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Episode: Dirty John: Live at The Theatre at Ace Hotel

Author: Los Angeles Times | Wondery
Duration: 01:19:59

Episode Shownotes

In the months since “Dirty John” was released, more of John Meehan’s victims have told their stories. Carolina Miranda from the LA Times interviews Christopher Goffard, Debra and Terra Newell, and John Meehan’s first wife. Plus, a panel on coercive control and a special live performance by Tracy Bonham. Recorded

live at the Ace Theatre.

Summary

In this live episode of "Dirty John," host Christopher Goffard presents a gripping narrative about the manipulation and coercive control exerted by John Meehan, detailing the brutal confrontation with Tara Newell. Through survivor stories, the complexities of emotional abuse and the cycle of violence are explored, emphasizing the impacts of domestic violence and the importance of understanding psychological manipulation. The episode also includes discussions on the societal stigma around victims and the role of bystander intervention, all while raising awareness for organizations aiding those affected by domestic violence.

Go to PodExtra AI's episode page (Dirty John: Live at The Theatre at Ace Hotel) to play and view complete AI-processed content: summary, mindmap, topics, takeaways, transcript, keywords and highlights.

Full Transcript

00:00:03 Speaker_12
By now, we all know how this story ends.

00:00:07 Speaker_12
It ends on a rooftop parking garage in Newport Beach, where a serial predator named John Meehan decides to exact vengeance on his estranged wife by going after what he thinks is the softest possible target, his 25-year-old stepdaughter, Tara Newell.

00:00:24 Speaker_12
It ends in broad daylight with a cascade of improbabilities. Tara happens to work in a dog kennel, and she hasn't yet changed out of the thick-shredded rain boots she wears when she hoses down the dog cages.

00:00:35 Speaker_12
And she happens to have her miniature Australian Shepherd with her. And when Meehan tries to abduct her at knife point, this small but fierce dog distracts him by lunging at his legs.

00:00:46 Speaker_12
And in her fight to survive, Tara's boots happen to connect in just the right spot. And by some fluke of physics, the long silver knife flies from his hand and lands on the pavement, handle pointed toward hers.

00:01:00 Speaker_12
And though she has no combat training, she just happens to have privately rehearsed for a confrontation like this one for years.

00:01:07 Speaker_12
John Meehan, a hardened criminal who towers over her by a foot, a survivor of jail and prison cells, has every advantage, but Tara wins. I wouldn't call it a happy ending exactly, but it's an infinitely better ending than it might have been.

00:01:23 Speaker_12
I'm Christopher Goffard. I'm the writer... I'm the writer and host of the Dirty John series and podcast, which my newspaper, the LA Times, produced in partnership with Wondery.

00:01:41 Speaker_12
Dirty John traces the multigenerational story that led to that confrontation, a woman looking for love on a dating site, a fraught family history haunted by homicide and exploited by a con man whose own past includes a long trail of women deceived and terrorized.

00:01:59 Speaker_12
Dirty John invites us to think about our own vulnerabilities and to remember that we shouldn't be too smug in our certainty that we're exempt from the predators of the world. Imagine your own blind spot, your own area of longing or vanity or naivete.

00:02:14 Speaker_12
In some context, it might be close to your best quality, like generosity or a capacity for hope.

00:02:21 Speaker_12
Now imagine there's a person out there whose sole goal is to find it and use it to destroy you, who will use manipulation and fear and elaborate lies intended to warp your sense of reality.

00:02:33 Speaker_12
Imagine a predator who has honed this ability like a science and has literally fed himself with it for much of his adult life. Tonight we're going to meet some of the people who emerged from this particular nightmare.

00:02:46 Speaker_12
Women who survived John Meehan and were brave enough over the course of many months to let me record their stories for the podcast with a candor and intimacy that frequently stunned me.

00:02:57 Speaker_12
I'd like to thank them because anyone who wants to understand this particular dark corner of the human psyche is in their debt. As one woman told me, there are many Dirty Johns out there who need to be stopped.

00:03:09 Speaker_12
And I think of the podcast as a cautionary tale that lays bare their stratagems and gives you a sharper sense of how to look beyond their masks.

00:03:19 Speaker_12
For me, the podcast is impossible to imagine without the Tracy Bonham song, Devil's Got Your Boyfriend, which is... the highlight of the soundtrack, and has the urgency of hard-won experience. She crossed the country to be with us tonight.

00:03:36 Speaker_12
Please welcome Grammy-nominated singer-songwriter Tracy Bonham.

00:04:05 Speaker_18
It's time to leave the city, oh how I feel for you, deep and all over. It was a pity you thought it'd never happen, oh who are you kidding?

00:04:26 Speaker_03
Unless it's something goofy, like in the movies, like perhaps a body double, a doppelganger who got you from your squirrel. It's time for other, oh, what an animal, animal. I won't say it loud and clear. Something you don't, you don't.

00:04:54 Speaker_03
Devil's got your boyfriend, he's got your wife He said he'd always love you, he'd never leave you Devil's got your boyfriend, he's got your boy And I'll never let go Ba ba da ba da ba Ba ba da ba da ba

00:05:20 Speaker_03
♪ And then a tip of Tina's, you won't believe it ♪ ♪ I heard it from another, on two or three minutes ♪ ♪ Well, anything can happen, maybe his sister ♪ ♪ But he said she lived in Bend, Oregon ♪ ♪ Let's look for something Freudian ♪ ♪ And what you notice is like peeling off an onion ♪ ♪ Layer by layer, liar by liar, it gets later and later ♪ ♪ And you haven't done a thing, done a thing ♪

00:05:56 Speaker_03
Nice. Well, devil's got your boyfriend, he's got your boy instead He'd always love you, he'd never leave Devil's got your boyfriend, he's got your boy And he'll never let you go Ignore the signs, ignore the signs Ignore the signs of warning

00:06:28 Speaker_03
Ignore the signs, ignore the signs, ignore the signs of warning. Loud, say it loud and clear, something you don't, you don't want to hear.

00:06:55 Speaker_03
Well, the devil's got your boyfriend He's got your voice and he'd always love you He'd never leave you The devil's got your boyfriend He's got your boy and he'll never let you go

00:07:28 Speaker_11
Thank you.

00:07:29 Speaker_04
Tracy Bonham, please give her a hearty round of applause. What a fantastic, fantastic song. Thank you for being here tonight. I'm Carolina Miranda. I'm a staff writer at the Los Angeles Times, and I'm going to be your host this evening.

00:07:54 Speaker_04
I think it goes without saying that Dirty John has been a phenomenon. Nearly 15 million listens. A story that reads like noir, but that is about very real people and touches on very real issues of coercive control and domestic violence.

00:08:12 Speaker_04
every aspect of Dirty John was very meticulously thought out down to the music, which has some connections to the themes that we're going to be exploring this evening.

00:08:22 Speaker_04
So this evening we are going to explore some of the more difficult topics at the heart of Dirty John, topics that affect the lives of many women and men too.

00:08:32 Speaker_04
We will hear new stories that have emerged since the story was published, there have been a lot, of women who had their lives turned upside down by John Meehan.

00:08:42 Speaker_04
And live on stage, we will also have the women who survived Meehan, Deborah Newell and Tanya Bales, plus the young woman who fought Meehan off, Tara Newell. Most importantly, by being here, you are making a difference.

00:08:56 Speaker_04
$5 from every ticket is going to the nonprofit Peace Over Violence, which works with victims of domestic violence. And so far, that translates to roughly $5,000 for the organization. So thank you so much for being here.

00:09:15 Speaker_04
It's going to mean a lot to a lot of women. So let's get this started.

00:09:22 Speaker_06
Newport Beach, 9-1-1.

00:09:23 Speaker_05
Hi, I'm calling for a 1-8-9-5 shooting in place. And there's a man up here with a knife and a girl screaming. They're on the top floor on the north side. Newport Beach Police, do you have an emergency?

