Dirty John Part 4: Forgiveness| LA Times & Wondery Podcast (Transcript)
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Dirty John Part 4: Forgiveness | Los Angeles Times& Wondery (Transcript)
Length: 43 mins
A listener note: This story contains adult content and language.
Christopher Goffard: The private detective instructed Debra Newell to take certain precautions. She should change hotels every few nights. She should study the crowd when she entered a room. She should look behind her to see if she was being followed, find new places to eat, change her routine, sell her car, get a dark wig to cover her conspicuous blond hair, ditch her stylish outfits for bland ones, blend in. She had more than 300 pages of documents she’d taken from her husband John’s home office and, during the frantic weeks of early 2015, she was poring through them trying to determine the scope of his criminal past. Every line deepened her fear. John was in the hospital, but she feared he might get out any day and come after her, so she followed the private eye’s instructions on making herself a difficult target, but one suggestion she didn’t follow. One thing she refused to do; that was to arm herself. She hated guns. 31 years earlier, her only sister had been killed by one.
From the Los Angeles Times and Wondery, this is Dirty John. I’m Christopher Goffard.
Part 4: Forgiveness
Shad Vickers: Right off the bat, we know this guy was a professional. I was scared for myself, I was scared from my aunt, I was scared for my family that, once he got out of the hospital, that he was going to take some physical retaliation for us catching up on him.
Christopher: This is Debra’s nephew, Shad Vickers, who helped her hide. Shad studied John’s record. To him, it had the look of a man who had managed, again and again, to avoid punishment for his crimes.
Shad: You could see how, “Case dismissed, case dismissed, case dismissed.” Probably women just said, “Forget it. I don’t want to deal with it. If I can just get it dismissed and if we’re done…” We saw letters from men where he was having sexual conversations through emails with men that were in prison. He was manipulating them. Women, while he was in prison, while he was out of prison. Just a lot of things that my aunt was like, “Oh my gosh.” Once we went through all that, I knew she was never getting back together.
Christopher: There was a sickening repetitiveness to the stories about John Meehan. From 2005 to 2014, from about the time he got out of prison in Michigan for drug theft to the time he met Debra Newell in California, he claimed victim after victim. The Laguna Beach Police counted eight of them. Running through the stories was a streak of sadism and single-minded vindictiveness. They showed a man taking pleasure in the mechanics of a dark craft he had mastered. It seemed to go beyond just the money. He seemed obsessed with humiliating anyone who defied his will.
To call him a con man would be too benign. He was that, but he was a lot more too. John would pick up women on dating websites, often he used match.com or Plenty of Fish. On dates, he would wear medical scrubs and pretend to be a doctor. He would induce women to send him intimate photos of themselves, which he then used to blackmail them. He sent them to their families. He sent them to their kids’ school. An Irvine woman told me that he cut and pasted her photo for match.com and sent flyers to our neighbors, calling her a slut and a home wrecker. A judge gave her a 5-year restraining order and he retaliated by asking for a restraining order on her. A Porter Ranch woman told police he wrote her an anonymous letter insinuating that he had raped her while she was unconscious and had taken photos of it. “You are my project for years to come,” he wrote, “this I promise. Do you think I joke? Every breath I take will be to ruin your surgically implanted life. Thanks for the pictures.”
By the spring of 2013, two women had long-term restraining orders already in place against John Meehan. That was when still another woman approached police. This was a 48-year-old aspiring writer from Laguna Beach. She told a strange and chilling story. The writer said she’d been recovering from brain surgery at a San Diego hospital when she awoke to find John standing over her bed. He said he was her anesthesiologist. He was handsome and friendly and gave her his number. Soon, they were dating. He told her he loved her. She told him that her family had millions. He told her to transfer her money into his account to hide it from her estranged husband. When she balked, he sent nude photos of her to her family and claimed she had been stealing from him. “You’re in way over your head on this one,” he wrote, demanding the money. “Make it happen and I walk away. If not, I will be your nightmare.” He went to prison for stalking the writer and being a felon in possession of a firearm.
