00:00:00
Tonight on Dateline. You were looking for love and decided to try a dating site.
00:00:05
I did. What was his description? He was a military, Navy SEAL. He would show up and have flowers, give me a card for no reason.
00:00:13
He was a charmer. My oldest daughter said to me, either he's the perfect guy, or you're going to end up on Dateline someday.
00:00:22
I Google Derek Allred, and I see all his old mug shots. When I saw the uniform, I knew there was something really wrong
00:00:29
because he had a fake badge on. Every minute he's with you, he is stealing all of your money.
00:00:35
The more we found out about him, it just seemed the more dangerous he became. He's starting to brandish a gun.
00:00:41
I had my dogs leashed and next to me. I had a little backpack for myself. The second I heard him snoring, I jumped out of my bed.
00:00:49
This gun used to be stopped. A diabolical Don Juan in the circle of bold, brave women determined to bring him down.
00:00:58
He's not going to do this to another woman. I'm Lester Holt, and this is Dateline.
00:01:12
Here's Andrea Canning with The Perfect Guy. It all came down to this moment. We had officers and agents in vehicles, exit points, entry points, to make sure he doesn't escape.
00:01:27
Finally, he was in their sights. This guy needs to be stopped. He was going from state to state, and he wasn't being held accountable.
00:01:34
This is what he did for power. It's almost like a drug. He was good, really good.
00:01:42
The best liar I've ever met in my life. He just didn't count on her. You have no idea. I'm not going to stop.
00:01:50
Cindy Pardini was a true success story. She'd earned her degree in construction management and engineering.
00:02:01
Graduated with all men in a hard hat and a gown. She went into technology, working for startups that became multi-billion dollar companies.
00:02:13
I had purchased stock in the first tech company that I had worked for. So by the time I left, I had a million dollars.
00:02:21
And how old were you then? 30. By her early 40s, she was looking to slow down. I had taken a breather from my tech career because I was traveling all around the world.
00:02:33
I was traveling well over 100,000 miles a year. One day, after posting something on Facebook about her beloved football team,
00:02:41
the San Francisco 49ers, a comment caught her attention. Somebody had come onto my page and said, go Cowboys.
00:02:48
And then they're like, you know, arch rivals. So that piqued my interest. That someone was a man named Derek Aldred.
00:02:57
They had mutual friends on Facebook. Curious to find out more, she scanned his LinkedIn page
00:03:03
and saw that he was a 42-year-old investment banker. So you're having this lighthearted banter over arch rival football teams?
00:03:10
Yeah. She didn't hear from him for several months. Then, in the fall of 2013, out of the blue, Derek messaged her.
00:03:18
He said, I've been going through a terrible divorce, and I've been in Maui decompressing.
00:03:23
And he said, I've just inherited a bunch of money, you know, several million dollars,
00:03:28
and I'm thinking about moving to San Francisco. He wondered if he could stay in her guest bedroom while he looked at properties nearby.
00:03:35
He said, I don't really want to stay in any of the motels lining up Lombard Street,
00:03:39
and I don't really want to stay downtown because that wouldn't give me the vibe of the marina.
00:03:44
How did you feel about him staying with you? It really didn't matter. I've had friends, you know, stay with me and I do Airbnb.
00:03:51
And so I kind of welcomed having the company in my house. So Derek flew from Hawaii to San Francisco and knocked on her door.
00:04:00
He seemed really charming. I mean, he sat down and we started talking. And so we kind of dug into his career.
00:04:07
He had an impressive background. Right. He said, right now I'm building a Ritz-Carlton in Maui, and I built the one in Tahoe.
00:04:16
After several days of house hunting, Derek went back to Hawaii for business. But he'd found a house in San Francisco he was interested in.
00:04:23
He said, do you mind if I come back while I work through this listing? And when he returned?
00:04:30
He was taking me to dinner almost every single night just to reimburse me. He even took Cindy and her sister to a 49ers game and a weekend getaway to that hotel he said he'd built, the Ritz-Carlton in Tahoe.
00:04:44
I wasn't pulling out my wallet for anything. My sister thought he was awesome. She said, you should date him.
00:04:52
Then he told her about an upcoming business trip to New York City and invited her as his guest on the luxury trip.
00:04:59
He said, I'm going to stay at one of our Ritz-Carlton's and look at other properties that we're investing in.
00:05:04
in. Is this still friendship or are things progressing? I mean, things are progressing,
00:05:10
but it's not a full-blown dating relationship. As the car pulled up to take them to the airport,
00:05:16
Cindy got a call from Priceline asking if she was traveling with someone by the name of
00:05:20
Derek Aldred. And I said, yes. And he said, I just need to let you know that it looks like he's
00:05:27
using other people's credit cards. Cindy had the man on speaker. Derek was in the room and grabbed
00:05:34
the phone. He was just like, why do you keep, you know, calling? You know, this is somebody's using
00:05:40
my name. This is not me. Derek explained that Priceline kept confusing him with another Derek
00:05:47
Aldred who was living in the Midwest. At this point, all my bags were downstairs and the town
00:05:53
car is calling up and asking us if we ready to go Cindy wasn sure what to believe so she threw caution to the wind and headed to New York The first morning there she says Derek was up bright and early
00:06:07
He got up, took a shower, put on a three-piece suit, had full contracts in hand, and put them in his briefcase.
00:06:16
After he was out the door, Cindy was having trouble with her computer, so she borrowed Derek's.
00:06:21
I wanted to just kind of check mail and just read the news online. I clicked on the mail, and I see that it's all of these women's names.
00:06:33
It looked to Cindy like he'd been messaging women he'd met online from various dating sites.
00:06:38
One email in particular caught her eye. It was to a woman named Wendy. And it said, hi, Wendy.
00:06:45
I hope you enjoy the weekend in Hawaii. I hope you got the flowers. and the earrings and I can't wait to see you again.
00:06:55
Cindy concluded Derek had been lying about what he was doing in Hawaii. He had told her it was all business.
00:07:02
She started wondering what else he could be lying about. She thought back to that call from Priceline and checked her bank accounts.
00:07:09
I've noticed like in the last month that there was a $20,000 line of credit that had been pulled down into my checking account.
00:07:19
The money was gone, and Cindy was in a panic. She checked her American Express Platinum account and saw that he had opened a card in his name on her line of credit and had spent thousands of dollars.
00:07:32
In fact, she discovered it was her money paying for their trip to New York. I was shaking. There are very few times in my life that I've been that shaken up.
00:07:44
When Derek returned later that day, did you confront him about the money? Yes. And then at that point, that was that.
00:07:52
He refused to discuss it further. And the last thing I remember is him walking out of the room with the silver briefcase.
00:07:59
Gone. Gone. Cindy was reeling. She couldn't think straight. She needed to get herself home so she could sort out this nightmare.
00:08:09
It was so shocking that it was hard to kind of put one foot in front of the other.
00:08:15
The road ahead would be far from easy for Cindy. She was in for the fight of her life.
00:08:22
When we come back... I literally went directly to Facebook, and I gave his name, and I said, if anybody knows of him, share this.
00:08:29
Share they did. A slew of dark stories about what Derek had done. I was stunned. I was shocked. I was disgusted.
00:08:38
All these crazy emotions. Cindy Pardini could feel the shock wearing off and cold reality setting in.
00:08:59
She'd been swindled by a smooth-talking con man and needed to act quickly. I literally went directly to Facebook and I said, I've just been a victim of fraud. I need help.
00:09:08
I gave his name and I posted his LinkedIn profile as well. And I said, if anybody knows of him, share this.
00:09:15
When she started totaling up her losses, to her horror, she realized in the month she'd known him, Derek had stolen much more than she originally thought.
00:09:25
He tapped into her 401k, mortgage savings, her Wells Fargo accounts, and her credit card.
00:09:31
How much do you allege that he ended up stealing from you in the end? It was $250,000. That's like losing $10,000 a day.
00:09:41
She tried to piece together how he'd done it. He started, she thinks, by hacking into her Gmail account.
00:09:47
Back then, security wasn't as tight. We didn't have the authentication that we do now.
00:09:53
He had been forwarding mail to his own mail and also playing a chess game with my mail,
00:10:00
so I wouldn't see deleted items. From there, she says he changed her passwords and was able to raid her bank accounts
00:10:09
and rack up thousands of dollars on her credit card. She contacted her local San Francisco police department and filed a report.
00:10:16
I actually got a female detective and she said, honey, I really don't think I'm going to be able to get to this until 2015.
00:10:27
And I'm like, that's two years from now. Oh my gosh. You must have just been so deflated.
00:10:32
Yeah, I wasn't being heard. So Cindy became her own detective. She started by calling Wendy,
00:10:38
the woman she discovered Derek had spent time with in Hawaii. I wanted to warn her of what had happened to me.
