Ep. 1: The Real Thing

A listener note. This story contains adult content and language. There are a total of 13 stab wounds which have penetrated the body. They are all arbitrarily numbered from 1 to 13. There are eight wounds noted in the left side and upper back in the shoulder and scapular area, where one number one is on the top of the left shoulder. I'm sitting in the office of a man who prosecutes murders for a living. His name is Matt Murphy. He's a veteran assistant district attorney who handles homicides out of Newport Beach, California. If you're from somewhere else and have a mental picture of Orange County about an hour south of LA, Newport Beach is probably part of that image. It's the side of the county that the tourist guides want you to see. Pacific coast highway runs through it, luxury shopping, piers and surf shops and plastic surgeons, yachts and cliffside mansions. I used to cover the city as a crime reporter for a local newspaper. There weren't a lot of murders, maybe one a year, two or three in a very bad year. Greed or lust figured prominently in the most memorable ones. These days, if you're one of the rare people who meet a violent death in Newport Beach, Matt Murphy is the prosecutor who will hear about it. The homicide case that landed on his desk in the summer of 2016 was particularly violent and it was unique in his experience. Number five is on the left, more to the upper arm area. Number six, seven, and eight are close to the midline region of the upper back. All of these stable ones are superficial wounds. They have all been sutured by metallic statements. Murphy is reading the autopsy report, which is part of how he assesses whether there's a prosecutable offense. A homicide is the killing of one human being by another. He had to decide whether it was a crime. Number 13, which is the fetal wound, is the upper left eyelid, one centimeter in size. Only room number nine has some bruising around it and another bruise noted around 12 and 13. So when you review something like this, what it tells you is this young woman thought like hell. From the Los Angeles Times and Wondery, this is Dirty John. I'm Christopher Gofford. Part one, the real thing. In the fall of 2014, Debra Newell was flipping through profiles on our time a dating site for singles over 50. 84 strangers wanted to get to know her. She took a chance on three guys. She had coffee with one, dinner with another, breakfast with a third. They were older and less handsome than their profile pictures. There wasn't any chemistry. Debra Newell has hazel eyes and high cheekbones and wavy blonde hair. When she was in her 30s, a man threw himself on the hood of her car, begging for a date. For years, attracting men had been as easy as walking into a room. Now she was 59, married and divorced four times. Her four kids were grown and she had a flourishing interior design business. She wanted a man to travel with and share her success with. She worried that she was too old for another chance at love. She tried to cite again. Someone else wanted to meet her. This guy checked every box. Look very successful, according to everything in his profile. He posted a few pictures that he was a physician. So I thought, "Hmm, interesting. Seems safe." So we started talking. John Michael Meahan had thick dark hair and a big, warm, friendly smile that invited trust. If you saw his smile on a billboard, you'd want whatever he was selling. He looked a little weathered, but he might have once been an all-American quarterback on a trading card. They exchanged texts, then phone calls. He said, "You're so my type." And the last guy just went, "I was weird," said I wasn't his type. I thought, "Oh, I'm so his type." Well, okay, good. That's a good thing. He sent me pictures of him as a little boy, said he was Christian, said that he had gone to my church, said I go to Mariners where he goes, he goes that's where I go. Said that I had four kids and grandkids, goes, "Oh, how lucky you are. I would love to meet them." She lived in Irvine about an hour south of Los Angeles. They met at her penthouse. She grabbed her Chanel bag and they walked down the block to a casual dining restaurant called Houston's, where they found a place at the bar. John was 55, six foot two with broad shoulders. He had flawless teeth, a strong John hazel green eyes. He focused on her intently. Debra wore black Gucci stiletto heels and designer jeans. John seemed to care almost nothing about his clothes. He looked like an overgrown college guy with his preppy shirt and his shorts. And I don't know. Like a franca I had never grown up. Yeah, exactly. That's what he looked like. He was smart and charming and articulate. He was divorced with two daughters. He said he had houses in Newport Beach and Palm Springs. That he was an anesthesiologist just back from a year in Iraq where he had worked with doctors without borders. He told stories about being on the front line, jumping out of a helicopter. If we just talked about what we wanted out of life, he asked a lot of questions about my business and how it works. I thought it was a good trait that he's more interested in me than himself. I think it's healthy when the conversation goes back and forth. She was still stung by her last boyfriend who had complained that she'd put on some