The Secret Service is mostly known as the organization that protects the President, but long before they started doing that, they were fighting the growing epidemic of counterfeiting in post Civil War America.

In the nineteen seventies and eighties, the Secret Service was still battling counterfeiting, and they had recently taken another forger off the streets.

But when they searched for his printing equipment, which is known as a plant, they found much more than they had bargained for.

On top of engraved printing plates and counterfeit bills, they found notes about financial scams, a kill kit, and even audio recordings of sexual assaults.

This is Monsters.

The details of the crimes in this story are true, but many of the names have been replaced with pseudonyms.

James Mitchell de Bartelabin, Junior was born on March twentieth, nineteen forty, in Little Rock, Arkansas.

He went by Mike and was the middle of three children born to James Senior and Mary lou de bardel Abin.

He had an older sister named Linda and a younger brother named Ralph.

Mike's young life was not stable by any means.

His father was commissioned as a lieutenant in the United States Army after the attack on Pearl Harbor in December of nineteen forty one, and was stationed in Washington, d c.

After the move, Mike's mother, Mary Lou, began drinking heavily, and James Senior began having an affair with a woman he worked with.

Mary Lou was aware of the infidelity and considered the affair an emotional divorce, but the couple remained married.

In nineteen forty five, the family moved to Austin, Texas, just before James Senior was sent to the Pacific Theater in Austin.

Linda would later report that their mother was often drunk and she had to pick up the slack and taking care of her brothers.

Mary Lou would sometimes take the children with her to the bars, where she would pick up men and have her own affairs.

When James Senior returned to the States after a nine month deployment, Linda said that he was so embarrassed by the state of their family that he rejoined the army and got stationed at Fort Campbell in Kentucky so they could start over somewhere else.

As James Senior's career advanced, the family moved to Frankfurt, West Germany, and then to the Hague in the Netherlands.

Mike would recall wanting to please his parents but feeling like they had unrealistic demands.

While Linda and Ralph spent time outside, Mike tended to stay inside alone drawing.

His parents didn't encourage his art, so he tried to excel academically, but that only lasted until his teens.

The Debardo Labins returned to the US in nineteen fifty three when James Senior retired from the military, and they settled in Albany, New York.

Once in high school, Mike became the victim of bullying, and it seemed that he turned his anger towards his mother.

It's believed that due to his mother's past neglect of him and his siblings, Mike developed a hatred of his own mother, which eventually became a hatred of all women.

When Mike was sixteen years old, after Linda had left home for college, he started regularly assaulting Mary lou In September of nineteen fifty six, Mike and a friend purchased a twenty two calibre h in Our Model nine twenty two Revolver and a twenty two caliber Astra auto pistol.

Just two weeks later, Mike was reported firing one of the guns in a wooded area and arrested for possession of a concealed weapon.

That would be the start of a lengthy rap sheet obtained by Mike over the years.

In May of nineteen fifty seven, he would add reckless driving to the rap sheet.

Shortly after that, he was expelled from high school, so he made a deal with the judge.

In exchange for both his previous charges, he would join the military.

In June of nineteen fifty seven, Mike joined the US Air Force.

He won't come as a surprise that Mike's military career was sure lived.

He completed basic training and was stationed at Scott Air Force Base in Illinois, but wasn't even there a year before he was court martialed for a number of minor offenses such as incorrect insignia and improper uniform.

He spent two months in the stockade, and almost as soon as he was released, he was written up for being a wall.

After another short stint in the stockade, Mike was ordered to undergo a psychiatric evaluation.

There the doctor reported that Mike was not likely to have a sustained satisfactory service career.

Due to that, Mike was given a less than honorable discharge.

In August of nineteen fifty eight, he moved to Fort Worth, Texas, whereas parents were living by then, and shortly after his arrival, Ralph dropped out of high school and joined the US Army.

From that point forward, Mike drifted around life with no real plan.

In nineteen fifty nine, he enrolled in a local high school in an attempt to get his diploma, but was expelled two months later.

In the summer of that year, he married a teenager named Linda Weir, but they separated three weeks later.

She would end up going into premature labor and having their stillborn daughter months later.

By the end of the year, Mike was arrested for a failed attempt to rob a service station and a string of auto thefts in the area.

He was given five years of probation.

By March of nineteen sixty, Mike had gotten a seventeen year old girl pregnant, and they married in June.

Not long after the baby was born, Mike abandoned his wife and child, but the girl was already pregnant again.

That baby was put up for adoption, and Mike was already moving on with his life.

How that was happening, other members of the de Bardolaban family were suffering.

