October 28, 2021 • 42 mins
Johnathan discovers that Mair Smyth’s cons have gone international, and police from Northern Ireland are hot on her trail. Mair's daughter Chelsea speaks out for the first time about her experience being raised by a con artist and getting roped into helping her scam $500,000 from dozens of victims in Northern Ireland. Chelsea reveals not only that Mair was an unfit mother, but offers a stunning psychological portrait of a woman who uses and exploits family members without a shred of remorse.
Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.com
See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
Mark as Played
Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:00):
Certain portions of what you're about to hear have been
dramatized based on real life events, eyewitness accounts, and court records.
Mayor Smith's trail of cons circles far and wide. She
was a brilliant woman from witchcraft. She would use a
lot of dragon's blood. She would do love spells, she
(00:21):
would do binding spells to blackmailing married men. I want
you to send them money, end of argument. Even shaking
down a Los Angeles politician, she wanted me to put
a bug in his office, and she was going to
buy the bug. And Mayor's knack for drafting unwitting accomplices
is epic, and I was holding the cash in my hand,
(00:44):
helping their deposited in the machine. More and more of
Mayor's victims keep finding my blog and calling me up
from all over the country and from all over the world.
I got a call from a detective in nor Than
Ireland found my blog. You've been looking for Marianne Smith
for ten years. Ten years. That's a long time to
(01:05):
be looking for someone. So she must have really like
did some damage. I did not see this one coming
at all. She lived in Northern Ireland. I had no
idea I thought the whole Irish thing was a lie.
I'm Jonathan Walton and this is Queen of the Con
(01:31):
Episode six, The Family. Just when I think I'm close
to solving the Rubik's Cube of Mayor's Conshigh uncover a
whole other level. So was there any truth to the
(01:54):
Irish thing? Was maryor Irish at all? Or was it
all just bullshit? Like at all? My buddy Evan Goldstein
is having trouble keeping up. It was all bullshit. The
only colonel of truth to the Irish thing was she
did live in Northern Ireland, which is not Ireland, Northern
Ireland's part of the UK. I didn't know that either
until I started on this journey, but she lived there
(02:14):
for almost ten years. So that's what gave her like,
you know, these little phrases, these words that the things
that would make it feel incredible to find out how
Mayor Smith a k A. Mary Anne Smith a k
A Mary Anne Andel, Maryanne Welch, Maryanne Clark, Maryanne O'Cleary
and Mayor Ellis wound up living in Northern Ireland for
(02:37):
almost ten years. I go straight to the source telling
people that you know, she's Irish Royalty when there's no
Irish royal family, it's bizarre, or rather the sources daughter
thirty year old Chelsea Welch. Today she's a bright and
hard working teacher in Tennessee, but her childhood was marked
(03:00):
by chaotic instability, growing up a victim of her mother's
many scams. Up until we moved overseas, she just bounced
from job to job. I remember she worked at a
pet store for a while, she worked at like a
recovery center. She worked at Denzo, which is a huge
(03:20):
manufacturing company in Tennessee that works with Japan. Just any job.
She usually worked with temp agencies, but she could never
hold a job down. And I remember one time she
actually got fired from a job. And I would love
to this day to know what the real reason was,
because I remember she told me that it was my fault.
(03:44):
Being raised by a con artist, always on the move
takes a heavy toll on Chelsea. I mean now, she's
a beautiful and kind young woman who looks nothing like
her mother and is nothing like her mother. Things have
really turned a corner for Chelsea. She's getting married next month.
She's ambitious and unflinchingly honest, but she's also super suspicious
(04:07):
of people, especially strangers. I don't believe anything anyone said.
And growing up with Mayor Smith as a mother wasn't
just hard, it was torture. I was being severely abused.
I tried to report that she was violent, but my mom,
(04:27):
she's not an idiot. Like my mom didn't do things
like punch me in the face and you know, give
me black eyes or break bones. She would like kick
me in the head and like kick me like in
other places. And you could not tell by looking at
me that I was being physically abused, like she was
(04:47):
not ever doing anything that would have left any traces
or signs. She would selectively. She's a place that bruise
it like on your head with a full head of hair.
You can't tell. I did always think it was weird.
I'm like, how am I always getting the crap beat
out of me? But you have nothing to show for it.
(05:12):
Chelsea's mother is not born in Ireland. Marianne Elizabeth Andel
is born in Bangor, Maine. On July nine. She left
the state of Maine and she was eighteen, but my
grandparents lived there until like the late eighties. Mayor joins
(05:32):
the military at that point as a Navy corman, which
is like an entry level hospital assistant, and lives briefly
in Sarasota, Florida, where she's charged with forgery and grand theft,
then Knoxville, Tennessee, where she's charged with fraud, passing bad checks,
and shoplifting. She also lives for a short time in
(05:53):
Washington State, Virginia, Illinois, and Michigan. My mom seemed really young,
immature to me. I thought that she was just odd
compared to other adults. I thought that she dressed weird.
Her demeanor was weird because she had that still needing
to be a teenager mentality. Chelsea, though, is not Mayor's
(06:16):
first child. Mayor has Courtney Lynn Welch in August of
Her husband at the time is Jeff Welch, a man
she meets while stationed in Michigan. Two years later, Chelsea
enters the fray. I was born in Illinois, but that's
the only time I've ever been to Illinois. And shortly
after Chelsea is born, Jeff Welch files for divorce because
(06:40):
he says Mayor is a pathological liar and she cheated
on him. You see, Chelsea is not his biological daughter.
In fact, to this day, Mayor refuses to tell Chelsea
who her real father is. What were some of the
stories you got when you would ask, who's my father? Oh? God, Well,
(07:01):
first of all, the logical train of thought would have
been that my sister and I had the same dad,
because when I was born, she was still married to
his dad. She gave me her married last name, like
I still have that last name, but my mom. So
they were all in the navy. So my mom told
my grandparents that, like, my dad died in the military,
(07:23):
which wouldn't be a far off example because I was
born during desert storm, so there were like actual deployments
and violence, so I wouldn't be a total crazy lie.
One time, she did tell my grandparents that he was
African American. I look like I could come from Sweden. Yes,
you're very fair skin blonde. And then apart from that,
(07:47):
she's just kind of danced around it and refused to
tell me. I think that either my sister's dad knows
and doesn't want to tell me, or my mom just
like had an affair or one night stained one of
the two. A Michigan court quickly declares Mayor an unfit
mother and awards full custody of Chelsea's sister Courtney to
(08:10):
mayor soon to be ex husband Jeff Welch, which is
rare in family court and very telling because most judges
bend over backwards to give custody to the mother unless
something is really wrong with her. I suffer from c
PTSD and I have really severe anxiety, and so one
(08:33):
of the main ways that my anxiety manifests itself is
I get really angry. And when I get really angry,
I used to have to have a physical response to
that anger, whether it was like punching a hole in
a wall or just like breaking something like. I did
not know how to release anger in a non physical way,
(08:56):
and until I just decided to go to therapy and
anger management, it really scared me because I was out
of control when I would get mad, and it wasn't
I wasn't getting mad at big normal things. It was little,
everyday life things that adults should know how to deal
(09:18):
with confidently and calmly. But because my mom was always
at a level ten, I did not know how to
regulate my emotions. So I would say that her influence
hurt me more on the personality side, because I had
no no coping skills, and it heavily influenced all of
(09:38):
my relationships, my ability to succeed. I mean, it was
a lot in Chelsea is a defenseless baby, and Mayor
(09:59):
abruptly leaves Michigan and her now ex husband, Jeff Welch.
