Ep 3: Filthy

A listener note. This story contains adult content and language. In March 2015, Debra Newell realized she had married a stranger, a man whose past was a series of fabrications. John had seemed desperately in love with her. She hadn't listened when her family told her his stories didn't add up. But now she had proof, police reports, restraining orders from multiple women, jail, and prison records. He was a serial con man, a master of intimidation, and according to the records, he had a nickname that went way back. Dirty John. Debra hastily cleared her things out of the Balboa Island House they shared. She had to walk away from $50,000 she'd paid on the year-long lease. She began living out of hotels hiding. John was stuck in the hospital after back surgery with an intestinal blockage. He began texting her accusations that she could not make sense of, that she had hit him, that she'd stolen $10,000 from his wallet. He threatened to call the police on her. He had become unrecognizable to her. He had seduced her with lavish, unending compliments about her beauty. Now he denigrated her looks, mocked her age, ridiculed her attempts to stay attractive at 59. Five marriages in a family that hates you. You want to see how this plays out? I sure do. You want to see how bad this turns out? You hit me. You threatened me, she replied. Enough. You're evil. This is a special version to the marriage of nothing. Remixed and remastered by salt-dots business. His motive was coming into focus. Divide up the stuff and I never see you again, he wrote, your choice. He said people he knew in the mafia had contacted him. Long lost relatives. He warned her. Be careful here. From the Los Angeles Times and Wondery, this is Dirty John. I'm Christopher Gofford. Part Three. Filthy. The mob always had a presence in our home. My grandfather was a holder, basically what he was. My dad explained to me as he held money. I remember they would roll the $100 bills up and they shove them into the shower curtain. It was so funny. I was 12 years old at the time. I'm like, who puts money in the shower curtain rod? I'm talking to Donna Mehan Stewart, one of John Mehan's sisters. They grew up in San Jose, California where their Brooklyn raised dad ran the diamond wheel casino. People came to play poker, lowball, and pan. The kids cleaned the floors and the ash trays from money. Donna says that what John and his brother absorbed from his father and the men around him was a set of illicit skills like how to file bogus lawsuits and pull off insurance scams. This is how you go about doing things dishonestly and cheating. They taught those boys that. Both my brothers were that way. They knew how to work systems. They knew how to lie. I'm trying to trace John Mehan's path from his childhood in San Jose to the day he'd lied and charmed his way into Debra Nuel's life. I'm trying to find out what he wanted to hide. Growing up, a John was held. Maybe it was just a sibling rivalry, but there was definitely issues with John. This is John Mehan's other sister, Karen Duvellae. She went to prospect high school with him in Saratoga, California in the mid-1970s. He was very popular because of his sports and he was very good-looking so he was a tick magnet. Had a lot of women. He had a lot of charisma. He learned at a very young age how to work it. From his far back as I couldn't remember, he was a straight-A student. I think John thought he was smarter than everybody else because everybody told him he was, but he had no common sense. He wasn't groomed to take that and be successful and to help other people and be grateful that he were blessed with these gifts. Instead, he was taught to manipulate at a very early age and that's the fault of my parents, especially my dad because that's all my dad knew. She says the family was related to Albert Anastasia, the East Coast mobster who ran Murder Inc. This is a name you know if you have even a passing interest in mafia history. Reporters called him the Mad Hatter and the Lord High Executioner and he was famous for eliminating potential witnesses. He died in 1957, riddled with bullets in a New York City barbershop. You might have seen the photo. John and Karen's grandmother did have the surname Anastasia, but I couldn't find a conclusive genealogical link to the mob family. What matters is that John grew up with this as the family lore and in the way others boasted about four bears who were on the Mayflower, John bragged about this supposed mafia pedigree. You know, if anybody did anything to John and my dad would tell us you go out there with a stick and take care of it. It's the Brooklyn mentality of you fight, you get even. If you want to get back at somebody, you don't get back at them, you get back at their family. That's where that mafia mentality came in. John was really influenced by my dad and that's what John locked on to was the glamour of a mafia family and it's just, you know, I look at it now and it's still so weird. The sisters say their mother had an affair with a casino worker and their parents divorced. At the time, Karen was a high school freshman and John was a sophomore and that's when she says John started to go really bad. It was a very bitter, it was a very angry divorce. You know, we were the All-American family two boys and two girls and literally one night I came home and it was gone. It was blown up and he just hated my mom for destroying the family and I think that is the beginning, you know, of John. You know, I think, you know, up until that point, he probably could have gotten some help with my parents would have stayed together long enough but, you know, he got caught in the wheel of dysfunction. You know, my other brother was gone. My sister was married and then there was me. So it was John and I that got kind of dumped. She says John hated his father too. His father encouraged him to join the Air Force. She says the Air Force offered John a free ride through medical school but he didn't want to give up the years of his life. So here he was, graduated high school, living here and there working in hospitals as orderlies, you know, and wheeling and dealing selling cocaine now. She says her brother was obsessed with the James Bond movies, Sean Connery's Bond, Swav and Beyond the Law