00:09:36 Speaker_06
Yeah, we do. We've got a stabbing, Weston. It's a woman. It's a male and a female. The male's not doing well. Weston and Dover.

00:09:48 Speaker_07
Okay, hold on one second. Hold on one second. Hi, I need an ambulance right away and the police. What address? What's your address? What's the address here? What's the address here? Please tell me what the address is!

00:10:01 Speaker_07
Someone's been stabbed and he attacked a girl.

00:10:04 Speaker_06
Hi, this is Tomoya Shimura with the Orange County Register. How are you doing? I'm well, and you? I'm doing well, thank you. Anything interesting going on? Oh yeah, just checking to see if there's anything interesting going on tonight.

00:10:14 Speaker_06
I don't have anything for you. Got it, thanks so much.

00:10:24 Speaker_04
I guess that's not very interesting.

00:10:26 Speaker_04
I'd like to welcome back to the stage a two-time Pulitzer finalist, staff writer for the Los Angeles Times, the author of the novel Snitch Jacket, which if you didn't get quite enough noir with this series, this is a good place to start with his work, Christopher Goffard.

00:10:51 Speaker_04
Welcome back. Thanks. So, this audio we just heard, a lot of very intense phone calls followed by nothing much happening.

00:11:00 Speaker_12
Yeah, you could be forgiven for thinking nothing was going on that day in the idyllic city of Newport Beach, California.

00:11:08 Speaker_12
I had that job for years where I was on the cop shift and your job is you call watch commanders and dispatchers and hope that they tell you what's going on. Sometimes they do, sometimes they don't.

00:11:19 Speaker_12
So, I think it underscores the difficulty of a reporter's job. The other thing you hear in that audio is you hear good Samaritans running to help. We all know the story of Skylar Sepulveda, the 14-year-old junior lifeguard, right?

00:11:34 Speaker_12
who ran, who saw the stabbing and ran in to help. There were other people who tried to help. After the series ran, I heard from a guy named Pernell Gaston, and he told me that he was walking his dog near the area. He hears terrorists screaming.

00:11:51 Speaker_12
get him away from me, get him away from me, call my mom. He runs up to help, and Meehan is lying there, face down, bleeding. They flip him over, and he says, a woman says, look, we've got to do CPR, we've got to revive him.

00:12:10 Speaker_12
People are hesitant because he's covered with blood, but this woman puts her mouth right up against his, breathes into his mouth, revives him for a minute, and then when the cops arrive, vanishes.

00:12:22 Speaker_12
So, I don't think she's ever been identified, but there were a number of people who did try and help, but in the chaos of the moment, nobody knew who was who, nobody knew that he had been the original attacker, at least among the crowd.

00:12:36 Speaker_04
Wow. Now, this story starts with the coroner's report. How did you come to it and what did you see in it that you thought would make a good story?

00:12:47 Speaker_12
Well, it started with the coroner's website and an enterprising reporter for the Daily Pilot named Hannah Fry was working the cop shift that day and came across this death on the coroner's website. It was a homicide in this parking garage.

00:13:04 Speaker_12
She thought it was probably a suicide, but she made some calls and she broke the story. And somebody calls her, a woman who didn't identify herself, calls her soon after and says, is he really dead? Good riddance.

00:13:20 Speaker_12
And she finds restraining orders that suggest why she might have said this and point to a larger story. Fast forward a couple months, I'm having lunch with Matt Murphy, the prosecutor that we'll meet tonight.

00:13:33 Speaker_12
And we're talking about what kind of stories I might be that might be gettable, and he says there's this crazy story out of Newport Beach. We're not going to file charges on it. He says usually it pains me when there's a homicide, I can't file charges.

00:13:50 Speaker_12
In this case, I'm delighted It's the clearest case of justifiable homicide you'll ever see. And because we're closing the case, the coroner's report will be open. Up until then, authorities hadn't been saying much at all.

00:14:05 Speaker_12
So I run down to the coroner's office, get the report. And what I see is that diagram with 13 stab wounds, right? And this was the first indication to me of just how brutal this confrontation was. and just how fiercely Tara fought.

00:14:27 Speaker_12
So, soon after that I met her, naturally I wanted to meet her, and she turned out to be as soft-spoken and docile-seeming and sweet as anybody you'll ever meet. So, it just got more and more interesting.

00:14:44 Speaker_04
So, tell me a little bit, John Meehan, who was he? And as you went into the story, what about him made him such a layered, complicated story?

00:14:55 Speaker_12
John Meehan is a drug addict, a con artist, a serial imposter, a failed law student.

00:15:08 Speaker_12
a nurse anesthetist who lost his license because he got hooked on the drugs that he was supposed to be giving patients to relieve their pain and got caught with them.

00:15:18 Speaker_12
He used his good looks to charm women, and he used his medical knowledge to get drugs, he used his legal knowledge to evade the law in a lot of cases, and he seemed uninhibited by anything like a conscience. He seemed to be a guy who

00:15:36 Speaker_12
needed to inflict pain on others in the way the rest of us need oxygen.

00:15:41 Speaker_04
Wow. Why has the story been so resonant? I mean, you hear from people all over the world about the podcast. Why do you think it's hit so hard right now?

00:15:53 Speaker_12
Well, I think toxic masculinity and issues of sexual assault are in the news. There's that. I think, well, podcast mania, too. I mean, there are 400,000 podcasts out there, and there's something about the intimacy of a podcast.

00:16:10 Speaker_12
You listen to the voices of the people who are living this life and death story. It's an absorbing story, and you feel like they're talking right to you. which I think is part of the Allure podcast.

00:16:22 Speaker_04
Which brings us to some fresh stories that have emerged in the wake of Dirty John being released.

00:16:30 Speaker_04
You've heard from a number of people who were threatened by him, including an ex-girlfriend who had disappeared from her life, and she had always wondered what became of him, and then this podcast comes out.

00:16:42 Speaker_12
Yeah, this is Angela Constant, and she says, I ruined her vacation in Maui with her husband because she logs on and she sees this guy that she dated back in the 80s, and she feels like she's been punched in the stomach.

00:16:57 Speaker_12
Of course, at the same time, she realizes she's dodged a bullet. But she dated him in the early 80s. She was 20, he was 22. She works as a teller in a bank in Los Gatos at the time. He comes in, he's always in his medical scrubs.

00:17:12 Speaker_12
So this is an indication that even back then, he's running this con and he pretends to be a medical student at Stanford University. And at one point, he leaves a note on a windshield saying, I can't bear not to see you again. Please call me.

00:17:28 Speaker_12
And she does. And we have some audio of how it unfolds from there.

00:17:35 Speaker_14
He took me home very quickly. I fell for him hard. And he had a skeleton standing in the corner of his bedroom, and that was really creepy. It was one of those anatomical skeletons that you would get if you were in med school, I guess.

00:18:00 Speaker_14
And it was really weird because it was between the bedroom window and his bed, and it was looking down. on his bed. He told me he was in medical school at Stanford. And at that time I had neither the life experience or a reason to question him.

00:18:22 Speaker_12
So I asked his sister about this and she said that he had a nickname for the skeleton, which was Mr. Bones, and that it was a real skeleton. It was a real cadaver skeleton that he probably stole, she thinks, from a cadaver lab or traded for drugs.

00:18:41 Speaker_04
Wow.

00:18:42 Speaker_04
Now, one of the issues the story raises is that many women in circumstances like this, when they are dealing with a man who's kind of taken over their lives and behaved threateningly, is that they are afraid to come forward because they're afraid no one will believe them.

00:18:57 Speaker_04
But I mean, part of it goes back to Meehan's seduction of women. Like, how is it that he managed to seduce women in the way that he did?

00:19:08 Speaker_12
Well, he'd been practicing for a long time, and in terms of why people didn't come forward, he used shame as a weapon, shame and humiliation. He managed to weaponize them very successfully. He would coax information out of people.

00:19:22 Speaker_12
He was always data mining. He would coax intimate photos out of people and then use them as a weapon.

