Dirty John Part 5: Escape| LA Times & Wondery Podcast (Transcript)

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Source: Wonderly/Stitcher

Dirty John Part 5: Escape | Los Angeles Times& Wondery (Transcript)

Length: 47 mins

A listener note: This story contains adult content and language.

Christopher Goffard: John Dzialo can’t be sure how John Meehan found him and he was apprehensive about taking him on as a client. His paralegal had done some research on Meehan and was so spooked that she told her boss she wanted no part of the case. Meehan had done prison time for stalking and terrorizing a Laguna Beach woman and now, on April 8, 2015, Meehan was sitting in Dzialo’s Santa Ana law office. Meehan wanted Dzialo to sue the Laguna Beach woman, claiming she’d cheated him of a quarter million dollars. Meehan had other ideas for lawsuits too. There was yet another woman who had supposedly cheated him. He also accused police who had arrested him of stealing his cash.

The blizzard of lawsuits was part of John Meehan’s plan to win back the trust of his wife, Debra, who was sitting beside him. He wanted Dzialo to prove he’d been the victim in case after case, not at all the dangerous swindler portrayed in mountains of court papers. Dzialo told me that he planned to turn down the case, even though he would be getting a $25,000 retainer, but meeting Debra, listening to Debra, gave him second thoughts. She seemed naive and helplessly in her husband’s grip.

John Dzialo: She struck me, right off the bat, as a very genuine, very sweet, very vulnerable lady and she was obviously in love with him. Although I really only met him face to face once, and that was in about a two-hour interview, he was the scariest man I had ever met in my life. I’m 70 years old; I practiced law for 42 years before I retired last year in September. John Meehan was scary.

Christopher: From the Los Angeles Times and Wondery, this is Dirty John. I’m Christopher Goffard.

Part 5: Escape

Dzialo: So I’ve got this lady sitting there, who just strikes me as a wonderful woman and this scary, scary guy that I just… I could hardly look at him sometimes because it just feels, to me, like the anger that he is holding inside is so intense.

Christopher: Debra explained that her family didn’t trust the man she’d married after a whirlwind romance of less than two months. There was a definite chill in her relationship with her children. They believed he was a greedy predator and that the longer they stayed married, the bigger his claim on her considerable wealth.

Dzialo: She was asking me, “What can we do? Can you do anything that will help put my family at ease?” I asked her whether or not she had gotten a prenuptial agreement with John before they got married and she said that she had not and I suggested that maybe it would ease your family’s mind if we did a post-nup.

Christopher: Dzialo began explaining how a post-nup would work. It would, effectively, cut John out of Debra’s fortune if they split up.

Dzialo: The strangest thing happened during the course of this two hours together. The more we dealt about the post-nup and how it would actually go in effect, the more sulking and angry John became. Not vocally; he didn’t get angry with me, didn’t say anything like, “We don’t need your goddamn stinking post-nup,” thing like that, but as we talked about it, he was sinking down in his chair with his hands crossed in front of his chest and he was almost scowling at me with his lips puckered and a squinty glaze. 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 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 a nutcase. This is a dangerous man.”

At one point, I looked at him and said, “John, it’s obvious that you don’t like this conversation about where we’re going with all of this, but John, it’s obvious to me that this woman loves you and she’s looking for a way to eliminate this problem that we have with her family. So I’m not here to try and hurt you, I’m not here to act as the bad guy. I’m here because this woman is in love with you and is asking for my help to try and smooth things over with her family.”

Christopher: John’s responses became shorter, more clipped, but still he didn’t yell at him or threaten him.

Dzialo: This was someone I wanted to get out of the room with. I just felt like this guy, his forehead’s going to break open right in front of me because there is so much anger. Even I would tell you beyond anger. I just got the feeling that this guy was consumed with rage. He was very good at keeping it bottled up, but it was something that was palpable to me.

Christopher: Nothing that would result in a complaint to the police department that would ever stick, though? You can’t file a charge on a guy for that.