She returns to Tennessee and gives Chelsea to her parents,
then she disappears. She was totally absent for the first
couple of years of my life, and it was a
situation where people didn't know where she was. So not
(10:21):
only was she gone. When I would say, you know,
where is my mom, people would genuinely answer with they
didn't know. Mayor eventually returns and tries to take Chelsea back,
but courts ordered Mayor to share custody of Chelsea with
her grandparents because the Tennessee judge has serious doubts about
(10:42):
Mayor's mothering ability. But Mayor's not having it. She pulls
every dirty trick in the book to get that decision reversed.
She took my grandparents, who had been taken care of
me for years, to court an accused my grandfather of
molesting me in order to get soul custody and created
(11:06):
one of the just the most outrageous wise that I
had ever heard. Wow, and how old were you at
this point when that happened. I would have been about
five or six. She tried to get you to say
you were molested. I mean she never said, like, you
have to say this. I know this isn't true. But
(11:29):
like with all things with her, she would just kind
of present something to you in such a confusing way,
like gas lighting to the extreme. She could almost convince
you that things happened when you knew in your right
frame of mind they never did. But she just knew
how to like get inside people's heads and just make
(11:52):
you even just question yourself and your own reality. Thankfully,
the courts don't believe Mayor's molestation lie, and she's forced
to share custody of Chelsea with her parents, Chelsea's grandparents,
because obviously since she had been out of my life
for several years, they weren't just going to let her
(12:14):
take me home. They wanted to see her and see
that she was well and okay, And they did not
deny her access to me. They just said, you can't
take her home full time yet. So Chelsea is raised
for the first part of her life in Merville, Tennessee,
and even though Chelsea isn't living with Mayor full time,
she still notices her mother's insatiable urge to invent stories.
(12:39):
I mean, she was always a pathological liar, just making
things up constantly. The thing is, my mom is always
far away from the place that she's lying about. So
she grew up in Maine, but I grew up in Tennessee.
So she's lying to a bunch people in Tennessee about
stuff that happened in Maine. So she's always make sure
(13:04):
that it's hard to dispute. But having me in the
mix every day would have made it more difficult if
I would have spoken up. But my favorite lie that
I just could not stand the most, and because I
never understood how anyone believed it. She used to tell
people that she was a figure skater growing up, which
(13:27):
you would believe because she lived in Lincoln, one of
the most northern states. But she couldn't leave it at that.
She couldn't just say I figure skated. No, she was
going to go Olympic, but my grandmother supposedly didn't allow
her to do that because she was jealous. And first
(13:50):
of all, that's crazy, because what kind of parents would
do that. She would say that to people all the time,
and I would want so badly to be like, you don't.
You don't know how to I skate like much less
to do anything. That is one of those weird cons
because some of the victims in Los Angeles told me
(14:10):
that story that she was an Olympic skater. She was
an Olympic hopeful. No, I mean hopeful for a ticket
to the Olympics. Maybe I may or may not have
made it to the Olympics, but that doesn't mean she
isn't going places. She absolutely is. She's just biding her time.
(14:35):
How did your mother end up in Northern Ireland? We
got a computer for the first time when I was
like eight years old, and she dated a man and
he was from Northern Ireland and she met him and
I don't remember, they talked for quite a while online.
So she's in Tennessee at this point, she meets Stephen
Smith online, a guy living in Northern Ireland. And did
(14:58):
she let you know what her plans are? At that point?
I mean, it's like, is it just gonna be long
distance forever? What was she saying about it? So at
my eleventh birthday party, she hands me an envelope and
there's plane tickets in it and it said where we
were going. And I was just like, Oh, are we
gonna go visit Stephen? And in front of all my friends,
(15:19):
she says, no, we're going to move there. And honestly,
I don't know that I would have cared about moving.
But what happened is she told me that I was
not allowed to tell my grandparents. So we went there
at the beginning of the summer and I knew we
were moving, I wasn't allowed to say anything. And then
she made me call them at the end of the
(15:41):
summer and say, hey, we're staying here and I'm going
to go to school. And my grandparents were really upset,
but they didn't protest because my mom made me call
and make it seem like something that I was like
okay with and I was not. She kind of like
(16:03):
kidnapped you pretty much. I mean, technically she broke the
custody agreement, but also that's a jurisdiction issue, and the
kind of money that you would have to spend to
fight that. I mean that she just kind of had
my grandparents hands tied behind their back. Because for years
she had been single, so now she had found a
guy who was nice. So now that I'm older, I'm
(16:27):
thinking they're probably thinking maybe this would be more stable.
But for Chelsea, living in Northern Ireland with Mayor is
anything but stable, and Mayor starts blaming Chelsea for everything
wrong in her life, even her own obesity. Your mom
used to weigh like almost three pounds. Yeah, when she
left to go to Northern Ireland to meet Stephen Smith.
(16:49):
What's she heavy? Then? Yes? I didn't know that now.
My mom told me that the reason that she gained
weight um was because of being on hormone replacement therapy
after she had me, because she had to have a
historic to me after having me, because I ruined the world,
you know everything the day that I was born. This
(17:11):
guy Phil for her. I think, I'm so sorry that
happened to you. That's so messed up on so many levels. Yeah,
it makes me mad, you know, mad, not even from
my situation. Just got a little your little girl to
be told something like that, it's fucked up. I mean
it was bad. How did your mom get so thin
(17:32):
that well, she had gastric bypass surgery. She went to Prague,
I believe, and paid cash. How many years into Northern
Ireland did she leave to go to Prague for gastric
bypass surgery. It would have been like six years. I
(17:54):
mean she didn't get really thin up until like my
junior senior year of high school. And now it was
the worst time ever, because the worst thing you can
give a narcissist is good looks, and it's like she
became even worse after that. I think like being kind
of overweight and frumpy kept her a little bit humble
(18:16):
for a while, and then once that was done anyway,
it was like I can't explain it, but there was
such a personality shift, like she always had this I'm
better than everyone attitude, and that attitude helps Mayor con
dozens of new victims. Remember that recently unearthed audio recording.
(18:40):
I play a piece of it for Chelsea to get
her reaction, because this particular part of the recording is
actually about Chelsea and her sister, Courtney, who was taken
from Mayor as a baby. But that's not the story
Mayor tells people in Los Angeles about her daughters. This
is there was a Christmas when my kids were young.
(19:02):
I think they were in first and second grade in
primary school. No matter what, We're living in Belfast, and
my family and I had a huge fight and I
decided that Christmas I didn't want to go to Galway.
I was just going to spend me and Chelsea and
Belfast because Courtney had to go home. And my family
were telling me not to send her on the plane.
(19:23):
And I knew if I didn't send her on the plane,
I would be arrested if I came back to America.
My ex husband would have me arrested. I know that,
and I keep my word. If I tell you i'm
going to do something, I'm gonna do it, no matter
I'm gonna cry, no matter what the sacrifice to me is,
I'm going to do it at all costs. So I
was very upset, and my family were boycotting me because
(19:48):
they were pissed they never got to spend Christmas with Courtney.
And my grand said, no one talked to Mary for Christmas.
So they sent all the Christmas present to Chelsea and
not one Christmas present for me that year, And it
was the hardest Christmas ever because of one present under
(20:08):
the tree was from my girls, and they had made
like a milk curtain candle and it was the ugliest
fucking candle I had ever seen in my life. But
it really affected me because I was alone, and it
(20:30):
was really hard for me to swallow that I was
upset for getting a shitty present. But it was from
the heart. I had to acknowledge to my daughters that
they gave me the most beautiful present in the world,
even though I was fucking furious, furious it honestly like
(20:57):
it's making me have like a physical angers bonds, like
I just want to hurt her. I have never been
took all away. God I she is. Oh, I hate her.