In August of nineteen sixty one, nineteen year old Ralph was on lea from the army when he and Mike got into an argument, causing Ralph to book himself into a motel room.

Ralph would tell his sister Linda that he was not planning to go back to the army after his twelve days of leave were over.

In order to keep his word, Ralph drove his car into a church parking lot and used a hose to reroute the exhaust into the interior of the car.

He was found dead later that evening.

In the years that followed, Mike made another attempt to get an education.

He got a waiver to enroll at Texas Christian University in Fort Worth without a high school diploma.

He took a variety of classes and didn't perform well.

Then his probation was revoked in September of nineteen sixty two and Mike was sent to prison.

When Mike was released eight months later, his parents had moved yet again, this time to Arling, Virginia.

From that point, Mike stayed with his parents as he recovered from a string of ailments.

He laid in his bedroom and used a projector to watch pornography.

He would also have women come over so he could photograph them nude.

If his parents complained, Mike would threaten to kill them, at times using a hatchet and a letter opener to do so.

When Mike went after his mother with a razor, his father finally called the authorities and their son spent forty five days in a psychiatric facility.

The doctors there determined that Mike did not suffer from any mental illness, and he was released back to his father four months later.

In September of nineteen sixty four, Mike married his third wife, a nineteen year old named Wanda Faye Davis who went by Fay.

She would be the first wife who began participating in crimes with Mike, and she would later testify about their activities.

She explained that shortly after their wedding, Mike convinced her to take some nude photographs.

Then he threatened to say send them to her family if she didn't help him commit a number of frauds.

First, he would have Fay look up the contact info for widowed women, something that was easy to do at the library back then.

She would call them and talk to them at length, which most were happy to do since they were usually lonely.

She would find out what bank they used, and then Mike would contact them a few days later, saying he was an investigator from their bank.

He would tell them they needed to withdraw some money from the bank and wait for him at home.

He would show up the same day, flash a forged badge, and collect the money, which he said was part of some fake investigation.

It's not clear the exact details, but he probably told them they would have their money reimbursed, only to never hear from him again.

Faye explained that they committed that scam repeatedly for about eighteen months.

Then they held the manager of a bank's wife for ransom.

In April of nineteen sixty nine.

During their marriage, she described a time when Mike and one of her cousins picked up a young girl and assaulted her, but the charges were eventually dropped.

Apparently since the girl willingly got into the car, it was okay that they sexually and physically assaulted her.

Mike had shown her photos of other young women he said he had sexually abused.

She would describe threatening to go to the police, only to be tied to the bed and sexually abused herself.

It wasn't until she got pregnant that she finally knew she had to break free.

During her first pregnancy, Mike pushed her down a flight of stairs, causing a miscarriage.

When she became pregnant again, she was able to get away from him, and she was granted a divorce in nineteen sixty nine.

At some point after she had a baby, Mike did force his way into her apartment and attempted to sexually assault her, but she screamed loud enough to alert the apartment manager, and Mike fled.

It wasn't that long before Mike lost interest in Fay and had moved on to who had become his fourth wife.

Mike had met Karen while she was a senior in high school and immediately developed an obsession.

She initially resisted his advances, but after Mike got into a motorcycle accident, Karen began visiting him.

When her mother found out and demanded she stop it, only made the girl want to see him more.

Mike suggested they solve the problem by getting married, which they did in nineteen seventy, just after Karen's eighteenth birthday.

Mike began his process of manipulation and abuse right away.

He had actually written out a list of how to control women, which said, get his satisfaction early.

Isolate her contacts with others.

Don't let her make any decisions.

Don't let her acquire any skills working, driving, social skills, etc.

Don't let her have any power bank accounts, ownership, inside information material for blackmail.

Never trust her completely.

Don't enlighten her with knowledge, especially of psychology.

Always remember that the relationship is temporary.

Likewise, prepare to cut her loose before she does it to you.

Set the quote unquote price higher than needed at first.

Whip infidelity, extreme humiliation, then gradually reduced to keep at an adequate level.

Actively seek out a new partner when she begins showing signs of rebellion.

Make her more dependent drugs.

Live in country, no phone or hidden for my use only, no driver's license, no books except fantasy, no fancy clothes, no doctors.

Never show weakness, guilt or insecurity.

Mike eventually got Careen to begin helping him commit frauds and went back to his old bank investor scam for a while.

Then on April thirtieth, nineteen seventy one, to the home of the vice president of a bank in Springfield, Virginia, and held his wife ransom, Just as he had years before with Fay, he had his wife help him secure the ransom.