weight. But John told her that she was beautiful, that she stopped his heart. Remember him rubbing my back. As you're sitting side by side. Yeah, he moved very fast. They kissed that night back at her place. He wanted it to go further. He did not want to leave. He even threw himself on her bed and said this feels incredible. She was getting uncomfortable. She had to insist he leave. She had to kick him out. The next day, she was back in her office a little sad. She tried to lose herself in her work. There were always deadlines. She'd spent 30 years building her business, Ambrosia Interior Design, and she was a name in her field. She supervised a team of devoted designers, marketers, and project managers. She liked to hire single women and mothers because she could remember how it felt to be alone, with one child and another on the way after her first marriage broke up. She took me through her storage warehouse in Irvine. It's as big as a supermarket and crammed with sofas, modern art, mirrors, frames, and a thousand other furnishings. She drums her fingers on an elegant object in the shape of an inflated blowfish. It looks to me like a vase, but she calls it a ceramic decorative ball. If it's a white and cream skin, they pull a lot of white. If it's a gray, more of a restoration, look, they pull those. So it just depends on the skin. When people walk into one of Deborah Newell's model homes, they're invited to imagine their futures in them. She calls them "approachable dreams." Her warm, flawless rooms are like glossy ads in upscale lifestyle magazines. No kids' toys or dirty dishes in sight. None of the messiness of actual living. One whole section of Deborah's warehouse is shelf after shelf of hard-back books coordinated by color, because books make nice furniture in perfect homes. A little nod to culture, though, the pages inside might as well be blank. Can you explain the books again? Because I. It's like pulled by color. Like, let's say it's a blue and beige scheme. Cream will pull blue and beige in cream books. So depending on what the color scheme is. And where do you get them? Libraries. I go around on Saturdays, collect books. I love to read. And it's really become something that's a little bit of a hobby in line to go around fine books. So aqua books, blue books, navy books. Light gray, yellow, brown. And the books themselves don't matter. Well, we don't want anything that says death, or sex on it. So we have to stay away from those. Did you make up those rules yourself? No, the builders did. It's like the face you show someone on a date. You're inviting someone to fantasize about the piece that may complete his or her life. If your eagerness or loneliness or desperation show too soon, you're done. Maybe that had been John's mistake. One of Deborah's daughters was working with her on the day after her disastrous date with him. She told her about it. I thought what a jerk. I can eliminate him. Later that day, John called her. He told her he was sorry. He knew he'd overstepped. He just wanted to spend every minute with her. Would she give him another chance? I was still attracted to him, so I was curious to hear what he had to say. And of course, he persuaded me. John had some idiosyncrasies. He showed up for dates in his faded blue medical scrubs as if fresh from surgery. He even wore them to a formal dress cancer benefit she invited him to. Some people snickered, but she thought, "Bizzy doctor." By the second or third date, he was telling her he loved her, that he wanted to marry her. Two weeks after they met, she emailed him. So you are the real thing, with a smiley face emoji. And he replied, "Best thing that will ever happen to you." He began spending the night regularly at her Irvine penthouse. This alarmed her 24-year-old daughter, Jacqueline, who lived there with her. Jacqueline thought he looked homeless. She remembered the first time she saw him at their place. Well, the second I opened the door, I just kind of looked at him head to toe and thought to myself, "Oh, this loser." He didn't carry himself very well. His body was kind of moping around. He looked very focused. His eyes were going from one corner of the room to the other as if he was scanning, thinking pretty hard about something. He had a lot going on in his mind, but he was pretty calm. Even at a glance, Debra Nuel's penthouse reflected money. There were black velvet dining chairs, a glass cocktail table, fine art on the walls, including two original Salvador dolly paintings. Jacqueline had a collection of expensive bags and purses. I have a safe where I keep Birken bags and my nicer purses. I had it in my office area, and he walked in and said, "What do you have in the safe kiddo?" I said, "None of your business." I slid the door close behind him. I believed that was my second interaction with him. When I told my mom that she'd better get this creep out of the house or I don't plan on living with her. Debra wasn't surprised by the criticism. She often exasperated her kids with her taste in men. They found something bad to say about anyone she dated. They'd seen her endure one bad relationship after another. Over the years, men had yelled at her, hit her, and taken her money. Soon she and John were quietly looking for a place together. They found a house on the boardwalk