First of all, I don't know how if that story
was true. Who the fuck cares that you, as an
(21:18):
adult didn't get a Christmas present? Oh, your kids got
all the good Like what the fuck? Some people go
through that real life situation and like a family doesn't
even send the kids presents. And let me tell you,
this woman is like just the greediest person ever, Like
she would get mad when she didn't get like Mother's
Day presents and things. So there was never First of all,
(21:41):
this couldn't have happened because my sister and there weren't
around each other. We were around each other when we
were little babies, and then we didn't see each other
again until I was sixteen, so we were certainly not
together at a Christmas in the first and second grade.
But it's just even in her fake life, she's if
you really listen, she's still a terrible person. It was
(22:03):
the worst candle ever and I had to lie, like
what what kind of mother says that? Like, even her
fake persona is a piece of ship if you pay
enough attention. Chelsea's real life with Mayor living in that
part of the world is not good. She sees things
(22:26):
no child should ever see and does things no child
should ever have to do. So the day that I
got a call from a police detective in Northern Ireland
saying that they've been looking for her for ten years,
I was shocked. What would have been your reaction if
you got that call? Not shocked at all. I knew
(22:48):
for sure there was something fishy going on there, but
I couldn't put my finger on it. In early two
thousand two, Mayor arrives in Northern Ireland with Chelsea and
moves in with Steven Smith. What was Steven Smith like?
(23:12):
Totally not someone I would have ever pictured her with
they were like nine and day and I always thought
that was weird, but obviously it's because she just pretended
to be. She's really great at reading people. You know,
she knows what you're looking for, like not just romantically,
but when she talks to people. I've seen it happening
(23:33):
like at the flip of a dime, Like she knows
how to be your best friend. She knows how to
like intimidate and scare you very quickly, like she just
knows how to get in your head and under your skin.
And she knows how to wrap Steven Smith around her
little finger, because he quickly falls head over heels from
Mayor and marries her. Chelsea says he's a good man,
(23:55):
a postal worker, and he has a passion for racing greyhounds.
By the time I was a senior in high school,
we had about fifteen to seventeen dogs in our house.
Mayor works a series of odd jobs in Northern Ireland
and eventually gets stable employment as a broker at a
British mortgage company. So I don't know how she did
(24:17):
it or how she qualified, because at this point I
was still only about thirteen, but she worked for this
big company out of England for what I think was
a few years. I'm pretty sure that was the longest
I'd ever seen her have a job with like one place.
And then she started working with a smaller company that
(24:38):
was kind of outside of Belfast, and that's when I
think she started being able to do whatever she was doing. Yep,
as usual, Mayor is up to no good and she
actually uses Chelsea, her own daughter, to do some of
her dirty work. She did make friends, we would like
(24:59):
a lot of her clients like personal friends. Like she
had one woman who, like I babysat her kids. There's
a couple of people like I babysat for them. She
would like hang out with them, and it was always
and where one of the two of them were like
moms whose husbands were like a little uninvolved. So it's
(25:20):
always people that need saving, people that need help. Yes,
that is the hallmark of every single con she's pulled.
It's she offers to help. Yeah. Wow, even from back then,
So looking back, how does that make you feel? She
essentially used you as bait in her con. Oh, she
used me for all sorts of things. I used to
(25:44):
forge signatures on papers because I mean, Northern Ireland is
a small country, but it's very rural, so driving people
live like way out there, and so she would say, like,
this paperwork has to be done by Monday, and I
don't have time to drap to this client's house. And
if you don't sign this, they're not going to get
(26:06):
their money because I am unfortunately I can pretty much
look at somebody's handwriting and copy it. Did she teach
you that skill? How do you learn something like that?
It's weird. Whenever I was like a little kid because
I lived with old people and I was an only child,
and I was trying to like learn cursive, I would
(26:27):
like pick up things that my grandmother had written and
like copied them, and I liked handwriting, and I was
obsessed with the movie Harriet the Spy. So I don't
know I've had this. I had already had this weird
thing about copying people's writing. And that sometimes makes me
wonder if, like the whole colon artist thing is like
(26:49):
a genetic trait. I had gotten grounded before for forging
a note for school, and when she got the note back,
she was like, I can't tell that this isn't my signature.
She was impressed with your Harriet the spy skills and
mimicking other people's handwriting and signatures. M hm, and she
(27:12):
drafted you yep. And how old were you at this point?
Do you recall when you were like forging signatures and documents.
I mean, obviously you don't know it's forging. Like your
mother is explaining that this is okay. I just can't
make the drive. We have to have these papers, and
they're not going to get their money. You know, the
fate of the world is in your hands and your kid.
(27:32):
It would have been like fourteen. Even when she worked
for the bigger company, she would sometimes do that. And
sometimes I would think to myself, like this is weird,
and I would have like worries that you know, what
if I get like I get in trouble and I
get arrested. But when she asked me to do something,
(27:55):
it was never an ask. It was it's not an option,
do it or else. How many signatures do you think
your mom made you forge? Is it like a couple
a dozen? D Was it a frequent occurrence? She would
always have you signing stuff for her at least once
a week. I would be signing several papers, and it
(28:19):
was always like on a weekend or like a Sunday night,
because it was never oh, just casually do this for me.
It was always like an emergency scenario. And that's part
of a scam too, because making things an emergency makes
you want to help her exactly. That's all part of
(28:40):
the trick. Unless app to argue because if she wasn't
talking about the person getting their money, you know, because
in order for her to get paid, she would have
made a commission. So she would say to me, like,
if you don't get this done, then I'm not going
to get paid, and like we'll lose this or I
I mean, she would just put like the way to
(29:03):
the world on my shoulders just to do something. And
it wasn't that I thought we were scamming people, like
I believed her that I was just signing something that
someone forgot to sign, or a paper that she forgot.
But I was worried about getting in trouble simply because
I knew forging signatures was illegal. It got to a
(29:25):
point where I'm like, Okay, I've done this a lot,
like but for some reason, I never thought this person
doesn't even know this paper exists. I just thought my
mom was a total airheaded idiot, and that was honestly
in my opinion of her. So I believed that she
was stupid enough to be so disorganized that she would
just forget things. But Mayor the mortgage broker is in
(29:50):
fact using Chelsea's Harry at the spy like signature spoofing
skills to scam a bunch of her clients. Because the
Northern Ireland Police detective who finds my dog and calls
me up in I'm trying to reach Mr Jonathan Walton
provides the other half of that story, the facts and
the figures part. He says, Mayor, who was known as
(30:13):
Mary Anne Smith, stole hundreds of thousands from dozens of
victims in Northern Ireland using her job as a mortgage
broker and also impersonating a financial advisor, left a trail
of devastation and now that Northern Ireland Police know where
she is thanks to my blog, they're going to try
and extradite her. The detective emails me days later, saying
(30:37):
I have prepared to find it for the prosecutors and
just want to check what the situation is with your kisses.
I have spoken to my injured parties who are all
still trying to recover financially and emotionally from their experience.
I didn't really get this sense that she was scamming people,
but I knew like something was that because there would
(31:01):
be times when my mom would be like rolling in
money where we would get like whatever. I would just
get handed a lot of cash to like go into
town and spend money, just wats cash and she would
just paying my friends loads of money sometimes. But now
I just wonder was that money, Like, was she scamming people?
(31:24):
I have no idea what was going on, but all
I know is that she would have either so much
money she didn't know what to do with or nothing.