00:10:46
How did she react? She said, I'm not seeing him. I broke up with him, you know, over a month ago.
00:10:54
Wendy said Derek hadn't stolen any money from her. That's when the conversation turned awkward.
00:10:59
Cindy told Wendy all the money Derek had been using to romance her came from Cindy's own credit card.
00:11:06
He was sending her $200 bouquets of flowers, sometimes twice a week. He bought her $3,000 earrings, spa treatments.
00:11:15
How's she reacting to this when you're telling her, hey, that was actually my money?
00:11:19
She was like, I'm so sorry. And she said, I knew something was off with him. That's why I broke it off.
00:11:26
She continued posting about him and even spoke to a newspaper. Tips started coming in.
00:11:31
One painted a picture of his childhood back in Northern California. He was adopted.
00:11:37
His father had a restaurant business. Did Derek have some kind of messed up childhood
00:11:42
that led him down this path? He grew up near the Oakland Hills of Berkeley. It's a very wealthy area.
00:11:50
Cindy got another tip about Derek's past. A woman named Vanessa said she dated him back in 1992 when she was a student at UCLA Derek was in his early 20s and told her he was a med student He was there walking through the hallways with his lab coat on
00:12:07
and his name was embroidered UCLA Research. She had no reason to doubt him. I would take him to the children's hospital where he was doing research for cystic fibrosis.
00:12:20
And even the girls at the reception knew him. She fell hard. He was tall. handsome and charming.
00:12:27
She remembers the long road trips they took to visit his parents. She thought they were building a future together.
00:12:32
He said we'd be married and he'd be a doctor and we'd have a family one day. But a year and a half into their relationship, everything changed.
00:12:42
One day, he says he has to go visit his parents out of the blue. Gave me a kiss and he's like, I'll see you soon, babe.
00:12:50
And then I never heard from him again. Vanessa says he'd taken off with a sentimental gold bracelet and $2,000 of her money.
00:12:59
She tried to get it all back. So I contacted his mom, trying to get answers. She was always evasive about his whereabouts.
00:13:07
It wasn't until 25 years later, when on a whim, she decided to Google her old flame.
00:13:13
There's a news article about him having swindled someone by the name of Cindy Pardini.
00:13:20
And I was like, what? I couldn't believe it. She discovered her handsome med student was an imposter.
00:13:31
Derek Aldred never even attended UCLA. I was stunned. I was shocked. I was disgusted.
00:13:37
Like, all these crazy emotions. And so I immediately reached out to Cindy. She was always kind of there to be supportive of me.
00:13:48
Soon, Cindy had established a small network of Derek's victims. We have group instant messenger.
00:13:55
We have group text. We have group emails. After Vanessa, four more women in California reached out to Cindy.
00:14:04
It was becoming clear to her that Derek was moving from woman to woman, deftly avoiding the law.
00:14:11
You didn't realize the can of worms that you were opening up. No, and the more I found out, the more I was just pissed off.
00:14:20
In the meantime, Cindy had been texting Derek, demanding he give her her money back.
00:14:26
Eventually, he said, I'll PayPal whatever you think I owe you. Of course, the money never showed.
00:14:32
So Cindy gave him a warning. I said, I'm going to be like a pit bull here. I'm just going to keep going after it.
00:14:40
You have no idea. I'm not going to stop. Coming up, Derek gets more daring with a brazen con at a luxury hotel.
00:14:50
He was having someone from a fictitious hospital in Hawaii, which was really Derek, sending emails to the hotel to say that he was good for the money.
00:15:00
Yes. When Dateline continues. Cindy Pardini still had hope that somehow she'd get her money back.
00:15:19
She'd been pleading with her credit card company and bank, asking them to help her.
00:15:23
Literally nine to five on the phone with banks and getting passed from one teller to another and having to rehash the story.
00:15:31
So far, she was getting nowhere. It had been six months since she'd last seen Derek Aldred, and she had no idea where he was.
00:15:39
I had hired a private investigator, and I just said, we've got to find this guy.
00:15:45
The PI found him. Derek was now dividing his time between Hawaii and Minnesota and was engaged to a woman named Kimberly.
00:15:53
What do you learn about Kimberly? I just knew that she was a doctor. I'm Dr. Kimberly.
00:15:58
Kimberly advertised her business online, and Cindy found the ad. She instantly sensed this was another victim.
00:16:05
At the same time, someone else was on Derek's trail. Sergeant Jason Urbanski of the St. Paul, Minnesota Police Department.
00:16:13
He'd gotten a call from the manager at the St. Paul Hotel. It's our finest hotel in St. Paul. It's catered to presidents.
00:16:22
There was a problem with a guest, the man seen here in this security video. I believe Hotels.com was the service that he had used to pre-register the room.
00:16:31
The credit card was eventually declined. He said he was a doctor and told them he would give them another credit card.
00:16:37
But he claimed the airline had lost his luggage. And he said, well, my wallet's in my luggage.
00:16:42
Is it OK if we just check in? The clerk gave him a room. Of course, the man checking in as Dr. Aldridge was Derek Aldred.
00:16:52
He followed up with the desk manager and said that he would be able to have payment made through his office in Hawaii.
00:16:58
Emails came in promising a third-party payment form was on its way. Chief of cardiovascular surgery, Dr. Reese, assured payment for Dr. Aldrich's stay.
00:17:09
And he always would sign his emails, mahalo. So he was having someone from a fictitious hospital in Hawaii,
00:17:19
which was really Derek, sending emails to the hotel to say that he was good for the money.
00:17:24
Yes. The sergeant learned Derek told the hotel manager it was a special weekend.
00:17:30
He was in town to take his fiancée Kim, her daughter, and niece to a Bruno Mars concert.
00:17:36
He then said that he was going crazy because he was in a single room. Can we just get another room?
00:17:42
And the hotel desk manager felt sorry for him and said, all right, we'll let you have this other room even though I'm not supposed to.
00:17:49
So the hotel was getting conned? Yes, yes. They got conned out of two rooms instead of just the one.
00:17:54
and he took advantage of charging all of the meals that he ate at the hotel and also used the mini bar out of both rooms and charged it to the room
00:18:06
The sergeant says Derek Aldred kept the con going for three days. At one point, he and Kim had been seen in the hotel business center.
00:18:14
She briefly spoke to him, then quickly walked away. He continued to talk to a hotel staff member.
00:18:20
And when it was time to pay the almost $1,900 bill, Derek pulled a vanishing act, leaving Kim and the girls high and dry.
00:18:29
And he just disappeared into the wind. So it's like the dine and dash, the hotel version.
00:18:34
Yes, the expensive hotel version. When the sergeant went looking for him, he got a lucky break, to say the least.
00:18:41
Derek was brazenly trying to pull the same scam at another hotel in the area. The general manager for the St. Paul Hotel is friends with the general manager at the Country Inn, I believe, is where he's trying to check into.
00:18:53
What Derek didn't know was that while he was trying to get a room, the two managers were talking.
00:18:59
And the guy said, funny, because my night manager called me and said, I have a guy that's given the same story.
00:19:04
He said, he's a doctor from Hawaii. Oh, boy. General manager from St. Paul Hotel said, call the cops because he just duped us.
00:19:10
What are the odds of these two managers talking? Exactly, exactly. Police arrested Derek and brought him in for questioning.
00:19:18
You're not a doctor. No. However, you purported yourself to be one when you presented yourself at the hotel.
00:19:25
No, I didn't report myself to you. No, I didn't. Looked me right in the eye and lied.
00:19:30
Did you feel like he was trying to con you? I did. I did. You don't know James Reese, Dr. Reese?
00:19:37
No. Chief of Cardiovascular Surgery? No. University of Hawaii? No. Why were they in contact, email with St. Paul Hotel saying that they would pay your bill?
00:19:49
I don't know, maybe ask Kim about that. Kim's a doctor, not me. It doesn't mention Kim at all.
00:19:57
Yeah. It mentions a doctor alder. I said, was this just some elaborate ruse by your fiancé Kim to try and get out of paying a hotel bill?
00:20:06
And he said, oh, I don't know. Oh, like he was almost going to blame Kim? Blame Kim.
00:20:10
Wow. But the sergeant knew Kim was no con artist. She was the one being conned. He had told her he was an investor and that he had hundreds of thousands of dollars.
00:20:21
In an interview with the sergeant a few days later, she told him Derek Aldred had all but destroyed her life.
00:20:28
Why don't you tell me how all this transpired and what occurred and how it affected you and what your losses had?
00:20:35
My losses, my whole life, ruined all my credit. And then he hid it from me, got into my email accounts, intercepted emails so that I wouldn't know.
00:20:45
He blocked calls from my parents so that my parents couldn't get in touch with me and tell me what was going on.