00:19:31 Speaker_12
I talked to a private eye named Nils Gravillius, and he represented a woman who had fallen for Meehan and wanted to know his background because his stories weren't quite adding up.

00:19:43 Speaker_12
And Nils had some very interesting observations that he came to during the course of his investigation.

00:19:52 Speaker_00
One of the things we can't go too light on is the way that a guy gets to be good at this. John Meehan probably responded to hundreds of personal ads.

00:20:04 Speaker_00
And he learned to hone his approach in the same way that a pitch man at the fair or a telemarketer will base his approach on how many seconds and ultimately minutes he gets to talk to a consumer.

00:20:19 Speaker_00
What a guy like Meehan is doing is he's constantly tightening up his approach. You know, he knows that surgeon sounds better than nurse anesthetist.

00:20:32 Speaker_00
He knows that divorced father with a problematic ex-wife and two beautiful daughters sounds way better than I left them in a ditch because I needed to pursue narcotics.

00:20:44 Speaker_00
These words and this approach that Meehan used didn't just talk these women into doing something that was unwise, he infected them with a persistently bad idea, that he loved them.

00:21:01 Speaker_00
And that they could get everything that they wanted emotionally from John Meehan. That he was a cornucopia of emotional goodness for every one of them. when in fact he was the opposite.

00:21:16 Speaker_00
He was a tiger trap lined with pungy stakes waiting for somebody to fall in.

00:21:27 Speaker_04
So that trap, what were the traps that he laid?

00:21:32 Speaker_12
He would find your weak spot and use it against you ruthlessly. And I have a few stories from women that I talked to after the podcast ran. And they basically trace what he was doing in the years before he met Deborah Newell.

00:21:52 Speaker_12
And it's caused me to re-evaluate my thinking about the guy. For a while, I thought that he was in it for the money. That's probably one of his motives consistently, but in some of these cases,

00:22:05 Speaker_12
His motive seemed to be sex and control, sex and domination. That's power over people. And the pleasure he took in inflicting torment on them. So that comes up over and over. In the first

00:22:21 Speaker_04
The first woman that I talked to... And these women have asked not to be identified, so we don't have audio of them, but we're going to tell their stories.

00:22:31 Speaker_12
There's a South Bay woman, she's a business executive. She dated him in 2009. They met on Match.com. She took the photo. of John Shirtless at the beach. And he would go to Christmas parties with her. She'd take him to the office Christmas party.

00:22:48 Speaker_12
He would charm the grandmas. He would charm the kids. He would talk sports with the guys. He was a chameleon.

00:22:56 Speaker_12
And she says that after about a year of dating him, she got a glimpse of where he lived, which is in this RV park in the desert in Cathedral City.

00:23:07 Speaker_04
And he'd been telling her that he was a doctor, right?

00:23:10 Speaker_12
He'd been telling her that he had these houses, that he was a success, and she'd never seen where he lived. And when she gets a glimpse of it, she's horrified.

00:23:20 Speaker_12
She says that he was an extreme hoarder, that it was filled with trash, filled with clothes, filled with piles of dental floss. And she says, let's go our separate ways. We want different things out of life. Let's split up.

00:23:36 Speaker_12
This is the trigger for her and he begins terrorizing her. He begins stalking her. He sends her notes saying, I know where you are. And eventually she has to take out a restraining order.

00:23:53 Speaker_12
And one of the chilling things that he does is she gets a five-year, 500-foot restraining order. And she goes to her window, and there he is, 501 feet away.

00:24:05 Speaker_12
So he knew exactly how to push right up to the boundary of the law and evade it again and again.

00:24:11 Speaker_04
Which is what made it so hard to catch him, because he wasn't breaking the law.

00:24:17 Speaker_12
In a lot of cases, he was literally one foot away from breaking the law. And she says, he wanted my career destroyed, my body destroyed, my life destroyed. She lost 25 pounds. Her life was terror for a year and a half.

00:24:38 Speaker_12
But she gets this restraining order. And after that, he moves on to a Porter Ranch woman that I talked to. This one is particularly sad, I think. She's a single mom in her mid-40s, a pharmaceutical rep, and this takes us up to about 2011.

00:24:55 Speaker_12
She tells me, he took my sanity and my self-esteem. He turned me into this meek little person. It was a toxic relationship and I couldn't find the courage to get out. And she says, why do you live in this RV if you're a successful doctor? He says,

00:25:11 Speaker_12
I like the freedom to travel. I don't like to be tied down to a property. And by the way, you're a gold digger. You're not good enough for me.

00:25:19 Speaker_12
He's telling her this, and this is part of his trick, is he convinces you that you need to prove yourself to be worthy of him, at least he did in this case. And the other trick he pulled was he tells her, You're a surface person.

00:25:36 Speaker_12
You don't let people get to know you. What are the ugly things about you that you don't share with people? That's the only way to true intimacy.

00:25:44 Speaker_04
He's data mining.

00:25:46 Speaker_12
He's data mining. He's coaxing information out of her that he's going to weaponize. And when she finds messages on his phone that he's dating other women, she says, I'm done. And he begins campaigning to destroy her.

00:26:01 Speaker_12
So she's out with her daughter and she gets a call from a friend saying, is everything OK? What are all these awful messages you're posting on Facebook?

00:26:10 Speaker_12
And he had hacked into her Facebook page and was posting all kinds of awful things, stuff that she had confided in him. Stuff about her co-workers. This co-worker has STDs.

00:26:26 Speaker_12
He sends intimate photos of her that he had begged her to send him to her kid's Catholic school. He tells her, you will lose your job, your income, your kids. When I'm done with you, your parents won't want you. And he gives her an ultimatum.

00:26:40 Speaker_12
He says, the only way I will stop is if you come out to Cathedral City now I own you for a year. You are my slave for a year. And anytime I want sex, you're going to be there. And because she's terrorized, she gives in.

00:26:58 Speaker_12
And this is their relationship for many months.

00:27:00 Speaker_04
And she's too afraid to say anything to anybody.

00:27:06 Speaker_12
She tries to get a restraining order. I think eventually she does. And when she tries to pull away, He sends her texts pretending to be one of his daughters. And he says things like, give my dad another chance.

00:27:22 Speaker_12
She replies, I need a restraining order against your dad. And Meehan replies back, still in the guise of pretending to be one of his daughters, do you think a piece of paper would stop him?

00:27:39 Speaker_12
So he seems to know whenever she changes her password, he's probably installed a key logger, a keystroke logger on her keyboard so he can track her movements. And I'll just read you a quote that she gave me.

00:28:00 Speaker_12
She says, he'd use every ounce of his deviated brain to come at you. He knew exactly where to hurt you. He wanted to isolate me from friends and family. So your perception is only John's. And she goes to a, she's a pharmaceutical rep.

00:28:16 Speaker_12
She happens to be selling antipsychotics. And so she meets a psychiatrist in this context. And he says, this guy needs to believe that he's in control. He needs to believe that he's making the rules. He's not going to just let you go.

00:28:30 Speaker_12
The thing to do is to make up excuses why you can't see him. Try and put distance between yourself and him. But she's only semi-successful at this.

00:28:40 Speaker_12
And the only way that she gets away really is that he's arrested finally in 2013 for terrorizing still another woman. And this is the Laguna Beach woman.

00:28:51 Speaker_04
So yet another, a third woman who came forward.

00:28:54 Speaker_12
These are only the ones we know about.

00:28:56 Speaker_04
Yeah.

00:28:56 Speaker_12
These are only the ones that filed restraining orders or talked to me or filed criminal charges against him. I don't know how many others are out there. So the Laguna Beach woman, she's a Brazilian

00:29:08 Speaker_12
a romance novelist, 48 years old, and she's waking up from brain surgery in a hospital in San Diego, and she sees John Meehan above her. He's in doctor's scrubs, and he's got a flip chart.

00:29:23 Speaker_12
He says, look, if you have any questions about your case, give me a call. She calls, and they start dating, and he learns that she has some family money.