The more Shad learned about his record, the more he felt there was good reason to fear John.
Shad: Yes, but I also knew that my aunt was leaving him. I was finally happy that she was going to be safe and we would figure out how to… I was already prepared that, if I saw him, I’d call 911. If anything happened, I was ready to call the police. My aunt was leaving him, that’s all that mattered. So we thought.
Christopher: Even as she was trying to process the information about who she’d married, even as she was trying to guard against him, Debra Newell also felt herself being pulled in another direction. John was sending her text after text, pleading with her. Her lawyer instructed her to change her will.
Debra Newell: Because he feels that this man is going to kill me because of the money, to get whatever he could. So they wanted to show him the will and show him that he is not the beneficiary but my kids are. In the meantime, 23 days go by and he’s been stuck in the hospital with his back, he’s had a bowel obstruction. I think he’s also loving all the drugs because he was addicted to painkillers. So 23 days go by and I just want to look him straight in the face and ask him why he did this. So I went in there and he said that those stories are wrong, that he was set up. He was trying to tell me so many times that he was set up and had to go to jail. Please forgive him. He just knew that I wouldn’t understand till he had all the evidence in front of him.
Christopher: All a big misunderstanding?
Debra: All a big misunderstanding and he had an answer for everything and it was so convincing that I thought, “Okay.” He, literally, had convinced me, at this point, that he is not this person.
Christopher: Despite all of the paperwork?
Debra: Yes. All the facts were right there in front of me and he is that convincing that I would say that… I was also in love with him. It’s so hard, when you’re in love, to listen. You’re listening to your heart, not your head.
Christopher: Did he beg you to take him back?
Debra: Yes.
Christopher: What sort of things did he say?
Debra: He can’t live without me, he’s so in love with me, this is different than anything he’s ever gone through. That he was set up and he’ll prove it.
Christopher: He had an explanation for the cruel, menacing texts he’d sent her — that was the drugs the hospital put him on; that wasn’t him. He had an explanation for why police had once found cable ties and cyanide in his belongings.
Debra: His explanation, cable ties, he said he works on cars. Okay, but with the cyanide, he said that he had MS and that he was going to take his life one day when it got too bad. I thought, “Okay, hmm. Cyanide is not it a good death, from what I understand.”
Christopher: But you didn’t know that until…
Debra: I didn’t know that. I was on the fence with him, but he was doing everything he could to win me back, to prove that these weren’t true stories, so on and so forth.
Christopher: Did you ask about his nickname, Dirty John?
Debra: He said it wasn’t true. He said, “I don’t know where you got that from.” It was as if everything… He was able to convince me. 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.
Christopher: It’s almost like he convinced you that all the facts about his life were some kind of hallucination on your part?
Debra: Yes, he made me out to be the one… That he was this great guy and that everyone else had done him wrong is what he had said.
Christopher: The restraining orders, how did he explain those?
Debra: He told me some of them weren’t him. He said, “That’s not my middle name,” or, “If you pull up my name, there’s lots of John Meehans out there.” And he said, “So that’s not a restraining order on me.”
Christopher: She found a newspaper story about John’s arrest for stealing surgical drugs when he worked as a nurse anesthetist in the Midwest. He had an explanation for that too.
Debra: He said that he was always in a hurry and took them home with him because he had to hurry up and get home to his kids. And when he was going through his divorce with his wife, that was her way of framing him so he couldn’t get the kids. So he always, again, he always had a story. He told me that he had lied because he thought he’d lose me, that he feels so lucky that I’m such a forgiving person who, hell, I’m the love of this life, that I’ve made him a better person. Just all this kind of stuff. He also backed up a lot of the lies by stating… He twisted. I said, “I read this.” “That’s not what happened. On my gosh,” and he’d have this whole elaborate story about what happened opposed to what I read.