There was never a steady middle and there never ever
could be, because right before Mayor leaves Northern Ireland in
two thousand nine, she disappears with the down payments of
(31:44):
six people's homes and she cons twenty other victims using
multiple investment scams. One of those victims is an elderly
woman who finds my blog and emails me. I too
was a victim of Marianna and Smith as I knew
her after reading your blog, I telephoned place. They confirmed
(32:07):
they already opening the case. I would like to say
this woman brought to justice as she robbed me of
my trust and people which affected my whole being. She
put me in a prison without bars, and I feel
she should be stopped so as not to do this
to anyone else. I, like everybody else, need to know
(32:28):
that justice is available to me in a world of corruption.
I am sixty six years old and living in financial
stress due to her to sit And what's really upsetting
is in two nine, before Mere flees Northern Ireland, someone
somehow tips her off and tells her that police are
(32:50):
investigating her. She panics and she gets the hell out
of Dodge, taking Chelsea and her husband Stephen with her,
and in her add dashed to escape mayor does be unthinkable?
Remember Stephen Smith's greyhounds. We had about fifteen to seventeen
(33:12):
dogs in our house. My mom made my stepdad put
all the dogs down, oh like kill them, put them down,
Oh my god, because there wasn't time to re home them. Um.
I don't know what happened, but I'm guessing that she
probably told him a number of days that they had
(33:33):
to be gone, and so he had to do that.
And then we packed what we could in suitcases and
everything else Scott left in our house. The house just
got completely abandoned, so she did not communicate with me
about what was really going on. But I mean, obviously
(33:54):
you don't put all your animals down and just flee
your home. Wow, I didn't know that she's is That's
just like, that's I mean, that's just fucking evil. I'll
never forget that day because those dogs, I mean, they
were his life. And he had already been through so
much of just being married her and just dealing with
(34:16):
her lies, and he had to come to and like,
why would you want to be with her? This disturbing, no, no,
this sickening revelation that Mayor ordered Stephen to kill seventeen
of their dogs for no reason stays with me for
(34:39):
a long time as a dog owner. I can't even imagine.
It's obvious to me now, Mayor Smith was born without
a soul. What does the rest of the family think
about your mother, your uncle's, your aunts. I mean, she's
kind of been a person on a non grattis since
(35:01):
I was a kid. She's came in and out of
everybody's lives because of me. But once I turned eighteen
and we moved back here. My stepdad actually ended up
like leaving her and living with my grandparents until he
went back home. So obviously there's no love or loyalty
(35:22):
to her. You should be like a drug addict, criminal,
con artist. That's what you were raised to be, you know,
like that would be surprising, but you turned out to
be the opposite. You're this rule follower, law abiding, talented, smart, hardworking, honest, kind,
friendly person. How did you pull that off? I just
(35:44):
think that for me, because I grew up with her
in my face, I was like, gosh, I need to
be anything but this. When Mayor Smith, on the run
from authorities in Northern Ireland, touches down on Tennessee Soil
(36:05):
in two thousand nine, she's flush with cash. She had
scammed close to five hundred thousand dollars from twenty six
victims there, and her first plan of action stateside is
to get her daughter, Courtney back into her life the
only way she knows how randomly. One day, Marianne asked
for Courtney's banking information, so Courtney gave it to her
(36:27):
because she said, well, I haven't been in your life
for the past eighteen years. I want to do things
to try to make things right, so she started sending
money to Courtney's account. Joshua Askavish is married to Mayor's
first daughter, Courtney. At the time. Courtney is a team
and has only recently connected with her biological mother Mayor.
(36:47):
She hasn't seen her mother since she was a baby
back in Michigan. What was Courtney's reaction to getting this money?
What did she think it was for? Just basically a
Marianne's way of saying, I'm sorry and let me buy
my way back into your life. Yeah, that's what it
sounds like, right, So, I mean literally just literally trying
to buy her. To that end, Mayor invites Courtney and Joshua,
(37:11):
who live in Michigan, on an all expense paid vacation
to the Smoky Mountains in Tennessee. And what did m
Mayor look like when you first met her? Honestly, she
had kind of a slightly brownish red hair, curly say.
She was just you know, medium build, about five ft
five five ft six something like that. I mean, honestly,
(37:34):
you could tell she had a little bit of work
down in the face because she didn't look like her
age at all. Really she looked young. Oh yes, I
mean she was just all buddy buddy. We we went
to the local Walmart as soon as they picked us
up from the airport, went right to Walmart and they're
buying all kinds of stuff Stephen and I which Stephen
Want was Mary Anne's husband at the time. We went
back to the electronics section and he's asked me about
(37:56):
game system. She's like, oh, what kind of game system
do you prefer? And I was like, well me, personally,
I prefer the Xbox three sixty. So he calls the
clerk over and he's like, we'll take that one right there,
and you know a bunch of these games. Oh wow,
So he just fought you an Xbox. Literally. I wasn't
asking for anything, you know, of the sorts, but and
(38:16):
I thought maybe it was just something they were getting,
you know, for the weekend or the week that we
were staying down there. We're walking out in the park
lot and Stephen picks the bag up, hands with me
and goes, here you go, Josh, you know, and this
is yours. I was like just blown away. I was dumbfounded. No,
I mean they ring from the get go. They were
just they were trying to flaunt money, you know, and
(38:37):
then we go to Gatlinburg. We spent a week in
the mountains of Gatlinburg in this giant mansion of a
cabin and a game room, a sauna, hot tub, you
name it. And according to Marianne, it was like a
thousand dollars a night we were there for It was
either five or seven nights. She really wanted you used
(39:00):
to like her or love her. Oh, absolutely, it was
definitely paying for forgiveness. Yeah, and it works for a
little while. Anyway. Mayor transfers thousands of dollars every month
to Courtney's bank account for an entire year, and then
suddenly the transfer stop and Mayor she's nowhere to be found.
(39:25):
About a month later, it's eight o'clock at night and
there's a knock at the door of the Michigan home
where Courtney and Joshua are living with their newborn daughter Avery. Well,
I was sitting in the living room watching TV heard
than not I wouldn't be through the people, and it
just look like some average joe out there. So I
(39:49):
opened the door and years for Irish speaking mobsters standing
there with automatic assault rifles, and Marianne and what did
they tell you exactly? Well, they threatened that if we
didn't tell him where Marianne was, or if she was
staying there, or whatever the case was, if we didn't
(40:10):
tell him where we could find her, they were going
to kill Chelsea. They're gonna kill Stephen, They're gonna kill myself.
They're gonna kill Courtney and her newborn daughter Avery. Oh
my god, next time, I'm Queen of the Con, my fugitives.
You ended up getting miss Mariann's myke in custody. Today,
(40:34):
Mayor's victims start fighting back. I finger gun Dad. Hers like,
and then her attorneys like, I'm gonna tell the judge
you did that, and Mayor starts scamming a whole new
cross section of society, the mentally ill. I still haven't
recovered from, to tell the truth, I never met a
woman that did that to me. For exclusive photos and
(40:59):
other bonus material, follow at Queen of the Con on Instagram,
and if you're enjoying Queen of the Con, tell your
friends about it and leave us a review on Apple
Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts. Queen of the Con.
The Irish Heiress is a production of a y R
(41:21):
Media and I Heart Radio, hosted by Me Jonathan Walton.
Executive producers Jonathan Walton for Jonathan Walton Productions and Eliza
Rosen for A y R Media. Written by Jonathan Walton,
Consulting producer Evan Goldstein, Senior Associate producer Eric Newman. Sound
designed by Baked ZD Media, mixed and mastered by Elliott Herman.
(41:46):
Audio engineering by Elliott Herman. Studio engineering by Chris McMasters.
Voice acting performed by Tim Cunningham and Carmel O'Reilly Legal
counsel for A y R Media. Gianni Douglas Executive producer
for iHeart Radio Chandler Mainz
Certain portions of what you're about to hear have been
dramatized based on real life events, eyewitness accounts, and court records.