00:20:50
So did you give him the card to use to pay for things? No, not my credit card. What he did with my credit card is I found he stole it out of my purse, made a copy on his phone,
00:21:02
which I actually have, and was using my credit card. Not only did he ruin her credit, Kimberly also told police he put her in debt so deep she worried she would never recover.
00:21:13
What was Kim's demeanor like? Broken is probably a really good word for it. Very broken, hurt.
00:21:19
While Derek was not charged with stealing from Kim, he was charged with one count of theft by Swindle for scamming the hotel.
00:21:27
For Cindy, 2,000 miles away in San Francisco, the arrest was welcome news. Did you think, finally, maybe this is going to be it?
00:21:36
This could be justice? Yeah, I thought, okay, we've got him. But Cindy knew how slippery Derek could be, so she reached out to local law enforcement.
00:21:46
I started getting involved with the Minnesota police saying, don't let him go. Keep him until he's sentenced.
00:21:53
The prosecutor agreed, but the judge didn't hold him. And as Cindy feared, Derek skipped bail.
00:22:00
When you find that out, do you just want to scream? Yeah, I mean, it was just so emotionally draining.
00:22:06
As Cindy saw it, in this game of cat and mouse, Derek had just scored another point.
00:22:12
But the game was far from over, and Cindy was determined to win. I was on a mission.
00:22:19
Coming up, a new victim meets Derek, the attorney, complete with office staff. He had a secretary. I would actually call the secretary and talk to somebody.
00:22:31
And then a big break could mean he's caught. So you know potentially exactly where he's going to be at an exact time.
00:22:40
Right. Cindy Pardini was angry. Just when she thought Derek Aldred would pay for his crimes, he'd gotten away again.
00:23:02
Derek Aldred was always one step ahead of the law. He was. Like a bloodhound, she'd been tracking his movements for almost a year.
00:23:11
Is he haunting you throughout this? Oh my gosh, I mean, he's always in my thoughts.
00:23:16
I would meet people and I would say, Hi, my name's Cindy Pardini, I'm a victim of fraud.
00:23:21
I mean, it was in my DNA. A warrant was out for his arrest for skipping bail on the hotel swindle.
00:23:27
But that didn't stop him from moving on to his next victim. In the fall of 2014, Cindy heard about another woman
00:23:34
who'd gotten tangled up in Derek's web of deceit. You get a call from the mother
00:23:40
of one of Derek's alleged victims. Yes. And she said, would you mind talking to my daughter?
00:23:45
So Cindy got on the phone with a woman named Joanne, a high school teacher in Minnesota.
00:23:51
By Cindy's count, she was victim number 10. Joanne told her she'd met Derek on Match.com.
00:23:57
He said he was a hotshot. Attorney with a firm that had offices around the world.
00:24:03
Had she fallen for him? Yes. What did he tell her? He was talking about marrying her.
00:24:08
Joanne, a deeply religious woman, also told Cindy that Derek would go to church with her each Sunday and pray before every meal.
00:24:16
Even though Cindy had never seen this devout side of Derek, she wasn't surprised.
00:24:21
He asks a lot of questions and he tries to become what the other person is in need of or what they're looking for in a partner.
00:24:36
What was his name with her? Derek Al-Arad. He actually took her to an office. There was a placard on the door, Derek Al-Arad.
00:24:47
This is Joanne. He had a secretary. I would actually call the secretary and actually physically talk to somebody.
00:24:55
Now, I have no idea how that works. Derek, the lawyer, had wined and dined Joanne, even took her on a luxury trip to Hawaii.
00:25:04
I was on cloud nine. I really thought this was the guy. But when she started poking around on social media, she stumbled on his real name and saw there was a warrant out for his arrest.
00:25:16
And just like Cindy before her, a nagging feeling prompted her to check her finances.
00:25:22
We did a credit check, and that's when I found out that he had opened a credit card in my name.
00:25:28
And there was $14,000 charged to it, including the whole trip to Hawaii. She broke it off.
00:25:35
I was just devastated. And called the police. Since there was a warrant out for Derek's arrest, she was transferred to Deputy Sheriff Paul Meskin,
00:25:45
who was working for the U.S. Marshals Service as a fugitive investigator. She told him her story of betrayal.
00:25:51
Technically, for my assignment with the marshals, it didn't fit because it wasn't a crime of violence.
00:25:57
Why did you decide, I'm going to take action here and help this woman? He was a parasite.
00:26:02
Here was this woman that completely victimized, this guy can't get away with this.
00:26:07
Let's see what we can do. Meskin got to work. So then I researched, and sure enough, St. Paul had a case for the hotel
00:26:14
and started working on that angle. The St. Paul Hotel swindle. Joanne gave him one of Derek's business cards,
00:26:21
so the investigator paid a visit to the law office address. The office that he claimed said,
00:26:27
well, there's nobody ever been here by that. It was a real address, but he had never been there.
00:26:32
There had never been any law firm or anything like that. And he would call the number and a woman would answer, right?
00:26:36
Right, right. Ever find out who this woman was? No. Meskin and his team brainstormed ways to catch Derek
00:26:43
and came up with a plan. He had originally told Joanne to shut down the credit card Derek had been using.
00:26:49
But now he had a different idea. Let's activate it again and we'll track it. See if Derek starts using the card.
00:26:56
He convinced Joanne to set the trap. She turned her card back on. And does it work?
00:27:02
They started getting information between the credit card companies. Turns out that Holy K bought a train ticket on Amtrak.
00:27:10
So you know potentially exactly where he's going to be at an exact time. Right. The ticket was for the next day, the 6.30 a.m. train leaving out of Union Station in St. Paul.
00:27:26
It was dawned November 7, 2014. This train platform was swarming with undercover U.S. marshals, sheriff's deputies and police officers all waiting for Derek Aldred to board the train.
00:27:39
would he finally be captured? We were in our positions and ready and the train came.
00:27:47
Coming up... This is a long train. There are a lot of ways to get on or off a train.
00:27:52
Yeah, although we had everything covered. So why is he about to slip through their fingers yet again?
00:27:58
This really came down to minutes. We were on a time crunch. When Dateline continues.
00:28:09
As the Amtrak train pulled into St. Paul Station, all eyes were on the lookout for Derek Aldred.
00:28:21
Had everyone familiarized themselves with his photo? Everyone knew who they were looking for?
00:28:27
We briefed everything up, let everybody know, here it is, here's the photos, here's what our plan is, here's the takedown team.
00:28:33
Plainclothes officers scanned each train car, ready to pounce. And this is a long train. There are a lot of ways to get on or off a train.
00:28:41
Yeah, although we had everything covered. So you're looking and looking and looking and...
00:28:47
He wasn't there. Derek was nowhere to be found. He evaded law enforcement again.
00:28:54
Yep. The investigator didn't know what happened, but was hopeful Derek would use the stolen card again.
00:29:01
For a few days, he heard nothing. And then... We just got a tip, used the card. He's on a train.
00:29:07
He's headed west. Okay, now let's work that angle. Do you know exactly where he's going?
00:29:13
We eventually get information as we're making phone calls and interviewing people
00:29:17
that it looks like he's headed for Portland. By the time Meskin got the tip, Derek was only a few stops away from his final destination.
00:29:25
So this really came down to minutes. Yeah, we were on a time crunch. He contacted the U.S. Marshals in Portland,
00:29:32
and a team raced over to the station, arriving just as the train was pulling in.
00:29:37
And he walked off the train and they just walked up to him and Derek and took him into custody without incident.
00:29:44
Bingo. Finally got him. He was sent back to Minnesota where he was charged with failure to appear
00:29:52
and for that theft by swindle incident at the St Paul Hotel Joanne was told he wasn charged for using her credit card because there wasn enough evidence to prove fraud Derek Aldrich was convicted and sentenced to 15 months
00:30:06
It wasn't nearly enough time, not the way Cindy Pardini saw it, but it was a start.
00:30:12
I was happy. At this point, I was hopeful. Hopeful that when he was released, she'd get justice for herself in California.
00:30:19
That San Francisco would finally wake up and extradite him. So I spent that year saying,
00:30:24
what are we going to do? Can you at least charge him? Nothing. Nothing's ever that easy, is it?
00:30:31
No. Less than a year later, Cindy got a tip that Derek was free again. She had no illusions,
00:30:37
though, that he had somehow learned his lesson. She figured, for Derek, the short jail stay was
00:30:43
just the price of doing business. And it was only a matter of time before he would pull another con.
00:30:48
Sure enough. In August of 2016, I get a message. He's back in action. And you're just like, oh.
00:30:57
Yes. The message in her inbox was from a woman named Missy Brandt, a flight attendant from St. Paul.
00:31:04
She told Cindy every disturbing detail. It started, like so many others, on a dating site.