Dzialo: Certainly not, and the woman he was married to wasn’t asking me to do anything about that. Two things occurred to me. The first was I just got stronger in my feeling that this woman needs some protection and if she’s got nobody else, then this office is going to try and do it as much as we can. The other thing that occurred to me, as I looked at John and I watched him seething about the idea that there would be a post-nuptial agreement, was that this guy is going to find a way to torch this deal now. He’s going to find a way to say, “No, you’re fired. You’re not doing this right. You’re fired.”

Christopher: After they left his office, Dzialo says he told his assistant that he thought Debra’s life was in danger, that someone needed to protect her.

Dzialo: This lady, I don’t want to be melodramatic, but this lady, her life is in peril. If she says or does the wrong thing for him, I just believe this guy’s got killer instincts in him.

Christopher: Dzialo got to work on the post-nup. He sent financial disclosure papers to John to fill out, but John dragged his feet in returning them. Dzialo also told him he’d studied the material he had given him on the woman he’d claimed had defrauded him, including a big stack of emails, and couldn’t see the makings of a lawsuit. He needed a lot more information.

Dzialo: He went ballistic on the phone and he started screaming and yelling, “You should have had that lawsuit filed by now. You should’ve had both of those lawsuits filed by now. I don’t think you know what you’re doing. You’re just a waste of my time. I’m done, you’re fired,” and I said, “Okay, all right. John, if that’s the way you feel, I think I should talk to Debra to see does that apply on the post-nup.” He said, “You are fired. You don’t work for me, you don’t work for Debra. We want nothing to do with you.”

Christopher: Dzialo had put some time into the case and he said he’d figure out what to bill him and return the remainder of the money.

Dzialo: He said, “No, the fuck you won’t. You are going to send me every goddamn dollar back,” that type of thing, and he starts screaming at me that I’m a fraud, that I’m a crook. He is just getting nasty beyond belief. “I have a check here for $25,000 tomorrow morning or I call the Bar Association.” I thought to myself, “There ain’t no way I’m giving this guy 25 grand back. I am going to figure out my time and I am going to bill it and I’m going to give him the remainder back and I don’t care whether he goes to the Bar Association or not. I’ve got a retainer from him, I’ve can show all my work. I can show all those emails.” But then we’ve got emails going back and forth between him and me, at that point, where he is just losing it. He wants his money, it’s got to be paid right now, he’s going to go to the State’s Attorney’s, District Attorney’s Office, blah blah blah, and me, I’m thinking of, “Wow, this is the guy that I’m pretty sure has homicide in his head.”

Christopher: It was around this time that Dzialo started bringing a shotgun to work.

Dzialo: I’ve got bills to pay, I’ve got the lights to keep on, I’ve got the rent to pay, I’ve got employees to pay, but I’m thinking, “This is one guy I don’t want to have out there screaming and yelling that I cheated him. This is a guy who would do anything,” so I agreed to give him his money back. I should add that, a couple weeks later, he filed a complaint with the Bar.

Christopher: Even after he cashed the check?

Dzialo: Absolutely.

Christopher: Dzialo wasn’t able to get through John to reach Debra and he wanted to know her position on all this. All he could think to do was drive to her business in Irvine, Ambrosia Interior Design, and leave her a note.

Dzialo: I said, “I’d like to leave this for Ms. Newell. This is a personal matter, if you’d please deliver it.” All I said was, “Debra, I don’t know if you know this or not, but John has filed a complaint with the Bar Association. I am just curious as to whether or not you’re aware of it and whether or not you concur with it,” that’s all I asked. I didn’t get a call from her; I got a call from him. “If you ever contact my wife again,” and that this may be the one time where he did threaten me, “if you ever contact my wife again, you are going to regret it.” I figured, “That was a dumb thing. Now I’ve pissed this guy off even more.”

Christopher: What’s interesting is that it took you only two hours to form an impression that’s lasted now years. It’s almost like the opposite of a religious experience where you meet someone holy and it changes your life. This is sort of the inverse of that, like you looked into a void.