Mike used the ransom money to start a nude photography studio in Washington, d C.

But the business failed and he went back to what he knew crime.

On May sixteenth, nineteen seventy three, he carried out another ransom, but that time he acted alone.

That time, despite having demanded seventy five thousand dollars, the bank manager only put two hundred dollars in marked bills in the bag and dropped it off at the designated spot.

Then he returned to the bank and called the FBI, who raced to his house and found his wife an infant daughter unharmed.

After that failed ransom, Mike and Karen moved to Fort Worth, Texas, and attempted two more extortions, which Karen would later testify were unsuccessful.

They then moved back to Arlington, and Mike decided to get into the counterfeiting game, but not before one last attempt at a ransom.

In April of nineteen seventy four, Mike found a used car for sale in the newspaper and met with a woman to take it for a test drive.

While testing the vehicle, he used wax to make an impression of the key and return to the following evening to steal the car.

The next morning, he waited for Marshall Groom, the CEO of a bank in Fairfax, Virginia, to leave his house.

He had watched Marshall for days prior and learned his routine.

As the man came to a stop sign, Mike rammed his vehicle from behind with the car he had stolen the day before.

Then, as Marshall got out, thinking it was a simple accident, he forced him into his own vehicle and drove him to a motel, where he tied him up.

Karen drove Marshall's car to a gas station across the street from the bank and left a note on the window which read roll window down, leave the money on the front seat, walk up.

Would haven drive in same direction you were driving?

Do not look back, do not talk to anyone.

Walk three blocks and wait three minutes, then return to bank.

You will be notified of mister Groom's location.

At about eight thirty am, Mike had Marshall called the bank and made a ransom demand.

Then he placed the captive on the bed and left.

The assistant left the money where instructed, but nobody ever picked it up.

It's not known why, but something scared the kidnapper away.

Marshall eventually wiggled himself free and called the police, who found him unharmed in his vehicle at the gas station, with the money still on the front seat.

Mike must have figured he was not cut out for kidnapping ransom and began printing counterfeit money at his home on South Columbus Street in Arlington.

A counterfeitter's printing equipment is called a plant.

There's not much information available about his first counterfeiting operation, but he had managed to get his hands on a multi lith twelve fifty printing press and was made making fake twenty dollars bills.

In nineteen seventy five, Karen left Mike, but she was still afraid of him.

She spoke to a lawyer about how to get a divorce and go into hiding, something she would ultimately not need to do since he was arrested not long after.

Karen was interviewed after that arrest, as some evidence of sexual sadism was found in his home when it was searched, but she didn't give the investigators any detail at that time, saying Mike would kill her.

It wasn't until after his final arrest that she finally spoke to investigators about the crimes he had committed while with her.

Mike was convicted of counterfeiting charges and sent to federal prison, but he was released in nineteen seventy eight after serving twenty three months.

A clerical error at the Crime Information Center led to Mike being listed in the database as deceased.

He quickly moved back to Arlington, where he continued his life of crime that included going right back to counterfeiting, but he also seemed to increase his violence against women.

Mike still owned the house on South Columbus Street in Arlington, so he moved back in and took a job as a barber, since it was a condition of his parole.

He purchased a dark blue nineteen seventy seven Ford Thunderbird, and after some time he stopped showing up at work.

A nineteen year old woman named Lucy Alexander went on a camping trip to Indian River in southern Delaware with her boyfriend over the Labor Day weekend of nineteen seventy eight.

On the evening of September three, the couple went to a bar and eventually got into a fight, causing Lucy to leave alone.

As she was walking back to their campsite, a man pulled over and offered her a ride, and in the seventies and eighties, hitchiking was a popular way to get around, so Lucy accepted.

Once they got to the campground, Mike pulled out a badge, claimed he was an FBI agent and told Lucy she was under arrest for hitchiking.

He handcuffed the young woman and began driving again, claiming he was taking her to the local authorities.

Eventually, he pulled over, gagged her, and forced her onto the floor of the back seat with a blanket over her.

He drove around for hours before stopping in a residential neighborhood and taking her into a house.

There, Mike proceeded to sexually assault Lucy multiple times over the next eighteen hours.

Lucy would say he had trouble maintaining an erection until he made her call him daddy.

He eventually redressed her, led her out to his car, and then drove around again for hours.

He led her out in a secluded area in Delaware, and she eventually flagged down a state trooper.

On February fourth, nineteen seventy nine, Mike went into the rental office of a newly built residential development in Fayetteville, North Carolina, and introduced himself as Al with either the last name Wyse or Wis.

