To catch a LOVE THIEF

When a Kansas woman starting blogging about her con-artist husband, she discovered he’d amassed many more victims – and wives. They joined forces with a bounty hunter to bring the swindler down. Genevieve Gannon reports.

- Genevieve Gannon

In May 2014, a woman named Lisa, from the American mid-west published a blog pleading with her estranged husband for money and answers. Her marriage had gone horribly wrong. The man she had pledged to love, honour and cherish had deceived her, left her with a massive debt, and then vanished.

“Scott, it has been several months since we’ve spoken,” the post began. “You said you were in counseling for the lying … I found no record of your divorce from Jennifer ... I am aware that you are currently engaged to Diana ...”

Lisa had known for a while that her husband was not who he claimed, but she was only just starting to discover how crooked he truly was. After creating the blog, she heard from women all over the United States who had also been wronged by the man she knew as Richard Scott Smith, but whom others called Mickey, Rick, or Scott. Some of these women had married him. Some had incurred large debts because of him. At least one had been bankrupted.

The growing contingent of cheated women compared notes and found that Smith seemed to follow a playbook.

“I think there’s something twisted deep within this person where he feels compelled to beg for and get someone’s love and then punish them,” says filmmaker Heidi Ewing, who found herself drawn into the twisted rat’s nest of lies, predation and fraud that Smith had left in his wake, and eventually made a four-part documentary, Love Fraud.

The similarities between the women’s stories didn’t end when he vanished. Each woman who tried to report him to the authorities hit a brick wall.

“The women weren’t taken seriously,” Heidi adds. “The police’s attitude was: ‘You dated him, you married him. What were you thinking? I hope you learned your lesson, honey’.”