Worst Roommate Ever: the crazy story of Jamison Bachman

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Alex Miller’s spare room had been on Craigslist for two weeks when, last March, she got the call she’d been waiting for. The man at the other end identified himself as Jed Creek. Creek was a lawyer from New York, but he had grown up just outside Philadelphia, only a few minutes’ drive from Miller’s apartment in the city’s well-to-do neighborhood of Chestnut Hill. Creek explained that he needed a place to stay while he tended to family matters — his mother was old and frail and his older brother was suffering from complications with hepatitis C, he said — and he’d been looking for a place without much luck.

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His abruptness surprised Miller, but Creek said he could pay her on the spot. He pulled a check from his pocket and made it out for $800. Miller noticed that the upper-left corner of the check was blank, and in the space where his name and address should have appeared, Creek wrote “219 E. Willow Grove Ave” — her own address now made his. He did not write his name. He signed the check in a messy scrawl, the only discernible letter an enormous, looping J. Then he and Zachary hailed an Uber, with a promise to return that evening. Miller asked if he needed any furniture. “No,” Creek said. “I have everything I need.”

Everything Creek needed, Miller saw when he returned, fit inside six Rubbermaid bins and a cat carrier. (It turned out that along with Zachary, he had a desperately shy tabby named Abigail.) He brought no mattress: For a bed, he dropped a heap of comforters on the bedroom floor. It struck Miller that someone who slept like this might not have much in the way of a proper bank account. But the following afternoon, she deposited his rent check and it cleared.

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Hearing about Creek’s behavior, Alex’s mother asked her daughter for his phone number, then plugged it into Google. She found two articles and didn’t finish reading them before picking up the phone and calling her daughter. “Alex, we have a big problem,” she said. “Jed Creek is not who he says he is.”

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Often, the first signs of trouble were easy to downplay: In many cases, roommates came home to find a chandelier removed, a bookshelf filled with unfamiliar books, a couch or potted plant shifted slightly this way or that. These incursions, almost imperceptible, seemed calculated to unsettle. Suspecting Bachman was entering her room while she was at work, Acevedo once placed an empty wine bottle behind her bedroom door, so anyone going in would knock it over; when she returned, she opened the door without thinking and then braced herself, but the bottle did not fall, having been moved several inches away.

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One Saturday, she told me, she unplugged his microwave and brought it upstairs to his room, telling him he couldn’t keep his things in the common areas. Bachman shouted that she had “no right to touch his things,” she said, and used the microwave to push her slowly backward, until she was teetering on the edge of the staircase. A friend intervened, and Frost called the police. Sometime after the cops arrived, a calico cat of Bachman’s named Emma disappeared, and Bachman wrote to Frost in fury: “YOU ARE THE PROXIMATE CAUSE OF MY CAT’S DISAPPEARANCE AND PRESUMED DEATH … DO NOT COMMUNICATE WITH ME AGAIN UNLESS IT IS THROUGH YOUR ATTORNEY.”

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