Christopher: There had been another chilling twist in the Laguna Beach case. As John awaited trial in the Orange County jail in late 2013, an inmate reported that John was offering money for the murders of two Laguna Beach detectives plus five other potential witnesses against him, including several ex-girlfriends and his ex-wife. John’s price? $10,000 a body. John’s philosophy? With no witnesses, there is no trial. The threat felt real enough that detectives requested still another restraining order against him and one wrote, “I regard him as a ticking bomb capable of unpredictable violence and I fear respondent will violently lash out and physically harm me.” But the jail informant refused to be a witness and no charges were filed for murder solicitation and the restraining order was denied.
What did he say about the contract hit that he tried to take it out on the cops?
Debra: He started laughing. He goes, “They’re going to believe some thug in prison over… They’re just making this up because I never… Where would I get 10,000 from at that point?” This was after the $900,000 that he said he had, the trust. At this point, I’m thinking, “Well, okay.”
Christopher: What about not being a doctor?
Debra: He said that he was like an anesthesiologist. I said, “Why would you do that?” He goes, “To make myself look better.” I said, “But, John…” He goes, “Look at you. You’re this high-powered businesswoman.” I remember his sister told me, later on, that John always wanted to be something great. He even told them he was a doctor and they found out he wasn’t a doctor. He always elaborated and made up these stories. I think, unfortunately, that’s who he was early on in life.
Christopher: So as he’s telling this lie, he kind of makes it a point to flatter you. Like, “You’re so much better than me.”
Debra: Yeah.
Christopher: And did he ever say he had a drug problem?
Debra: No, never. Never caught on to that, but there were a lot of pills around that I nearly… With his bad back, I didn’t think. I remember the first time I was with him, I thought, “Wow, there’s a lot of pills,” but then, once I realize he had a really bad back, he has screws and I don’t know if you… He has so many scars on him, so I thought, “Well, I guess he needs pain pills. And if he’s only taken one a day, and if he has MS, I guess he has to take something for that.” I didn’t really educate myself on what everything exactly was. I feel guilty, to some degree, that I’d married him and that he’s in the hospital, but at the same time, I feared…
Christopher: Explain that to me. Guilty why?
Debra: Because I made a commitment. I made a commitment to marriage, better for worse, but at the same time, I’m looking at this man and I have to think about my myself and my safety and my kids’ safety for that matter.
Debra: She did something that would astonish and horrifying her family. She withdrew her request to annul the marriage. She took him back. She didn’t tell her family at first; she knew they’d be furious. She didn’t tell people at her office, but she began sneaking away to see him and she began quietly looking for another place with him. Their house on Balboa Island was full of bad memories and the plan was to start fresh. They found an apartment near the Irvine Spectrum.
Debra: It took two months to move into another place together. So we moved in, there was a caution with me. I kept trying to figure out what were lies, what was the truth. The issue was is he treated me so well. It was as if I was the only thing on earth.
Christopher: I listened carefully to Debra’s explanation for why she went back to him, but no matter how many ways I asked, no matter how many ways she tried to explain, it remained baffling. This was a woman who ran a prosperous interior design firm with 30 employees, a savvy entrepreneur who traveled around the world and saw her work celebrated in the newspapers. Was this an extreme example of the compartmentalized nature of intelligence, an illustration of how we can be sharp in one area and easily misled in another? I thought of conversations I’d had with some of the other women John had deceived, women of intelligence and achievement. A PR professional, a gynecologist, and John’s ex-wife, Tonia, a nurse anesthetist, who told me it wasn’t about how smart you were in the brain. She said, “The heart is a different organ.” But, in Debra’s case, I kept thinking there had to be more to it. I kept going back to what had happened to Debra’s older sister, Cindi, in 1984, and of what had happened to her killer and what it said about Debra’s family.
Arlane Hart: I have spoken all over the United States and even out of the United States because people love to hear, I think, about forgiveness.
Christopher: This is Arlene Hart, mother of Cindi and Debra Newell.