Mayor Smith's trail of cons circles far and wide. She
was a brilliant woman from witchcraft. She would use a
lot of dragon's blood. She would do love spells, she
(00:21):
would do binding spells to blackmailing married men. I want
you to send them money, end of argument. Even shaking
down a Los Angeles politician, she wanted me to put
a bug in his office, and she was going to
buy the bug. And Mayor's knack for drafting unwitting accomplices
is epic, and I was holding the cash in my hand,
(00:44):
helping their deposited in the machine. More and more of
Mayor's victims keep finding my blog and calling me up
from all over the country and from all over the world.
I got a call from a detective in nor Than
Ireland found my blog. You've been looking for Marianne Smith
for ten years. Ten years. That's a long time to
(01:05):
be looking for someone. So she must have really like
did some damage. I did not see this one coming
at all. She lived in Northern Ireland. I had no
idea I thought the whole Irish thing was a lie.
I'm Jonathan Walton and this is Queen of the Con
(01:31):
Episode six, The Family. Just when I think I'm close
to solving the Rubik's Cube of Mayor's Conshigh uncover a
whole other level. So was there any truth to the
(01:54):
Irish thing? Was maryor Irish at all? Or was it
all just bullshit? Like at all? My buddy Evan Goldstein
is having trouble keeping up. It was all bullshit. The
only colonel of truth to the Irish thing was she
did live in Northern Ireland, which is not Ireland, Northern
Ireland's part of the UK. I didn't know that either
until I started on this journey, but she lived there
(02:14):
for almost ten years. So that's what gave her like,
you know, these little phrases, these words that the things
that would make it feel incredible to find out how
Mayor Smith a k A. Mary Anne Smith a k
A Mary Anne Andel, Maryanne Welch, Maryanne Clark, Maryanne O'Cleary
and Mayor Ellis wound up living in Northern Ireland for
(02:37):
almost ten years. I go straight to the source telling
people that you know, she's Irish Royalty when there's no
Irish royal family, it's bizarre, or rather the sources daughter
thirty year old Chelsea Welch. Today she's a bright and
hard working teacher in Tennessee, but her childhood was marked
(03:00):
by chaotic instability, growing up a victim of her mother's
many scams. Up until we moved overseas, she just bounced
from job to job. I remember she worked at a
pet store for a while, she worked at like a
recovery center. She worked at Denzo, which is a huge
(03:20):
manufacturing company in Tennessee that works with Japan. Just any job.
She usually worked with temp agencies, but she could never
hold a job down. And I remember one time she
actually got fired from a job. And I would love
to this day to know what the real reason was,
because I remember she told me that it was my fault.
(03:44):
Being raised by a con artist, always on the move
takes a heavy toll on Chelsea. I mean now, she's
a beautiful and kind young woman who looks nothing like
her mother and is nothing like her mother. Things have
really turned a corner for Chelsea. She's getting married next month.
She's ambitious and unflinchingly honest, but she's also super suspicious
(04:07):
of people, especially strangers. I don't believe anything anyone said.
And growing up with Mayor Smith as a mother wasn't
just hard, it was torture. I was being severely abused.
I tried to report that she was violent, but my mom,
(04:27):
she's not an idiot. Like my mom didn't do things
like punch me in the face and you know, give
me black eyes or break bones. She would like kick
me in the head and like kick me like in
other places. And you could not tell by looking at
me that I was being physically abused, like she was
(04:47):
not ever doing anything that would have left any traces
or signs. She would selectively. She's a place that bruise
it like on your head with a full head of hair.
You can't tell. I did always think it was weird.
I'm like, how am I always getting the crap beat
out of me? But you have nothing to show for it.
(05:12):
Chelsea's mother is not born in Ireland. Marianne Elizabeth Andel
is born in Bangor, Maine. On July nine. She left
the state of Maine and she was eighteen, but my
grandparents lived there until like the late eighties. Mayor joins
(05:32):
the military at that point as a Navy corman, which
is like an entry level hospital assistant, and lives briefly
in Sarasota, Florida, where she's charged with forgery and grand theft,
then Knoxville, Tennessee, where she's charged with fraud, passing bad checks,
and shoplifting. She also lives for a short time in
(05:53):
Washington State, Virginia, Illinois, and Michigan. My mom seemed really young,
immature to me. I thought that she was just odd
compared to other adults. I thought that she dressed weird.
Her demeanor was weird because she had that still needing
to be a teenager mentality. Chelsea, though, is not Mayor's
(06:16):
first child. Mayor has Courtney Lynn Welch in August of
Her husband at the time is Jeff Welch, a man
she meets while stationed in Michigan. Two years later, Chelsea
enters the fray. I was born in Illinois, but that's
the only time I've ever been to Illinois. And shortly
after Chelsea is born, Jeff Welch files for divorce because
(06:40):
he says Mayor is a pathological liar and she cheated
on him. You see, Chelsea is not his biological daughter.
In fact, to this day, Mayor refuses to tell Chelsea
who her real father is. What were some of the
stories you got when you would ask, who's my father? Oh? God, Well,
(07:01):
first of all, the logical train of thought would have
been that my sister and I had the same dad,
because when I was born, she was still married to
his dad. She gave me her married last name, like
I still have that last name, but my mom. So
they were all in the navy. So my mom told
my grandparents that, like, my dad died in the military,
(07:23):
which wouldn't be a far off example because I was
born during desert storm, so there were like actual deployments
and violence, so I wouldn't be a total crazy lie.
One time, she did tell my grandparents that he was
African American. I look like I could come from Sweden. Yes,
you're very fair skin blonde. And then apart from that,
(07:47):
she's just kind of danced around it and refused to
tell me. I think that either my sister's dad knows
and doesn't want to tell me, or my mom just
like had an affair or one night stained one of
the two. A Michigan court quickly declares Mayor an unfit
mother and awards full custody of Chelsea's sister Courtney to
(08:10):
mayor soon to be ex husband Jeff Welch, which is
rare in family court and very telling because most judges
bend over backwards to give custody to the mother unless
something is really wrong with her. I suffer from c
PTSD and I have really severe anxiety, and so one
(08:33):
of the main ways that my anxiety manifests itself is
I get really angry. And when I get really angry,
I used to have to have a physical response to
that anger, whether it was like punching a hole in
a wall or just like breaking something like. I did
not know how to release anger in a non physical way,
(08:56):
and until I just decided to go to therapy and
anger management, it really scared me because I was out
of control when I would get mad, and it wasn't
I wasn't getting mad at big normal things. It was little,
everyday life things that adults should know how to deal
(09:18):
with confidently and calmly. But because my mom was always
at a level ten, I did not know how to
regulate my emotions. So I would say that her influence
hurt me more on the personality side, because I had
no no coping skills, and it heavily influenced all of
(09:38):
my relationships, my ability to succeed. I mean, it was
a lot in Chelsea is a defenseless baby, and Mayor
(09:59):
abruptly leaves Michigan and her now ex husband, Jeff Welch.
She returns to Tennessee and gives Chelsea to her parents,
then she disappears. She was totally absent for the first
couple of years of my life, and it was a
situation where people didn't know where she was. So not
(10:21):
only was she gone. When I would say, you know,
where is my mom, people would genuinely answer with they
didn't know. Mayor eventually returns and tries to take Chelsea back,
but courts ordered Mayor to share custody of Chelsea with
her grandparents because the Tennessee judge has serious doubts about
(10:42):
Mayor's mothering ability. But Mayor's not having it. She pulls
every dirty trick in the book to get that decision reversed.
