Love is the most powerful force there is. So powerful, in fact, that it can make people do crazy things they would never normally do.
In the fall of 2005, a 22-year-old Petty Officer in the Navy fell madly in love with a young woman he met during a chance encounter over the phone. Unfortunately, the officer’s passion drove him to commit an unthinkable crime after an innocent Marine got caught up in his ‘girlfriend’s’ tragic web of lies…
Unusual Behavior
On January 2, 2006, a Marine Corporal failed to show up for roll call, which was highly unusual for the decorated Marine who had fought in 2 tours in Iraq. His friends and co-workers immediately felt that something was wrong as he would never just leave the base in Virginia Beach without getting permission.
A Marine’s Marine
“He was your ideal Marine. He wanted to look good, you know, Marines pride themselves on looking good in uniform — he was a Marine’s Marine,” said his friend, PJ McGrath. According to other friends, however, the Marine was also devoted to his wife and their unborn child…
A Family Man
“He talked about his wife, how excited he was to be a father… He was really looking forward to it. You could just tell, when he talked about her and his soon-to-be-born child, he just lit up,” said Gunnery Sgt. William Richard. Instead of being sent overseas away from his growing family, the Marine decided to enroll in intelligence school at the Navy-Marine Corps Intelligence Training Center.
A Red Flag
For the soon-to-be dad, it was a way to help people while also ensuring he would always be able to take care of his family. So when he just didn’t show up for class and was nowhere to be found on the base, everyone knew something must have happened…
An Investigation Begins
That day, NCIS agents were called about Marine Corporal Justin Huff, who seemed to have vanished and an investigation was opened. “We had all hands on deck. We probably had roughly 20 to 30 agents that were pulled in,” NCIS Agent Maureen Evans said.
The Surveillance Video
Investigators searched Justin’s room and found the only thing missing was his wallet. It appeared like Justin had just stepped out of the room for a minute and planned to return. “We pulled surveillance video of the night before he went missing and we were able to see him… leaving in the middle of the night, his dorm room and leaving the building to go out of view,” Special Agent Bill Elflein said…
The First Lead
Agents reached out to Becca, Justin’s wife, and she told them she hadn’t spoken to him the day he disappeared but that he seemed perfectly normal when they spoke the night before. Nothing made sense to the NCIS agents until they got their first lead when Private First Class William Richard told them about a strange conversation he had with Justin a few days earlier.
The Rape Investigation
“He told me that an individual came… had a conversation with him about a rape and that he was possibly involved in the Thanksgiving time frame… he told me the guy said he was an NCIS agent doing an investigation,” Special Agent Elflein said about what Richard reported. “Justin Huff also told Richard that he did not believe it was an NCIS agent because he asked this person for credentials and the agent failed to produce credentials…”
A Fake Agent
Even though Justin didn’t believe the man was an NCIS agent, his friends and fellow Marines said that he would have wanted to clear his name and help out any way he could after hearing a girl had been attacked. Investigators determined Justin wasn’t under any kind of NCIS investigation, proving that the man who had visited him really was an impersonator. “So we were wondering who this guy was that was posing as an NCIS agent and talking to Justin,” Special Agent Elflein said.
The Next Clue
Then, the agents got another clue from Private Richard, who explained that he ran into a man outside the entrance of the housing complex looking for Justin 2 days before he vanished. He didn’t think anything of it at the time, but shared the man’s description with the agents in case he was involved…
A Breakthrough
Agent Elflein spread the description of the man around the base, and within a few days, some of Justin’s Marine friends saw a man that fit the description. They accused the man of having something to do with Justin’s disappearance, which he denied. “But they had the wherewithal to grab his identification and for the very first time we had the name Cooper Jackson,” Agent Elflein said.
