This is the eleventh post in a series about my past relationship with the man I mentally refer to as The Beast.

Those first few months after the confrontation at the prison are somewhat difficult to describe. I look back now and it feels almost as if another person lived through that time. I'll do my best to describe the events and my discoveries.

A day or two after the prison visit I received a call at work. It was one of LMS's sisters. Even better, it was the sister he told me he was living with at the time he met me. She was very nervous at first, unsure of how I would react to her. She was worried that I would be angry with anyone associated with him. I assured her that I did not transfer blame from him to his family. We ended up having a very long talk and I discovered the truth behind so many lies. There were revelations for her too and it struck me that J and I were not the only ones affected by his actions.

In spite of the phone call I still hungered for information. I had a burning need to know everything. I needed to know why. Not having the money to hire a private investigator (which I actually considered doing), I placed a series of ads on a very popular local website. I received a few replies from inquisitive people and gave them short shrift. But I received two genuine replies - one from J's sister and another from a woman who was very close friends with LMS when they worked together (at the company where the fraud was committed).

I think it would be best if I listed a few key lies he told me and the truth I later discovered. All this information came from LMS's sister D, the friend from work (N) and J and her sister.

LMS: Living with his widowed sister and her two daughters. Her policeman husband was killed in 2004. His sister was still depressesed and grieving and had developed a suffocating dependence on him. (The story he told me when we first met.)

The Truth: He was living with his girlfriend and her daughter. He met this woman when she visited a friend at his place of work. At the time she had just moved to Cape Town with her boyfriend and her daughter. LMS wooed her away from her boyfriend and moved in with her.

(At more or less the same time he was also making moves on another woman he worked with. I think he was priming the next possible victim.)

His sister has never lived in Cape Town. She lives in their home city, with her (very much alive) husband and their son and daughter. Her husband is not and has never been a policeman.

LMS: He moved his sister and her girls to another city and tried to make a living there, returning to Cape Town after about three months.

The Truth: He, his girlfriend and her daughter moved to that city. He was running away from the criminal investigation stemming from his theft of clients' money. The police caught up with him and he was remanded into custody in his home city. The same sister he lied about was the only one of his siblings who still held any hope that he would reform himself. She borrowed a large sum of money from her very reluctant husband (who loathes LMS) to bail out her brother. She told me she expected some humility but instead all he gave was a cocky attitude. Needless to say, she is stuck repaying that loan.

The girlfriend finally saw him for what he was and left. She maintained contact with his family for a while but her anger and hurt made it too difficult for her to remain in contact for much longer.

LMS: He is the youngest of 7 (a younger sibling died in an accident years before - that part is true), raised in a working class Catholic family. He was adopted from an orphanage at the age of about 8 months. He always had a difficult relationship with his parents, especially his mother, who made him feel different to his siblings.

The Truth: He is not adopted and is his parents' biological child. He is, in fact, the apple of his parents' eye - they still believe he has good in him. They don't know about his claim of being adopted. His sister is afraid of the consequences as they are both elderly and in poor health.

LMS: He has a law degree, a teaching diploma and is a certified Financial Advisor.

The Truth: According to his sister he barely managed to pass Matric (final year of high school).

LMS: After working as a store manager for a leading chain store, he saved up enough money to go to London, where he lived for three years. Incidentally, while working at a pub there, he met Joe Cocker who gave him his denim jacket at the end of the evening.

The Truth: He's never been out of the country. He was fired from his job because of theft and they wanted to cover it up to avoid embarrassment to the company.

LMS: He worked for the Cape Town branch of an oil company. While working there he developed a software add-on that they subsequently bought from him. He left their employment and used the money to purchase a restaurant in the CBD. After about three years he had to sell the restaurant to clear his then-wife's gambling debts, as part of the divorce settlement.

The Truth: He worked for that company but was asked to leave because he was suspected of fraud. He worked at the restaurant he claimed to own but as an employee. He was fired there too because of - you guessed it - theft. I don't know if there was any truth to the gambling debts, though considering the source, I now doubt that was true.

LMS: He invested his clients' money in a property venture and the owners of the property company ran away with the money. He did the due diligence beforehand but he was the dupe whose signatures were on all the paperwork. His ex-employers used their financial clout to finance the best lawyers so they could wiggle out of their liability.

The Truth: He misrepresented himself to his ex-employers. He stole the money from his clients' accounts. I don't know if the clients ever did take legal action against his ex-employers but the criminal charges were always aimed at him. The magistrate in his case commented to the effect that LMS was a habitual liar.

---------

There were many other lies, big and small, too numerous to detail here. Just one example of those lies: The bakkie (pickup truck) we had on loan had to be returned to my employer. LMS told J and her family that he'd been hijacked (and that he owned the bakkie). He generated so much sympathy from that lie that one of J's friends (a psychologist) offered LMS free trauma counselling.

For all that I discovered there were still so many mysteries. I grasped that he was a con man, a liar, a thief. What I couldn't fathom was the depth and breadth of his lies. He lied about nearly everything, even things he had absolutely no reason to lie about.

At my next appointment with my psychiatrist I told her what had happened. She listened intently and at one point cut in and said to me very seriously, "Ishtar, he is a psychopath and you are fortunate you found out before he married you or got you involved in one of his schemes."

She went on to tell me that most people have the image of a psychopath as a homicidal maniac - film, books and television usually portray the psychopath as such. While a minority of psychopaths do kill and/or physically abuse, many more are non-violent criminals, especially of crimes like fraud and theft. She mentioned that those who do not turn to crime usually emotionally abuse and manipulate those who cross their paths. They are usually very charming, often very intelligent, are arrogant and habitual liars.

Psychopaths, she said, have no compassion and little to no empathy. Manipulating and hurting people is a form of amusement for them. They will tell you a cruel lie merely because they are amused at your response. They get bored easily and are always looking for the next thrill. They usually end up taking stupid chances that get them caught.

Chillingly, she told me there is as yet no cure for psychopaths. Medication has no effect and neither does therapy. Even scarier, therapy actually helps psychopaths manipulate their victims because they use those therapeutic techniques in their mind games.

In her opinion, I never stood a chance. There was no way I could've seen from the start what he was really about. Much later I spoke to a psychologist and asked if she concurred with labelling LMS a psychopath. She concurred fully with my psychiatrist's opinion. Obviously neither had ever met LMS so they weren't giving me an official diagnosis. My psychiatrist had worked with psychopaths in the past so she had actual experience with them that she could also draw on.

What they gave me was their educated opinion, based on the information I'd given them. Both were confident that their informal diagnosis was correct. I did some research of my own afterwards and so much of what I read applied to LMS. He is practically a texbook case of a psychopath, in my opinion.

I feel as if I've lived several lifetimes since last year and I am irrevocably changed. I will write further posts about my state of mind and the process of recovery since that awful day in June 2008, when I saw the true face of The Beast.