in his backstory as Kayleigh. Victim 10 was Kristen; Victim 11 was Megan, and Victim 12 was Riley.
Each of these girls are all women Hannah catfished.
BUT, we have other victims, and at the end of this, I’m going to give them numbers as well. Some of them are not like Victims 1-12, but they are still, indeed, victims. They are people who were violated when Hannah used something of theirs to complete her dollhouse.
Unknowingly, their names and faces became characters in the stories that Hannah told to each victim to make her online persona authentic, and by snatching their real identities, she turned each one into an unwilling participant in the masquerade.
Make no mistake: they are Hannah’s victims, too.
*****
I published Victim 11’s story on January 3rd of this year, and it took one whole day for it to make its way to Hannah’s hometown of Myrtle, Mississippi, and an earthquake could not have caused more rumblings for the tiny town.
Those rumblings caused my inbox to erupt, and I received message after message after message from people who had grown up with Hannah, who had gone to elementary and high school with her, and they had stories to tell.
Stories about what, you might ask? If people with whom she grew up were going to hit me up, a stranger, to send me stories, whatever could they be about? Were they stories of her causing trouble, being the class clown, making straight A’s or becoming the town hero for a valiant act?
Nope, my faithful anglers. None of the above.
They were catfish stories, y’all.
I was told by multiple people that she started with those closest to her: her high school classmates.
Approximately S.E.V.E.N.T.E.E.N. Y.E.A.R.S. A.G.O.
Close your mouth. You don’t want a hook to find its way through your cheek.
But before we get to those slippery fishing escapades, I want to untangle a different set of fishing lines. Since becoming a student of Catfish Psychology 101, I can not help but muse over why Hannah chose the names she chose to be her alter ego, her fake daughters, her fake dog, her fake baby mamas. I wondered if she chose names at random or if they had meaning.
I pondered exactly how each moniker was picked because it could have been similar to naming one’s own child. I named my children after family members, people I loved, because I wanted them to carry strong legacies by bearing those names. I wondered if there was a method to Hannah’s madness. I contemplated if she picked particular names because they would be easy for her to remember and keep straight, even without a spreadsheet, because they were familiar names to her. I wondered if they were names of imaginary friends she created as a child, before she gave those imaginary friends stolen faces and put them in her dollhouse.
And now, I have what I believe are some answers, but I’ll just put the information out there and y’all can decide.
Need I remind you, Victims 1-9 all thought they were either dating or conversing with a man named Justin Andrew Mitchell. From what I was told, Scottie did not become the face of J.A.M. until Hannah crossed paths with him when she lived in Hattiesburg. Before Scottie, Justin Andrew had different faces. One looked a lot like a guy named Kyle; another was some hot-bodied young’un who liked to go shirtless; another was a fresh-faced surfer boy. Those are the only photos I saw, sent to me by victims who encountered “Justin” before Scottie’s face became synonymous with Justin Andrew Mitchell of the Hattiesburg chapter and later Justin Mitch McClain from the Tuscaloosa tales.
It seems clear that the name Hannah always intended to use was Justin Andrew Mitchell. She used it for about 15 years until she had to change it if she didn’t want someone to use Google and verify, after doing a reverse phone search, that he was indeed a she.
But why? Why THAT name?
MAYBE, just maybe, because she went to elementary school with someone who was born with it.
I had the pleasure of having a real conversation with a real man named Justin Andrew Mitchell.
THE Justin Andrew Mitchell knew Hannah Bagwell, though he had not seen her since the last day of sixth grade at Myrtle Attendance Center.
From the first day of the first grade until that final day of sixth, Justin Andrew Mitchell sat in a desk in the same classroom as Hannah Bagwell. She was his classmate from about the age of six until about the age of 12.
He did not know her well, even though, to the best of his recollection, there were only 28 others in their class. He lived in another town and just went to school in Myrtle.
Their parents did not socialize. They did not go to Sunday School at the same church. He did not even know who her parents were. He did not know if she had any siblings.
They were not next-door neighbors, though some folks told me that there were times in high school when Hannah told victims that fake Justin Andrew Mitchell was, indeed, her neighbor and she had messages from him to give to them. We will get to that later.
Nope. He remembered her, but he had not talked to her in approximately 20 years. He remembered that she had brown hair, he recalled her bangs in particular, and that she was quiet.
He had nothing negative to say about her as an elementary student. Quite possibly, had he not found out that she stole his given name, probably chosen by his parents for meaningful reasons, in order to victimize women for close to two decades, he may have never had a reason to say anything about her ever again.
So why did she pick his name?
THE Justin Andrew Mitchell seems to have absolutely nothing in common with the gaslighting love-bomber who calls “himself” the same. He looks and sounds just like every Mississippi boy I grew up with, a hard-working family guy who probably loves some fried catfish for Friday lunch but who wouldn’t know where to start in order to be one online.
Maybe she liked him in a schoolgirl sort of way and giving her online persona his actual full name was an homage to him.
Or maybe it was because he was no longer her classmate.
He went to another school. He lived in another town.
He was out of sight, and maybe even out of mind.
If she got caught, he could not confront her at school. He would have to drive to another town to talk to her, or figure out who her parents were to look their home number up in the phone book and call her. Those were still in existence back then.
She would not have to look at him in the desk ahead of her each day, knowing that she was using his name to catfish the girl sitting one desk ahead of him.