00:29:33 Speaker_12
and manages to convince her to transfer the money to him to keep it from her soon-to-be ex-husband. But when she hesitates, a friend of hers says, that's kind of a dumb thing to do, you don't want to do that.

00:29:47 Speaker_12
When she hesitates, he begins terrorizing her too. He steals her passport so she can't leave the country and go back to her family. He sends her photos of her house and from inside her house to let her know that he's been there, that he's watching her.

00:30:05 Speaker_12
And she tells the Laguna Beach PD, they investigate and this is when they do a search of his desert storage unit in Cathedral City and they find cyanide, they find zip ties and they find a gun.

00:30:26 Speaker_12
And I asked the investigator, what could he want with this? He said he was probably going to take her money and kill her. Tie up loose ends, right? But this is what sends him to prison.

00:30:38 Speaker_12
And this takes us up to mid-2014, which is when he gets out of prison. Soon after, he meets Deborah Newell. And we all know how that story goes.

00:30:48 Speaker_04
Exactly. Now, after the podcast was released, you also spoke to Meehan's children from his marriage to Tanya Bales.

00:30:57 Speaker_12
Right. Emily and Abigail. I was particularly curious about this because Meehan always talked about how his ex-wife had wronged him, how vicious she was for keeping him from his his children, what a great father he was.

00:31:14 Speaker_12
He would pose with his kids on dating sites, on the profile picture.

00:31:20 Speaker_04
So using them as props, like a father.

00:31:22 Speaker_12
Right, kind of using them as props. And I was curious what kind of relationship he actually had with them. And it turns out almost none. And so Abigail Meehan, she's 18 years old, a high school senior in Georgia now.

00:31:40 Speaker_12
And she hadn't had contact with him in maybe 10 years and has only a few memories of him. And we have some audio of Abigail.

00:31:50 Speaker_01
Hearing the threats that he would make to my mom and stuff, I was always scared of him. I always thought that he was going to come and hurt my mom or try to kidnap me.

00:32:01 Speaker_01
in the mornings before school, even in high school, like, 16, 17-year-old girl, I would be so scared in the morning when it's pitch black that he would be in my car when I was going out to my car to drive to school.

00:32:14 Speaker_01
I would just have the most, like, irrational fears that he's, like, waiting for me or he's gonna, like, show up to my school and, like, try to take me. Like, I was just always so scared.

00:32:25 Speaker_01
I still think about him every single day, and I hate that my life is centered around it.

00:32:31 Speaker_01
But I would just want him to know, I would want him to know all my accomplishments and I would want him to like feel bad for missing out on my whole life, you know?

00:32:41 Speaker_01
I thought that dying was like the easy way out, that he got killed and he was, he didn't have to suffer for what he was going to do or plan to do or past things that he has done.

00:32:51 Speaker_01
I thought that he should be in jail for the rest of his life and that's what he deserves. Tara did what she had to do. I have nothing against Tara, but I would rather him have survived it and then been put in jail and just had to suffer in jail.

00:33:07 Speaker_04
Abigail is in the audience with us tonight, so please give her a round of applause. She's a wonderful young woman, very smart.

00:33:20 Speaker_12
I just want to read one thing she told me. She said, I look like my mom, and I have her brain and her heart, and he just helped create me, and I don't have any of his traits.

00:33:35 Speaker_04
Now, you also spoke with Emily, Abigail's sister.

00:33:39 Speaker_12
Right, she's 22, and she remembers being a little girl, and he'd get visitations with her, he'd be right out of jail, and she remembers him taking her to Chuck E. Cheese, and he would bring a trash bag full of toys and trinkets that he'd buy at the dollar store, knick-knacks, board games, things like that, and we have some audio of her also.

00:34:06 Speaker_11
Well at first, he was still my dad and I still wanted to see him and I was excited to see him.

00:34:12 Speaker_11
I do remember that and kind of asking my mom where he was and sometimes he would promise me these lavish gifts and he would, one time he promised me a laptop and I sat by my front door for three days waiting for the mail and the UPS man to come.

00:34:36 Speaker_11
And my mom actually had to write a letter to my teacher because I did not do any of my homework, because I was so fixated on these promises that would never come.

00:34:50 Speaker_11
He would tell me he was going to take me to Disney World, that he was going to fly us to California to be with his family, and just all these little tales. He has two girls, you know? And I wondered if it ever crossed his mind.

00:35:10 Speaker_11
I wonder how the men in my daughter's life are treating them right now. And I mean, thankfully, no one has treated me other than him like that. But I do wonder if that ever crossed his mind.

00:35:25 Speaker_04
It's a really poignant statement.

00:35:29 Speaker_12
Now Emily is going to be a nurse anesthetist like her mom. And one thing both sisters told me is that they have a terrific stepdad who's been a father figure to them.

00:35:39 Speaker_12
And in a story that's otherwise extremely grim, I think that's one of the bright spots.

00:35:44 Speaker_02
Amazing.

00:35:50 Speaker_04
So before we let you go, we have you up here on stage, we solicited questions from readers online in advance of the event. And so I went to high school in Orange County in Irvine, actually. And so I have a requisite Orange County question.

00:36:06 Speaker_04
So reader Sandra Mayhew asks, what is it about the character or nature of Orange County that contributes to these shocking stories? Just thought we'd end on a light note.

00:36:21 Speaker_12
Somebody told me my beat should be called psychosis in the suburbs. It happens to be where I live and work. And if I lived and worked in Bend, Oregon, people would say a lot of twisted stuff was coming out of there. Because that's what I write about.

00:36:39 Speaker_12
But I think there's also You know, it's a big, diverse county, and there's also some welfare, and I wish I could give you a better answer than that. The one I did before this was framed about the case in Irvine with the lawyers planting the drugs.

00:36:56 Speaker_12
I think there's this deep interest in what goes on beneath the surface of a seemingly idyllic suburban setting.

00:37:04 Speaker_04
Thank you so much, Christopher. Let's give him a hand.

00:37:11 Speaker_17
Terrific. It was so convincing that I thought, okay. So he literally had convinced me at this point that he is not this person. All the facts were right there in front of me, and he is that convincing.

00:37:41 Speaker_17
He was so good at it, it could be a cold day out, and he could convince me that it's 95 degrees. That's how good he was, to where you questioned yourself.

00:37:55 Speaker_04
So we wanted to take this evening's gathering to talk about some of the very real, very hard issues behind that Dirty John raises as a podcast. And so we have convened a panel of very interesting experts. To my left is Frances McBride.

00:38:13 Speaker_04
She's a detective with the LAPD who specializes in domestic violence cases. And she is currently in the midst of establishing a family justice center to support that work. here in Los Angeles.

00:38:26 Speaker_04
To her left is Patty Giggins, who's the Executive Director of Peace Over Violence, who we are supporting this evening. Long time domestic violence awareness organization here in LA. They do incredible work.

00:38:38 Speaker_04
And then on the far left is Matt Murphy, a senior deputy district attorney in the Orange County DA's Office, who tipped Christopher on the fact that there was more to the story than just the pages of the coroner's report.

00:38:51 Speaker_04
So thank you so much for being here tonight. So one of the things that I wanted to discuss, the podcast raises these serious issues about what has, in recent years, is starting to be described as coercive control.

00:39:11 Speaker_04
In England, actually, coercive control, that means like controlling somebody else's life in a very aggressive way without physical violence is now itself a criminal, a legal term, a criminal term.

00:39:23 Speaker_04
And this summer, a man was actually sentenced to 12 weeks in prison for coercive control of his spouse's life.

00:39:31 Speaker_04
removing her SIM card so that she couldn't speak to family members, preventing her family from getting in touch with her, basically assuming control over every aspect of her life.

00:39:40 Speaker_04
So I wanted to start with a question for Patti, which is, can you tell us what coercive control is and then how it connects to the larger issue of domestic violence?

00:39:50 Speaker_13
Yes. Everything that you've been hearing is really specimens of coercive control. And it definitely is an integral part of domestic violence, but it's the hardest part for anyone to understand.