Dzialo: That is so true because we all… We don’t want to believe the really bad things about people. We just don’t. We want to think that people are good and when you meet somebody like this and you realize, “I am sitting here in the presence of evil incarnate,” you know that people like him really do exist and one has just come into your orbit. Scariest man I’ve met in my 70 years.

Christopher: Debra made sure John understood that one day, her children would inherit all her money. That was fine, John told her. All he needed was her.

Debra Newell: He used to tell me that he could date so many wealthier women than me, that he would much rather be with me with no money living under a bridge than with the wealthiest woman living in a mansion without love.

Christopher: Debra had cut John out of her will months back for fear that he might kill her. And though she went to sleep beside him and woke up beside him, it was impossible to completely banish that fear.

Debra’s kids thought it was flat out crazy that she had returned to John and Meehan wanted her kids, particularly her two oldest daughters, out of her life. He blamed them for the troubles in the marriage, blamed them for hiring a private eye to probe his past, blamed them for temporarily turning his wife against him. This is Jacquelyn.

Jacquelyn Newell: I was very angry that she had gotten back together with him because I just felt like all of the evidence that we had, how could you believe… How could any story prove that this stuff is okay to be here, all of this evidence about John?

Christopher: John’s hatred for Debra’s family did not seem to extend to Terra, Debra’s youngest and quietest daughter, even though she had clashed with him. He found her the least troublesome of his stepdaughters. Terra feared him and disliked him; he was the reason she sometimes carried a pocket knife. She said she was willing to sit down with him and try to work things out, believing he would never take her up on it. Jacquelyn was upset with Terra for seeming to give him a chance.

Jacquelyn: Terra’s a lot more like my mom where she wants to believe the best in people rather than see any of the bad things. I could probably be a little bit more like them; it would do me some good, but I just couldn’t see anything good in him, just all bad.

Christopher: In the summer of 2015, Terra was living in Vegas with her boyfriend, Jimmy Grob. They were renting a three bedroom house, with three dogs and two cats, and trying to make it work. Every love affair has its own set of rituals and theirs was a Sunday night television show.

Jimmy Grob: If there was something that Terra and I bonded over, it definitely was an affinity for one of our favorite shows, The Walking Dead. The way the show is set up, they put these characters in such crazy, dire circumstances. One episode, I think it was in the second season, where a character is trapped in a bathroom of an RV and is just, basically, death is knocking at the door right there. It’s relentless, it won’t stop, it’s menacing, and then she gets handed a screwdriver from one of her mates up top and ends up just stabbing the thing to death in the face. It was just that fight or flight moment and it’s like what are you going to do when something that menacing just won’t stop?

Terra Newell: We would watch that show, then we would watch it again and then we would watch The Talking Dead. I just thought, if there’s a zombie apocalypse, then maybe I might know what to do.

Christopher: A zombie is an uncomplicated dream of evil. Almost everything else in the world is ambiguous. There’s good in bad people and bad in good people and gray everywhere, but zombies are not reasonable and they’re not redeemable; they’re only survivable or destroyable. As the shadow of John’s menace seemed to lengthen, this was the feeling of all the people who had come to fear him. Terra said she got a zombie kit for Jimmy with food, water, a flashlight, a filter straw, matches, a thermal blanket, and knives.

Terra: I told him to take it just in case he ever had zombies in his life.

Christopher: Where did you get all the stuff?

Terra: I went to there’s a zombie apocalypse store in Vegas.

Christopher: The zombie kit was her Christmas present to Jimmy in 2014 and it was their last Christmas together. By the summer of 2015, they were breaking up. In the breakup, Terra got Cash, their Australian shepherd. She had a tighter bond with Cash than Jimmy did. Debra drove out to Vegas to pick up her daughter, who was crestfallen after the breakup. John didn’t object. Terra moved back to California and started applying for jobs. She found one as a kennel attendant and dog groomer. She loved the company of animals.

John and Debra were living in a luxury apartment near the Irvine Spectrum, an upscale area. They traveled a lot — Denver and Colorado Springs, San Francisco and Seattle, Santa Barbara and Lake Tahoe. He was back to his doting ways.