00:31:11
I was at a point where I figured I would like to meet somebody. She quickly found a match.
00:31:16
someone named Richie Peterson, a former Navy SEAL. He had just retired, and he was very decorated.
00:31:23
Your relationship progressed? Yeah, right away. I walked in my house, and there was four dozen roses.
00:31:30
Wow. Romantic. Yep. Two days later, there was four more red dozen roses for my daughters.
00:31:36
What did your daughters say about him? They were just like, wow, oh my gosh, and teddy bears and candy.
00:31:41
And eventually, he bought a boat for us. Like he gave it to you? Well, he had it at the marina.
00:31:48
But he said this boat is for you? Yeah. That's a big gift. Big gift. It was a nice boat.
00:31:56
Missy had now spent four months with her new dream man. Are you thinking, like, he could be the one?
00:32:01
I mean, I did actually tell my daughter when I was bringing her to school one day.
00:32:04
I mean, I would marry him. And yet, no matter what his new name or occupation, Derek couldn't help but be Derek.
00:32:13
Missy said he started doing shady things that gave her pause. He would just go missing.
00:32:17
And I'm like, why do you go MIA? Like, literally, when we are supposed to do something, all of a sudden, there's zero communication.
00:32:23
Like, you're just gone. And how does he explain that? I mean, there's always an excuse.
00:32:27
And when he was around, she said they were always taking trips to the ER to deal with his old war injuries and a heart condition.
00:32:36
Or so he said. We spent a lot of time in the emergency room. They're giving him drugs.
00:32:40
They're giving him drugs, lots of drugs. It was after a legitimate trip to the ER.
00:32:45
he'd been in a motorcycle accident, curiosity got the better of Missy. When he wasn't looking,
00:32:51
she snooped. So I'm going to look in that wallet. And when I open up the wallet,
00:32:56
there's a Minnesota state ID in there that says Derek Milan Aldred. He told you he's Richie.
00:33:03
Yeah. Is this like a lightning bolt? Well, that was the sign that clearly I needed,
00:33:08
but I don't say anything at the time. She waited until he went to run an errand and then lit up his phone.
00:33:16
I'm doing nothing else with you. And he's like, I don't know what you're talking about.
00:33:20
This is how you confronted him? Yeah, via text. I am, we're done. I have nothing, we're nothing else to do with you.
00:33:28
Derek Mylon Aldred. First, she was devastated, then angry, then curious once again
00:33:34
because of what she'd seen while she was snooping. When I found his wallet, I also found two credit cards.
00:33:41
With a woman's name on them, Linda. Do you search Linda? Now I'm on my mission is to find Linda.
00:33:48
She didn't know it then, but Missy had just become a player in one of Derek's most outlandish cons yet.
00:33:57
Coming up, Missy tracks down Linda, who's home alone with Derek. So I'm like, we need to get him out of there.
00:34:05
You're now helping her. Of course I am. Absolutely. I mean, she's afraid. Missy Brandt had no idea where her former boyfriend, Richie Peterson, aka Derek Aldred,
00:34:27
was, only that he was out of her house and her life, or so she thought. This story is unbelievable. I mean, it's not a story. It's our lives, and it's unbelievable,
00:34:38
but it's real. Missy's Twilight Zone began when she spotted Derek's real ID in his wallet,
00:34:47
googled his name, and discovered his history as a con man. Missy knew he had credit cards belonging to a Linda.
00:34:55
She looked her up online and realized Linda lived nearby. I requested her friendship on Facebook and sent her a message.
00:35:03
I just said, I know you're going to think I'm crazy, but I believe we're dating the same man.
00:35:08
It took a few days, but Missy finally got a response from Linda, who seemed in a panic.
00:35:13
Because he was in the house, and so I'm like, we need to figure out how to get him out of there.
00:35:18
You're now helping her. Of course I am, absolutely. I mean, she's afraid. Does she get him out of the house?
00:35:24
He comes upstairs and says, I need to go to the hospital, I'm in so much pain again.
00:35:28
So she gets him out, she's like, I will bring you, she brings him, and then he immediately calls the police.
00:35:34
Hours later, when Derek took an Uber from the hospital back to Linda's. He was getting out, the lights came on.
00:35:42
Police lights. Derek was put in the back of a squad car and brought in for questioning.
00:35:47
Later, while Linda was being interviewed by investigators, a package arrived at her house.
00:35:53
It was addressed to Derek from another woman What in the box The box was chocolate and a bottle of whiskey a card saying I hope you feel better
00:36:05
But it wasn't what was inside the box that piqued Missy's interest. And I'm like, I need the return address.
00:36:11
Missy sensed this was a third victim in town. She drove to the woman's house to drop a bombshell.
00:36:17
I want her to know what's happening. And she wasn't home, so I just had a post-it note
00:36:23
just said, we're all seeing this guy. On the post-it? On the post-it. I'm like, I know you're dating him.
00:36:29
I'm dating him another day. And the girl, just call me. Derek had conned not one, not two,
00:36:37
but three women in the Minneapolis area, all at the same time. He's a cruel Casanova.
00:36:43
He is, yeah. The woman who sent Derek that package, she says he swindled her out of roughly $10,000 worth of jewelry
00:36:53
Missy says he didn't take any of her money, but Linda? How much money did Linda say she lost?
00:36:59
About $385,000. Wow, that's a lot of money. In six months. He saw that vulnerability, and he went after it.
00:37:07
This is Linda speaking with NBC affiliate Care 11 in Minneapolis after Derek's arrest.
00:37:12
How could I be so dumb? I basically gave him access to steal my identity. What's the answer to that?
00:37:20
He's a professional. He's very believable. Reporter Lauren LeManchek. She says that he cleaned out her 401k, her son's college fund, her life savings gone.
00:37:32
So Linda was one of the more unfortunate. Yeah. He really destroyed Linda's life and her finances.
00:37:39
She says she wound up sleeping on people's couches because she didn't have a home.
00:37:43
I was in a pretty dark place when I found out who he was. when I found out that everything was just a lot.
00:37:53
Linda was broke, homeless, and even in trouble with the law. Remember the boat Derek bought for himself and Missy?
00:38:01
He bought the boat with Linda's money. Yeah, and was paying like slip rent with checks from Linda's checkbook.
00:38:09
Oh, and they were bouncing because her money's disappearing. But they wanted to put Linda in jail.
00:38:13
They wanted to pick her up and charge her for writing fraudulent checks. Even after all that, Derek managed to get away.
00:38:21
Police released him pending further investigation. When Cindy heard the news, well, you can guess her reaction.
00:38:29
I was pretty much losing at that point. It was now 2016, so I'm now three years into this, and I'm just getting tired of it.
00:38:37
She had to wonder if Derek had sweet-talked his way out of custody. After all, women and businesses weren't his only targets.
00:38:45
Cindy knew he had tried to fool police before, and it was all caught on video. Coming up, turns out Derek's scamming goes way beyond romance and finance.
00:38:58
When I saw the uniform, I knew there was something really wrong because he had a fake badge on.
00:39:02
And then he lets his latest victim know he's got a gun. That's like in a really scary part of a movie.
00:39:09
It was very scary. When Dateline continues. When Derek was released in Minnesota, Cindy Pardini was not entirely surprised.
00:39:29
She'd come to know just how devious he could be, even with police. He was dressing up as a firefighter in the mid-2000s.
00:39:39
She's referring to an old case out of California. She stumbled across it while hunting down Derek.
00:39:45
So are you feeling like, hey, this guy's an even bigger con than I believed? Yes.
00:39:52
It was 2005. Tom Oldag was a fire investigator in Northern California. He sometimes handled calls about firefighters who'd gotten into trouble.
00:40:02
On that day, a local hospital said it was treating a firefighter named Derek for an overdose.
00:40:08
Walked in and he was in a hospital gown. I asked him if I could see his uniform.
00:40:11
And when I saw the uniform, I knew there was something really wrong because he had a fake badge on.
00:40:17
He could tell the uniform was fake too. The investigator knew this man was a fraud and he was determined to find out why.
00:40:24
We had searched his car. We found some prescription bottles. We found some prescriptions that weren't in his name.
00:40:30
What did you think his motive was to pretend to be a firefighter? I was kind of thinking he was doing it seeking drugs.
00:40:37
Derek was released from the hospital, but Tom Oldag wasn't going to let this one go.
00:40:42
You really investigated this guy. I did. It really pissed me off because he was impersonating a firefighter.
00:40:48
It's an honorable occupation, and here's a guy who's just seen what he can get away with.
00:40:52
Testing out his theory that Derek was after prescription drugs, the investigator drove around visiting hospitals, urgent care centers,
00:41:00
and pain specialists in four Northern California counties. Was he conning the doctors and the nurses and the pharmacists?
