The Other Mrs Jordan is the story of how a dangerous bigamist got nailed

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Possibly like you, my recurring thought when watching The Other Mrs Jordan (ITV1) was — eh? How? How the hell could this unremarkable man manage to con and swindle so many people and have women falling at his feet?
William Allen Jordan wasn’t someone you’d look twice at in the street, yet here were intelligent women handing him thousands of pounds and having his babies (he lied to some of them that he was infertile due to mumps). I am not victim-blaming. Quite the reverse. This case convinced me more than ever that no one is con-proof.
But as Mary Turner Thomson, whom Jordan married bigamously and had two children with, said: “He messed with the wrong woman when he messed with me.” This was true because she was a powerhouse who helped to nail him with fabulous determination and also wrote a book about him. But not before he had relieved her of £198,000. I hope the book sales replaced a chunk of that.
The time frame jumped around, flitting between Scotland and America and the various people he had scammed over two decades, fathering 14 children (odd for a man claiming to be firing blanks). It was a complex, difficult story to tell and had some of the victims restaging phone calls, which felt a bit unnecessary. But it is a jaw-dropping tale.
We all like to think we would see through a psychopathic fantasist who claimed to be a CIA agent, letting him go missing for months, but Jordan seemed to be a superb liar. The women who took part in the film told their stories well, clearly relishing their chance to take revenge, and good for them. One used herself as bait so the police could arrest him. Brave woman. How easy it is to be taken in by someone who shows all the signs of totally loving you.
But perhaps it was Mary’s daughter, Eilidh, who has disowned her jailbird father, who put it best. To him, all the victims were simply characters he could control as he chose in his real-life Sims game, she said. This average-looking bloke is extremely dangerous and these women have done the world a favour by holding him to the light.★★★★☆
You may remember the tale behind The Body Next Door (Sky Documentaries) from the inquest headlines in 2016. But they didn’t tell the whole gobsmacking story. Or show the vast human capacity for selfishness. A sleepy Welsh village had a killer in its midst, one who wrapped their male victim in 40 layers of plastic.
But the story gets stranger and sadder and darker than you could imagine. Episode two is excellent and infuriating in equal measure when it interviews the “secret”, long-suffering children of the killer. Just like ITV’s conman documentary, if it were a novel it would seem too far-fetched.
It started in Beddau, south Wales, and perhaps to lighten things, the director cast it almost as a stage play with the local interviewees described as the Pastor, the Neighbour, the Carer and the Pub Landlady. Episode one was called Act One. This is a technique becoming increasingly popular with documentary-makers, but it does risk undermining the seriousness of the subject matter.
No spoilers, but the opener to episode two, in which a woman says, “My mother was a nasty, horrible, heartless bitch”, gives you some idea of what we’re dealing with. Depressing, and fascinating.★★★★☆
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