with a license to kill. That was the image of himself John favored. He had a customized license plate that said M-E-E 007. He actually went to Santa Clara University for a while but got in trouble all the time. It was just easier for John to just be 007 and to, you know, deal with women and money and, you know, cars and just hustle. He was a hustler and whatever he had to do to get money, he would do. He was in the Taco Bell and he picked up a piece of glass and put it in the Taco and bid into it. The company that my dad worked for was one he paid the claim. So I don't know if they were both in casutes on that or what but I know my dad was hurting for money back then. She tells me another story about a time John jumped in front of a Corvette and accused the driver of hitting him. It busted like pretty good but, you know, my dad was behind that one and got John a grip of cash, the settlement. The sisters told me that John got busted for drug dealing that he testified against a friend in exchange for leniency and that as part of the deal he had to leave California. John got a bachelor of arts degree from the University of Arizona in 1988 and that fall he enrolled in law school at the University of Dayton. I found a man named Kevin Haran who happens to be an FBI agent now but in the fall of 1988 they were law school classmates. I don't know if it was an heir about him or he was closer to the way he looked or whatever, he just kind of had a look of like like a like a California guy. I don't know why that stuck out with me but it did but. He says John didn't make a strong impression as a student. He made his name in other ways. I was living with some some buddies right there on campus and they they were the ones that really got to know him and and I think it pretty much coined the phrase that came to know of him and it called him dirty John and again that had to do with I think just him being kind of having a little reputation as a lady's man or something like that. Along with dirty John they called him filthy John. on. Sometimes they just called him filthy. In the fall of 1989, Kevin moved into a house John was renovating out by the cemetery. "What's he secretive about his past? You know, either I never asked or you just never talked about it or whatever, but you know, I guess it speaks volumes of the fact that I don't know anything about it. I hardly know anything at all about him. And here I live with him. I want to say it probably was that semester. I was noticing he was bringing girls back to the house." One of them was Tanya Cells, a pretty young nurse. She seemed so nice and innocent that Kevin had to wonder how John had won her. "Here's an intelligent, articulate, decent-looking guy at the University of Dayton Law School who, you know, seems to have his life together." This is Tanya, who now lives outside of Atlanta. "He would tell you story after story about, you know, that he just comes from this family that's just not him and, you know, that he was able to escape them because other people stepped up into his life and helped, you know, make him a great person." The last semester of the second year of law school, John, disappeared. "Completely vanishes. And no one, I was talking everybody and everyone's like, what happened to Dirty John and everyone's like, he just didn't come back." They got an answer when his report card arrived at the house. "I remember, you know, kind of peering through the envelope, you know, the light peering through it that, you know, I remember seeing a bunch of Ds and Fs. And so I knew, I mean, we knew that he was done, that he had basically flunked out." Kevin says John's mail kept arriving at the house, boxes of CDs, credit cards, and fictitious names. It was clear that John had been running scams. Kevin says John also took money from an older woman for a roofing job he never completed. I found another law school classmate of John's, Lance Gildner, who says John seemed proud of the credit card swindle, not sheepish about it at all. Lance thought, this guy is committing felonies. "So the name Dirty John, it started with his womanizing, but it seemed to grow and evolve and encompass a bunch of other things that he did like the housing scams, right?" It probably was a conglomeration of many different things that people knew about him, that he was basically this strange lone wolf guy that, you know, did all kinds of scandalous type things, and it wasn't just with women. I knew this stuff about Tanya that he was cheating on her, you know, that people called him filthy and dirty John, and he was ripping off little old ladies and stuff like that. John was still in the area, and his latest deception wasn't once more audacious and more intimate. He was getting married to the pretty nurse. It's November 10, 1990 at St. Joseph Catholic Church in Dayton, Ohio. John Mehan failed law student is about to marry Tanya Cells, who is about to graduate from anesthesia school. This is the bride's family church where she was baptized and her dad was an altar boy. The officiating priest is her uncle. "Heavenly Father, here are prayers for Tanya and John." The bride is 25. The groom is 31, though she thinks he's 26. He's told her he was born in 1964. She also thinks his name is Jonathan. Although his name is just John, he shaved five years off his age and added five letters to his name. "Did it strike you a strange that he didn't bring anybody to his wedding from his family?" "Okay, well, I mean, I can explain that. He would, he told me that, you know, his dad was an alcoholic and his mom was addicted to pain killers and that they were embarrassing and that they didn't get along and that the wedding day was about him and he didn't want them ruining it." John fidgets and smirks in his tux through the ceremony. He looks like a boy in a grown-ups costume enjoying some fantastic private joke. John wears that glib devil-make-air expression as his friend Phil gives the toast. "You all don't know John, real well. I've known him for about three or four years now." And if you talk to any of his friends, you'll just, as far as the reaction to his wedding, you'll just find out if there's a really shocking battle. And the reason why, failed yourself out of me. No, in the reason why, I think one of the reasons John