Debra: He spent the day, many days, getting my cars washed, running errands for me, going to the post office, helping me with different things, getting my dry cleaning, going grocery shopping. He’d have flowers all the time for me. He wanted to hold me all night and kiss me constantly and things like that. There was this… Obviously, it feels good, so you hold on to that, I think, at times.

Christopher: At night, he fell asleep holding her, breathing against the side of her neck, his arm over her body. It was strange to be in love with someone and fear him at the same time. She was careful what she told him about her kids because he became so volatile at any mention of them. He was secretive about the rare phone calls he’d get. He claimed to spend a lot of time at 24 Hour Fitness or at the sauna, but she really had no idea what he did all day.

When they went to the dog park to let the golden retriever, Murphy, run around, who was this woman who kept smiling at them? Had they shared something together? Sometimes she’d come home, afraid she’d find something she didn’t want to see, like John with another woman or doing drugs.

Debra: I was a little nervous going home. I didn’t know what to expect, I didn’t know what he was doing on his computer all day, I didn’t know what he was doing. I was scared. I think that I was scared for my life and my kids’ life. I’d made such a major mistake.

Christopher: And so what happens? Do you tell anybody, “I need to get out of this”?

Debra: I didn’t want anyone to worry, so I kept it to myself. I did call psychologists a few times and talked to them.

Christopher: What did they say?

Debra: they said, “You need to protect yourself, so it’s best not to just jump out of it real quickly, but to plan it.”

Christopher: Debra would have to play the role of the happy wife for now. Sometimes, he seemed to sense that something had changed. He said, “You don’t look at me in the same way. I know you’re going to leave me.” She told him it was just his imagination, that she was busy at work, that she was stressed, that she was sorry, and she made him one of his favorite meals — pork roast with vegetables, jambalaya, chicken noodle soup from scratch. He’d say he wouldn’t know what to do without her, that he wanted to die in her arms.

Sometimes they had the semblance of a normal, domestic life. In the evening, he’d put on the TV while she sat, reading, beside him. He liked the show Lockup, the documentary series about life behind bars, and Intervention, the show about addiction, two subjects about which he had intimate experience. He liked the comic Daniel Tosh on Comedy Central, but his favorite show was MTV’s Ridiculousness, which mocks people in viral videos who do stupid things and get hurt. It always made John laugh.

Debra had begun hiding money from him. She’d take $2000 from every paycheck and give it to her eldest daughter or to a friend. She didn’t want him to have access to all her money for fear he’d take it and she didn’t want him to know that she was still giving money to her kids.

In October 2015, she bought a house on North Water Street in Henderson, Nevada. It was an investment and she got to work upgrading it, but more importantly, it was a place John could stay where he would be away from her children. One day, she went to see Jacquelyn and, when she returned, he confronted her about where she’d been. He’d kept a tracker on her car. He told her if she saw Jacquelyn again, he’d throw Jacquelyn in the ocean and make sure she didn’t come out.

Debra: I’d say, “Stop being so dramatic,” or things like that. There were just comments, like about his ex-wife, about Jacquelyn. I started realizing, “This man, if I do try to leave him…” And I think that part of me wanted them to finally all like each other and be a happy family. It wasn’t going to happen. It wasn’t happening.

Christopher: By December 2015, they’d been married a year. John sat down to type for her a two-page letter. It was a treacly bonbon with a core of arsenic. It reminded her of what he required. Between her family and her husband, there was room only for him.

Debra: It starts out saying, “Deb, happy anniversary. One year and forever means forever,” he would say that to me all the time. “We’ve been through some hard times, complicated times, but at the end of the day, I have you to myself. No family, no issues that we can’t work out. I love you. You have the kindest, most forgiving heart of any person I’ve ever known. I want to grow old with you. I want to hear your breath in the middle of the night, feel you reach for me when there is nothing else between us. I can’t imagine living without you and you’re absolutely nutty family,” they’re not nutty, by the way, “I hope to get over what they did. I wish I could now because I see the pain you have being away from them. I wish I could just fix this. I wish I could make all those problems and issues go away, but sometimes life is so complicated that there is no turning around. Sometimes the issue is bigger than us. Sometimes letting go is better than holding on. We have each other. We have each other forever. I will never cheat or disrespect you in any way. I have no desire for anything other than you. You are simply the best person I’ve ever known, with the biggest heart imaginable. I wish I was more like you. I wish I could see the world like you do.”