She took my grandparents, who had been taken care of
me for years, to court an accused my grandfather of
molesting me in order to get soul custody and created
(11:06):
one of the just the most outrageous wise that I
had ever heard. Wow, and how old were you at
this point when that happened. I would have been about
five or six. She tried to get you to say
you were molested. I mean she never said, like, you
have to say this. I know this isn't true. But
(11:29):
like with all things with her, she would just kind
of present something to you in such a confusing way,
like gas lighting to the extreme. She could almost convince
you that things happened when you knew in your right
frame of mind they never did. But she just knew
how to like get inside people's heads and just make
(11:52):
you even just question yourself and your own reality. Thankfully,
the courts don't believe Mayor's molestation lie, and she's forced
to share custody of Chelsea with her parents, Chelsea's grandparents,
because obviously since she had been out of my life
for several years, they weren't just going to let her
(12:14):
take me home. They wanted to see her and see
that she was well and okay, And they did not
deny her access to me. They just said, you can't
take her home full time yet. So Chelsea is raised
for the first part of her life in Merville, Tennessee,
and even though Chelsea isn't living with Mayor full time,
she still notices her mother's insatiable urge to invent stories.
(12:39):
I mean, she was always a pathological liar, just making
things up constantly. The thing is, my mom is always
far away from the place that she's lying about. So
she grew up in Maine, but I grew up in Tennessee.
So she's lying to a bunch people in Tennessee about
stuff that happened in Maine. So she's always make sure
(13:04):
that it's hard to dispute. But having me in the
mix every day would have made it more difficult if
I would have spoken up. But my favorite lie that
I just could not stand the most, and because I
never understood how anyone believed it. She used to tell
people that she was a figure skater growing up, which
(13:27):
you would believe because she lived in Lincoln, one of
the most northern states. But she couldn't leave it at that.
She couldn't just say I figure skated. No, she was
going to go Olympic, but my grandmother supposedly didn't allow
her to do that because she was jealous. And first
(13:50):
of all, that's crazy, because what kind of parents would
do that. She would say that to people all the time,
and I would want so badly to be like, you don't.
You don't know how to I skate like much less
to do anything. That is one of those weird cons
because some of the victims in Los Angeles told me
(14:10):
that story that she was an Olympic skater. She was
an Olympic hopeful. No, I mean hopeful for a ticket
to the Olympics. Maybe I may or may not have
made it to the Olympics, but that doesn't mean she
isn't going places. She absolutely is. She's just biding her time.
(14:35):
How did your mother end up in Northern Ireland? We
got a computer for the first time when I was
like eight years old, and she dated a man and
he was from Northern Ireland and she met him and
I don't remember, they talked for quite a while online.
So she's in Tennessee at this point, she meets Stephen
Smith online, a guy living in Northern Ireland. And did
(14:58):
she let you know what her plans are? At that point?
I mean, it's like, is it just gonna be long
distance forever? What was she saying about it? So at
my eleventh birthday party, she hands me an envelope and
there's plane tickets in it and it said where we
were going. And I was just like, Oh, are we
gonna go visit Stephen? And in front of all my friends,
(15:19):
she says, no, we're going to move there. And honestly,
I don't know that I would have cared about moving.
But what happened is she told me that I was
not allowed to tell my grandparents. So we went there
at the beginning of the summer and I knew we
were moving, I wasn't allowed to say anything. And then
she made me call them at the end of the
(15:41):
summer and say, hey, we're staying here and I'm going
to go to school. And my grandparents were really upset,
but they didn't protest because my mom made me call
and make it seem like something that I was like
okay with and I was not. She kind of like
(16:03):
kidnapped you pretty much. I mean, technically she broke the
custody agreement, but also that's a jurisdiction issue, and the
kind of money that you would have to spend to
fight that. I mean that she just kind of had
my grandparents hands tied behind their back. Because for years
she had been single, so now she had found a
guy who was nice. So now that I'm older, I'm
(16:27):
thinking they're probably thinking maybe this would be more stable.
But for Chelsea, living in Northern Ireland with Mayor is
anything but stable, and Mayor starts blaming Chelsea for everything
wrong in her life, even her own obesity. Your mom
used to weigh like almost three pounds. Yeah, when she
left to go to Northern Ireland to meet Stephen Smith.
(16:49):
What's she heavy? Then? Yes? I didn't know that now.
My mom told me that the reason that she gained
weight um was because of being on hormone replacement therapy
after she had me, because she had to have a
historic to me after having me, because I ruined the world,
you know everything the day that I was born. This
(17:11):
guy Phil for her. I think, I'm so sorry that
happened to you. That's so messed up on so many levels. Yeah,
it makes me mad, you know, mad, not even from
my situation. Just got a little your little girl to
be told something like that, it's fucked up. I mean
it was bad. How did your mom get so thin
(17:32):
that well, she had gastric bypass surgery. She went to Prague,
I believe, and paid cash. How many years into Northern
Ireland did she leave to go to Prague for gastric
bypass surgery. It would have been like six years. I
(17:54):
mean she didn't get really thin up until like my
junior senior year of high school. And now it was
the worst time ever, because the worst thing you can
give a narcissist is good looks, and it's like she
became even worse after that. I think like being kind
of overweight and frumpy kept her a little bit humble
(18:16):
for a while, and then once that was done anyway,
it was like I can't explain it, but there was
such a personality shift, like she always had this I'm
better than everyone attitude, and that attitude helps Mayor con
dozens of new victims. Remember that recently unearthed audio recording.
(18:40):
I play a piece of it for Chelsea to get
her reaction, because this particular part of the recording is
actually about Chelsea and her sister, Courtney, who was taken
from Mayor as a baby. But that's not the story
Mayor tells people in Los Angeles about her daughters. This
is there was a Christmas when my kids were young.
(19:02):
I think they were in first and second grade in
primary school. No matter what, We're living in Belfast, and
my family and I had a huge fight and I
decided that Christmas I didn't want to go to Galway.
I was just going to spend me and Chelsea and
Belfast because Courtney had to go home. And my family
were telling me not to send her on the plane.
(19:23):
And I knew if I didn't send her on the plane,
I would be arrested if I came back to America.
My ex husband would have me arrested. I know that,
and I keep my word. If I tell you i'm
going to do something, I'm gonna do it, no matter
I'm gonna cry, no matter what the sacrifice to me is,
I'm going to do it at all costs. So I
was very upset, and my family were boycotting me because
(19:48):
they were pissed they never got to spend Christmas with Courtney.
And my grand said, no one talked to Mary for Christmas.
So they sent all the Christmas present to Chelsea and
not one Christmas present for me that year, And it
was the hardest Christmas ever because of one present under
(20:08):
the tree was from my girls, and they had made
like a milk curtain candle and it was the ugliest
fucking candle I had ever seen in my life. But
it really affected me because I was alone, and it
(20:30):
was really hard for me to swallow that I was
upset for getting a shitty present. But it was from
the heart. I had to acknowledge to my daughters that
they gave me the most beautiful present in the world,
even though I was fucking furious, furious it honestly like
(20:57):
it's making me have like a physical angers bonds, like
I just want to hurt her. I have never been
took all away. God I she is. Oh, I hate her.
First of all, I don't know how if that story
was true. Who the fuck cares that you, as an
(21:18):
adult didn't get a Christmas present? Oh, your kids got
all the good Like what the fuck? Some people go
through that real life situation and like a family doesn't
even send the kids presents. And let me tell you,
this woman is like just the greediest person ever, Like
she would get mad when she didn't get like Mother's
Day presents and things. So there was never First of all,
(21:41):
this couldn't have happened because my sister and there weren't
around each other. We were around each other when we
were little babies, and then we didn't see each other
again until I was sixteen, so we were certainly not
together at a Christmas in the first and second grade.
