When your husband is a con man

Joyce Reynolds Barber was in pain.  In her medicinal fog she was struggling to comprehend.  She was horribly confused.

For no reason she could fathom, her husband, Dr. James Michael Barber, had been arrested. And the sheriff’s deputies claimed he owed $50,000 in child support.

Joyce Reynolds: I was shocked, I was shocked.

Keith Morrison, correspondent: Did he claim it was a mistake?

Reynolds: Yes.

Joyce, numbed by medication and her own deep need to believe in the truth of the love she felt, believed him.

But, down in Arkansas, the arrest aroused the immediate suspicion of her husband’s business partner, Bob Donnellan. He thought his partner had been married for 39 years so the allegations didn’t make sense.

Bob Donnellan: That was the major red flag that started your investigation.

And he was beginning to get suspicious about other things too: There didn’t seem to be any cash flowing into their business even though his partner was supposedly bringing in new clients.

Luvonda Donnellan: I said, "Well, I’m gonna find out about this guy."

Morrison: But it required a little sleuthing?

Bob Donnellan: A lot.

So like any good investigators, Bob and Luvonda Donnellan started digging and what they uncovered shocked them:  Not only had their partner been married before, he had married over and over again…

Donna Foster, the first wife
Donna Foster was his very first wife.  She met Michael Barber— that’s what he called himself then— in high school in Missouri.

Donna Foster: He’s a charmer. He can tell you exactly what you want to hear. He was very good looking. He was the tall dark and handsome football player.

But for Donna, the first clue to who her husband really was, came on her wedding night.  It was supposed to be a small quiet affair— it was anything but.

Foster: And next thing you know they come knocking on. The police come knocking on the door.

Morrision: Police on your wedding night?

Foster: Yes. They came right after him. I’m sitting there dumbfounded. “We came to get mike.” “What did Mike do?”  “Mike’s not old enough to get married.”

It turns out, 19-year-old Barber had lied on his marriage license, claiming he was actually 21, the legal age at the time in Missouri. So he spent his first night as a married man behind bars.

But as Foster says she would soon discover, that wasn’t the only thing Barber lied about. 

Morrison: What did he tell you about his ability to have kids?

Foster: He couldn’t have them. He was sterile. He had had mumps at a young age.

So, of course, she didn’t take precautions and soon was pregnant. Before she even gave birth, however she says her husband had already deserted her.  He was engaged to another woman in another state.

Foster:  I got mad. And I threw him out. And he came back, I  had a little 22 automatic and I shot at him.

Donna says he never met his son and never paid her a dime for the child he left behind.

Foster: He still owes me for 18 years of child support at $50 a month.

As the Donnellans quickly learned Donna wasn’t the only woman Barber married and ran out on with a baby and a stack of bills to take care of. 

They became convinced he was a serial conman— his past was littered with damaged women, in a pattern that appeared colder and more calculated each time it happened.

Diana from St. Louis
Take for instance Diana in St. Louis, Missouri.

Diana:  He pretty much wined me and dined me and swept me off my feet real quick.

Twenty years ago, she became Mrs. Barber too.  Her husband told her his name was Chris Barber and he said he ran a trucking business.  And Diana trusted him, of course, with her money.  And the financial problems started when the newlyweds went to buy a home.

Diana: The check he wrote for the closing of our house had bounced.

Morrison: That was a big check?

Diana: $8,000 - 9,000.

Morrison: You must have been frantic.

Diana: And he said maybe I got some stuff messed up. I’ll take care of it tomorrow. And I believed him.

And he knew, says Diana, how to play with her emotions.  So even as the checks continued to bounce, she stayed. She says she even bailed him out of jail several times.  What could she do? By then she had a son too.

Diana: I kept hoping having a child would change him. I believed there was one soul mate, one marriage you work through the hard times.

How hard?  She had to sell the house and dodge the creditors. And then she couldn’t anymore. Not after the phone call from the bank.

Diana: They said the check I wrote for $18,000 had bounced. I said, I didn’t write a check for $18,000. I  went down there and looked at it and I said, That’s my husband’s handwriting."

Morrison: Forged?

Diana: Forged my name.

Diana filed for divorce and bankruptcy. That was after she says she discovered he had taken out a $100,000 loan in her name.

Diana: I thought “God, this guy is going to haunt me for the rest of my life with this financial crap.”

Soon the Donnellans were up to a half dozen jilted ex-wives scattered across the country. There were abandoned children and empty bank accounts. 

Donna Layne Roberts
Including his next target another Donna— Donna Layne Roberts.

Roberts has been hard of hearng since she was 3 years old. She married Barber in 1997. He told her he was a former POW,  a retired NFL player, and a cancer survivor. She said he was so sick sometimes, he threw up blood.

So she forgave his sometimes insensitive behavior and the times he didn’t seem to take into account her disability.

Donna Roberts: When he talked to other people he would say things under his breath and I wouldn’t catch it.

What was he hiding? She never knew until the day, after four years of marriage, when he simply walked out the front door. Gone.

Donna Roberts: I went to the bank to withdraw some money to go to the grocery store, there was no money. It was all gone.

She says he took — everything close to $400,000.  And she too went into bankruptcy.

Donna Roberts: I lost the house and became homeless. That was a very very hard time for me.

Broke and broken-hearted, Donna soon learned her husband had been seducing his next victim from their home computer.

Rember Joyce, in New Jersey? Barber married Joyce eight days after leaving Donna.

The Donnellans cracked their case. They learned their partner preyed on a certain type of woman.

Luvonda Donnellan: What he went for was women with credit.

Morrison: So if they had good credit, he would take advantage of their good credit?

Bob Donnellan: Their names were on the loan documents, their names were on the credit cards, their names were the president of the company. They took the fall financially for every dime he walked away with.

They were ready to turn in their business partner, though not without some embarrassment. After all, they’d bought his stories, too.

Morrison: Do you feel like kicking yourself about it?

Bob Donnellan: No. you don’t get mad.

Morrison: You get even.

Donnellan: That’s right.

For one thing, they called Joyce to warn her as much as anything. 

Morrison: What kind of stuff were you getting from them?

Reynolds: Just telling me he wasn’t the man who I thought he was.

But Joyce just wouldn’t, couldn’t believe it.

And then, one day, she got another call.  Not from a detective, or an ex-wife. But from a woman who says she knew “Dr. Barber” better than any of them— a woman who had decided the time had come to make sure he did not get away with it.

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