00:40:04 Speaker_13
We understand the cycle of violence when there is an outburst of physical violence and then it calms down, then you have the honeymoon phase where people make up. But even when you have a cycle of violence, underneath that cycle,

00:40:20 Speaker_13
is almost this constant control, that's sneaky, insidious, very invisible to anyone outside the relationship and often the person in relationship to this controller, we'll call him the controller. It's persistent. All the behaviors are strategic.

00:40:44 Speaker_13
It's about really taking over someone else's life. They are able to, as you've heard Christopher talk about how they'll find the weak spot in a person or the vulnerability, and they play that almost like a harp. So they humiliate.

00:41:06 Speaker_13
They, at the same time, they build you up. and they take you down. They isolate you from your family, your friends, and from your support.

00:41:17 Speaker_04
And that it isn't always attached to violence.

00:41:19 Speaker_13
It's not always attached to the physical violence, but even when there is physical violence, that coercive control is there.

00:41:29 Speaker_04
I wanted, you brought up the term cycles of violence, and it's something I've heard described in issues of domestic violence a lot, and I was wondering, Detective, if you could explain what that cycle of violence is and how it plays a role in sort of how we as a society deal with domestic violence.

00:41:47 Speaker_15
Well, the cycle of violence is During training they'll show you like a circle. You have the honeymoon phase, you're in love, and then the tension's building, it's building, and then the lash out, the abuse happens.

00:42:07 Speaker_15
So now you have the abuse, and now you have the remorse. I'm so sorry. I'll never do that again. Please forgive me. I'll buy you this. And then it's the honeymoon phase.

00:42:19 Speaker_15
And then it goes the honeymoon phase, and the tension starts building back, building back, and then he lashes it. I'm using he, but the abuser usually lashes out, and then it starts the honeymoon phase again.

00:42:32 Speaker_15
And it's just a cycle, and it keeps repeating itself.

00:42:34 Speaker_04
And how does that honeymoon phase affect, because, you know, from the outside it can be very easy to say, okay, after one strike, you're out.

00:42:42 Speaker_04
But how does that cycle work in terms of kind of drawing a woman or a partner, because this does happen to men as well, back into the relationship?

00:42:54 Speaker_13
Well, I think that the thing to understand is that these people really believe that they are in love. You know, they are bonded. It could be a neurotic bonding. It could be parts of the relationship that are really very good.

00:43:13 Speaker_13
There are parts that are nurturing. Most of the time, they're not that way all the time.

00:43:18 Speaker_04
I wanted, I had this question for Francis and Matt. We had a number of readers, including Esther Martinez and Amy Martin, asked a version of the question, which was, how did Meehan get away with so much?

00:43:33 Speaker_04
And that brings me to a question I have, which is, you know, people can be victims of domestic violence for years before perpetrators are arrested and or convicted. So why are these cases so difficult to deal with?

00:43:48 Speaker_04
You know, we hear about these people who, you know, had been abusing a partner for years, but we only hear about it when maybe the murder happens or something like that. Why are they so difficult to arrest and prosecute?

00:43:58 Speaker_10
And that cycle that you talk about, and it really is a cycle. Unfortunately, the gears of justice turn a lot slower than that cycle most of the time.

00:44:07 Speaker_10
So as a prosecutor, you wind up with cases where they will have broken up and gotten back together five or six times by the time you even get to court. And time and time again, what you'll get is that manipulation a lot of times by the abuser

00:44:21 Speaker_10
And now the problem becomes the prosecutor or the police officer. And they're the issue and they're the problem. So you get these victims that come in that have no interest in pursuing the case in court that come to you.

00:44:32 Speaker_10
I can't tell you how many times, especially when I was doing misdemeanors, where you're the bad guy and you've got this victim of abuse that you're trying to help.

00:44:40 Speaker_10
comes into court and tells you they don't want to proceed, they don't want to go forward, how dare you ruin their life. And that's really the problem. Domestic violence is so common in our society that you deal in such volume that after a while,

00:44:57 Speaker_10
You know, those cases tend to go away when you find this resistance. Now, we still prosecute them. You still do your best, but California law hasn't really been helping much either.

00:45:06 Speaker_10
It's been getting more lenient for the will of the person who's in this dysfunctional relationship. So now, a lot of times when women don't want to pursue it, you can't oftentimes as a prosecutor. It's actually harder now than it used to be.

00:45:20 Speaker_10
And I get involved in the homicide unit after It has its final cycle and you wind up with these horrific murders.

00:45:28 Speaker_13
You know, most women want the violence to stop. They want the abuse to stop. They don't want to necessarily lose the relationship for a lot of reasons, love, they have kids, economy, what are they going to do? Maybe they don't have any other resources.

00:45:44 Speaker_13
So it's a very complex relationship.

00:45:47 Speaker_04
Now, Detective McBride, you were also saying that for you it was so important to be able to interview these women, that as a police officer it was very important to have somebody talk to somebody who's been abused sort of in the immediate wake and somebody who knows how to do this.

00:46:01 Speaker_04
Why is it important for you to do that?

00:46:03 Speaker_15
Well, usually when the abuser or the victim calls, it's usually the sixth or seventh time that it's happened, because usually the very first time someone gets abused, the police are not called, and statistics show that.

00:46:19 Speaker_15
And what happens is they're mad, everyone's in the heat of the moment, and it's important to interview your victim at that time, because the officer will take the report, The next day, it'll go on the detective's desk.

00:46:33 Speaker_15
The detective will call, and the victim usually doesn't even want to press charges anymore. So it's important. So just at least getting a record of that in the event of future events.

00:46:43 Speaker_15
Right, in case the victim decides to backpedal and not go ahead with the prosecution.

00:46:49 Speaker_04
Now, one of the things that I wanted to address about women that keeps women from coming forward is the issue of shame, that they're embarrassed, Or that perhaps they will be shamed. You know, why didn't you leave him sooner?

00:47:03 Speaker_04
So I want to talk about that. Like why is it, and this is for all of the panel, why is it so important for women to come forward and to talk about it? And how can we de-stigmatize it? This is the tough question.

00:47:17 Speaker_13
Well, we're experiencing that right now with the Me Too moment that we're in. So many, I imagine that we could do Me Too for domestic violence and we would have, you know, hundreds and thousands of women saying, me too.

00:47:31 Speaker_13
It's very easy to be a little bit on the outside and judge someone else, judge their relationship, judge their choices, or not making the right choice.

00:47:43 Speaker_13
And what happens is it's almost the worst thing that someone who's in a relationship like this is to hear, is to be told, why don't you leave? Why didn't you leave? And what's wrong with you? I would never put up with this.

00:47:59 Speaker_13
So what this does is continue the isolation that the abuser has been trying to do because that abuser is very judgy also. And so it's probably one of the worst things that we can do to people that we know and love.

00:48:15 Speaker_13
is to judge them about their relationships. It doesn't help them extricate themselves.

00:48:21 Speaker_04
Yeah. Frances, you said that you always have something you tell people who are... As far as? As far as, like, judging other people's relationships.

00:48:29 Speaker_15
Yeah, never say never. Never say never. You know, you don't, I don't know, if you just think about your own life, how many times have you said, I'll never do that, and you've done it? So you never say never. Yeah. Because you're gonna do it. Yeah.

00:48:42 Speaker_15
And you know, the domestic violence goes across all classes. You don't have to be the poor, it could be the rich. It goes across all classes. Educated, uneducated. Doesn't matter. Everything.

00:48:54 Speaker_04
Now we have a question from a reader, Bill in Irvine. He said, what should friends and family members of people like Deborah Newell do when they think they recognize a situation like this and see the woman staying with a predator?

00:49:07 Speaker_04
So what advice do you all have?

00:49:13 Speaker_13
Well, I would say really listen and try not to judge and try to keep a connection. And it's challenging because when you see somebody doing something that is hurting them or staying in a relationship that's hurting them.