Christopher: He went on to say, “I love the way you smell and the way you drift off to la-la land while I’m talking to you. I love the feel of you and, needless to say, making love to you is about as close to a religious experience as I have ever had. I hope I die in your arms because this world would be a dark place without you. I hope you love me and we grow old together. I hope.” He told her these sort of things all the time and they always sounded sincere.

Debra: And I felt very torn. Here’s my family, and here I go again, another failure. I didn’t think I could go through another divorce. I thought, “How can I keep getting this so wrong so many times?” I know my problem is I jump into them without really getting to know the person.

Christopher: She knew she would never really be able to trust him. She knew she’d been deceiving herself, that her children had not been her enemies, but the ones who’d seen him clearly from the start. In February 2016, John discovered the Debra had been secretly giving Jacquelyn money to attend real estate classes.

Jacquelyn: He thought that I was out of my mom’s life and the fact that my mom and I were talking a little bit really bothered him because he wanted me just out of the picture, away.

Christopher: Of all the people in the family, you’re the one he most identified as an enemy, right?

Jacquelyn: Yes. John and I really had it out for each other.

Christopher: John started sending Jacquelyn lewd messages. He called her real estate school and slandered her, embarrassing her to the point that she dropped out. She says he sent her a picture of her birth certificate with spit on it. She sent some heated messages back. She showed me their exchanges from March 6, 2016.

Jacquelyn: I googled “pile of shit” and then I sent him an image of a pile of shit and then I was like, “If you had a life, you wouldn’t be wasting your energy emailing me. Let’s just stop wasting each other’s time. Nobody cares about you.” He was like, “You don’t have a mom. She’s right next to me and we’re reading your emails together.”

Christopher: She reads me a couple more from John.

Jacquelyn: “Mommy wants nothing to do with you and that will kill you. Jumping off a tall building would make me smile. Headfirst will work.” I said, “Leave me alone, you sick pervert.”

Debra: Yeah, “jump head first. Your mom and I will be laughing.” I thought, “What a sick thing to say to my daughter.” It was just the things he would say that, at that point, who can be with someone like? But I really had to protect myself and my kids.

Christopher: Debra had been married to John a year and three months at this point. She withdrew $120,000 from her bank account hoping he wouldn’t notice. She gave some money to a friend to hold and some to a daughter. She had $30,000 stashed in the bottom drawer in a closet, banded stacks of $100 bills. Somehow he found it. He confronted her at their Orange County apartment.

Debra: He put in front of me and said, “What’s this?” I said, “Money,” and he went into my accounts and said, “Why are you withdrawing all this money?” He had been tracking all my accounts.

Christopher: When the plopped that sack of cash in front of you, what did you say?

Debra: “It’s mine. It’s mine before you. I just don’t want you to have it,” and he says, “No, everything that is yours is mine.” I said, “No, anything that was mine before you is still mine,” and that’s what he said — and we were getting heated up and I’m not one to even raise my voice if you know who I am. He said, “Hit me, hit me. Because if you hit me, I’ll make sure you never get up again.” I said, “I’m not going to hit you,” and I packed a bag and I left and I said, “I want a divorce. I’m out of here.” That was the end of the end. I think I grabbed one shoe, you some of my makeup, and left.

Christopher: You mean one pair of shoes?

Debra: No, one shoe. I’m taking stuff and I’m leaving.

Christopher: Debra and Jacquelyn drove out to the house in Henderson, Nevada when they knew John was in California. They worried he might be monitoring them on security cameras he’d installed at the house, so they had no time to lose. He could make it there in four hours if he knew. Debra put tape over the camera lenses, they brought professional movers and they worked quickly packing up Debra stuff, stacking it into the big truck. It was March 29, 2016. Jacquelyn used her iPhone to record the condition of the house as they prepared to leave, just in case John complained that they’d damaged or stolen his things.

