‘Love Fraud’: In TV series, women say Johnson County man romanced, then swindled them

The plot twists in “Tiger King” pale in comparison to another true crime docuseries, the jaw-dropping — and sometimes even affecting — “Love Fraud,” about a Lenexa con man accused of swindling more than a dozen women around Kansas City and beyond.

The engrossing four-episode series, debuting at 8 p.m. Aug. 30 on Showtime, introduces a constellation of women who say they found themselves romantically and often financially entangled with Richard Scott Smith, the grifter at the story’s center.

“Love Fraud” is directed by Heidi Ewing and Rachel Grady, whose 2006 documentary “Jesus Camp” also had a Kansas City area theme, a Lee’s Summit evangelical church. They produced “Love Fraud” for Showtime through their New York-based Loki Films.

Unlike most docuseries that chronicle events of the past, before the end of its first episode “Love Fraud” moves the story forward. The film’s directors allow the women to recount stories of how they say they were wronged while helping them bring Smith to justice by hiring private detectives.

“We’ve made a lot of documentaries. We’ve never put ourselves in any of them,” Grady says. “But it felt like there was no way to get out of this one because we just became so personally invested and involved. We would learn stuff, and we would share it with the women. And the women would learn stuff, and they’d share it with us.”

The Star wrote about the charges against Smith in March 2017. But the filmmakers say they found out about him not from that story but from a website created by Lisa Lenton of Georgia, who married Smith in 2012. She started the blog to warn other women about him.

Filming for “Love Fraud” began in December 2017. A year before, Sabrina Dunlap of Shawnee dumped Smith and then discovered that he had bought two cars in her name, started cable service in her name in four Kansas City area apartments Smith rented out, opened credit cards in her name and emptied out a joint bank account, she tells The Star.

Although Dunlap had agreed to marry Smith, she says after they parted she learned he was still married to another woman, Jean Hansen of Olathe, who also appears in the Showtime series.

Dunlap went to the police, and Smith was charged with identity theft and forgery in Johnson County in February 2017. The forgery charge was dropped, but Smith pleaded guilty to identity theft and was sentenced to 10 months in jail. Court records show that in April 2019 he violated his probation — failure to report and failure to pay are cited — so the probation was extended 18 months, until Oct. 29.

In 2017, Hansen told The Star that soon after she married Smith in 2015, she learned that he was still married to Lenton. “He tells great stories,” Hansen said then. “It’s part of his charm.” But she soon learned that “every word out of his mouth is a lie.”

Dunlap, a hairstylist, met Smith while cutting his hair. She didn’t think much of him at first — “He was different, but OK. Seemed nice,” she says — and she had a rule that she didn’t date customers. He was a good tipper ($50 with each haircut), and on his third haircut told her if she ever needed anything, he’d help her out, leaving her his business card. She threw it in the trash.

During the fourth haircut they began talking. She says Smith told her he’d been married seven years and got divorced three years prior. He had no children, but he had three stepchildren and showed her photos of children she’d later learn were Hansen’s kids.

Dunlap gave Smith her number, and he called within five minutes of leaving the parking lot.

“I thought, ‘This is odd,’ but he was not playing games,” Dunlap says. “I’m so tired of guys saying they’re gonna call but don’t call. Or it’s a week later or two years later. He instantly replied. There were no games, no (bull) — at least that’s what I thought. It was like, OK, maybe God does love me, sending me someone that’s good.” But after a few months of dating, despite plans to marry, Dunlap says she dumped Smith.

“He had completely changed,” she says. “When I look back, the pattern is when a guy gets ready to dump you — I’ve been through this a lot with men – they get angry toward you, everything is your fault.”

Dunlap says the day after she ended it with Smith, Hansen contacted Dunlap’s mother through LinkedIn to say she was Smith’s wife. Dunlap estimates she was out $100,000, including lawyers’ fees. The filmmakers say another woman ended up $750,000 in debt.

‘The next con’

Oddly, the filmmakers say Smith never invested the money he got from the women. He just used it to woo the next one.

“He would use it to leverage the next con, basically,” Grady says. “He wasn’t stealing $750,000 in cash. He was taking $750,000 of their credit. That’s another thing that was very odd and very confusing about this story, is that he’s a con man that would (essentially) walk away with no money. … Why was he spending all of his time torturing people and humiliating people and walking away with pennies?”

In the $750,000 incident, the filmmakers say, Smith started a business with the woman, married her and then had her co-sign on a home mortgage. He didn’t pay the mortgage for months, but he picked up the mail so she never saw the past-due notices, they say. By the time Smith took off, the woman was on the hook for thousands of dollars.

Tracy, another Kansas City-area woman, said her three months dating Smith was a whirlwind. (Filmmakers decided to use only first names to protect the identities of the subjects. But some of them allowed The Star to use their last names as well.)

“I met him online on a dating site and (he) swept me off my feet,” she says. “He really reads people and what they’re needing in their lives. I was a single mom with three children, and I was looking for security. I was looking for stability, and he tried to pretend to feed me those things and that just played into everything that I needed.”