Complete Strangers
Jackson, an intelligence specialist in the Navy, was from a small country town in southwest Virginia and joined the Navy to see the world. According to NCIS agents, however, Justin and Jackson were complete strangers. “As the investigation continued, there was a very strange connection between Justin Huff and Cooper Jackson that we could never have never predicted,” Agent Elflein said…
The Missing Link
According to NCIS agents, they soon learned that the missing link between the 2 men was a petite blonde woman named Samantha. “She portrayed herself as blonde hair, blue eyed, five feet, gorgeous young lady. What Samantha was doing is what we now call “catfishing” and it basically involves creating a persona that you’re not,” NCIS Agent Maureen Evans explained.
A Random Caller
It all started when Samantha, whose real name was Ashley Elrod, called Jackson randomly in November of 2005. According to investigators, Elrod had been calling random numbers at the barracks for the past 3 years. After ‘accidentally’ calling the wrong number, she would identify herself with a fake name and try to establish a relationship…
A Web Of Lies
“She had had other relationships with guys in the Navy, and so there was a certain prefix that she could call the barracks. And so it was that random. She just happened to pick out, that evening, the room that Cooper was in,” said Don Marcari, Cooper Jackson’s lawyer. According to Marcari, Jackson thought the stranger sounded cute and started talking to her. “She told Cooper that she was five foot, 100 pounds, blonde. She was an art history major from a rich family in Texas that owned three houses in the Outer Banks.” In reality, Elrod was a heavyset 22-year-old high school dropout from North Carolina. She found photos of a pretty, blonde young woman and sent them to Jackson.
Too Good To Be True
“Cooper was a little bit socially awkward, I think, particularly with girls. Never had, from what I found out, a very lasting, long-term relationship. And now he had this beautiful, rich girl that was interested in him, that would talk with him for hours a day. And I think he just became in love and infatuated with her,” Marcari said about Jackson. However, soon Jackson wanted to meet up with Samantha, who he considered his girlfriend…
A Plan Backfires
They would make plans to meet up but something would always come up and Samantha would cancel. Jackson started getting suspicious and demanded to know what was going on. Elrod started to fear what would happen if Jackson found out the truth and told him that she slept with a Marine at a party to push him away and make him move on. Unfortunately, her plan backfired.
A Chance Encounter
Jackson refused to believe his girlfriend, who had told him how much she loved him, would cheat on him and became convinced that she must have been raped. When he continued to press Elrod for details, she broke down and just agreed with him so that he would stop interrogating her. But the interrogating only continued, and he coerced her to confess that a tall, white, and muscular Marine with dark hair had raped her. After that, Jackson searched the base for someone and became convinced that Justin Huff was his girlfriend’s assailant after Justin gave him a ‘look’ during a chance encounter…
The Murder
Jackson called Elrod back and pressed her to admit that the Marine’s last name was Huff. When she again broke down and agreed with him to appease him, Jackson posed as an NCIS agent, kidnapped Justin, and drove him to a remote wooded area in North Carolina to avenge his girlfriend. Justin swore on his life, his wife, and his unborn child that he had nothing to do with the rape, but Jackson was in too deep with all the crimes he committed to get Justin so he slit his throat and lit his body on fire anyway. Eventually, Jackson admitted everything to NCIS agents after they connected the dots and apprehended him. He even led them to where he buried Justin’s body and the murder weapon.
The Truth Is Finally Revealed
Jackson was charged with killing Justin and faced the charge during a 3-day hearing at Norfolk Naval Station. During which, he saw Elrod for the first time while she testified that she catfished people because she had low self-esteem, and was stunned to see the woman he had spent hours talking to wasn’t a petite blonde but a 300-400 pound young woman. During the hearing, Jackson apologized to Justin’s family for the pain he caused them. Ultimately, he took a plea deal to avoid the death sentence and was sentenced to life in prison without the possibility for parole. “It’s really, really sad that this family suffered this loss so brutally,” Agent Maureen Evans said. “They have to live every day without him, and I think the world is not in a better place because I think he had a lot to do and I think he woulda done a lot and impacted this world.”
Marine Caught In Tragic Catfishing Web Of Lies Pays Ultimate Price is an article from: LifeDaily