00:41:07
Pharmacies. In a week and a half or so, it was probably up to about 20 different pharmacies and clinics.
00:41:13
Dozens of prescriptions. There were some times, one day he went to five different pharmacies.
00:41:18
In one day? Yeah. He was real busy. Oldag discovered the fake firefighter had gotten every last pill for free by claiming he was injured on the job.
00:41:28
He was filling out workers' comp forms. He'd go in there on a fake name, fake social security number, and get his medications and walk out.
00:41:37
Old Egg now believed he had enough to go after Derek for fraud. I had an arrest warrant for him.
00:41:43
We brought his ex-wife in, we were talking to her, and he happened to call her on her
00:41:47
cell phone. She told us where he was at. The investigator sprang into action and raced over to a nearby fast food place.
00:41:54
He was on a pay phone right outside of McDonald in Placerville So I went in there really quick and got him at gunpoint Arrested him At gunpoint Yeah I wanted to know that it was real serious on my part and not to play anymore
00:42:08
The investigator interrogated Derek for more than two hours. You know, just take a deep breath and be honest.
00:42:15
He quickly admitted he had an issue with pain medication. I'm addicted to the Vicodin and Soma.
00:42:21
And came clean about all his names. Obviously my name, and then Allred, A-L-L-R-E-D. Aldridge.
00:42:29
How do you spell that? A-L-D-R-I-C-H. What other first names would you have used?
00:42:36
Usually always Derek, I mean. Okay. Any Richards? I think I have in the past, yeah.
00:42:42
But when the investigator asked him about getting drugs for free, well, the con man wasn't about to confess to that.
00:42:48
You go in a hospital impersonating a firefighter, right? and then how would you use that to get pills?
00:42:57
How would a person do that? I don't know, to be honest with you. Have you ever done that?
00:43:03
Specifically to get pills, no. This takes the term liar, liar, pants on fire to a whole new level.
00:43:08
Oh, exactly. About an hour into the interview, Oldag left the room. He wanted Derek to stew for a bit.
00:43:15
When he came back, he tried a different approach. You shake his hand. I did. I told him he was the best liar there was ever.
00:43:22
And that pumped him up. I'm going to shake your hand. You're very good at what you do.
00:43:28
The way you go and get drugged, you're very good. Aren't you? Not something that, yeah.
00:43:32
No? Aren't you very good? Well, yeah. I've been doing it for a long time. I was shocked. I was completely shocked at that answer.
00:43:41
The new approach worked. Derek opened up about his other fake identities. I've represented myself as an executive, as a firefighter,
00:43:50
you name it. And all those social security numbers? Just pull a number out of, you know,
00:43:56
out of thin air. He would recall everything. Without a piece of paper, it was all in his head.
00:44:02
Smart? So I knew he was very smart. He was incredibly smart. Do you think there was part
00:44:06
of him that enjoyed the con? Oh, I have no doubt. I believe that he is a narcissist and very much
00:44:12
he enjoys the challenge of seeing what he can get away with. Later on, he told me that I was the
00:44:18
first guy to catch him in 19 years. Derek Aldred took a plea deal and was convicted of six felonies,
00:44:25
including embezzlement, burglary, and making false insurance claims. In total, he swindled
00:44:31
the firefighters' workers' comp fund for more than $200,000, all to pay for his medical care
00:44:36
and prescription drugs. And for those crimes? We did three years probation, a year, year and a half
00:44:43
in county jail. Old Egg was certain Derek wouldn't go straight after his time in lockup.
00:44:48
He is fraud, and tigers don't change their stripes. Oldag was right. As we now know, in the years that followed,
00:44:57
Derek scammed more than a dozen women in five states, including Wendy, Cindy, and all those women in Minnesota.
00:45:04
By 2016, he was free again and headed to Sin City. Only now he seemed in a rush, more desperate,
00:45:12
and he let it be known he was carrying a gun. Coming up, a new victim caught in Derek's web tries to escape.
00:45:23
I had a little backpack for myself, and the second I heard him snoring, I jumped out of my bed, and I ran downstairs.
00:45:31
Cindy Pardini feared Derek would never stop. So it was no surprise when in late 2016, she heard he conned another woman in Arizona.
00:45:53
By Cindy's count, victim number 16. He had met a woman there and he had stolen jewelry from her.
00:46:00
And so he got arrested there. And again, he didn't show up for his sentencing. So he got away again?
00:46:09
Yes, again. From what Cindy had been hearing, Derek seemed to be rushing through women and cons.
00:46:16
They're in shorter periods of time. He's moving pretty fast through all of them.
00:46:21
And the women in Minnesota had told her something frightening. He's starting to brandish a gun.
00:46:26
I still sometimes have a hard time really wrapping my head around it. Kelly Patterson met Derek just a few months after his escape from Arizona.
00:46:36
He'd shown up in Las Vegas calling himself Rich Taylor, former Navy fighter pilot.
00:46:41
Seven or eight deployments. That's a lot. That's a lot. Kelly, a single mom of two girls, recalls being swept off her feet almost immediately.
00:46:51
Rich quickly moved into her house, bought her roses, a Mercedes, and a membership to a swanky country club.
00:46:58
He just called me one day when I was at work and said, hey, we're members of Red Rock Country Club now.
00:47:04
Isn't that where OJ plays? He might. Her new life seemed perfect. We were going to the club all the time for dinner and lunch,
00:47:12
and he was golfing there a lot. Were you proud to show him off? I was. I had a group of girlfriends from college,
00:47:18
And they came in and met him, and, I mean, they just were like, wow, we're so happy that you've met someone like this.
00:47:27
You deserve it. But not everyone was smitten. Where Kelly envisioned the altar ahead, her teenager saw trouble.
00:47:34
My oldest daughter, she said to me, either he's the perfect guy, or you're going to end up on Dateline someday.
00:47:43
And here you are. Right. Rich also flunked the meet the parents test when her father visited from Ohio.
00:47:51
I think immediately my dad just had that fatherly instinct. Same as your daughters.
00:47:59
Same as my daughters. Kelly admits she also had some doubts about Rich, but shoved them aside.
00:48:05
Her family, however, would not. Back in Ohio, her dad made some calls while her sister scoured the Internet.
00:48:13
I was at work. My parents called me and they said, Kelly, he is not who he says he is.
00:48:18
My dad said, I'm really worried. I don't know if he could be violent. How are you feeling when you hear this?
00:48:24
Sick to my stomach. I would be scared. I was scared, and I had to go home, and I had to pretend like everything was okay to try and get away from him.
00:48:36
Fortunately, her daughters were away at the time, staying with their dad. But that meant Kelly had to face him at home, alone.
00:48:43
She was especially frightened because he once told her he had a gun. He wouldn't leave my side.
00:48:49
It was like he knew that something was wrong. As much as I was trying to act like everything was okay,
00:48:57
I think he sensed it. That's like in a really scary part of a movie. It was very scary.
00:49:03
So I went to bed with him and waited for him to fall asleep. And I had a little bag packed for myself.
00:49:10
And the second I heard him snoring, I jumped out of my bed and I ran downstairs.
00:49:16
And just when she thought she'd escaped unnoticed. I got in the car and as I was backing out, he was standing in the doorway.
00:49:24
and I just peeled out of my neighborhood and drove directly to my girlfriend's house.
00:49:29
Could you see the look on his face? Yeah. He looked angry and my phone started blowing up and I didn't answer it and he called and called and called.
00:49:38
You got out just in the neck of time. I got out just in time. Eventually, she'd realized just how lucky she was.
00:49:45
Rich had only stolen her rent money. As for the Mercedes? We walked off that lot with this almost $50,000 car and not a dime had been paid.
00:49:54
That's how good he was. She later returned it, and the country club he scammed. I think at one point the bill was getting so high that the general manager called him and said,
00:50:04
you know, we're going to need you to make a payment. I think it was around $20,000.
00:50:08
And I think that that was when everything started to kind of go sideways for him.
00:50:14
Kelly would also learn that Rich was actually Derek Aldred, a con man, not a Navy man.
00:50:19
And that was the thing that my dad was so adamant about. He was like, this jerk is walking around impersonating, you know, military, you know, not okay.
00:50:33
Military men and women do not like that. No, nobody likes that. My dad went to NCIS and talked to an agent.
00:50:42
The Naval Criminal Investigative Services. Yes, yes. And my dad said he's impersonating a naval officer.
00:50:49
Her father was furious, but Kelly was just ashamed. I was really, really upset with myself, and I lost faith in myself.
00:50:58
I didn't trust myself anymore. Such a bad decision. If anything helped, it was this.
00:51:05
She found out she was not alone. Kelly was now part of a strange sisterhood. What would you call this club?
