Bower was not easily fooled. She did not fall for this first scam. In fact, she says, ‘As soon as I started engaging properly with the site, I identified loads of scammers, and I batted them all off. Their stories were ridiculous.’ Three months later, a new message popped up, with a photo that caught her eye.
‘He was very dishy, casually-smartly dressed: nice jeans, proper shoes. Just the sort of man I liked.’ Still, Bower remained sceptical. Derrick Lanar was 54, she was 61. Bower quizzed him over the age gap, but he brushed it off: ‘And after all, my husband had been 20 years older than me.’ Lanar told Bower that he was working on an offshore fracking site in Elgin, Scotland, with five of his own staff. The internet connection was ropey, so could they move their conversation off the dating site and on to their phones? Bower undertook a little detective work on Google, and his story seemed perfectly plausible.
And so a whirlwind romance commenced. Later, Bower would draw up a forensic account of the next 10 weeks, listing dates, telephone numbers, and the content of conversations. Reading it is exhausting. Living through it must have been overwhelming.
The pair trade details about their work (he is frustrated with his current job but the unstable internet connection is slowing the project’s completion) and their private lives (he has a sister, with whom he shares a flat in Wanstead, east London, but who leans too heavily on him for money). They do not only…