00:49:29 Speaker_13
But if we can stay and be that friend, we're doing the opposite of what the abuser is trying to do, which is to separate and isolate. that person from the support.

00:49:45 Speaker_13
Because you don't know at one point, maybe something, a light bulb's gonna go off, or you're gonna be able to step in, you can be that support person, and they be able to make some of the changes that they need.

00:49:58 Speaker_13
But to expect people to just leave, the other thing that's important is often when people who are in those kinds of relationships leave, it gets more dangerous. Because the abuser gets angry.

00:50:11 Speaker_13
It's angry and it gets in pursuit, and that's when homicides can happen, right? That's right. When they're trying to leave.

00:50:19 Speaker_04
Are those the kinds of cases you see in homicide? It's women who were in the process of leaving?

00:50:24 Speaker_10
Well, not just women.

00:50:25 Speaker_04
Not just women.

00:50:26 Speaker_10
Laguna Beach is one of my cities. You see this in same-sex relationships. You see this. I mean, I've got more than one man or man that's been murdered by their wife who thinks they're cheating or whatever. You talk about that power dynamic.

00:50:40 Speaker_10
It's not exclusive. And I totally agree. It crosses all cultural lines, socioeconomic lines, orientation lines.

00:50:47 Speaker_10
And I think, I couldn't agree any stronger, I think the answer is you've got to be a good friend and hang in there and just be aware that that person, especially in extreme cases like Meehan, they're looking for any excuse to separate those friends out because you

00:51:03 Speaker_10
as a friend, your sanity, your support, you offer them something that reduces their dependence on the abuser. So hang in there through grim death for your friends, and you'll get that moment of opportunity.

00:51:19 Speaker_10
And fortunately, it is very rare where it does result in a homicide, but they sure do happen. And just, I guess, worry and hang in there.

00:51:28 Speaker_13
I think it's important for others, significant others, to become educated. If your friend is going through this, become educated about what the cycle of violence is, what coercive control is, so that you can be that resource.

00:51:44 Speaker_04
I want to switch a little and talk about the role of the internet, because this has come up a lot in the story. Obviously, abusers and stalkers existed way before internet dating, so I don't want to completely vilify the Internet.

00:51:57 Speaker_04
I know many people who have met their wonderful partners through the Internet. But what role can the Internet play in something like this? So, Frances and Matt.

00:52:05 Speaker_15
Well, we were talking earlier about just the volume of the Internet. A lot of times on the Internet, you start to develop a relationship. You haven't even met. So, the back and forth, back and forth, the emails, you've met,

00:52:20 Speaker_15
kind of emotionally know each other, and then you meet. And also the volume of Dirty John, he could hit 50 women in one evening and 30 respond. That's a lot more than, you know, going through the penny saver looking for a date.

00:52:37 Speaker_04
Does that still exist?

00:52:40 Speaker_02
That's old school.

00:52:44 Speaker_10
The kind of weird part about that, we were talking about it earlier. I actually had a murder that happened out of the Penny Saver. Out of the Penny Saver. In 1994, the Bill McLaughlin murder in Newport Beach.

00:52:54 Speaker_10
He met this woman, Nanette Johnston, out of the Penny Saver in a personal app. And she put it together, it's like the plot from Body Heat, and she orchestrated his murder with her real body.

00:53:05 Speaker_04
Let's talk about that case a little bit, because the Meehan case was extreme, and we often talk about how it's extreme, but it's not the only extreme case. Tell me a little bit more about this case. Who was this gentleman?

00:53:19 Speaker_10
He was an inventor, and he invented the subterfuge that separates plasma from blood. So as you can imagine, there's a million medical uses for that. There's still a patent on it. And he was richer than certain countries, I think.

00:53:32 Speaker_10
So he had this beautiful house, these nice kids. He was married for 30 years, and he got divorced. And he dated, the first person out of the gate was the worst woman in Orange County named Annette Johnston. And she was a lot like Meehan.

00:53:47 Speaker_10
She left a trail of broken lives. She was a manipulator. She lied through her teeth. She said she was a prodigy student from Arizona State. She never went to Arizona State. I think she might have gone, like, audited a summer school class once.

00:54:01 Speaker_10
But she knew enough to talk the game. He brought her in. She learned his business dealings.

00:54:08 Speaker_10
She then, her real boyfriend was a former football player named Eric Naposki, he used to play for the Patriots, and she convinced him that he was abusing her, which was not true, and got him so, he was just dumb enough to buy into the whole thing, and he went into his house and shot him.

00:54:26 Speaker_10
It took us 15 years to solve that one.

00:54:28 Speaker_04
Wow, for his money.

00:54:30 Speaker_10
And in those intervening 15 years, she victimized man after man after man. And she was finally married to a really good guy named Billy McNeil, who had no idea about her background.

00:54:40 Speaker_10
And she'd cranked out $280,000 in credit card debt that he didn't know about. They came and arrested her. He was on her side until he learned about all this in the background. She had no idea. So those people are out there.

00:54:54 Speaker_10
I think predators like this have existed probably since ancient Rome and ancient Greece. But to answer your question, the internet has put it on steroids. And every one of us wants to be loved.

00:55:04 Speaker_10
Every one of us goes through times in our life where we're lonely. And more than one of us has tried online dating before. I know I'm not alone.

00:55:17 Speaker_04
I don't know what you're talking about.

00:55:22 Speaker_10
It's just for most people that you meet out there are also nice people. They're looking for the same thing, but it creates a unique opportunity for guys like Meehan or people like Annette Johnston to meet strangers where you can't

00:55:37 Speaker_10
You meet somebody through friends, they're kind of vetted. You meet somebody on the internet, it is a wing and a prayer all the way. And sometimes people get married, sometimes people get murdered.

00:55:53 Speaker_04
I think we should just end the show right there. That was some amazing philosophy. I'm going to quote you. Now, this brings me to my last question, which is related to this question of the internet from reader Maggie Schmidt.

00:56:10 Speaker_04
So how can women and men protect themselves from this kind of fraud or other crimes and this issue of control? What can people do to make sure that they don't get caught in these traps?

00:56:24 Speaker_15
Well, to me, It was too good to be true. John wanted to be with her every moment, wanted to rub her feet, make her dinner. I don't know any man that wants to do that. That should have been the first flag. So be aware of flags.

00:56:50 Speaker_15
pay attention to some flags.

00:56:52 Speaker_04
Yeah. If it's too good to be true. If it's too good to be true, it probably isn't. Oh, what's your sense, Matt, in terms of what people?

00:57:00 Speaker_10
Well, what's interesting is in this particular case, uh, you know, given the volume, there's a lot of women that were interviewed by detectives over the course of this investigation and

00:57:10 Speaker_10
You know, I think we all need to be kinder to people that do get sucked into this because of the human emotions, and we should feel… you know, we've all felt lonely, but there are women with Meehan who went, okay, you're a doctor, and they… one of them went to the hospital he said he worked in, physically drove there.

00:57:30 Speaker_10
Nobody knew him because he wasn't actually a doctor, and she went back and said, dude, You're, nobody knew you there. You're not working there. Get out, you know, basically.

00:57:41 Speaker_10
So, and basically, I guess the answer is it's almost like you're investing your heart, you're investing your money. It's, do your due diligence, you know.

00:57:52 Speaker_04
Patti, did you want to add anything?

00:57:54 Speaker_13
I think what we try to do at Peace Over Violence is really start educating young people on what constitutes a healthy relationship. What are we really looking for? It's not just where to look, like on the internet, it's what are you looking for?

00:58:10 Speaker_13
To think about what goes into What kind of relationship do you really want to have? Most of us didn't have that in high school. I certainly didn't.

00:58:21 Speaker_13
And so we're trying to inculcate that with young people now so that there's a lot more education, a lot more thought, not so much about, not only about what you have to be cautious about, but what you really would like to have in your life.

00:58:34 Speaker_13
Who do you really want to be with? Who do you want to be, you know, who's your compatible person? And we're having a lot of fun, I think, having these conversations with young people.