Jacquelyn: “I’ve got everything, let’s go. I’m going to want a video of you leaving. Let’s go. You’ve got your keys? You got your phone?” I just have a video looking back, you can see the truck and the guys moving the stuff and then her driving home.

Debra: It got really ugly really fast, which I knew it would.

Michael O’Neil: Gigolo is the perfect term for this guy. He had nothing, nothing, and portrayed himself as having everything.

Christopher: Debra had approached a family law attorney, who spoke to John Meehan by phone and heard something chilling in his voice. He cared about his clients, he said, but he had a family. He decided to pass on the case. Then she found Michael R O’Neil, who had more than four decades in the law and kept a shotgun at his Santa Ana office. He sized up the situation fast. He saw how John, a disgraced and penniless nurse anesthetist, had lured her in then managed to keep or even after he’d been unmasked the first time.

O’Neil: You take the victim away, the con man’s nothing. He has to eat. Like a shark, he’s gotta eat and that’s what he is, he is a shark and he looks for his prey. They select, these people. They don’t just, nilly-willy bump into somebody go, “Wow, you’d be a great victim.” They know exactly about their victim and she finally realized that once she saw all the bad stuff that, “Hey look, let’s get away from this guy,” and then he became a bad con man. He took away the polish and the svelte shark stuff and he became a big, fat sea bass. She’s very religious and, when you humble yourself, you the shark, and you say, “I can’t believe that all these years I’ve been this shark. I now would like to be a salmon or a trout and I owe it all to you,” well, that is more the chameleon of the guy.

Christopher: Wonder how far you can take this fish metaphor.

O’Neil: I guess I won’t, but that’s what he’s done. He’s just… You have to find somebody that will swallow that line hook, line, and sinker.

Christopher: When I ask about the specific nature of the con that John would run, by that I mean his goal was to get into people’s lives, marry them, and then take half their stuff, right?

O’Neil: No, to take all their stuff. He didn’t want half and he believed, after all, he was entitled to it. He was entitled to it.

Christopher: She filed for divorce in April 2016. If Debra had glimpsed a frightening sight of him during their first separation, now he seemed a creature of pure malignancy. He wrote, “You get your family, I got the dog. I got the better deal.” He wanted money and promised to bleed her dry through the divorce courts if she fought him. He wrote, “For once in your holier than thou life, listen to me. You are going to have to pay both sides, which could easily take a year. We had a good run except for your family. There is no trust, but the last thing I want to do is break you.”

He sent her photos of himself with a provocatively posed ex-girlfriend. He threatened to disseminate compromising photos and emails. He wrote, “Make yourself available or I ruin a family. There are children involved, Deb. This is bigger than you. No more being nice. This will turn an entire family inside out. You’re selfish to allow this. You’ll never forgive yourself, but I am doing it.” He lectured her, “You don’t know how to live. Sex is not love. Get help.” He denounced her as a crook on Yelp. He had once coaxed naked photos out of her and now he sent them to her family. He texted her that he knew where she was when she picked up her grandkid and he sent a horrible text to one of her nephew’s, whose mother, Cindi, Debra’s sister had been shot to death in 1984 by her husband. It was a wound that John delighted in inflaming. John wrote, “Your dad should have put one in the back of your useless head as well as your brother just after he blew your mom’s brains out all over the wall.”

Debra says he forged her name on $17,000 worth of checks and he accused her of assaulting him. “Deb, I saw this coming. It’s pathetic it’s come to this point, but you leave me with no options after your storm of lies.” She replied, “Storm of lies! Wow. You are the expert in that area.”