00:51:13
Like the Courage Club. It's taken a lot of courage for us to speak out about it,
00:51:18
because this is not the kind of attention any of us welcomes. According to Cindy, by 2017, Derek, the bogus lawyer, doctor, firefighter, professor,
00:51:30
CEO, hotel developer, fighter pilot, Navy SEAL, had caught more than a dozen women in seven states.
00:51:37
These are smart women. What happens is he's a master manipulator. Lauren Lemanchek from CARE 11 was now reporting extensively on these victims
00:51:47
and Derek's ability to prey on them. How does this happen to these women? There's a doctor, there's a nurse,
00:51:53
there's an engineer, there's a computer programmer. One woman was a nuclear physicist.
00:51:59
But when they went to police, LeManchek says the women often felt they weren't heard.
00:52:04
What the women say time and again is they feel like they're treated like scorned women,
00:52:08
like their complaints aren't taken seriously, that sometimes police departments just don't have the bandwidth
00:52:12
to really investigate these financial crimes. and so he gets off with a slap on the wrist.
00:52:19
Derek Aldred had tried his luck in Vegas with nothing to show for it. He was moving on, this time to Texas
00:52:26
and a showdown. Coming up, Derek strikes again but may have met his match. I got my gun.
00:52:36
I had my dogs leashed and next to me. God forbid he comes to that door. I'm ready.
00:52:41
When Dateline continues. After talking to Kelly in Vegas, things were pretty quiet for Cindy Pardini.
00:52:59
Derek Aldred was in the wind. I knew that he had moved on, but I didn't know where.
00:53:04
Even though Kelly's dad had alerted naval investigators, nothing came of it. Then, five months later, Cindy's phone rang.
00:53:11
It was a woman from Dallas, another victim. She was very upset. Like, this had just happened to her.
00:53:19
Cindy listened to her story about duplicitous Derek. He was still using the name Rich Taylor and posing as a Navy vet.
00:53:27
He'd been dressing up in, you know, the military uniform. He told me that he was still in the reserves with the United States Navy
00:53:34
and worked for the Department of Defense. Dory Van Horn, an HR manager at a telecommunications company,
00:53:41
had only dated Richie for about six weeks. The tall man in uniform had quickly captured her heart.
00:53:47
Their first date, though, started out rocky. He took her to a Texas Rangers game.
00:53:52
He went up to the will call and he said, you know I Captain Rich Taylor And he said Colonel somebody I don remember the name left tickets for us here But there were no tickets He started getting angry and he pulled out his NCIS badge and said look this is who I am
00:54:09
Come on, we need these tickets. I mean, it was a good five to ten minutes at least.
00:54:14
And finally, they came up with some tickets. During the game, Dory said Richie's phone buzzed.
00:54:19
An urgent call from the Pentagon. He told her they were asking for his expertise on North Korea.
00:54:27
The North Korean crisis started right around that time. There was a Senate hearing committee that he was going to have to go down and present his opinion.
00:54:35
Are you thinking, wow, this guy's really high level? Yes, I was impressed. Later on, she saw his uniforms, those medals, all kinds of military awards.
00:54:45
Did he ever wear his military uniform around you? He did put on his dress blues when he was having several meetings out at the DFW airport.
00:54:57
And I also had seen him in like a flight jumpsuit that pilots wear. He had the helmet with a microphone on it.
00:55:06
Dory offered to drop him off at the airport for his top secret missions because his Porsche had been in an accident.
00:55:12
At least that's what he said. He even sent her pictures. He told her he was in the Navy Reserves flying F-18s.
00:55:21
And he would send me pictures that he had taken when he was up in the sky of flying.
00:55:25
They were flying training missions, basically getting prepared for this attack that is pending possibly with North Korea.
00:55:34
Some of his grand stories did make her wonder. But I was falling for him. I thought he was, you know, the one I'd been looking for.
00:55:43
So a lot of these little things I just pushed down. You were ignoring your gut? Yes, ignoring my gut. Absolutely.
00:55:50
Were you falling in love with Rich? I think I was. Did he express to you that he was falling for you?
00:55:57
Absolutely. I got I love you after, it was about two weeks. But, she says Richie the Romantic also had a dark side.
00:56:07
He would just kick the wall, kick my bookcase, kick something, flip something off the coffee table.
00:56:13
But I always made excuses for it. The dramatic end came the day Richie left behind an iPad he had borrowed from Dory.
00:56:21
I pick it up, I flip it open, and everything's different on the front page. He's hijacked your iPad.
00:56:28
And what do you find inside? A picture of him laying in a hospital bed. And then I look closer, and the name on the account is Derek Allred.
00:56:37
And I remember looking at it thinking, that's Richie. A quick Google search and the name Derek Aldred showed up.
00:56:46
Along with his decades-long history of fraud and a stack of mug shots that could fill a photo album, Dory could barely breathe.
00:56:54
I went upstairs and got my gun. And I sat on my couch. And I was wide awake. I had my dogs leashed and next to me, just sitting there ready.
00:57:04
God forbid he comes to that door. I'm ready. Derek never showed, so Dory fled to her brother's ranch.
00:57:14
And while I was out there, I started digging into my finances. Dory searched her accounts, and there it was.
00:57:21
Derek had drained her checking account and charged thousands on one of her credit cards.
00:57:27
In total, $19,800. The only thing I can put together is I went upstairs. You know, he snapped a picture of my checkbook, and then this extra credit card that I had up there, he took.
00:57:39
She called the police. Detective Kelly Hunt of the Colony Texas Police Department got the case.
00:57:45
She knew Derek Aldred was bad news after running his name through a criminal database.
00:57:50
Theft and some fraud, and you could just see that this was just something he just got away with.
00:57:55
No real time in jail. Detective Hunt assured Dory she would make sure he didn't get away this time.
00:58:02
Unlike many detectives before her, she understood this wasn't about scorned women out for revenge.
00:58:08
I took it probably a little more personal than other cases I would have, just because, you know, you could see the trail that he left of just destruction.
00:58:19
And here's where Dory did something that would prove crucial to the case. We've got to stop him. We've got to do something different that hasn't worked before.
00:58:27
After Derek left, she collected a closet full of potential evidence. I had all kinds of uniforms, uniforms and badges.
00:58:34
He hid them all around my closet, way in the back of a closet. Detective Hunt was also interested in the credit card fraud aspect of the case.
00:58:43
She knew it was something she could work with. She visited three local businesses where Derek had used Dory's card.
00:58:49
In all three places, they knew him. Real big talker. He would wear his military uniform.
00:58:55
I had one of the cashiers come in, and he did a photo lineup. Picked him out immediately.
00:59:00
So that was, for me, an airtight case. We could go ahead and get a warrant and get him into custody before he ran.
00:59:09
But there was something else she needed to do. Of all the stuff he left behind at Dory's, one thing stood out.
00:59:16
He also had a badge from the NCIS, Naval Criminal Investigations. It looked to me like a legitimate badge.
00:59:24
So she reached out to NCIS and showed that badge to a real agent. when he compared his to Derek's.
00:59:32
He couldn't tell them apart. He took pictures of it and then he goes, I have to send this to my boss right away
00:59:37
because he'll never believe this. Derek is impersonating a federal officer. Correct.
00:59:42
Which is an avenue that can be taken to maybe finally get him. Yes. That gold badge was about to lead the U.S. Navy
00:59:51
into a con man's treasure trove and launch an investigation with teeth Coming up a previous victim willing to go undercover could change everything She pretending that she still in love with him
01:00:06
Meanwhile, she's... She's setting him up. NCIS agents Mike Elkair and Jeremy Hauk got a look at the military paraphernalia Dory had collected.
01:00:27
They were astounded. The conference table was filled with counterfeit Geneva Convention ID cards, military uniforms, medals, counterfeit NCIS special agent badges.
01:00:36
I've never seen anything like it. And it all belonged to one man, Dory's former boyfriend, Derek Aldred.
01:00:43
How seriously does the military take it when someone is impersonating a military officer from a legal standpoint?
01:00:50
From a legal standpoint, it's free speech to wear a military uniform out in public.
01:00:54
But it's illegal if you use that to gain something of value. It's called stolen valor.
01:01:01
And as far as the agents could tell, Derek had used the military to live the high life.
01:01:05
He really went all out to fit the persona of a military officer. Absolutely. Purple Heart, Silver Star.
01:01:15
Absolutely. SEAL Team 1, Underwater Demolition School. He displayed them all. So all of this here represents stolen valor.
01:01:24
Absolutely, yes. And this was a big part of your case. This was. This was definitely the hook to get in to start the case.
01:01:31
The agents quickly learned there was so much more. Mail fraud, aggravated identity theft,
01:01:37
fell in possession of a firearm, wire fraud, access device fraud. There was a whole slew of charges.