on Balboa Island in Newport Beach. The rent was $6,500 a month. She put down a year in advance. He didn't want his name on the lease. Tax problems, he said. After Jacqueline's overt hostility, Debra wasn't about to tell her kids that John would be moving in with her. She knew what they'd say that she was moving too fast, acting with her heart, repeating old mistakes. What her kids didn't see was how well he treated her day by day, better than her husband's head. How he brought her coffee in the morning and got her groceries. How he took her Tesla and Range Rover in for maintenance. Sometimes he even carried her purse for her. She was convinced that they'd understand how wonderful he was once they got to know him. And she knew that if any of her kids would give him a chance, it was her youngest, Tara. Tara Newell was 23 and is quiet and non-confrontational as her sister Jacqueline was assertive. If Jacqueline was the streetwise family rebel, Tara was the pleaser. The first word people used to describe her was sweet. Tara was into dogs and zombie shows, church and country music. She had Psalm 23 tattooed on her foot. She had her mom's blonde hair and soft manner. She was an avid hiker fit but physically small, with a gentleness that made her seem smaller still. She was living outside Vegas with her boyfriend. They'd met at a pet store where they'd both worked and had bonded over the walking dead. Tara was taking online dog grooming classes. For years Tara had watched men come in and out of her mom's life. She knew her mom liked to take care of people and tried to see the best in them. Sometimes she trusted too easily. So Tara felt protective of her mom. She liked Christians and some men with lions say they were a Christian, just to charm her. And they would go to church with her but they wouldn't be involved or have a personal connection with the Lord. Tara wondered why a guy who sounded as good as John would still be single. She wanted to have a look at him. A few days before Thanksgiving, Tara and her boyfriend Jimmy Grob drove out to Southern California for a few days. John was helping Deborah move into her new rental house on the water. At six foot two, John was physically imposing and he towered over Tara by a full foot. My first impression of this guy, we walked in and he just didn't really want to say hi to us. We tried to say hi to him. He gave us like a quick hi and we tried to help him move in stuff. She had her three dogs with her including her miniature Australian shepherd cash. We went into the house, we had the dogs there and stuff and they were roaming around. They were very anxious picking up probably from my energy from John and John's energy just he wasn't thrilled to meet us. I just thought maybe he might be shy or something else might be going on. Jimmy thought John's behavior was odd. He huffed and strained as he tried to move Deborah's queen mattress single handedly. He tried to throw the mattress a few feet in front of him, you know, wrestle it down the stairs and onto the car. It was just wasn't taking any help. Me and Tara and someone else were there and we're looking at each other like is this guy for real right now. He's just really overdoing it for no reason. It seemed like he was trying to impress us or Debbie or both, you know, just some kind of ego trip that he had. While Tara and Jimmy were staying in Deborah's spare bedroom, Deborah was trying to maintain the illusion that John wasn't really living there. He'd moved in after knowing her just five weeks. Here's Tara. About the second day we stayed there, I went into her bathroom to get some Q-tips and his stuff was just all there. And then I questioned her about it. I was like, why is this stuff here? He told me he wasn't moving in because he only known her for two months. And she couldn't shake a few questions. If he had houses in Newport Beach in Palm Springs, why had no one been allowed to see them? Why was he always driving mom's cars instead of his own car? Why did he seem to spend all day playing Call of Duty on the 70 inch plasma TV mom had bought for the house? If he was a doctor, why did he seem to own nothing but a few old clothes? I was just confused because to be honest, his story about having the three cars in the house, it didn't make a lot of sense to me. I called BS on that. Tara was looking through a closet when she found a box of John's stuff. There was a nursing certificate with his name on it. I don't know the medical field that much, so I just thought he had a nursing certificate on top of it. And I see theologist, Degree or whatever. And I said, oh, I found his nursing certificate to my mom, like, how do you think he's not moving in here? She told me he was getting his stuff, or she was getting his stuff framed for him. And that's why it was there. Tara wasn't satisfied with the explanation. And she did something Deborah was not accustomed to from her quietest, most docile daughter. For the first time in Tara's life, she lashed out and screamed at her mother. Why was she lying? Why didn't she just admit that he was living there? My mom came up before him, started questioning me. Why are you asking me this and stuff? And then he came up right behind her and just started screaming at me. I'm in the back bedroom, and I just hear a bunch of yelling, and