00:58:46 Speaker_04
Terrific. Thank you so much. Thank you to all three of you.

00:58:59 Speaker_08
You can be smart in the brain and not smart of the heart or not have a lot of life experiences or street smarts to come across. you know, even characters who are 10% of what John was, you know, people who lie to you or cheat you or steal from you.

00:59:17 Speaker_08
I had a pretty easy, normal, you know, upbringing, childhood and everything. And this was, you know, this was my first experience with evil.

00:59:29 Speaker_04
So this brings me to the women at the heart of this story and who have, who are just so brave in being here to tell it, Deborah Newell and Tanya Bales. Thank you for being with us. You're welcome.

00:59:56 Speaker_04
So I wanted to start with a question from a reader, and I think it's a question I have too, which is why has it been important to you to tell the story, to speak out? It could not have been easy to reveal all of these intimate details about your life.

01:00:15 Speaker_09
Well, it's not that I'm psychic or anything, but I've known for more than a decade that this was not going to end well.

01:00:28 Speaker_09
It was important for me to tell the story and to participate with Chris Goffard, who I came to trust and thought that he would do a good job. And it was important for me to participate because I wanted it to be told right.

01:00:43 Speaker_09
And on a maybe selfish level, it validated what I had been through. It's not something that in casual conversation, if someone asks you about it, you can adequately describe this story in less than five hours. Which is what it took.

01:01:03 Speaker_04
What about you, Deborah? Why was it important for you to talk about it?

01:01:07 Speaker_17
Well, I put my dirty laundry out there, which was not fun. I'm sure. But I felt that maybe I could be there for other women that have gone through this. So I was hoping that I could help someone.

01:01:27 Speaker_04
Terrific. Which brings me to another question for you, Debra. I feel like, you know, we talked about with the expert panel earlier, the question of shame and women coming forward, that from the outside, these can be really easy cases to judge.

01:01:45 Speaker_04
Why didn't you leave? Why didn't you do this? But, you know, part of Meehan's MO, John Meehan's MO, was that he was very charming, and I remember having a conversation with you, and you told me, like,

01:01:58 Speaker_04
You know, what people see is that minor percentage of his life, of our daily life, that ended up being devastating.

01:02:04 Speaker_04
So I'd love to get a sense from you of, like, what was your daily life like that would make sort of some of the weird things that maybe you were seeing and hearing seem not real?

01:02:16 Speaker_17
Well, like she was saying earlier, it was too good to be true. From the moment I met him, he was very attentive and he would do everything, I shouldn't say everything, but he treated me like a queen.

01:02:37 Speaker_17
And I think he lured me in, he listened to me, everything that came out of his mouth was, he seemed very intelligent, he seemed very into his children. He was successful.

01:02:54 Speaker_17
Just the fact that he was, had gone, well, what he told me, was doctor without borders. to me that was very heroic.

01:03:05 Speaker_04
That he'd been in Iraq, right? With Doctors Without Borders.

01:03:08 Speaker_17
Exactly. So here I am listening to this story thinking, wow, I've met a pretty decent guy.

01:03:18 Speaker_04
Tanya, I wanted to ask you, when did you get an inkling that John wasn't quite who he had told you he was?

01:03:26 Speaker_09
I think the only inkling that I got that he wasn't who I thought he was was probably in the first six months that we were married. I went to his desk looking for

01:03:40 Speaker_09
some sort of supply, and I came across a picture of him, and the picture looked like a school photo, and it was dated, he would have been like three years old, because I thought he was born in 1964, and I'm going to say the photo may have said 67, and it looked like a school photo.

01:04:01 Speaker_09
But I was young, I didn't have any nieces or nephews, I didn't really know what aged children, you know, looked like. But I do remember having a visceral feeling at that moment, looking at that picture, like something might not be right.

01:04:17 Speaker_09
For whatever reason, I put the picture back. I never said anything. Because everything else seemed okay. Everything else seemed okay. I can't be It can't be what I'm seeing, you know.

01:04:29 Speaker_09
But it really wasn't until, and a lot of people don't realize this, that he left me. You know, they think I left this terrible person.

01:04:37 Speaker_09
No, he was leading a double life with another woman in Michigan, and it really wasn't until he left me that I got strong and brave enough to start

01:04:45 Speaker_09
I'm seeking some questions, some thoughts that had been in my head, and I found his mother who I'd never met, and I called his mother, and you know, she said, I knew you would call me one day, and she's really the one who laid it out for me, you know, about his age and his deceit and a drug use and a prior arrest, and I learned a lot that day.

01:05:06 Speaker_09
And then did you confront him with it later? I did, not immediately, but soon after. And, you know, that really was a turning point where it got ugly for me. Yeah.

01:05:20 Speaker_04
I mean, I think what made it challenging in listening to both of your stories is how quick he was with responses whenever you asked about, like, was there ever a time when you asked about something that didn't quite make sense and he was just like,

01:05:36 Speaker_17
Within time, sure, because he would mix his stories up a little bit. And I'd say, wait a minute, I thought you said this, and he would have an answer.

01:05:47 Speaker_04
And the answers always sounded plausible. Yes. What has been the most important thing that you've learned through this ordeal?

01:05:58 Speaker_04
I mean, I think one of the things that we want to talk about is almost like looking back and then also looking forward, thinking about the other women who might be facing situations such as this.

01:06:08 Speaker_04
What have you learned from it and what do you want to pass on?

01:06:13 Speaker_09
Well, I mean, I've thought a lot about, I mean, I'm raising two daughters, and I've thought a lot about their future, and their men, and dating, and how did I get so unlucky?

01:06:23 Speaker_09
I mean, sometimes people meet someone, they have an attraction, and they live happily ever after, and it's kind of luck. And I just thought, you know, we,

01:06:38 Speaker_09
We… we research and when we buy a house, for example, we inspect the roof, we look at the foundation for cracks, we ask people their opinion, and when… sometimes when we're picking our mate, which is the most important decision you'll ever make emotionally, financially, physically,

01:07:00 Speaker_09
Sometimes we just are kind of willy-nilly about it. It's just a good feeling that we have and we don't do any research. And I would say that was, you know, my mistake. I just believed him at face value. I didn't do any research.

01:07:13 Speaker_09
I didn't look for cracks in the foundation and the consequences of that were pretty devastating.

01:07:21 Speaker_04
What about you, Deborah? What was the sort of takeaway from you for this experience? Investigate.

01:07:28 Speaker_17
Listen to your children. I have some pretty wise children. Take time. Take the time to get to know the person and really know what you're doing.

01:07:43 Speaker_04
So not jump in so quickly. Never jump in that fast. Yeah. My mother always used to tell me that when I was young. Don't jump into it. Oh, I've been told that too. I know, a million times.

01:07:52 Speaker_04
And you don't really think about how important that piece of advice is. But it really is. I wanted to add another panelist to our conversation. The young woman who fought John Meehan and won. Please welcome Tara Newell. We should stand up for her.

01:08:11 Speaker_04
And Cash!

01:08:15 Speaker_02
Awesome!

01:08:23 Speaker_04
Now, Cash has never starred in any kind of theatrical production, so we'll... But he's a hero, so. Smile for everyone. So, you know, Tara. You can let him wander around. Is it okay? Yeah. Tara, I wanted to start with you.

01:08:43 Speaker_04
You have emerged as, you know, I get, I've read so much about what people have said about this podcast, and you've emerged as the hero in the story. And you've had, you have a lot of people that write to you. How have you dealt with that?

01:08:55 Speaker_04
How has it felt to sort of have inadvertently achieved that status?

01:09:00 Speaker_16
I'm a little weird but I mean it's really nice to get messages from other women have been through a trauma or have been through my mom's situation and then they're just kind of inspired by the podcast and what I've said and also some have even asked for advice on what to do in their situation so it's been

01:09:28 Speaker_16
Really humbling getting that stuff.