01:01:43
Social security fraud. He was collecting social security disability because he was blind.
01:01:49
Derek's not blind. But building a federal case takes time, and that's one thing they didn't have.
01:01:56
We needed to catch him as soon as possible because he was going to run. Lover on the lam.
01:02:00
He has a history of running, and so why stop now? So Agent Elkair had an idea. I asked Detective Hunt if she could just get a local warrant for the credit card abuse charge,
01:02:10
just so I can get him into custody. Hunt got the warrant. Now they needed to find Derek.
01:02:16
Not surprisingly, Cindy got involved. She was still keeping track of Derek's whereabouts and thought she might know where he was.
01:02:23
Her information came from a new member of the club, a woman named Tracy. Once I reached out to Cindy, she said, well, there's another girl in Texas as well.
01:02:33
He'd been dating Tracy at the same time as Dory, which explained all those charges on her credit card.
01:02:38
He was basically whining and dining on my dime. They hit Airbnbs pretty much every weekend, fancy dinners, fancy lake houses they rented.
01:02:48
Based on what Cindy learned from Tracy, she thought it was possible Derek was still in Dallas.
01:02:54
Agent Elkair tracked down Tracy, hoping she was still in contact with Derek. She wasn't.
01:02:59
She told me that she got into a fight earlier prior to knowing all of this, and she kicked him out of her house.
01:03:05
The agent asked her to patch things up so she could find out where he was. She did exactly what we asked her to do, to text, to apologize.
01:03:13
She's essentially acting at this point. Correct. Pretending that she's still in love with him, everything's fine.
01:03:19
Right. Meanwhile, she's... She's setting him up. Derek took the bait and told her he was in the hospital having a heart procedure
01:03:28
She offered to pick him up the next day. And the plan was to arrest him in front of the hospital?
01:03:33
Yes. All the details had been worked out. They were ready to make the arrest. But then, after seeing a local police alert online, not knowing a sting was in the works,
01:03:44
Dallas TV station WFAA ran a story warning the public about Derek. Women who meet this man online say they're left with empty promises and empty wallets.
01:03:56
And you're just like, why? Why now? Yes, based on what we knew of Derek at that time and how savvy he was,
01:04:02
we were concerned he was going to see that and he was going to be gone. He could run.
01:04:06
He could run. The agents decided to go ahead with the sting anyway. The adrenaline was pumping.
01:04:12
We were keeping our eyes out, hoping to spot him and hoping that everything went smoothly.
01:04:18
NCIS enlisted the help of local law enforcement. Ten officers and agents had the hospital covered.
01:04:24
We had plainclothes officers just walking around the hospital. as just normal patrons.
01:04:28
And we had officers and agents all around the hospital in vehicles, just staged locations, exit points,
01:04:35
entry points, to make sure we cover our bases with Derek so he doesn't escape. Did you feel like this was your moment?
01:04:41
You were finally going to catch Derek Aldred? I felt that if we didn't catch him now,
01:04:44
we weren't sure if we were ever going to catch him. The pickup time was fast approaching.
01:04:51
Derek sent a text to Tracy. There was a problem. Best laid plans don't always work the way they're supposed to.
01:04:58
They don't. Coming up, Tracy has bad news for law enforcement. Was she frantic? She was a little frantic.
01:05:07
And then Derek, finally in custody, claiming he's the victim of a scorned woman.
01:05:13
When things went south, I mean, she was bitter and wanted revenge or whatever you want to call it.
01:05:17
When Dateline continues. The Navy sting operation in Fort Worth was in trouble. Police were supposed to arrest Derek as he left this medical center.
01:05:36
Tracy, working with investigators, had just gotten a text from him. So in the last minute, she called me and says, hey, he's at the Heart Hospital.
01:05:43
He's not at Fort Worth, and he's waiting for me there. Was she frantic? She was a little frantic, but I think we were more concerned with losing him.
01:05:51
How do you all scramble to get into position in the new location We just get in our cars Some of us were already in cars and we just start heading in that direction The agents had to wonder if Derek had seen that local news report gotten spooked and changed his plans at the last minute
01:06:08
When they pulled up to the second hospital, the agents didn't see him there either.
01:06:12
Just start walking around the hospital and trying to find him in the valet, in any of the lobbies, anywhere where we can get eyes on him.
01:06:20
So the new medical center is crawling with local law enforcement and federal law enforcement.
01:06:25
trying to find Derek Aldred. Yes. And then, there he was. He was sitting in a lounge
01:06:30
in an expensive-looking suit and tie waiting for Tracy. We said, Derek? And he said, yes.
01:06:36
I said, go ahead and stand up. Put your hands behind your back. The sly fox who talked his way out of every trap
01:06:41
this time was acting like an obedient puppy. And I was more shocked at the fact that he wasn't questioning what was going on.
01:06:49
A normal person would go, what is this all about? And it was almost like he was at peace with it.
01:06:52
So Tracy said, we got in. You know, we've got him. Tracy, who was at the hospital, witnessed the arrest.
01:06:59
She was on the phone giving Cindy a play-by-play. I said, send me the pictures now.
01:07:04
And so she hung up and she took pictures of him in a suit with his hands behind his back.
01:07:10
Handcuffs. In handcuffs. Could you believe it? I couldn't believe it. I was so happy.
01:07:16
Tell me a little bit about why you may think you're here today. Within minutes, Derek Aldred had gone from a hospital lounge to a police department interview room.
01:07:28
So he had seen that news report and was dodging the law when agents nabbed him. But now he wanted them to know something.
01:07:41
He was the victim here of angry exes like Linda from Minnesota. and hurt, probably a little scornful, and wanted revenge or whatever you want to call it.
01:07:54
But the agents weren't interested in his sob stories. They had something else in mind.
01:07:59
And let me ask you, have you ever served in the military? No. Never served in the military?
01:08:03
No. Have you ever been in law enforcement before? No. Fireman? No. No. The only thing that he essentially really told the truth about is that he wasn't in the military,
01:08:12
he wasn't a pilot, he wasn't a special agent with NCIS. And yet the agents had security video of Derek walking around in an airport posing as a fighter pilot.
01:08:22
And one of the things he did was he would tell one victim that he was deploying for the weekend and she would drop him off at DFW on a Friday night at one terminal.
01:08:31
And then he would walk to a different terminal and have another victim pick him up and he would tell her that he just got back.
01:08:37
So they put the question to him. Do you wear uniforms of military personnel? No, I don't.
01:08:43
Never? I have in the past, but I mean, yeah. Like by in the past, last week? No, not last week, not last month, not last year.
01:08:53
Except they had a photo that said otherwise. Dory snapped it days earlier when Derek wasn't looking.
01:09:01
In full naval uniform on his cell phone, not paying attention, she snapped a photo of that.
01:09:06
But when they showed him the proof, he tried to deny it. I never wore this in public anywhere.
01:09:11
And that's a, I don't even know how that was taken. That's crazy. So when do you think that was taken?
01:09:19
I'm not quite sure. A normal response would be, yeah, that's me. I don't know how you would have gotten those photos.
01:09:25
So you caught him in a lie immediately? Absolutely. In fact, they had a lot more images.
01:09:31
Derek in dress blues and whites, light jumpsuits, none of which is a crime exactly.
01:09:37
But have you ever heard of the term stolen valor? I have. Up until recently, I hadn't.
01:09:43
Wearing military uniforms and flashing badges to get things for free? That is a crime.
01:10:13
or tickets to baseball games or concerts? No, nothing. Never. Once again, they had evidence.
01:10:22
You had these credentials here. You had this Navy. Oh. Yeah. Okay. You know what I'm talking about, right?
01:10:28
Yeah. Okay, so this is a common access card? You can buy them off of eBay. Yeah.
01:10:34
Is that where you got these from? That's where I got that, yeah. And what were you going to do with these here?
01:10:39
Nothing. I haven't done anything with them. But remember when Derek took Dory to see the Texas Rangers on their first date?
01:10:46
Cameras were recording more than just the game. The Rangers ticket, we were able to pull some footage.
01:10:54
And clearly you are showing ID and insisting that you're military and gaining something, which is the equivalent of stolen valor.
01:11:07
I didn't, I never showed ID. Oh, yes, he did, according to stadium security officers.
01:11:14
They recalled the larger-than-life man who waved his NCIS badge. I showed him a picture of Derek, and they said, yeah, absolutely, he was a great guy.
01:11:23
We gave him a tour of the stadium. The real agents had the fake one in a corner.
01:11:28
But Derek, who could talk himself out of a tight spot, was going to give it one more try, not only with them.