The agent wasn't sure his target was thirty one year old Elizabeth Mason, and he went on to tell her that he and his wife were played to move to the area and we're in the market for a house.

She showed him some listings, not intending to go visit any of them, but eventually Mike was able to convince her too.

They looked at a few in town, but it wasn't until they came across a more secluded house that Mike decided to get out and take a closer look.

There was an agent lock box, and once inside, Elizabeth would tell police that her customer made a big deal about picking out where all his furniture would go, something she felt wasn'n act.

She had walked down a hallway to the back of the house, and when she returned, Mike was pointing an automatic pistol at her.

Elizabeth said she had read a magazine article about a woman who scared off an attacker by just acting crazy, so she tried that, but Mike was not scared.

He ended up hitting her with the pistol and then trying to shoot her, but the gun didn't fire.

The police would later find a full magazine on the floor of the house and believe that Elizabeth might have ended up hitting the magazine release when she was flailing around acting crazy.

Once it was clear Mike wouldn't be able to shoot her, he began beating her more with the pistol.

Elizabeth finally gave up, and Mike told her he was just going to tie her up and rob her.

As soon as the woman was tied up, though, the attacker pushed her to the ground and started strangling her.

Elizabeth would later say he was screaming, quote, pass out, just pass out, bitch.

Finally she did pass out.

It's estimated that Elizabeth was unconscious for about forty five minutes, during which time Mike sexually assaulted her and then left in her car.

When she woke up, she said she remembered being in the house in a daze for a while.

Before leaving the house.

She was holding her pants in her hands, which were taped behind her back, and her pantyhose were around her ankles.

She managed to make it to a neighbor's house and ring the doorbell, and they called nine one one while she was on the porch.

She said they were too afraid to open the door.

Elizabeth.

She was in the hospital for two days before she was well enough to be interviewed by a detective.

Her car was found, but there was no evidence to reveal the true identity of her attacker.

The case went cold, but once Elizabeth was back home, she received a phone call where a man asked if she was Elizabeth Mason, the real estate agent.

When she said yes, he just hung up.

She said she recognized the voice as being the same man who had attacked her.

On Memorial Day weekend of nineteen seventy nine, Mike went to the Maryland shore, where he knew there would be an abundance of young people celebrating the holiday.

Twenty year old Lorie Jensen was the manager of a small convenience store in Ocean City, which she closed just before midnight on June first, As she was walking home, a man pulled over next to her, flashed a badge, and told her he was a police officer.

He ordered her into his car and questioned her about a local robbery.

She told him that she had been at work at the time of the rob so we asked Laurie to direct him to her boss's house so he could verify her alibi.

She complied, but when they got to the house, Mike stopped the car, told the young woman she was under arrest, and handcuffed her hands behind her back.

That time, Mike drove to a secluded area and stopped the car.

As soon as he did, Laurie was able to get the door open, jumped out of the car and started screaming.

Mike quickly subdued her, putting cuffs on her ankles and then covering her face with tape.

After that, he drove around for two hours before ending up at a house.

Just like with Lucy Alexander, he sexually assaulted her multiple times, needing her to call him Daddy in order to maintain an erection.

That time, he locked his victim to an eyebolt on the floor inside a closet Between assaults.

Laurie also said that he called her Becky for some reason, took pictures of her, and made an audio recording of him torturing and sexually assaulting her.

She would later report the forced her to perform oral sex on him multiple times and that his penis was quite small.

It would turn out that Lucy had given police the same detail.

He held her for more than twenty four hours before driving her back to Maryland and releasing her just a few blocks from her family's home.

He said that if she told the police, he would release the pictures he took of her.

Mike put his house on South Columbia Street up for sale in nineteen seventy eight, and it eventually sold, and he rented a house on a dead end street in Falls Church, Virginia, just west of Arlington.

He used the name Frank A.

Turner to purchase another Multilith twelve fifty offset printer and assembled it in a bedroom there.

Mike set up a counterfeiting operation that didn't produce perfect twenty dollars bills by any means, but they were decent enough for the untrained eye to non notice.

He started with eight and a half inch by eleven inch sheets of twenty pound Crane's crest white paper that was determined to be the paper that would best match US currency, which is actually printed onto paper that's made with twenty five percent linen and seventy five percent cotton.

He used a screen to dye the paper a matching ivory hue.

Then he used the offset printer to print the front and back of the paper.

He had fixed a treasury seal and a serial number.

Then he printed tiny little marks of red and blue to simulate the synthetic threads that can be found in the real currency paper.

Once dry, might cut the bills, soaked them in tea in hand, crumpled them.