Arlane: Cindi was our first born. A darling young lady, she turned into a beautiful young lady and she married a wonderful young man named Billy. But one night, she came home from her graduation and flopped on our bed and lifted up her left hand and said, “Look what I got tonight,” and I said, “Is that a little friendship ring?” She said, “No, Mama. It’s an engagement ring.” I said, “Oh dear.” She was only 17 at the time. I said, “Honey, when are you planning to get married?” She said, “On my eighteenth birthday.” I said, “Oh, no.” Cindi really had a mind of her own. She was very stubborn.
Christopher: Billy Vickers managed a supermarket. He and Cindi had two boys.
Arlane: When they were married, I think it was 14 years, 13 or 14 years, Cindi came to me and she said, “Mom, I’m not happily married. You were right, I should have waited longer.” She said, “He’s not the type of person I want to be married to.” I said, “What?” because I thought they got along pretty well; he was fun to be with. She said, “He’s very, very possessive. He won’t even let me wear a bikini at the beach.” I said, “Oh, really? I didn’t even know that,” and all this time we are having great times with him at picnics and over at our house at Christmas time and Thanksgiving and we just had a great family unit. She named several things that I didn’t even know what was happening. She said, “I can’t even go out in the evening to go shopping or anything because he’s afraid a guy will pick me up or something.” I can understand, maybe, why he was that way because she couldn’t even step out the door with the guys looking at her and gawking at her. She was just a beauty. “But, Mom,” she said, “he is so possessive I can’t do anything.”
Christopher: One day, a professional football player met Cindi in Palm Springs and got her phone number. She was flattered by the attention. Arlane says he would send his limo by to pick her up. The marriage foundered.
Arlane: She said, “Mom, we’re going to get a divorce,” and I said, “Honey, that’s terrible,” and she said, “No, I can’t stand living with Billy anymore,” and she told me all the things she didn’t like about Billy. I loved Billy, I was… So anyway, they separated at that time and Billy came and lived with us, with Shad, older boy, he was eleven, and Cindi stayed in the house with the younger boy, Shane.
Christopher: She says Billy was determined not to lose her.
Arlane: He was crying, he said, “I don’t… Cindi wants me to divorce. She wants to get a divorce and I don’t want a divorce. I love her so much. I can’t let her go.” Cindi called me up and she said, “Mom, I’m going to be at the house tomorrow and I want to talk with you. We have not been able to talk and I want to talk to you and tell you the things that are happening.” I said, “I’d love to have you.” She said, “I’ll come over for lunch.” I said, “Great. I’ll fix your special lunch for you.”
Christopher: Billy Vickers had taken a friend’s gun. There was a chrome-plated .25 caliber pistol with a black plastic handle. He met his wife at their house in Garden Grove in Southern California. They were selling the place and there were details to settle. He walked up behind her as she sat at a table writing out checks.
Arlane: I was teaching piano at the time, like I’ve done all my life. Every half hour, another student would come in. It was a beautiful day and I thought, “I get to see Cindi today. We’ll have lunch together, it’s going to be great.” I was really excited. Right about noon, I got up and went in and fixed lunch because she said that she’d be there at 12, but 12 came and she didn’t come. 12:30, 1 o’clock. So I put everything back in the refrigerator and continued my day of teaching.
4 o’clock, the doorbell rang and I went to the door. There were two policemen standing there and the one on the left said, “There’s been a shooting,” and I thought, “Oh, no. he’s so disturbed over losing Cindi that he shot himself.” I said, “Who’s been shot?” He said, “Your daughter has been shot.” I said, “My daughter?” I couldn’t believe that. I should, “How bad is she?” not expecting this at all, and he said, “She’s dead,” and I looked at him and the other policeman just broke in and said, “And Billy shot himself too,” and I said, “Is he dead too?” “No, he’s not dead.” I said, “Oh, no.” I couldn’t believe what I was hearing. I could not believe.
The two policemen just stood there with their hats on their chest and, right at that time, I just thought, “You know what? I need to pray. I really need to pray,” and I asked them, “Can I just pray?” and they said, “Of course you can,” so I stood there and I lifted up my hands toward heaven and I just said, “God, you’ve got to help me. I cannot do this alone. You’ve got to help me, God. Help me, God.” I’d been a Christian since I was a little girl, I knew God personally. All of a sudden, I felt a sense of peace come over me and it drifted down all through my body and I breathed a deep breath and I looked at the police and I said, “I’m going to be okay.”