After Tracy was engaged to Smith, her daughter, Kayla, grew suspicious. She searched Smith’s truck and found pill bottles with the labels removed and official paperwork with different names (Smith had not used his real name when dating Tracy). Kayla then Googled the names, including Richard Scott Smith, which led her to Lisa Lenton’s website.

Ewing says she and Grady were looking for a story about women who had been conned, but they prefer not to do adaptations of books or articles. They were intrigued when they discovered Lenton’s blog.

“He takes their assets. He takes their dignity. He humiliates people. He walks off with maybe thousands of dollars at a time, but also people’s assets and their good credit. And nobody was looking for him,” Ewing says. “And (the women) felt that nobody cared about their story. And we didn’t really know where he was, and they didn’t know where he was. And we thought, well, maybe we can all go find him.”

‘Complete and utter weirdo’

In addition to interviewing the women individually, Ewing and Grady also brought them together for group interviews at Mannie’s Bonding Co. in Olathe, the workplace of Carla Campbell, a crusty, tell it like it-is and add as many F-bombs as possible bounty hunter.

Campbell becomes the spice of “Love Fraud,” enlivening every scene she’s in.

“I kept telling the film crew, if this film comes out and I’m the highlight of this film, that’s a huge problem,” Campbell tells The Star. “I’m only doing this for the girls, trying to get these girls some kind of happiness over all the B.S. they had to put up with.”

Campbell says she’s seen the series and she’s satisfied.

“What I appreciate is they did not make a spectacle out of me,” she says. “I don’t mind being on the outskirts because it’s about the girls, not me.”

Campbell first came in contact with Smith when she bonded him out of jail in early 2017 on charges stemming from Dunlap’s case.

“It was just like he walked through the door standing tall, head up high, like he didn’t just come out of jail,” Campbell says. “It was like he was going on a Sunday stroll. It was an arrogant thing. And then he was saying, ‘This is all a witch hunt.’”

Campbell says she didn’t know about the allegations of a trail of conned wives, ex-wives and former girlfriends until the “Love Fraud” directors contacted her.

“She had no dog in the fight anymore … and there was no legal reason for her to be looking for him,” Ewing says. “That’s why she just worked pro bono to help, because she wanted to bring him down. … She’s like Calamity Jane, isn’t she?”

Initially Campbell couldn’t understand “how can this many classy women who’ve got their (stuff) together, are very well-educated, be that stupid?” she says. “This mother-(expletive) must be awesome in bed. Come to find out he’s not awesome in bed, he’s a complete and utter weirdo.”

Campbell says she eventually understood the attraction after talking to more and more of the women: It was chivalry.

“A guy who opens the door, who shows up out of nowhere with lunch, that was his charisma,” Campbell says. “That is what kept these women attracted to him. ‘He was so sweet and so kind,’ they said. But once he gets in the door, you’re done.”

‘I do not trust anymore’

Through the first three hours of “Love Fraud,” Smith remains an enigma, a shadowy figure glimpsed in grainy surveillance footage. In episode four the filmmakers give him an opportunity to make his case in what can most charitably be described as a dumpster fire of an interview.

Since “Love Fraud” was completed, the docuseries screened at the Sundance Film Festival in January and the women continue to try to investigate Smith.

Campbell retired from Mannie’s late last year because of back issues and a cancer diagnosis. She’s trying to raise money to cover some significant medical costs for her cancer treatment through a GoFundMe account, which the “Love Fraud” filmmakers helped her set up. Campbell remains in close contact with several of the women and the filmmakers, sharing tips and trying to track down any additional women Smith may have left in his wake.

“We think that maybe after this airs,” Ewing says, “there’s going to be other women coming forward that were married to him or have stories about him.”

The filmmakers say for the women featured in “Love Fraud,” there are two main reactions to their experience with Smith: Self-recrimination over being duped and rage.

“We encountered the tears and the frustration and the sadness and self-guilting, but then quickly they discovered they wanted to get even,” Ewing says. “We thought that was probably healthier than living a life of kicking yourself, and so we encounter both of those aspects in all the women. And in the end, they decided we’re going to at least try, against the odds, to bring him to whatever justice the system will give him.”

Tracy says that through therapy and the support of family, she’s come to a place where she can move on.

“I continue to date and look for someone that is my future,” she says. “I feel like if I stopped dating or if I stopped looking for someone, then he would have won. And I refuse to let that happen.”

Dunlap says for her, healing didn’t happen overnight. She acknowledged she gets her back up if someone suggests she should have known better.

“It’s not that I’m dumb or stupid or naïve,” Dunlap says. “I don’t want people to say, ‘How would you not know?’ Sometimes you just don’t know. I’m not completely healed, but I’ve learned to deal with it. But I do not trust anymore.”

Her parting advice: “Do background checks,” she says. “It’s gonna save you a lot of money and a lot of pain.”

Freelance writer Rob Owen: RobOwenTV@gmail.com or on Facebook and Twitter as RobOwenTV.

Includes reporting by The Star’s Katie Moore.

This story was originally published August 26, 2020 at 5:00 AM with the headline "‘Love Fraud’: In TV series, women say Johnson County man romanced, then swindled them."