Then he graded them and put them into batches labeled A A B et cetera.

In July nineteen seventy nine, he took the best looking notes and began exchanging them for real currency.

He would go to shopping centers and malls outside of where he lived buy something small with a counterfeit twenty dollars bill and walk out with the change.

He would be successful most of the time, but occasionally the clerk would refuse to accept the bill.

That wouldn't end with the shopper being detained and arrested, though they would generally just leave and never be seen again.

That happened at a doughnut shop in a mall in Florence, Kentucky, where the clerk was able to give the Secret Service a description of Mike, But that was a needle in a haystack.

Mike spent the rest of nineteen eighty traveling between states passing forged twenties.

He hit shopping centers in Elizabeth, New Jersey, Scranton, Pennsylvania, Durham, North Carolina, Birmingham, Alabama, Atlanta, Georgia, Dallas, Texas, New Orleans, Louisiana, Columbus, Ohio, and various cities in Virginia.

By the end of the year, Mike had passed about fifteen hundred fake twenty dollars bills in thirty eight different states.

Those crimes were just how Mike supported himself financially, though.

Between his trips to pass counterfeit bills at various malls, he spent his time abducting and assaulting women.

Twenty five year old Diane over ten had gone to a club to see a band play on November one, nineteen eighty.

The club was about an hour and a half away from her home, and back then there was no GPS.

You couldn't even print out directions from the internet, so though she found the club all right, she had a difficult time finding her way home and it took longer than usual.

At about four am, she saw red light flashing behind her and believed that a police officer was pulling her over on the side of the road.

A man approached her window and told her to pull ahead onto a smaller road off the highway.

Diane pulled ahead, but decided not to pull onto the dark road, choosing instead to go to a parking lot up ahead that had lights.

There, Mike asked her to get out of the car, and when she did, he handcuffed her and threw her into his vehicle.

Diane knew something was wrong, so she started kicking and fighting.

She managed to get the passenger door open, and as Mike hit the gas, she flew out of the car and onto the ground.

As she was trying to get up Mike had swung the car around and was heading right towards her.

She leaned out of the way just enough to get bumped by the fender and thrown to the side.

When she got up, she could see the car in a gas station parking lot pulling around to make another attempt at her life.

Diane was able to run up a set of stairs and hide.

When Mike got back to the area, he got out of the car and looked for her, but when he couldn't find her, he hopped back in his vehicle and sped away.

Diane actually knew a family who lived in one of the houses at the top of the stairs, so she made her way there and banged on the door until their teenage son answered and she finally got help.

She was able to give a description of Mike and his vehicle, but back then it wasn't easy to link cases together, so her case wasn't linked to any of the previously assaulted women.

On November twelfth, twenty seven year old Maria Santini was working the register of a little clothing store in Willingborough, New Jersey, when a man walked in wearing a suit and carrying a briefcase.

He asked for the manager, but Maria told him she wasn't ten, but could give him her number.

She looked down to get a piece of paper, and when she looked up again, the man was pointing a sod Off shotgun at her and told her to open the register.

She did, and Mike took the one hundred and forty eight dollars and fifty five cents in the till before tying Maria up at the hands and legs.

He then explained to the frightened young woman that he was going to take her to a house and rape her.

He told her he wasn't going to do anything else to her, but if she fought back, he would kill her.

Mike put Maria on the floor of the front passenger seat and covered her with a blanket.

Then he drove them to a rented house.

In the house, he took off Maria's clothes and hog tight her on the living room floor.

Then he left and returned wearing women's clothing.

From there, he took a bunch of pictures, eventually moving her into a bedroom and taking more pictures with her wearing a variety of different shoes.

Then he laid on the bed next to her and touched her genitals, but she told the police there was no other sexual activity.

He changed back into his regular clothes, had Maria redress and drove her to a fire road in the New Jersey Pine barrens.

He told her to wait until he had completely driven away before walking out of the area.

She was also able to give the police a description of the man and his vehicle, but there wasn't much else to go on.

A little over a year prior, the same clothing store had been robbed by a man matching Mike's description.

A different young woman had been working, and after the man pulled a gun and asked her to open the register, he ordered her into the shop's back room, but the woman refused.

She said, quote, no fucking way, I'm not going.

That's all there is to it.

The man tied the woman up, put tape over her mouth, and left.

The detective who interviewed Maria thought it was possible that Mike had been skeered away when he was challenged by a strong woman, but couldn't get over it and returned to teach her a lesson.

Unfortunately, on November twelfth, it was Maria working instead of the previous victim.