01:11:34
Are you ready to do this? We're recording. Yeah, go ahead. but also with us. Coming up, our turn to confront the con man. What do you say to all
01:11:47
these women who say that you destroyed their lives? I was a horrible boyfriend. Destroying someone's life, I think, is a bit exaggerated. And then the hardest thing about being his
01:12:00
You get really emotional talking about that. That part bothers me. NCIS agents Elkair and Houck were losing patience with Derek Aldred.
01:12:23
They'd been interviewing him for more than an hour and were getting nowhere. I think in the last 20 minutes, you have lied to our face about 50 times.
01:12:33
Like, you've been lying to all of these people. Guys, I just told you the truth.
01:12:38
They'd had enough of Derek's deceit. We wanted to make it very clear that we weren't going away.
01:12:43
We weren't going to give up on this case. Their tone changed as fast as one of his identities.
01:12:48
You just say, I didn't do it. That didn't happen. When it's clear, why would all of these people say this?
01:12:56
Then there is evidence of it happening. Then there's videos and pictures of you doing it.
01:13:05
What was your impression of Derek throughout this interrogation? I thought he was a sociopath, but he was articulate, smart, coherent.
01:13:14
Could you see firsthand how he was able to con so many people? Absolutely. His absolute confidence in everything that he said and he did.
01:13:23
It's believable. The agents continue to push. They knew Derek had borrowed Dory's gun.
01:13:30
And since he's a convicted felon, that's illegal. Never carried a firearm for two months?
01:13:35
No. Were you driving around with one in the car? I don't believe so. I hope not.
01:13:39
Once his confidence was rattled, he actually asked us to get him a nitro pill from his bag because he was having heart problems.
01:13:49
In the stuff you took out of my pocket, there's my Mentos bottle. I have my, there's nitro in there.
01:13:56
Can I please have one of those? You need a nitro? Yeah. Stand by. Okay, thanks. And we looked at each other and we were like, is this guy seriously trying to convince us to give him a pill out of a Mentos bottle?
01:14:08
They ended the interview and sent Derek to the hospital as a precaution. When Cindy and her team got that update from the agents, they were in a panic.
01:14:18
They worried Derek had just fooled federal agents. All of us were like, oh no, here we go.
01:14:24
They're going to let him go to the hospital and he's going to flee from the hospital.
01:14:28
And I assured them that he was under guard 24 hours a day and he would be brought back to the jail.
01:14:32
They took him to the hospital They found nothing of course Later that night my phone started blowing up and I started receiving text messages It says oh thank you for what you did You know he took me for this
01:14:44
Cindy's network was in overdrive. The scores of women started sharing their stories with Agent Elkherr.
01:14:50
Finally, someone was listening, and the agents were getting just what they needed from Cindy's Courage Club.
01:14:57
How helpful were the women in building your case? They were the case. They were the case.
01:15:02
So without them? There was none. Now it was up to federal prosecutor William Tatum to get justice for those victims.
01:15:11
But after a first look at the evidence for stolen valor, he was concerned. Stolen valor, unfortunately, has a very low penalty.
01:15:19
And adding the money Derek stole from Dory's credit card wouldn't make much of a difference.
01:15:24
But because the charges were federal, when Tatum came across the stories of all the other women whose bank accounts had been drained,
01:15:31
He had an idea. What we needed to do was get Cindy Bardini's loss amount in there,
01:15:36
get Linda Joyen, get all of those in there, because then we were looking at a loss amount over a million.
01:15:43
That would carry a much harsher sentence. How much do you think he stole in total?
01:15:48
It's in the millions, and that's just for the people we know about. The prosecutor tacked on gun possession, but still wasn't sure that was enough.
01:15:56
So he took a closer look at Derek's fake uniforms and medals. and he couldn't believe his luck.
01:16:03
Dory had kept the packaging. Important because now Tatum had proof Derek had used the mail to buy his imposter kit.
01:16:11
So once we had all of these packages, then we knew we had mail fraud. That was your smoking gun, really.
01:16:17
Dory saving these packages. Now the prosecutor had what he needed. He offered Derek a deal.
01:16:23
We offered him the option to plead guilty to the mail fraud and two counts of aggravated identity theft.
01:16:29
So 24 years total is what he would be looking at. 24 years behind bars. Would he take it?
01:16:37
So far, his strategy when speaking to investigators was to deny, deny, deny. We wondered what he would say to us.
01:16:45
He agreed to a phone interview. We've spoken to a number of women who say that you did steal money from them.
01:16:51
And in fact, you stole money from them to use that money to wine and dine other women.
01:16:55
What I would say is that these women, a lot of them, not all of them, a lot of them are
01:17:02
twisting and manipulating facts. They would say the exact opposite, that you're the one who's twisting and manipulating facts.
01:17:09
I know they would because I seen some of their statements Did you steal from these women No These women are just broken from their interaction with you
01:17:22
That's what they told us. I really don't know how to respond to that because in the short term of knowing some of these women and how we interacted, I just don't see how that's possible.
01:17:36
I think that they would say that that was a clueless statement. They might. They very well might.
01:17:42
What do you say to all these women who say that you destroyed their lives? I'm not trying to justify my behavior.
01:17:49
My behavior was, I was a horrible boyfriend. Absolutely horrible. Destroying someone's life, I think, is a bit exaggerated.
01:17:57
When I pressed him about his fake identities, that he didn't deny. You have been accused of posing as an attorney, a doctor, a firefighter, an executive, a veteran, and there's more.
01:18:08
How did you keep it all straight? It's impossible to keep straight, particularly when I was running from the courts or, you know, running from the United States Marshals.
01:18:19
I mean, it was tough to keep track of who I was saying, you know, where I was and what I was doing and who I was.
01:18:30
It's overwhelming. My husband was a fighter pilot, an F-18 fighter pilot. that you purported to be one, members of the military obviously don't look kindly on people posing as military officers.
01:18:42
Andrea, I think that's kind of a cheap shot question. It's a big part of your case, stolen valor.
01:18:48
Right. But, I mean, it's not a big part of my case because it's actually no part of my case.
01:18:53
But it opened the door, really, to the federal authorities going after you. Right. I'm not going to answer it.
01:19:00
Why did you pose as all these different occupations and professions? And yet he made a deal.
01:19:15
It took a while, but he finally accepted? Yes, he did accept it and he did eventually plea.
01:19:20
But there was no guarantee a judge would accept that deal. So the prosecutor asked Derek's victims to tell their stories in court.
01:19:27
We were going to make the argument to the judge that all of this conduct throughout the entire United States, it should all count in this case in Sherman, Texas.
01:19:38
Eight of Derek's victims arrived in court, including Vanessa, Missy, Dory, and of course, Cindy, who had fought so hard to see this day.
01:19:47
You were the first to give your victim impact statement. It was very powerful. You said a dark journey that will throw you into the spells of depression rage and loneliness It will unravel your deepest insecurities leaving you with a lingering emptiness that haunts your every breath
01:20:01
That's about right. That's intense. It was. It was a very lonely time for me. The judge listened to every word from every woman.
01:20:12
And when it was Dory's turn, she spoke of how Derek had forever stolen her ability to
01:20:17
trust. He took a piece of you. Yeah. I was a very trusting, loving, you have my trust until you show me otherwise.
01:20:27
I'm the other way now. You know, I don't trust anybody. You get really emotional talking about that.
01:20:36
That part bothers me. Then, Derek Aldred faced the judge and the women and tried to pull off one last con.
01:20:44
He got up there and said, I didn't mean to hurt anybody. I didn't steal from anyone.
01:20:48
These were all just bad relationships. He kind of tried to turn on the, you know, look at me, poor Derek Aldred.
01:20:55
I'm about to go to prison and I haven't really done anything. But the judge wasn't falling for it, not even slightly.
01:21:02
He told Derek the madness had to stop. He had said something to the effect of, if I could give you a life sentence, I would.
01:21:09
On August 22, 2018, the judge gave Derek Aldred the maximum 24 years and ordered him to pay more than a quarter million dollars in restitution.
01:21:20
We asked him about that. The phone interview was from a federal prison in Sheridan, Oregon.
01:21:25
The judge threw the book at you, suggesting that he believed these women. Yes, and that's a shame.
01:21:32
What was it like for you facing all those women in court? To see some of them, it was surreal.
01:21:41
Did you look at Derek in the courtroom? Yeah, I looked, but he didn't look back.
01:21:45
There was no reaction to what any of us were saying. Many believe Derek Aldred has Cindy Pardini to thank for his time behind bars.
01:21:55
Cindy was the driving force in getting them together, and then all of them coming together made them all the hero.
01:22:02
I walk forward every single day, and every day that I walk forward, I'm walking further away from this situation.
01:22:10
Does it also give you comfort in knowing that the prison that Derek Aldred is in
01:22:14
is no four seasons? Exactly. That's all for now. I'm Lester Holt. Thanks for joining us.