But it's just even in her fake life, she's if
you really listen, she's still a terrible person. It was
(22:03):
the worst candle ever and I had to lie, like
what what kind of mother says that? Like, even her
fake persona is a piece of ship if you pay
enough attention. Chelsea's real life with Mayor living in that
part of the world is not good. She sees things
(22:26):
no child should ever see and does things no child
should ever have to do. So the day that I
got a call from a police detective in Northern Ireland
saying that they've been looking for her for ten years,
I was shocked. What would have been your reaction if
you got that call? Not shocked at all. I knew
(22:48):
for sure there was something fishy going on there, but
I couldn't put my finger on it. In early two
thousand two, Mayor arrives in Northern Ireland with Chelsea and
moves in with Steven Smith. What was Steven Smith like?
(23:12):
Totally not someone I would have ever pictured her with
they were like nine and day and I always thought
that was weird, but obviously it's because she just pretended
to be. She's really great at reading people. You know,
she knows what you're looking for, like not just romantically,
but when she talks to people. I've seen it happening
(23:33):
like at the flip of a dime, Like she knows
how to be your best friend. She knows how to
like intimidate and scare you very quickly, like she just
knows how to get in your head and under your skin.
And she knows how to wrap Steven Smith around her
little finger, because he quickly falls head over heels from
Mayor and marries her. Chelsea says he's a good man,
(23:55):
a postal worker, and he has a passion for racing greyhounds.
By the time I was a senior in high school,
we had about fifteen to seventeen dogs in our house.
Mayor works a series of odd jobs in Northern Ireland
and eventually gets stable employment as a broker at a
British mortgage company. So I don't know how she did
(24:17):
it or how she qualified, because at this point I
was still only about thirteen, but she worked for this
big company out of England for what I think was
a few years. I'm pretty sure that was the longest
I'd ever seen her have a job with like one place.
And then she started working with a smaller company that
(24:38):
was kind of outside of Belfast, and that's when I
think she started being able to do whatever she was doing. Yep,
as usual, Mayor is up to no good and she
actually uses Chelsea, her own daughter, to do some of
her dirty work. She did make friends, we would like
(24:59):
a lot of her clients like personal friends. Like she
had one woman who, like I babysat her kids. There's
a couple of people like I babysat for them. She
would like hang out with them, and it was always
and where one of the two of them were like
moms whose husbands were like a little uninvolved. So it's
(25:20):
always people that need saving, people that need help. Yes,
that is the hallmark of every single con she's pulled.
It's she offers to help. Yeah. Wow, even from back then,
So looking back, how does that make you feel? She
essentially used you as bait in her con. Oh, she
used me for all sorts of things. I used to
(25:44):
forge signatures on papers because I mean, Northern Ireland is
a small country, but it's very rural, so driving people
live like way out there, and so she would say, like,
this paperwork has to be done by Monday, and I
don't have time to drap to this client's house. And
if you don't sign this, they're not going to get
(26:06):
their money because I am unfortunately I can pretty much
look at somebody's handwriting and copy it. Did she teach
you that skill? How do you learn something like that?
It's weird. Whenever I was like a little kid because
I lived with old people and I was an only child,
and I was trying to like learn cursive, I would
(26:27):
like pick up things that my grandmother had written and
like copied them, and I liked handwriting, and I was
obsessed with the movie Harriet the Spy. So I don't
know I've had this. I had already had this weird
thing about copying people's writing. And that sometimes makes me
wonder if, like the whole colon artist thing is like
(26:49):
a genetic trait. I had gotten grounded before for forging
a note for school, and when she got the note back,
she was like, I can't tell that this isn't my signature.
She was impressed with your Harriet the spy skills and
mimicking other people's handwriting and signatures. M hm, and she
(27:12):
drafted you yep. And how old were you at this point?
Do you recall when you were like forging signatures and documents.
I mean, obviously you don't know it's forging. Like your
mother is explaining that this is okay. I just can't
make the drive. We have to have these papers, and
they're not going to get their money. You know, the
fate of the world is in your hands and your kid.
(27:32):
It would have been like fourteen. Even when she worked
for the bigger company, she would sometimes do that. And
sometimes I would think to myself, like this is weird,
and I would have like worries that you know, what
if I get like I get in trouble and I
get arrested. But when she asked me to do something,
(27:55):
it was never an ask. It was it's not an option,
do it or else. How many signatures do you think
your mom made you forge? Is it like a couple
a dozen? D Was it a frequent occurrence? She would
always have you signing stuff for her at least once
a week. I would be signing several papers, and it
(28:19):
was always like on a weekend or like a Sunday night,
because it was never oh, just casually do this for me.
It was always like an emergency scenario. And that's part
of a scam too, because making things an emergency makes
you want to help her exactly. That's all part of
(28:40):
the trick. Unless app to argue because if she wasn't
talking about the person getting their money, you know, because
in order for her to get paid, she would have
made a commission. So she would say to me, like,
if you don't get this done, then I'm not going
to get paid, and like we'll lose this or I
I mean, she would just put like the way to
(29:03):
the world on my shoulders just to do something. And
it wasn't that I thought we were scamming people, like
I believed her that I was just signing something that
someone forgot to sign, or a paper that she forgot.
But I was worried about getting in trouble simply because
I knew forging signatures was illegal. It got to a
(29:25):
point where I'm like, Okay, I've done this a lot,
like but for some reason, I never thought this person
doesn't even know this paper exists. I just thought my
mom was a total airheaded idiot, and that was honestly
in my opinion of her. So I believed that she
was stupid enough to be so disorganized that she would
just forget things. But Mayor the mortgage broker is in
(29:50):
fact using Chelsea's Harry at the spy like signature spoofing
skills to scam a bunch of her clients. Because the
Northern Ireland Police detective who finds my dog and calls
me up in I'm trying to reach Mr Jonathan Walton
provides the other half of that story, the facts and
the figures part. He says, Mayor, who was known as
(30:13):
Mary Anne Smith, stole hundreds of thousands from dozens of
victims in Northern Ireland using her job as a mortgage
broker and also impersonating a financial advisor, left a trail
of devastation and now that Northern Ireland Police know where
she is thanks to my blog, they're going to try
and extradite her. The detective emails me days later, saying
(30:37):
I have prepared to find it for the prosecutors and
just want to check what the situation is with your kisses.
I have spoken to my injured parties who are all
still trying to recover financially and emotionally from their experience.
I didn't really get this sense that she was scamming people,
but I knew like something was that because there would
(31:01):
be times when my mom would be like rolling in
money where we would get like whatever. I would just
get handed a lot of cash to like go into
town and spend money, just wats cash and she would
just paying my friends loads of money sometimes. But now
I just wonder was that money, Like, was she scamming people?
(31:24):
I have no idea what was going on, but all
I know is that she would have either so much
money she didn't know what to do with or nothing.
There was never a steady middle and there never ever
could be, because right before Mayor leaves Northern Ireland in
two thousand nine, she disappears with the down payments of
(31:44):
six people's homes and she cons twenty other victims using
multiple investment scams. One of those victims is an elderly
woman who finds my blog and emails me. I too
was a victim of Marianna and Smith as I knew
her after reading your blog, I telephoned place. They confirmed
(32:07):
they already opening the case. I would like to say
this woman brought to justice as she robbed me of
my trust and people which affected my whole being. She
put me in a prison without bars, and I feel
she should be stopped so as not to do this
to anyone else. I, like everybody else, need to know
(32:28):
that justice is available to me in a world of corruption.
I am sixty six years old and living in financial
stress due to her to sit And what's really upsetting
is in two nine, before Mere flees Northern Ireland, someone
somehow tips her off and tells her that police are
(32:50):
investigating her. She panics and she gets the hell out
of Dodge, taking Chelsea and her husband Stephen with her,
and in her add dashed to escape mayor does be unthinkable?