all of a sudden Tara runs to the back bedroom, crying hysterically. And John isn't too far behind, burst into the room. And it just happens so quick, just like the flip of a switch. He was accusing me of wanting to take my mom away from him. [BLANK_AUDIO] also accusing me of snooping through his things, which I didn't, but because he said that, it made me question, what is he trying to hide? I screamed back because I didn't like things he was saying, and when someone's screaming at you, it's hard for you not to have a reaction out of them. - He was yelling that he shouldn't have been snooping through his stuff and that his kids would have been punished for this, being spanked and smacked. - He definitely was trying to take control. He was definitely sticking his chest out, trying to take a commanding position. You know, I had a broken hand at the time, so it was just kind of felt like I couldn't do anything in that moment except stand up for Tara, and he definitely didn't like that. I could tell that she was more scared than anything because he was very brooding male dominant personality. - Type before that we hadn't really seen that, we'd seen this, you know, kind of cool, suave, you know, Newport beach-looking guy. Debbie and John kicked us out that night, and it was just a very emotional, very scary, you know, then, especially on Thanksgiving, you'd expect that family would be brought closer together. I even remember telling Debbie as we were walking out, you know, I thought Thanksgiving was about family and not boyfriends, and I can tell that got to her because I think she was starting to realize who and what she was giving up just for this guy. - And we were not welcome there for Thanksgiving because he didn't want us there and he was living there. So that truth came out that he was living there. - Yeah, I yelled at her too because they told her, and like, how can you let this guy talk to me? I just said it way differently, I screamed at her. I said, how could you let this guy talk to me? Like, this is your home, I'm your daughter. I just met him, like, what's going on? And you're gonna let me leave over him? - So, that day was very hurtful. - John had explanations for her kid's hostility to him. They were jealous, they wanted her money, they were waiting for her to die so they could collect. And he had an explanation for why he had a nursing degree but called himself a doctor. He said he also had a PhD which earned him the right to the title and he had advanced training in anesthesiology. The day after the blowout, the family gathered for the big Thanksgiving party at the Balboa Island House. It was impossible to ignore the sudden fissures in the family, impossible to ignore Tara's absence. But others were willing to give John a chance, like Deborah's mother Arlene, she adored him. - We were standing at the window looking at the ocean and getting at the bay, I should say. And I was just kind of quizzing him and he was very nice, very nice, he was, but he never really dressed up. He was just kind of tacky looking. I thought for Thanksgiving Day, we always dressed up in our family and it's made a real special day and here he comes down and just looking pretty sloppy. But I thought, well, he worked hard and that's okay for him to do that. And we just kind of talked about little things and I told Debbie later I said, oh, I think he's a great guy, you know, he's just very nice and courteous and he's very kind to me. - When Jacqueline showed up, her cousin told her, John wanted to have a private word with her in the alley behind the house. - I was like, oh hell no, this is not happening right now. I have nothing to say to you. Anything that he wanted to say to me, it could have been said in the house in front of everybody. So I did not appreciate that at all and that prompted me to say some bad things about him. Like, I think he's the devil and he's just a loser piece of shit. That's what I told everybody and then I left the home. - To John, this was more evidence that Deborah's kids were spoiled and out of control. His words tugged at Deborah's anxiety that maybe they were. She thought she could use a professional's objective advice. She found a psychologist and the psychologist told her that her kids didn't have a right to run her life. She was 59. If this was the man she'd chosen, it was her business. - So then the psychologist starts working with me to have boundaries with the girls. So I was told that I have to give them rules a bit of that gonna come over. They have to be invited over, they can't just stay without calling first. That I have a right to hang up on them if they're gonna yell at me. Tell them that I deserve happiness just like you do. You're not gonna treat me that way or I'm gonna hang up on you. She was just teaching me to not allow them to have behavior like that towards me. And John loved it. That yeah, I agree with you. This is great. ♪ Where the devil's got your boyfriend ♪ ♪ He's got the one who said he'd always love you ♪ ♪ He never leave you ♪ ♪ Devil's got your boyfriend ♪ ♪ He's got the one and he'll never let go ♪ - Their house on the boardwalk had floor to ceiling windows that made you feel you were sitting atop new port harbor. It had a rooftop deck where they could watch the sailboats and the great yacht slide