Thirty seven year old Jean McFall was a real estate agent in Boser City, Louisiana for about five years.

On April twenty seventh, nineteen eighty two, she was in a sales meeting when a man who identified himself as doctor Zach called the office.

After being notified that he had called a number of times asking specifically for Jean, she excused herself from the meeting and took the call.

Jean left and met doctor Zak at a housing development and picked up the keys to five different houses to show him.

The building contractor saw Jean and her client at the sales office that morning and would go on to describe a man who matched the description of Mike de Bardilabin.

The office secretary had also seen the man and gave a similar description.

The two left the office at about ten thirty that morning, and Jeane never returned.

Her car was found parked behind a motel that night, and an investigator had hoped that Jean had possibly taken a liking to the man and they were spending some private time together when her car was untouched.

The following day that theory was busted.

They searched through all five houses that Jeanne was going to show to the man, but nothing was discovered on the first pass.

It wasn't until the second search that someone noticed some little bits of insulation on the floor of one of the houses and went to check the attic.

It was there that Jeanne's body was discovered, hanging from a rafter with a rope tied around her neck.

She was fully dressed and her clothes were soaked in blood.

Investigators believed that Jeanne had gone into the attic willingly, probably prompted by questions by the potential buyer.

There she was manually strangled, then tied to the rafters with the rope.

They believed the attacker stabbed her in the chest by swinging his arm around her while standing behind her.

Then he walked around and stabbed her again.

There was a mark on her white blouse where you could tell that the man had wiped the blood off of his knife.

Her purse was gone, and an autopsy concluded that Gene had not been sexually assaulted.

There was no trace evidence and no apparent motive for the murder.

The man had asked for Gene by name, so they assume he saw an ad in the newspaper that the woman appeared in and set out to target her.

But why.

On the evening of April twenty eight, the Mike had been at two malls in North Carolina, where he passed a total of thirty counterfeit twenty dollars bills.

By then, the Secret Service had gotten enough descriptions that they were able to put together a sketch, which they distributed to malls all over the country.

The mall passer had become notorious in malls on the East Coast, and the sketch started working pretty quickly.

A year later, in April of nineteen eighty three, Mike had a close call it a mall in Gastonia, North Carolina.

He used a fake twenty to per just a book at the b.

Dalton Bookseller, but the cashier thought the bill looked suspicious.

Despite accepting the bill, he then followed Mike when he left the store.

He watched the man go into the toy store across the way and make another small purchase before heading to the J.

C.

Penny.

The cashier went back to his store and called security.

The security guard's pager was broken, which delayed his effort to track down the counterfeitter, and by the time he started closing in, Mike had sent something was up, and he headed for the exit.

He hopped into a car and drove out of the parking garage as the security guard jotted down the license plate number.

The license plate would come back stolen and the mall passer would remain on the loose.

That close call wouldn't cause Mike to stop passing counterfeit money, though.

Over the next month, he passed bills in Atlanta, Georgia, Columbia, South Carolina, Reading Pennsylvania, and Lynchburg, Virginia.

From there, he headed west to Tennessee, which was on the radar of the Secret Service agents.

Over the years, they had studied his travel patterns and knew he would soon be in eastern Tennessee, so they began canvassing shopping centers there.

On May twenty fourth, Mike passed fourteen fake twenties at a mall in Johnson City.

The next day, Mike was in Kingsport, Tennessee, where he tried to make a purchase at a B.

Dalton bookseller, but the cashier had been recently counseled by the Secret Service and had a sketch of the mall passer, as well as a description of the fake bills.

She told Mike that she couldn't accept the bill, so he tried to pay with three one dollar bills, but she wouldn't return the twenty.

Then she picked up the phone and called the police.

While she was on the phone, Mike claimed that his wife had gotten the bill as changed from another shop and that he was going to go get her.

Then he disappeared.

The police arrived at the mall and the Secret Service office in Knoxville was notified, but Mike had left Kingsport.

He had driven about two hours west to the newly opened Foothill Mall in Maryville, just southwest of Knoxville.

An agent for the Secret Service had anticipated the mall passer's inclination to pray on cashiers who were likely new to their jobs.

He knew that Mike liked to pass his bills at bookstore, so he met with the employees of the Walden Books, ensuring they knew exactly who to look for.

He was only minutes after the agent left the store that Mike appeared at the register with a paperback.

As the cashier happily sold the book to the counterfeitter.

The manager popped into the back room and called the authorities.

Mall security immediately started following Mike as the Secret Service agent was notified.

They watched him make a purchase at a toy store before following him through the main corridor of the mall.