They took me inside and we sat. I had to lie down on the floor because a lot of our furniture was out; our couch was out being covered. I was lying there on the floor and the two policemen were just kneeling down right beside me and they were so kind to me. I just said, “You know what? I’m going to be okay because I feel God’s presence with me. And he’s told me in his word that whatever we go through, he’s going through it with me,” and he was. He went right through that.
Christopher: Her grandson, Shad, who was 11 years old, was in another room. She had to tell him what had happened.
Arlane: Shad was in there watching on TV and I took him out of the room. I said, “Something terrible’s happened, Shad.” Shad said, “What grandma? Why are the policemen here?” I said, “They came to tell me that your Daddy has shot and killed your mother,” and he goes. “No, no.” I said, “That’s right, and he also shot himself, but he’s not dead,” and he said, “Oh,” and you know what? He looked up at me right then and he said, “You know, Abraham Lincoln didn’t have a mother,” and I said, “Yes, that’s right. You’re right, Shad, and look what he turned out to be.” He said, “I know. I can get through this too like you, Grandma.”
But you know what? I still loved Billy and everyone cannot believe that I loved Billy. I didn’t love him for what he did. I hated what he did, but I still loved Billy and I forgave him. He called the house, he did regain his faculties after about six weeks in the hospital, and he called and he wanted to talk to all of us, and so we all got around the phone and he just kept saying, “I’m so sorry. I’m so sorry,” and I said, “Billy, we know that you’re sorry, but we still love you.” He said, “How could you love me? How could you?” and I said, “God has given that love to us for you. We love you and we forgive you,” and he just sobbed and cried.
Christopher: I went to the courthouse in Santa Ana to dig up what’s left of the official record of the case. It’s been 33 years and most of the file is long since destroyed, including the exhibits, but I found a transcript of the preliminary hearing on April 26, 1984, in the case of People versus Billy Franklin Vickers. Vickers was charged with murder in the first degree. A witness named Carol Planchon, one of Vickers’ friends, testifies that Billy came to her house to borrow her husband’s gun about two weeks before the shooting. Vickers said he wanted to take it to the shooting range and that her husband and said it was okay. She gave it to him and joked, “Don’t hold up a liquor store.” Planchon’s husband, Bill, testifies that he never gave Vickers permission to take the gun. He says he worried Vickers would harm himself. He called Vickers repeatedly and asked to have it back and Vickers replied, “I don’t have it anymore. I got rid of it.”
An emergency dispatcher testifies that, at 3:08 PM on March 8, 1984, a man calls and says, “I shot myself.” A paramedic says that he stepped into the house and found Cindi Vickers slumped in a chair with her husband bleeding from his self-inflicted wound on the kitchen floor. A medical examiner testifies that Cindi Ruth Vickers died of a single gunshot wound to the back of the neck. The black powder around the hole showed the gun had been in direct contact with the skin.
I found the defense attorney who represented Bill Vickers; his name is James Riddet. He knew the facts were bad for his client, who was looking at the possibility of life in prison. Riddet told me that he was sitting in his office one day when he received a phone call that astonished him. It was Arlane, the victim’s mother. She was offering to aid in the defense of her daughter’s killer. She didn’t believe he could have done it if he’d been in his right mind.
Arlane: I was on the witness stand or five hours and he kept saying…
Christopher: The District Attorney?
Arlane: Yeah. He kept saying, “You mean that you like Billy?” I said, “I not only like Billy, I love Billy. I knew him before, I know him now. I hated what he did, hated absolutely; he killed our daughter, but I still love Billy,” and that guy just shook his head and stomped out and he said, “I cannot believe what you’re saying.” The whole jury had tears in their eyes, they were crying.