He had brought only three boxes with him to the marriage, mostly old clothes. Now, he wanted $7000 a month in spousal support and 75,000 in attorney’s fees. He accused her of stealing $90,000 in cash from him and $30,000 in gold coins. He complained that he was living on monthly disability checks of $558 for his bad back. John wrote, “It doesn’t matter that paying support isn’t what a ‘real’ man demands. It’s what the court feels is equitable. That’s all that matters. Think, Deb. There is no alternative to this unless you start thinking. That, or you will eventually get bled dry. Be smart, Deb. You have no idea of the mistakes you made. Be smart and you’ll save a fortune.” “I don’t trust anything you say,” Debra wrote, “you’re evil.” She understood, now, how he worked. He turned everything around. He made his victims look like his tormentors. He told her she was a pathological liar. “Face it, Deb, I’m smarter than you.” She replied, “Stop! Don’t contact me again or I will go to the police!”

He had posed as her soul mate, the answer to her longings after four failed marriages, and now he used her past as a barb. “You think I’m going to allow your family to continue? Look in the mirror, five times and still making the same mistakes. Now you’re getting yours. Pray, Deb. Pray hard.”

He had turned himself into a churchgoing Christian and wept during sermons, knowing God mattered to her, and now he used her faith as a cudgel. “Everyone is a better Christian than you,” he wrote, “paybacks are costly and a bitch.” He had rhapsodized endlessly about her beauty and promised she would never know loneliness again and now he wrote, “You lying old bag. You’ll grow old alone.” He sent her a list of her clients, builders who used her interior design business, and threaten to call them twice a day.

Debra brought her lawyer a stack of legal papers documenting his criminal history and his emails. She wanted a restraining order. She feared for her life. She wanted protection for herself, for her 36-year-old daughter, Nicole, her 26-year-old daughter, Jacquelyn, and her 38-year-old son, Brandon. She did not list Terra, who was 24, on the request. John seemed not to be a threat to her.

O’Neil: I get submitted an inch worth of documentation. I worked day and night for two or three days, both with Debra and without Debra, to put together the entire package.

O’Neil: O’Neil cited more than a decade’s accumulation of mayhem. The theft of hospital drugs, the Indiana Board of Nursing calling him “a clear and immediate danger to the public.” The time he’d jumped from a moving ambulance to avoid arrest, the restraining order requests from women who feared he would kill them, the detectives, so worried by John’s reported death threats that they too asked for a restraining order, the arrest for extortion and stalking. But all of that wasn’t enough.

O’Neil: In order to get a domestic violence restraining order in the judicial system in family law, you have to show a couple of things. Number one, that it’s an emergency. Number two, that you are in fear of your life, safety, whatever, immediately and that the alleged perpetrator has the ability and the means to do what it is you’re alleging he’s going to do which puts you in fear and apprehension. What the court said is, “Now we can’t do that because he hasn’t laid hands on you, he hasn’t hurt you physically.”

Christopher: Plus, John lived in Henderson, in another state and there wasn’t what the court thought of as fresh blood. O’Neil was surprised but understood the court’s reasoning.

O’Neil: In retrospect, it would have been nothing more than a piece of paper and that piece of paper wouldn’t have slowed down Meehan at all.

Christopher: John had never been violent to Debra before. O’Neil thought his threats were probably idle. He hoped.

O’Neil: I hadn’t seen anything where he had made any overt gestures to get hands on her. I just thought, “This is a sick puppy.” That was my position all along, “You’re just a sick son of a bitch,” that’s what I thought.

Christopher: The judge told them they could come back in 14 days to apply for a permanent restraining order. Debra did something, inadvertently, to sabotage it. She says another lawyer told her she would save on legal fees if she could get John to settle. Would he accept a certain dollar amount to agree to an annulment? She misunderstood that as a suggestion to meet him and she went to the Henderson house.

She thought he looked like he’d aged a decade since she last saw him and his weight was way down. She broached the subject of the annulment. She even said they might try to start fresh afterward with no lies. It was the only thing she could think of to say. He wouldn’t hear of it. She’d promised till death do us part. He wept and said he was dying of cancer. He didn’t want to die alone. How could she leave him? He told her he’d do anything to make it right.