Right as the agent caught up to them, Mike realized he was being followed and took off running.

As he ram to a doorway into a parking area, he was stopped by two polic officers and slammed against a car.

He claimed they could let him go because he had been cleared by the other officers, but the agent was announcing over the radio not to let him go.

Mike de Bartilabin, the mall passer, was finally caught, but the Secret Service had no idea that they had actually taken an even worse criminal off the streets.

Mike had an idea in his wallet that said he was Roger Colin Blanchard of Charlotte, North Carolina.

The vehicle he had been driving had plates that came back stolen, but the car itself was registered to James R.

Jones of Alexandria, Virginia.

The physical descriptions of each man matched the person they had in custody, and it became clear they were the same person.

Doubting either was the man's true identity, they submitted his fingerprints, which came back as a match for Mike de Bartilabin.

Inside the car they found more counterfeit bills, guns, pornography, various illegal and illegal drugs, eighteen stolen license plates, nine forged driver's licenses, a fake police badge, and bags of cheap merchandise.

In Virginia, agents went to the address where the vehicle had been registered and found a small, furnished studio apartment.

It was a basic bachelor pad that didn't contain any evidence, least of all a printing press.

It was only when they flipped through the local phone book in the apartment did an agent find a little piece of paper with the name of a storage facility at the nearby Landmark Mini Storage.

The manager let the agents into the unit that had been rented by a man named j.

R.

Jones.

That storage unit was too small to house a printing press, but they found a lot of other incriminating evidence, though not much of it was about counterfeiting.

They found a printing plate and some more counterfeit bills, but that was all that would be used in their case against Mike.

For counterfeiting, they found a red domed emergency light that could be plugged into a car's cigarette lighter.

They found a sche mask, ammunition, handcuffs, and rope.

They also found a bag with a bunch of handwritten notes containing women's names and addresses.

In another bag was what an agent described as a kill kit, the tools one would bring with them if they were planning to kidnap and kill someone.

Eventually, the agent started the process of packing everything up and taking it to the Washington Field office where they could go through everything in catalog what they found.

It was about four o'clock the following morning that one of the agents picked up a cassette tape and popped it into a cassette player.

What he heard was horrific.

Mike had recorded himself torturing and sexually assaulting his wife Karen.

While they were still trying to piece together who exactly they had in custody, they found a second address associated with Mike, the house he had rented in Falls Church, Virginya.

Agents found that house vacant, and the neighbors said that the occupant had been evicted in nineteen eighty one.

After canvassing storage facilities in that area, they finally found another unit that JR.

Jones had rented at Private Storage and Manassas, Virginya.

It was in that unit that they found Mike's Multilith twelve fifty surrounded by junk.

Within the piles of junk were more printing plates and ink.

Once the unit was cleared out, they counted two hundred and seven thousand, seven hundred dollars in counterfeit twenty dollars bills.

But again, outside of the evidence that would convict Mike of counterfeiting, there was more evidence of other crimes.

There were six handguns, ammunition, women's underwear, more stolen license plates, and a number of women's drivers' licenses.

The Secret Service knew that their suspect was involved in other crimes, and despite their original goal being to put away by a counterfeitter, they got permission from the Secret Service Director to investigate the contents of the storage unit further to find out what those crimes were.

Once they had permission, they started the long task of going through everything that had been collected, and it didn't take long to start putting the pieces together.

They found scripts that Mike had written to use for his bank investigator scam.

They found lists of addresses for bank executives that could be used in his ransom attempts.

Then they found photographs of various women.

In some photos you could see Mike in the frame and others you couldn't.

It would become a pattern that the women in the photos where Mike wasn't in frame could be found alive, where none of the women where Mike was seen in the photos were ever found.

Authorities speculated that Mike killed those women.

They also found another recording that Mike made while he was torturing and sexually assaulting a woman.

That woman turned out to be Lori Jensen, who was burned with a cigar while Mike asked her how it felt.

They collected receipts, bank records, and notes that gave them a timeline of Mike's movements for the past few years, and then they began cross referencing that with what could be his other crimes.

They cataloged a number of journals that contained incriminating information.

There were entries where he described crimes, and in one entry he mentioned the name doctor Zach.

Agents interviewed Karen again, now much more willing to talk, and she outlined the crimes they had committed together.

Then they tracked down a woman named Barbara Abbott, who had married Mike sometime in late nineteen seventy nine, making her his fifth and final life.

The couple weren't together for long, but she said little by little Mike told her about his fake IDs, his forged twenties, and even played his torture tapes for her.

He had also taken nude photographs of her, which he threatened to release if she didn't do what he said.