Christopher: I talked to the former prosecutor she’s referring to, Thomas Avdeef, who took the case to trial in January 1985. He says it looked to him like a cold-blooded execution, but that wasn’t what made it singular in his experience; it was the victim’s family. He says Cindi Vickers family threw her away. As he interpreted it, the gist of the mother’s testimony, and that of other family members whose names he doesn’t recall, was that Cindi had mistreated her husband and he says he has no doubt that testimony influenced the result. “They threw her under the bus,” he tells me. “I don’t know the dynamics of the family. I could never understand that. Why say bad things about the victim?”
The defense attorney put on psychologists to make the case that Vickers hadn’t been in his right mind, that he’d been in a state of temporary unconsciousness. This seemed to sway the jurors as well. During deliberations, they sent a note asking to be read the legal definition of consciousness versus unconsciousness. The jury found Vickers not guilty of murder, but it couldn’t agree to the lesser charge of voluntary manslaughter. The judge declared a mistrial on February 1, 1985. Avdeef says he planned to retry the case when Vickers agreed to plead guilty to voluntary manslaughter. Billy Vickers wrote on the plea form, “On March 8, 1984, in the county of Orange, I shot and killed my wife, Cindi Vickers.” In exchange, he got a 5-year sentence. Arlane credits her own testimony for Billy’s short prison term. He got credit for time served, credit for good behavior, and he was out before Christmas 1986. The consequence of forgiveness was this: Bill Franklin Vickers spent 2 years 9 months and 9 days in lockup for shooting his wife in the head.
Debra disagrees with the prosecutor’s interpretation of her mom’s testimony. Debra says her parents taught her to see the good in people always. They made it a point to take in troubled kids and give them another chance. They believed that none of God’s children was irredeemable and enough love could work wonders. Billy Vickers remarried and return to Orange County, not far from where he did the shooting. He’s still in the area. I tried to get him to talk to me, but he didn’t return my messages.
For years, Debra would see him in the bleachers at her nephew’s football games and at family functions and people were careful not to bring up Cindi. One of our nephew’s had a birthday party a few years back and there was Billy and she had to leave. Now and then, she’d run into him at the church she attended, Mariners. She’d say hello, she’d try to be polite, but she didn’t want to be around him. Debra says that forgiving him brought her mother peace, but that she was never able to do it herself.
You were raised, though, in a culture of extreme forgiveness.
Debra: Yes.
Christopher: I’ve never seen… I’ve covered a lot of criminal cases and I don’t think I’ve seen a lot of cases where the mother testifies on behalf of the guy who’s killed her daughter.
Debra: The way I view it is my parents were raised and their whole life was being a Christ-like Christian. And in their roles in the church, being the example, I think that that was the only way that they knew how to be. I went to a psychologist over it because I wasn’t quite having that instant forgiveness and I was talking to the psychologist and he said, “What’s happening is they’re on cloud nine and they have this forgiveness, they believe all this. You’re trying to be down here and deal with life and the realization of what’s happened isn’t as easy for you to accept and forgive.”
Christopher: I guess what I’m trying understand is did your feeling that people need to be forgiven because that’s the Christian thing to do, did that play into your decision to take John back?
Debra: I don’t know. I think that I fell love and was willing to believe what he was telling me. Wanted to believe what he was telling me I guess. I’ll never understand it why, but I always do see the great in, I think, everyone.
Christopher: I have to be frank with you, this is the part of the story that’s hardest to explain.
Debra: I bet. Why I would go back? Yeah.
Christopher: So when you took him back and you moved into the Spectrum with him, did he seem repentant?
Debra: Extremely. He was going to church with me, he would cry in church. He literally did just about anything that I wanted to do. Went to this Christian concert with me, asked me for forgiveness. We started going to pre-chapel, but we started going there and he really liked it.
Christopher: He would weep in church during the sermon?
Debra: Yeah.
Christopher: What did you make of that?
Debra: Well, of course, I thought, “‘That’s wonderful.”
Christopher: You thought he was feeling God and feeling repentance?
Debra: Yeah.
Christopher: Were there certain messages that induced tears?
