According to Johnathan Walton's website, he first met Marianne Smyth in 2013.
She told him that her family was Irish royalty (Ireland does not have a royal family), and that her uncle was one of the signers of the Irish Constitution. He also said that she had often shown off her wealth by wearing designer labels, and that she had a penchant for paying the bill when dining out with her friends.
But, he noted, it was all fake.
After Walton and Smyth became fast friends, he said that she confided in him about her inheritance issues. She said that a male family member had died, and that his 25 million euro estate was going to be divided among five heirs — including Smyth.
Walton said that Smyth showed him angry emails and text exchanges from the other beneficiaries, who were unhappy that Smyth was getting part of the money.
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Smyth was ultimately arrested in July of 2014, and Walton thought that her family members were framing her in order to cut her out of the will.
He paid her $4,200 bail, and he continued to loan her thousands of dollars for her legal fees.
Eventually, Smyth asked him for a $50,000 loan to get her legal issues dismissed. He allowed her to charge it on his credit cards, and he later had to file for bankruptcy.
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Upon her second arrest, Walton began to investigate his friend online. He found out that she had really been arrested for Felony Grand Theft for stealing $200,000 from the travel company she worked for. As for the $50,000 loan Walton gave her, it wasn't for getting the case against her dismissed. It was to pay for the $40,000 plea deal she had struck for the charges from the travel company.
He soon learned that Smyth was never going to receive an inheritance, and that she wasn't actually from Ireland. She had also created the email accounts for her disgruntled family members.
When confronting Smyth didn't work, Walton discovered that she had been scamming people for decades. She allegedly faked a breast cancer diagnosis, and she got her loved ones to give her thousands of dollars for treatments.
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She did live in Northern Ireland for nine years after marrying a local there. The authorities there were looking for Marianne Smyth because she had conned people out of more than $50,000 while working in mortgages.
Walton said that Smyth also faked being both a psychologist and a psychic over the years, and that she had gone under several dozen aliases before.
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