James Parrillo, charged with kidnapping in New Jersey after the woman authorities say he dragged across the country and held captive for nearly a year escaped to a gas station, is a skilled conman who’s been using different aliases to prey on vulnerable victims for decades, sources tell Fox News Digital.Â
Facebook groups including “Missing on the Pacific Crest Trail” have been sounding the alarm about Parrillo for years after the months-long kidnapping and alleged repeated rape of a transgender California woman named Kira Moon in 2018.Â
Author Andrea Lankford, who features allegations of Parrillo’s disturbing cons in chapter of her upcoming book, “Trail of the Lost,” tells Fox News Digital that the man often will “fake an illness for sympathy,” claiming to have cancer or be mute from his time in the Navy, or Army or Marines – whichever false persona – to lure in vulnerable women during his travels.Â
“He is charming,” Lankford told Fox News Digital. “He arouses people’s compassion, especially for a woman, and then he arouses her romantic desires, and then they get sucked in, and then he switches, and the mask comes off, and he becomes evil and abusive and mean and controlling.”Â
WOMAN KIDNAPPED IN BORDER STATE, HELD CAPTIVE FOR NEARLY 1 YEAR ESCAPES TO NEW JERSEY GAS STATION: POLICEÂ
Moon’s sister, Kat Marchington, detailed to Fox News Digital how Moon, a then-62-year-old from the San Francisco Bay Area who had traveled all over the world, decided to embark on the Pacific Crest Trail after recovering from a back injury. Marchington admitted that despite training, her sister was “woefully unprepared for the reality” of the 2,650-mile trail backpackers take from Mexico up to Canada.Â
Parrillo, going by the name “Jay Cerilo,” or his trail nickname “Medic,” claimed to fellow hikers that he was a millionaire veteran with cancer traveling while waiting for his mansions to clear escrow. Moon and Parrillo met about a month into her journey, but the pair never…
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