Debra: A father’s day one. He cried on father’s day. It was a hard day for him, said he missed his kids every single day and he thinks about them every single day.
Christopher: This was part of John’s master narrative of his life in which he was the perpetual victim. His ex-wife, who’d found surgical drugs in their home and called police, had wronged him. His ex-wife had deprived him of his daughters.
John was back from the hospital, 20 pounds lighter. He was lifting weights, chugging protein shakes, frustrated at the slow pace of rebuilding his big frame. He would keep falling sick and need to go to the ER, maybe to get drugs Debra thought. Terra Newell told me that, when her mom took her to lunch that summer, the summer of 2015, mom seemed distracted, preoccupied by her smartphone. Someone kept texting her and Terra had a strong suspicion who it was. “Are you still seeing him?” she asked. “Yes,” they had been living together again since June. Debra’s family was furious when they found out that she’d gone back. They were in disbelief. Even her mother had trouble understanding.
Arlane: I didn’t have anything to do with him because it was just wrecking the family. It totally, totally wrecked the family for many months. The family was just torn apart. We didn’t get together because of that and everyone was talking about. Why is Debbie staying with this guy? I kept praying, “God, I don’t want to lose another daughter. Not another one.” I’d just say, “God, help.” I didn’t know how to pray. Whatever God needed to do, I just wanted that man out of our lives. I was nervous the whole time.
Christopher: Because of John’s presence in her life, Debra’s children were pulling away from her, in some cases, not letting her see her grandkids. Shad, the 11-year-old boy who lost his mother to his father’s bullet, was now in his early 40s and estranged from the aunt he had long treasured as a second mother.
Shad: For months and months, we wouldn’t talk to her. Nobody. I thought about that every day, about him killing my aunt. I was very… I was protecting myself, I was staying… As long as I wasn’t talking to my aunt, I wasn’t getting texts or emails from John. So long I completely… If I ever had any type of conversation with her, unfortunately, she would tell him and then he would be… He found me any way possible. He would text me. I’d block him from his cell phone, I blocked him from my aunt’s cellphone, I blocked my aunt’s cellphone, I blocked him from email, I blocked my aunt’s email. Facebook, I got off Facebook, I got off Instagram, I got off every social media possible. He still found me. He still got other phones if I did have any contact with my aunt. But then when I said, “Okay, Debbie, I am done. No more. If you’re going to continue with this guy, you’ll never have any contact with me or my kids,” and then it was better.
Christopher: Debra says the estrangement from her kids and grandkids was breaking her heart. John told her he needed her. He had multiple sclerosis, after all. She wouldn’t abandon him to his illness would she?
It sounds like he knew exactly what part of you to appeal to.
Debra: Always, yeah. He had a way of convincing me. I don’t know if I truly believed him or just wanted to believe him. And again, halfway in the marriage, I realized that he’s not going to be that is easy to leave.
On the next episode of Dirty John:
John Dzialo: I couldn’t tell you what color his eyes were, but I can tell you that, as I sat across that table from him that day, they were as black as coal. It’s the kind of thing where you look at somebody and you swear, you swear you can hear, you can literally hear the seething cauldron that’s inside their brain. That’s when I started looking at this guy thinking, “Oh my God, he is an odd case. This is a dangerous man.”
Christopher: Our next episode will be available in two days. In the meantime, if you like what you heard, do tell your friends about our show. It’s available at LAtimes.com, wondery.com, and every major podcast player, including Apple Podcasts, Stitcher, NPR 1, Tunein, Iheartradio, and Spotify.
Dirty John is reported and written by me, your host, Christopher Goffard, for the Los Angeles Times. Karen Lowe is our producer and editor. Audio design by Jeff Schmidt. Executive producers, Jeffrey Glazer and Hernan Lopez for Wondery. Over the course of this production, our LA Times team has included Shelby Grad, Steve Clough, Robert Meeks, and Devon Maharaj. You can read the story at LAtimes.com. We’re putting up installments as these episodes air.
Read the next episode’s transcript.
Read the transcripts of the other episodes in the series here.