No offense to THE Justin Andrew Mitchell, but it is doubtful that he was “special.” Not to her, anyway.
Instead, it seems likely that he was convenient.
But, when Hannah stole his name, she may or may not have known that doing so had the potential to cause big problems for The Real Justin Andrew Mitchell. If she didn’t think about that, she should have, or maybe she did not care. I couldn’t tell ya.
I can tell you that the ripple effect of even her mere name choices for all of her dolls never stop. They just roll on, seventeen years later.
THE Justin Andrew Mitchell told me that one day when he was in high school, he thinks during the school year of 2006-2007, he got called into the principal’s office. His cross country/track coach asked him if he had been harassing girls, and he said no, of course not. He had no idea what she was talking about, and he told her so. She, as any coach would, told him not to lie to her. He said that she was rather stern with him at first, and he was afraid that he was in trouble, but he reiterated that he did not know to what she was referring and had no reason to lie. She softened and told him that she did not believe he would do something “like that,” believing him.
He can’t remember exactly what the nature of the “harassment” was or if it was even told to him specifically, but his impression then and now was that someone using his name was sending messages to local high school girls via text or possibly through Facebook. These messages were bothersome enough that they were reported, either by parents or female students themselves, and the information jumped from principal to principal, landing him in one of their offices to defend himself.
This mystery was finally solved for him when half of Myrtle contacted him after my blog post came out.
They remembered.
So did he.
And now, almost two decades later, I’m letting THE Justin Andrew Mitchell claim the title of Lucky #13.
*****
Like THE Justin Andrew Mitchell, Victim 14 was not catfished by Hannah. Instead, Hannah stole her little family—-their names and likenesses, anyway.
All four of them.
When my blog posts blew through Myrtle, the first message I got was from Claire, Victim 14.
On January 5, 2024, about 5 minutes before 4 o’clock in the afternoon, Claire said to me, in part:
I was just made aware of the situation with Hannah Bagwell. My husband graduated with her from Myrtle. In part 5, she uses MY kids’ names as his own kids! Also, my husband’s middle name is McClain. She has deleted me and my husband off of Facebook so we can no longer see her posts. I was going to see if you knew if pictures of my kids were shared?
Yet another mystery solved, and as glad as my detective-head was, my heart hurt. I was angry for Claire. I was angry for her husband. I was angry for those babies.
I couldn’t imagine how she felt.
With her permission, I screenshot her Facebook profile photo and one other public picture of her children and sent them to Kristen and Megan, and they verified that they were the children Justin Mitch McClain had claimed as his own.
So, to her question, I had to say, “Yes.”
Claire’s daughter was the little girl Hannah made Megan believe she had met at a gas station coming back from the lake, “kinda drunk and kinda sunburned.” Megan specifically remembered that the kids pictured often had their names appliqued on their clothes, so she knew those were their actual names.
It made them more real. Because they are.
Here is what putting together the puzzle pieces from Claire’s messages revealed:
- Claire and her husband are both alums of Myrtle Attendance Center. Her husband, who we will call McClain since that is his real middle name, graduated with Hannah. Claire was in a class below her.
- Both Claire and McClain were Facebook friends with Hannah and had been, presumably, for years as most of us are with those we have known since forever, even if we were never close. Neither had any idea that being Facebook friends with her opened themselves up to her using their children’s photographs to fill her new Justin Mitch McClain dollhouse, located in Tuscaloosa, Alabama.
- Claire had no interactions with Hannah, even in high school. She said neither she nor McClain really knew her well, and “she kept to herself a lot.”
- Neither Claire nor McClain had seen her since she graduated from high school 14 years ago. Out of sight; out of mind. She had long since quit swimming in the Myrtle pond to find her catfish victims. Tuscaloosa was her river now. No need to worry that anyone from Myrtle would ever, ever know.
- When Claire contacted me, I could see that Hannah’s Facebook page was still searchable, which meant if Claire and her husband could not see it but I could, she had blocked them. Just them. Tell me this: who BUT fake Justin Mitch McClain would know that the parents of “his” fake children finally could become aware that their real children were being used in Fake Justin’s fake life because their names were in my blog posts? Only one person in the world would have a reason to block Claire and McClain specifically from Facebook. And to their knowledge, only one person did: Hannah Bagwell.
Claire’s messages led me to understand that Hannah used McClain to become Tuscaloosa-based fake Justin, Claire and McClain’s children to become “his” children, and to round out the foursome, she had to include Claire somehow.
So, she named “his” dog, Mo.
Claire’s nickname.
Claire is now Victim 14, McClain is Victim 15, their son is Victim 16, and their daughter, Victim 18.
With that, I need to do something I haven’t done until now but should have done a long time ago: give numbers to Scottie’s half-sister, Fake Kali. She is now Victim 19. Fake Kayleigh, the little girl that Carol-Ann and I tracked down is now Victim 20.
And good ole Scottie gets the heralded title of Victim 21. That coveted legal age is one many teenagers view as the age of freedom. Scottie finally gets his face back, and with that, his freedom.
Kyle can be Victim 22. Surfer boy can be Victim 23. Hot Bod can be Victim 24.
And next you will meet Victim 25, another girl whose identity was stolen for Hannah to play with online.
In high school.
Stick around. Myrtle stories are abundant.
Let me know if you have one of your own.
If you or someone you know has been catfished by Justin Mitchell or Justin McClain, feel free to email me at mwstaceylaw@gmail.com
uglyreal 