She wrote him a $10,000 check to fix the Henderson house and told him he could stay there while they figured things out. She was trying to keep him occupied and buy some time. She says she slept on a mattress on the floor that night. “I’m dying, Deb. Slowly dying. Please, just come up with something so we can move on,” he texted her when she got back to California. “I’m not doing well, Deb. I’m doing horrible without you. I need you.”

Because she had seen John, because she had actually spent the night at the Henderson house, her lawyer knew no judge would grant the restraining order. How scared could she be if she saw him voluntarily?

O’Neil: I said, “What were you thinking? You have completely taken away every muscle, every hammer, every degree of strength that we have to get a restraining order. You have completely vitiated that 100% so we have no chance.”

Christopher: It was June 2016. Debra was living out of hotels, working out of hotels, checking in under the names of her assistants, wearing a dark wig to conceal her blonde hair. Now and then, she snuck into her office in Irvine.

Around 1:00 PM on Saturday, June 11, she got there to find her blue, sport model, 2015 Jaguar XF was missing from the lot, a $64,000 car. Two days later, the car was discovered in front of a business a block away. It reeked of gas and there was fire damage to the seat and doors and there was a gas can in the car. Whoever had attempted to torch her car had done an inept job. The windows were rolled up and the doors were closed. The fire had extinguished itself for lack of oxygen.

Grainy surveillance footage showed John, in jeans, crouched behind the bushes, watching the car, waiting, that Saturday morning and it showed him come back about an hour later, wearing gloves and a painter’s uniform. Police talked to John, who admitted that he had taken the car that Saturday, but insisted that he had done so with Debra’s permission and had then returned it unharmed. This was not a full admission of guilt, but a stupid thing to say. It put a man, who lived out of state, at the scene.

O’Neil: Well, once he came down and set the Jaguar on fire and stole the Jaguar, it sort of changed the playing field a little bit. Now he’s reaching out. I kept talking to Irvine PD; they couldn’t do anything. We have a video; we know he did it. You have the video, do something about it.

Christopher: O’Neil thought if police could connect him to the Jaguar torching, he could finally get the restraining order.

O’Neil: Everybody kept assuring me, “Yeah, we’re investigating. Yeah, we’re looking into it. Yeah, we think we got the right guy.”

Christopher: All of June passed and then all of July, and still, the police had not arrested him. They said they were building a case, trying to nail him with inconsistencies in his story.

O’Neil’s name and business address was on all the court papers. He says two of his friends, who were family law attorneys, were murdered by people on the opposing side. He thought it was a good time to put in extra locks at his Santa Ana office.

O’Neil: I just thought he was the boogeyman. I don’t mean to say that I was intimidated or I was scared, I’ve got a big old shotgun that sits over there underneath my cabinet, but still, it doesn’t do you any good if it’s over there under the cabinet if somebody barges into your office and you’re sitting over at your desk. He was a bad man from the onset. He was a bad man. Whether or not he would take it to the extreme that he ultimately took it to, I would have never thought that until at least the car incident and the torching. Then he became a hands-on.

Christopher: Debra blocked his texts and emails and this seemed to enrage him. Debra changed phones. She refused a hire a guard; she thought she would be okay, since she was on the road a lot, living out of hotels. When she was in Orange County, she stayed with Jacquelyn, who had found a new apartment near the John Wayne Airport. It had a security gate, but Jacquelyn worried about John following her into the parking garage. After the car torching, he seemed capable of anything.

Jacquelyn: I felt like I needed some protection as far as a weapon because what am I going to do when some 6"2' guy comes at me? I’m 5"2, I’m 95 pounds.

Christopher: Jacquelyn says she got herself a Smith and Wesson revolver. Of all John’s step kids, she knew he hated her the most.

On the final episode of Dirty John:

Dispatcher: […] you have an emergency?

Male voice: Yeah, we do. We got…

Female voice: There’s been a stabbing.

Male voice: Come on, breathe. Come on, breath.

Dispatcher: All right, I understand. We have officers on the way.

Female voice: My mom started screaming to me and then she saw this guy just raising his hand up and down.

Christopher: 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.

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Read the transcripts of the other episodes in the series here.