Remember Stephen Smith's greyhounds. We had about fifteen to seventeen
(33:12):
dogs in our house. My mom made my stepdad put
all the dogs down, oh like kill them, put them down,
Oh my god, because there wasn't time to re home them. Um.
I don't know what happened, but I'm guessing that she
probably told him a number of days that they had
(33:33):
to be gone, and so he had to do that.
And then we packed what we could in suitcases and
everything else Scott left in our house. The house just
got completely abandoned, so she did not communicate with me
about what was really going on. But I mean, obviously
(33:54):
you don't put all your animals down and just flee
your home. Wow, I didn't know that she's is That's
just like, that's I mean, that's just fucking evil. I'll
never forget that day because those dogs, I mean, they
were his life. And he had already been through so
much of just being married her and just dealing with
(34:16):
her lies, and he had to come to and like,
why would you want to be with her? This disturbing, no, no,
this sickening revelation that Mayor ordered Stephen to kill seventeen
of their dogs for no reason stays with me for
(34:39):
a long time as a dog owner. I can't even imagine.
It's obvious to me now, Mayor Smith was born without
a soul. What does the rest of the family think
about your mother, your uncle's, your aunts. I mean, she's
kind of been a person on a non grattis since
(35:01):
I was a kid. She's came in and out of
everybody's lives because of me. But once I turned eighteen
and we moved back here. My stepdad actually ended up
like leaving her and living with my grandparents until he
went back home. So obviously there's no love or loyalty
(35:22):
to her. You should be like a drug addict, criminal,
con artist. That's what you were raised to be, you know,
like that would be surprising, but you turned out to
be the opposite. You're this rule follower, law abiding, talented, smart, hardworking, honest, kind,
friendly person. How did you pull that off? I just
(35:44):
think that for me, because I grew up with her
in my face, I was like, gosh, I need to
be anything but this. When Mayor Smith, on the run
from authorities in Northern Ireland, touches down on Tennessee Soil
(36:05):
in two thousand nine, she's flush with cash. She had
scammed close to five hundred thousand dollars from twenty six
victims there, and her first plan of action stateside is
to get her daughter, Courtney back into her life the
only way she knows how randomly. One day, Marianne asked
for Courtney's banking information, so Courtney gave it to her
(36:27):
because she said, well, I haven't been in your life
for the past eighteen years. I want to do things
to try to make things right, so she started sending
money to Courtney's account. Joshua Askavish is married to Mayor's
first daughter, Courtney. At the time. Courtney is a team
and has only recently connected with her biological mother Mayor.
(36:47):
She hasn't seen her mother since she was a baby
back in Michigan. What was Courtney's reaction to getting this money?
What did she think it was for? Just basically a
Marianne's way of saying, I'm sorry and let me buy
my way back into your life. Yeah, that's what it
sounds like, right, So, I mean literally just literally trying
to buy her. To that end, Mayor invites Courtney and Joshua,
(37:11):
who live in Michigan, on an all expense paid vacation
to the Smoky Mountains in Tennessee. And what did m
Mayor look like when you first met her? Honestly, she
had kind of a slightly brownish red hair, curly say.
She was just you know, medium build, about five ft
five five ft six something like that. I mean, honestly,
(37:34):
you could tell she had a little bit of work
down in the face because she didn't look like her
age at all. Really she looked young. Oh yes, I
mean she was just all buddy buddy. We we went
to the local Walmart as soon as they picked us
up from the airport, went right to Walmart and they're
buying all kinds of stuff Stephen and I which Stephen
Want was Mary Anne's husband at the time. We went
back to the electronics section and he's asked me about
(37:56):
game system. She's like, oh, what kind of game system
do you prefer? And I was like, well me, personally,
I prefer the Xbox three sixty. So he calls the
clerk over and he's like, we'll take that one right there,
and you know a bunch of these games. Oh wow,
So he just fought you an Xbox. Literally. I wasn't
asking for anything, you know, of the sorts, but and
(38:16):
I thought maybe it was just something they were getting,
you know, for the weekend or the week that we
were staying down there. We're walking out in the park
lot and Stephen picks the bag up, hands with me
and goes, here you go, Josh, you know, and this
is yours. I was like just blown away. I was dumbfounded. No,
I mean they ring from the get go. They were
just they were trying to flaunt money, you know, and
(38:37):
then we go to Gatlinburg. We spent a week in
the mountains of Gatlinburg in this giant mansion of a
cabin and a game room, a sauna, hot tub, you
name it. And according to Marianne, it was like a
thousand dollars a night we were there for It was
either five or seven nights. She really wanted you used
(39:00):
to like her or love her. Oh, absolutely, it was
definitely paying for forgiveness. Yeah, and it works for a
little while. Anyway. Mayor transfers thousands of dollars every month
to Courtney's bank account for an entire year, and then
suddenly the transfer stop and Mayor she's nowhere to be found.
(39:25):
About a month later, it's eight o'clock at night and
there's a knock at the door of the Michigan home
where Courtney and Joshua are living with their newborn daughter Avery. Well,
I was sitting in the living room watching TV heard
than not I wouldn't be through the people, and it
just look like some average joe out there. So I
(39:49):
opened the door and years for Irish speaking mobsters standing
there with automatic assault rifles, and Marianne and what did
they tell you exactly? Well, they threatened that if we
didn't tell him where Marianne was, or if she was
staying there, or whatever the case was, if we didn't
(40:10):
tell him where we could find her, they were going
to kill Chelsea. They're gonna kill Stephen, They're gonna kill myself.
They're gonna kill Courtney and her newborn daughter Avery. Oh
my god, next time, I'm Queen of the Con, my fugitives.
You ended up getting miss Mariann's myke in custody. Today,
(40:34):
Mayor's victims start fighting back. I finger gun Dad. Hers like,
and then her attorneys like, I'm gonna tell the judge
you did that, and Mayor starts scamming a whole new
cross section of society, the mentally ill. I still haven't
recovered from, to tell the truth, I never met a
woman that did that to me. For exclusive photos and
(40:59):
other bonus material, follow at Queen of the Con on Instagram,
and if you're enjoying Queen of the Con, tell your
friends about it and leave us a review on Apple
Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts. Queen of the Con.
The Irish Heiress is a production of a y R
(41:21):
Media and I Heart Radio, hosted by Me Jonathan Walton.
Executive producers Jonathan Walton for Jonathan Walton Productions and Eliza
Rosen for A y R Media. Written by Jonathan Walton,
Consulting producer Evan Goldstein, Senior Associate producer Eric Newman. Sound
designed by Baked ZD Media, mixed and mastered by Elliott Herman.
(41:46):
Audio engineering by Elliott Herman. Studio engineering by Chris McMasters.
Voice acting performed by Tim Cunningham and Carmel O'Reilly Legal
counsel for A y R Media. Gianni Douglas Executive producer
for iHeart Radio Chandler Mainz
Host
Johnathan Walton
Popular Podcasts
United States of Kennedy
United States of Kennedy is a podcast about our cultural fascination with the Kennedy dynasty. Every week, hosts Lyra Smith and George Civeris go into one aspect of the Kennedy story.
Stuff You Should Know
If you've ever wanted to know about champagne, satanism, the Stonewall Uprising, chaos theory, LSD, El Nino, true crime and Rosa Parks, then look no further. Josh and Chuck have you covered.
Dateline NBC
Current and classic episodes, featuring compelling true-crime mysteries, powerful documentaries and in-depth investigations. Follow now to get the latest episodes of Dateline NBC completely free, or subscribe to Dateline Premium for ad-free listening and exclusive bonus content: DatelinePremium.com