01:09:35 Speaker_04
One of the amazing things about this is, and I got to have dinner with them the other night, is seeing how close you have all become in the wake of this. You guys spent part of the Thanksgiving holiday together.

01:09:47 Speaker_04
You've now been hanging out over the course of these days in advance. What kind of support have you found in each other? Two women who were with Meehan at very different points in his and your lives.

01:10:00 Speaker_09
Well, I knew about Debra and knew the danger that she would be in, but being in the situation I was in, I could not call her, warn her. I knew that one of her children had called Detective Lucan.

01:10:18 Speaker_09
And I just felt that now that it was over, you know, there is some, you know, there's a little bit of guilt that I couldn't mourn her, but I just felt like I needed to support her now in going through what she had to go through for women from the past and saving all those women from the future.

01:10:38 Speaker_09
that he's not going to be able to hurt and destroy their lives and their reputation.

01:10:42 Speaker_04
And it was just important for me. What about you, Tara? How has this been an interesting familial bonding experience for you?

01:10:50 Speaker_16
Well, it's nice knowing that there's people that were in his life in the past and stuff that don't hate me for doing what I did and had to do. So grateful for that.

01:11:06 Speaker_04
And actually, I mean, over the course of this weekend, you guys made another, it seems that with every time Mihan comes up, a new discovery is made, and you made a new discovery this weekend just in simple conversation.

01:11:21 Speaker_17
I think it was with Jacqueline. With Jacqueline, your daughter.

01:11:24 Speaker_04
Yeah, she's out here somewhere. So tell me a little bit about the discovery that you made.

01:11:33 Speaker_09
Well, we were out to dinner the first night. Debra took us out to a nice restaurant. And Jacqueline, who I think Jacqueline started this ball rolling, and she's a true hero too. I mean, we're up here, but she deserves a lot of applause.

01:11:53 Speaker_09
You know, I'm very grateful for her. But they were just discussing some things like on her phone, she's got pictures of all kinds of documents and things that were in the house and things that they found.

01:12:06 Speaker_09
And they mentioned to me that he had large quantities of bleach and acetone, you know, like nail polish, acetone. And what was the other thing? Epsom.

01:12:21 Speaker_04
Epsom salt. Epsom salt.

01:12:23 Speaker_09
So I thought, gosh, I guess I've watched too much Breaking Bad. I was like, can you dissolve a body with that, those things?

01:12:30 Speaker_04
I don't know.

01:12:30 Speaker_09
I'm not a chemist. And so this morning I got my Starbucks because I'm on Eastern time. It's 4.30 in the morning. None of you are up. And I got on my phone and I Googled and right away it said acetone and bleach make chloroform.

01:12:45 Speaker_09
which is something that if you've watched movies, you've seen people put that on a rag and put it over a woman's face and they pass out. It was used as an anesthetic. So the mystery is, was he planning to use that on anybody?

01:13:02 Speaker_09
Had he used that on anybody? Was he anesthetizing himself? How easy was he accessing drugs? And then I did remember a detail when he was in nursing school. He took a master's level toxicology course that I thought was very strange.

01:13:19 Speaker_09
Why are you taking something harder than you need to take? And that just, you know, that sparked that memory. He's being his own little chemist and making chloroform. I mean. We also thought the bleach could be cleaning up a crime scene. A crime scene.

01:13:34 Speaker_09
But why does a guy need acetone? Right. He wasn't putting on nail polish.

01:13:39 Speaker_17
Well, you don't know.

01:13:40 Speaker_04
We don't know everything about John. I mean, I think it just gets at this idea that every time you kind of scratch the surface of John Meehan, we learn.

01:13:50 Speaker_04
And with the story being published and Christopher having all of these people approach him with all of these other stories, you scratch it a little bit and there's more.

01:13:58 Speaker_04
Several readers wrote in, including Jack Newarth and Cindy Eye, who have been very concerned about how you have all healed in the wake of this. So how have you recovered from this individually and as a family?

01:14:12 Speaker_04
What kinds of things have you done to bounce back? So who wants to? You want to start Tara?

01:14:20 Speaker_16
Well, lots of therapy. I did a lot of EMDR for the trauma and going through the trauma just the whole story and then it rewires your brain to where you think differently about it and the triggers go away from like the PTSD.

01:14:42 Speaker_04
Because you were quite anxious in the months following, right?

01:14:46 Speaker_16
Yeah.

01:14:47 Speaker_04
How did that manifest itself for you?

01:14:49 Speaker_16
Well, at first I was in shock and then just like little noises, loud noises. If I was in a restaurant and people were talking, I'd get super agitated. I didn't want to be there. I would break down and cry a lot. It was such a process. Barking of a dog?

01:15:13 Speaker_16
Oh yeah. Barking with a dog at the dog kennel. I couldn't work. I would just have meltdowns.

01:15:22 Speaker_04
What has been an important part of this process for you, Tonya?

01:15:24 Speaker_09
Well, a couple of things. One, sharing my story. I've gotten tremendous support. You know, everybody has a story. It might not be the same as yours, but, you know, people share their story.

01:15:37 Speaker_09
When they know that your life isn't perfect anymore, they're more willing to share maybe a side of themselves, and so that support. But I think the main thing or one of the main things was I had to forgive myself.

01:15:48 Speaker_09
I had to forgive myself for, you know, not listening to my brain, not listening to some of those things, for not choosing a better father for my children, which is kind of strange because I wouldn't have those children without him.

01:16:03 Speaker_09
And I did replace him with a great man I've been with for fourteen years who's been a wonderful father. Shout out to Augie.

01:16:15 Speaker_04
What about you, Deborah? What have you personally done in the wake of this?

01:16:20 Speaker_17
I had guilt like you wouldn't believe. It was hard. It was really hard. Sorry.

01:16:29 Speaker_04
It's okay.

01:16:33 Speaker_09
It's a little bit more raw for Debra.

01:16:35 Speaker_04
I've had more time. Yeah. I mean, I think it just gets it. I'm sorry. It's OK. It's OK. I think it just gets at the idea.

01:16:43 Speaker_04
I mean, for us, the fact that you spent as much time talking to Christopher as you did, and coming here tonight and being willing, facing an audience and being willing to talk about this. Very personal story I think is remarkable.

01:17:05 Speaker_17
The guilt was again horrendous. I wanted to educate myself on trying to understand what was the truth and what was a lie with John. And so I I reached out to his family, which was important. I reached out to others.

01:17:28 Speaker_17
I learned about sociopaths, psychopaths. I just wanted to understand the whole process. Why me? Why did I go through this? I feel that I just adore my kids and appreciate the fact that here we are and that she's alive. Yeah.

01:17:55 Speaker_09
And he targeted. He targeted. We were both targets. And, you know, she needs to forgive herself too, but it's not going to happen overnight. Yeah.

01:18:06 Speaker_04
It takes time. It takes time. Thank you so much for being here tonight.

01:18:11 Speaker_02
You're welcome.

01:18:12 Speaker_04
Please, please, please give them a huge round of applause. So I wanted to say a few thank yous for this evening to Debra, Tanya, and Tara for being brave enough to tell their story. For cash, just for being cash.

01:18:40 Speaker_04
For Christopher Gofford for his dogged reporting. He spent months working on this story. A story like this does not tell itself. To Matthew Murphy, the DA who helped prompt it. To Detective Frances McBride for her expertise.

01:19:01 Speaker_04
To Patty Giggins at Peace Over Violence for sharing so much knowledge about how to support someone who's facing this stuff. To Wondery, who helped make this podcast, who made this podcast possible.

01:19:17 Speaker_04
For the Ace Theater, for making us feel very much at home. I have now moved into the green room. To the LA Times, which published the story, edited the story, made the story happen. And to the folks at LA Times, public affairs and event planning.

01:19:37 Speaker_04
Without them, this whole evening would have never, never happened. Yes. and who were like taking requests for meals and water and everything. Thank you, Tracy Bonham. Thank you so much and please drive home safe and subscribe to the LA Times.