An man purporting to be a member of the elite Navy SEALS has left the island after taking advantage of the hospitality of a Freeland area woman for several months.

Barbara Gosselin, 45, said she met Reginald Malone, who told her he was almost 50, through an Internet dating service.

“I found him under the name ‘Passion for Love,” she said with an ironic laugh last Friday, a few days after finally kicking him out of her house on Dec. 23. Even that simple act cost her money.

“I gave him taxi fare to the ferry,” she said.

She also paid for an airport shuttle ride to Sea-Tac. Whether or not he flew away, she doesn’t know.

Malone had lived with Gosselin from Sept. 28 to Dec. 23, eating her food, using her Internet access, dialing long distance, and sleeping under her roof on a couch in the living room.

All the time he told Gosselin he was waiting for orders as a captain in one of the Navy’s SEAL units. He told Gosselin he never had money because the Navy was having trouble getting his pay to him.

But he had no trouble spending hers.

“He ran up quite a hefty phone bill for me,” said Gosselin, who is an inspector at Boeing’s Everett plant. “Eleven hundred dollars plus the next one (from December). But I got out pretty cheap.”

She also bought Malone cigarettes. However, she notes that he never stole anything from her, never used drugs and only drank an occasional beer.

Gosselin said she and Malone had a platonic relationship. She was looking for romance on-line, but the two never became intimate.

“I was looking for a relationship but he slept on my couch all three months,” she said, quoting him as saying, “Let’s start off as friends, then work into a relationship.”

In their first Internet chat, on the dating service udate.com, Malone told her he was aboard the aircraft carrier John F. Kennedy returning from Afghanistan. They communicated intermittently, then several months later he showed up on her doorstep in the Bush Point area.

“No uniform but very well dressed, with all kinds of beepers,” she said.

She described Malone as African American, 6 feet tall with graying hair, wearing a gold and diamond ring on his right hand and a gold ring on his left hand that matched his necklace.

Gosselin said Malone was a mild mannered roommate, “quite cordial, polite.” She left early for work and often returned home late after working overtime. Sometimes he’d cook her dinner and he often washed the dishes. When she asked about his Navy job, he talked knowledgeably about NAS Whidbey.

“He knew about the base, its squadrons and what they did,” she said.

Still, not everything seemed right about his relationship with the Navy.

“But he wouldn’t take me to the Navy Exchange to go shopping,” Gosselin said.

As for family, Malone’s story was that his wife died during childbirth in Houston, and his daughter was attending MIT.

At Gosselin’s house, Malone stayed up late watching TV and perusing the Internet. “He liked to be on the Internet,” she said. After he left, she found out “he downloaded a lot of things.” She said it appeared to be pornography, and she deleted it.

Fake SEAL revealed

As time went by Gosselin became more and more suspicious of her roommate’s story. Using a friend’s computer, she investigated. She came across a Web site for a group called the SEAL Authentication Team, which keeps track of men who falsely claim to be SEALS. On that site’s Wall of Shame was a picture of the Reginald Malone, the man who had been living with her.

She asked for more information and received an e-mail the next day.

“I about fell over,” she said.

Gosselin then learned Malone is being sought by authorities in the Vancouver, B.C. and Seattle areas. Since September 2001 when the SEAL Authentication Team became aware of his claims, he had “bilked a number of women out of large amounts of cash, run up tremendous phone bills, downloaded massive amounts of porn to their personal computers, and been engaged to different women.”

According to the SEAL Authentication Team, Malone usually claimed, falsely, to be a captain with SEAL Team 6, just back from Afghanistan. However, Team 6 was deactivated in the late 1980s, and it never had a black captain named Malone.

That was enough to convince Gosselin that her house guest was no longer welcome. She was worried how he might react, so made a phone call to the Island County Sheriff’s Office.

Wanted in Tukwila

The call was referred to Detective Evan Tingstad. A background check showed only that Malone was wanted by Tukwila Police for third-degree theft, with $600 bail. There was a warrant issued, but it was for King County extradition only, meaning Tukwila police would not leave King County to pick up the suspect. Island County can’t afford to transport suspects to other jurisdictions in such cases, Tingstad said.

Tukwila Police Lt. Darrell Baskin acknowledged last week that the warrant was for King County extradition only because, “We’re trying to balance time and expense with our resources.”

Baskin said the third-degree theft charge was related to the theft of checks from an employer. Also, Malone was recently married in King County but then disappeared. A woman in King County obtained a restraining order against him.

Tingstad said he explained the options to Gosselin, in light of the fact neither the Tukwila police nor Island County Sheriff could respond. When she asked what to do, Tingstad told her it was her decision. She could tell him to leave immediately.

As Gosselin recalls the conversation, she was advised, “He seems to be harmless, just ask him to leave.” So she confronted Malone alone. When she told him to leave, “He threw a little temper tantrum,” she said.

“But I paid for the taxi and the shuttle ride,” so he agreed to leave.

That was the last she saw of Malone, but she was worried that he might come back after learning that she went public with her story. She talked the Whidbey News-Times and Seattle TV stations.

“He’s conned quite a few women out of money,” she said. “I just want to help other women without putting myself in jeopardy.”