over the waves. - John liked to wear baggy sweats and sweatshirts with the logo of the University of Arizona where he had gotten an undergraduate degree. - Everything said Arizona on it. I thought, huh, we're 55 and we're wearing. - So basically thought he was a mess in terms of his wardrobe. - Yeah, and he had the baggiest pants. - She took him to buy a closet full of new clothes. They went to Brooks Brothers. - He would try things on night, say no. - Let's go back when he comes out and something. I like that. Let's get back. - She bought him some shoes, designer jeans, dress shirts, slacks, a black tweed sport coat, some form-fitting cashmere sweaters, deep burgundy, navy blue. - He looked better in darker tones and pastels. Guy with darker hair looks better with the true colors. Blues, he didn't look good in red. - More winter, winter, tones, jewel tones. - Like you got a white canvas with this, man? - Yeah, he said, "Dress me, I want to, I want to please you." So yeah, I dressed him. It was like my new doll. He said everything was stolen. When he was in Iraq, so. Every day now, he was begging her to marry him. She resisted. She loved him, but she knew her kids would be furious. In early December, she was driving to Vegas on business and he was tagging along. Why not drop by the courthouse while they were in town? - He was quite excited. I was a little more nervous and kept seeing I can't wait to be married to you and just, I'm so in love with you and so on. I felt that this was an opportunity to love again. - We can take John to be your wedding husband to live together in Bonn's marriage. - There's a video of the ceremony. They're standing in a dreary room against a wall with a plant-covered trellis. It has the look of a spur of the moment decision. - John is wearing jeans and an untouched shirt kind of sloppy. Debra is in stylish slacks. He's beaming down at her. He chuckles a little as he tries to get the ring on her finger. Afterward, they celebrated with lemon drop martinis. They had known each other less than two months. No one had been invited to the wedding. She didn't tell anyone. It was all a secret. She kept it a secret as the weeks passed and Christmas approached. The family planned to have their traditional Christmas get together at the home of Debra's eldest daughter, Nicole. Jacqueline refused to go. Tara was torn. She desperately wanted to spend the holiday with her little nieces and nephews, but she didn't want to be around John. Here's Tara again. - Me and my mom went to therapy to try to work things out and be able to have a Christmas together. And we worked out that John was not to be around the kids. So I just wanted to be involved in them. And then I got there hanging out for a while with them. And then he shows up with my mom. - John was still just her boyfriend as far as anyone knew. He bustled in with his arms full of presents for the children. Dozens of presents Debra had bought. - He went directly to the kids. And started opening presents with them, and I felt very offended by that, because that wasn't what we would discuss. As Deborah remembers it, he didn't do anything wrong. He brought in the presents and sat by himself at the dining room table, and the kids came up to him. Who could blame him for that? And he was good with kids. They brought out the playful side that she found so endearing. Everyone agrees what happened next. Tara began crying hysterically, making a scene. Tara, you just need to handle this. You don't have to hang out near him. Just, you know, go hang out in the other room. And she was fit to be tied. And she said, you promised that he wouldn't play with the kids. I go, what am I supposed to do? You're sitting right there. I go, it's sort of a tough situation. You just have to let it go. Tara's grandmother didn't understand why she was so upset. Here was Tara sitting in the family room by herself just crying. Her eyes out trembling and crying. Oh, if she was hysterical, she would not. She said, I just want to leave. And I was getting upset with her for doing that. You know, this is Tara World, all of our family meeting for Christmas. And she was just sitting there shaking and just crying. Tara knew what people were thinking. There she goes again, being over-emotional. She was the youngest in the family. Her dad had left the house when she was young. And she'd been looked after by nannies during the years her mom built her business. She knew some people still thought of her as the little girl who needed attention. It was sometimes a fight to be taken seriously. And she would question the intensity of her own feelings. She always kind of got upset about things. And so I sat down and talked to her about that. She said, I don't care. I don't like it. There's something about it. I don't like it. In early 2015, Tara was back home in Vegas with Jimmy and their dogs. Tara wasn't talking to her mom. She just hoped John would go away. She wasn't like her sister Jacqueline back in Orange County who had decided to take aggressive steps to make him go away. Jacqueline was angry or more suspicious by the day. More than once mom would call and ask if she'd borrowed cash from her wallet. Money was missing. Jacqueline told her to keep a better eye on it. And I would be like, no, you know, I didn't go out of my way