She helped him with war on bank investigators scam, but it failed when a suspicious bank teller called the police.

Both Mike and Barbara were originally arrested, but Mike got his wife to change her story and claimed she pulled the scam with someone else.

After that, Mike was released and Barbara had to serve sixty days in jail.

During Christmas of nineteen eighty, Mike got a really bad case of pneumonia, so Barbara dropped him off at the hospital and used the chance to take off.

Mike went on trial for his counterfeiting first, where he fired his lawyer and represented himself.

He was found guilty and sentenced to twenty five years in prison.

He was brought up on more counterfeiting charges and tried a second time, where he was found guilty and sentenced to ten more years.

After his third trial for counterfeiting, Mike was determined to be a dangerous special offender and received another one hundred and thirty five years in prison.

After that, Mike was tried for the kidnap and sexual assault Lori Jensen.

At that trial, he also acted as his own lawyer, which made him able to cross examine his own victim.

Because of that, he was able to make Lorii sit through the recording he made of her sexual assault, further traumatizing his victim.

Would not make Mike seem innocent to the jury, who found him guilty on all counts.

The judge sentenced him to one hundred and eighty years in prison and made sure to inform him that this sentence was to run consecutively with his counterfeiting sentence.

He had a combined sentence of three hundred and fifteen years and would become eligible for parole after serving fifty nine years.

Then, Mike was tried for his kidnap and sexual assault of Maria Santini, where of course, he acted as his own lawyer.

Again, he was found guilty and the judge sentenced him to sixty years in prison with parole eligibility in thirty and a half years, to be served consecutively with his other sentences.

That brought Mike's sentence up to three hundred and seventy five years with parole eligibility after just under ninety years.

That meant he would get parole in two thousand and seventy three, when he was a ripe one hundred and thirty plus years old.

It was safe to say that Mike would never see the outside of a prison, and he died of pneumonia on January twenty sixth, twenty eleven.

Mike de Bartolavin was only convicted of a fraction of the crimes he actually committed.

Investigators found pictures of forty different women in his storage union, and most of them remain unidentified.

Despite circumstantial evidence that he murdered Jean McFall, he wasn't indicted on that crime due to lack of evidence.

He was also suspected in the murder of real estate agent Edna MacDonald in nineteen seventy one and a man named Joe Rapini in nineteen eighty three, a month before his capture.

He was also not tried for either crime.

While he was being tried for counterfeiting, investigators were tracking down his victims who would be brought in so they could identify Mike as their attacker.

Mike had been indicted on eleven more counts of kidnap and rape in the case of Lucy Alexander, but after having been sentenced to an additional one hundred and eighty years, the prosecutor got permission from the victim to not bring it to trial.

Mike was going to spend the rest of his life in prison, so she didn't see the need to have to go to trial where she would likely be cross examined by her attacker, and that decision was made before the Maria Santini trial, so she likely felt she made the right decision.

When more time was tacked on, Mike became somewhat of an enigma to the people investigating his crimes.

It was like two criminals were operating inside one body, the counterfeiter who spent his days passing forged bills and the sexual sadist who spent his nights hunting for young women to torture and rape, and in between he seemed to kill others for no discover reason.

A true monster on every level.

If you're the victim of domestic abuse, please reach out to someone for help.

Please talk to your local shelter, Call the National Domestic Abuse Hotline at one eight hundred seven nine nine safe.

That's one eight hundred seven nine nine seven two three three, or you can go to the hotline dot org to chat with someone online.

If you're having feelings of harming yourself or someone else, or even just need someone to talk to, please contact your local mental health facility call nine one one, or call the National Suicide Prevention Hotline by simply dialing nine eight eight in the United States.

They're available twenty four hours a day, seven days a week, and we'll talk to you about any mental health issue you might be facing.

If you're a member of the LGBTQ plus community and suffering from discrimination, depression, or are in need of any support, please contact the LGBT National Hotline at one eight eight eight eight four three four five six four, or go to LGBT Hotline dot org.

Thanks so much for letting me tell you this story.

If you're a fan of true crime, you can subscribe to this show so you don't miss an episode.

My other show, Somewhere Sinister is no longer getting new episodes, but you can check it out if you like interesting stories from history that aren't necessarily true crime, but true crime adjacent.

It's available anywhere that you listen to podcasts.

You can also check out my personal vlog, Giles with a Jay, which is sporadically updated with stuff about my personal life, travel and music.

It's available on YouTube.

If you'd like to support the show, check out our merchandise at thisismonsters dot com.

A link is in the description.

Thanks again, and be safe.