to your office or anything like that to go take her borrow money from you. How many places did you bring your purse today? Not only could it be that loser you're dating, but it could be anybody. It's just she has a lot of little opportunities that people though you can't trust will take advantage of because she's so nice. She doesn't protect herself very well. She doesn't see the danger in a lot of situations. Other unsettling things were happening like the texts Jacqueline would receive from her mom's number. And I knew that the replies were not coming from my mom. It wouldn't even be the way that she would type out her text message. He would misspell his words or he would use like slang. And my mom, she's a pretty proper person when she's text messaging. You know, she uses capitals periods and such. Like on Christmas, I was talking to my mom and she said, turning phone off, marry Christmas. I was like, that's weird that my mom doesn't want to talk to me on Christmas. Jacqueline thought her mom had no idea who this man was. She decided to find out. I just had such a hatred and such a good intuition about John being an evil person that I felt like I needed more facts and more evidence because just me not liking him and thinking that he's an untrustworthy person isn't enough to tell my mom. It could look like, oh, people are just jealous that I'm happy or it could be taken into so many different contexts. She started watching John's movements. John would leave the Balboa Island house in the morning in his medical scrubs, driving Deborah's Tesla and come back in the afternoon. He said he wasn't affiliated with any particular hospital. That he traveled between clinics and ORs doing anesthesiology work as needed. So I asked my mom what he was doing all the time with her car and she says, I don't know. I don't know where he goes during the day. He puts on his scrubs and he goes to work. And I said, are you sure? Would it be okay if I put a tracker on your car one day to find out where he's going? She said, sure, put a tracker on my car if you want to put a tracker on my car. Deborah says she doesn't remember agreeing to this, but Jacqueline insists that she did. She showed me a picture she took when she attached the tracker. The photos time stamped 11.34pm on February 2nd, 2015. John had been in her mom's life about four months at this point. She says she bought two trackers online, actually, and put them in rotation. One would be on the car while she charged the other. She could monitor John's movements on her laptop or iPhone. She began studying the strange routes he took around Southern California, looking for patterns and clues. I just found that he would go to different doctor's offices and then he would go to a warehouse and he would usually go to a post office. It was usually fast food. He would always pull over and get shit food. And then he would go to the gas station. And then he would go to a few one or two doctor's offices, not in the area. They wouldn't be in Irvine. They would be sometimes Mission Viejo, or one doctor's office looked like it was in San Diego. And then the Tesla would come all the way back up the coast, sometimes like be at a charging portal. So I couldn't figure out what he was doing. I thought that maybe he was getting scripts for OxyContin or like drugs that. and probably selling them on the street or maybe keeping them in a storage facility. So I couldn't figure out all of that. But I was definitely trying my hardest. None of it amounted to proof. None of it was necessarily incompatible with his story. These were fragments of a puzzle. Jacqueline knew she had to be careful about what she told her mom. It could get back to John. She didn't want to be dismissed as a medler in her mom's business. Did you let anybody else know that you were tracking her? Did you tell her? I mean my boyfriend, but he thought I was crazy. He was like, you shouldn't get involved with this guy's scary. Like, it'll all pan out and your mom will find out. But I was like, no, no, you don't know my mom. She is so sweet she needs some help. There's something else you should know about the Newell family. A homicide more than three decades old that haunts the subtext of this story in ways large and small. In 1984, Deborah's older sister Cindy had been trying to escape a bad marriage. She told people her husband was controlling and possessive. One afternoon, he pressed a handgun against the back of her neck and killed her with a single bullet. It was the reason Deborah hated guns. It was the reason she refused to have a gun around, long after people began warning her that she needed one. On the next episode of Dirty John. Here it is, right here I have a picture. He had $500 plus $475 plus $150 plus $3,414. A six-seater. He was trying to get different gun parts and he was adding that. Dirty John is reported and written by me or host Christopher Gofford for the Los Angeles Times. Karen Lowe is our producer and editor. Audio designed by Jeff Schmidt. Executive producers Jeffrey Glazer and her Nan Lopez for Wundery. Over the course of this production, our LA Times team has included. Shelby grad, Steve Cloud, Robert Meeks and Devon Maharaj. You can read the story at LA Times.com. This is a special version of Dirty John. Remixed and remastered by Salt Audio.