and I dated off very well is that we're a little bit skeptical. You know, to see John clearly mean in love is an inspiring thing for me. And I'm sure for his friends too. And so John, I wish you the best thing you may let happily ever have. Thank you. Phil might be describing a guy he's just met for all we learn about him. I track down another of John's groomsmen and he tells me how strange the wedding felt. A Don Draper wedding, he calls it. A reference to the John Ham character on Mad Men who is living under a fake name with a fabricated past. John, how do you feel this this evening? I'm fine. I feel good, thanks Phil. And I appreciate the toast. He did a damn good job and I appreciate everybody being here except Lance. Thank you. And so what do you got planned for the rest of the evening? A rest of the evening drink, for quality, fun, plundering, pillages, near and far. Sounds good. There's a blank space where the story should be and the stories his buddies do have aren't repeatable. Let me start by saying this. John, me and Nick name is filthy. John, me. Yeah. But why? Yes, why? Friends, why remember when you first read it? That's the name of this. Why? Yes, I do, but it cannot be divulged on care. I don't know. After the wedding watching this video, Tonya is surprised to learn that this is the nickname of the man to whom she has just pledged her life. Tonya asks him about it and he laughs it off. It's nothing. 10 years into the marriage, Tonya made a phone call. He'd always forbidden. She, you know, clearly was shocked to be getting the phone call, but she also said in that phone call, I always knew you would call me. You know, I always knew that this would happen. Tonya is talking about how she tracked down John's mother Dolores in July 2000. Tonya had helped put John through nursing school at Wright State and Dayton and then through the Middle Tennessee School of Anesthesia and they had two daughters. But now he was leaving her. He'd been working at Good Samaritan Hospital in Dayton and traveling between hospitals and nearby states. He was not a doctor, but a nurse with specialized training and anesthesiology, a nurse anesthetist. And he'd been having an affair with a doctor in Michigan, though Tonya didn't know the details at this point. So Tonya called his mom. She reads to me from her journal. I told her who I was and that John had left me asking me for a divorce. I told her that he had always forbidden me to talk to anyone in the family, but that now that I had nothing to lose, I wanted to know if she would talk to me and help me answer some questions that I had about John. She proceeded to tell me the following and I just make like bullet points. John's real birthday is $2.359. So that's the day I get confirmation of that. His birthday is John Michael Meahan, not Jonathan Michael Meahan. He had gotten arrested in California late 70s. I think it was actually early 80s for selling cocaine and turned in his best friend as a plea bargain. His mom asked me if he was still using drugs. I was like what? She called his sister Donna who told her some of the same things and his sister Karen. We talked for two hours. In quotes, I wrote, "We'll tell women anything to get them to like him." She said he was a genius, got straight A's. Tonya searched the house they shared in Springboro, Ohio and found a hidden box containing the powerful surgical anesthetics of her said and fentanyl. As a nurse in this, the test herself, she knew there was no legitimate reason for him to bring these drugs home. At some point, he'd become hooked on the drugs he was supposed to be giving patients. She told police who started an investigation. This was September 2000. Depending on the state and the hospital you're in, when you go in for surgery, whether it's knee surgery or open heart surgery, your life is often in the hands of the nurse anesthetist on duty. They put in the breathing tube and they monitor your vital signs while you're under and they control the amount of pain medication you're getting. An MD, that's the anesthesiologist, may or may not be supervising them. Anastasia, if you're a good anesthetist, you've got some experience. We always say the job is 99% boredom, because everything's going right. You're doing things right, everything's right, and 1% sheer terror, because when things go bad they go really bad. And if you don't have all your faculties, how are you going to handle something when it goes bad? How easy is it in that position like John was to steal the drugs? Extraordinarily easy. And here's the deal, even though it's easy, anybody can do it. Once you start using, it's not so easy anymore, because you need more and more and more and more and you get sloppy and sloppy and sloppy. At worst anasthetists who are stealing drugs and injecting them can miss something vital and kill a patient. More commonly they leave a patient in excruciating pain. It looks like the anesthetists gave the right amount of medicine and the patient wakes up and you're hurting and terrible pain and their blood pressure's high and their heart rate is high and then that's usually how the anesthetists start getting looked at. Do they have a series of patients who are coming out that seem like they should be comfortable and they're not? I supported him when he went to nursing school. I supported him while he went to anastasia school and this is what he put a black mark on my profession, but my profession and I helped him get there. I had guilt about that and so that guilt about that having him not hurt patients and protecting my children were my driving force for going to the police and doing what I did to make sure that he was stopped. John's career was unraveling. He lost his job at the Ohio and Michigan hospitals where he had been working and tried to start over in Warsaw, Indiana. Tanya's friends notified the nursing boards there. I don't know any of those details, but he was asked to get treatment, but he accused me of being the one to call the Indiana board to report him, which I had not. He was threatening me with these phone calls, I guess he thought that I was ruining his life. It's his career. Police told her to get the threats on tape. She plays them for me. Let me ask you a question. Can you answer me a question, honestly? That's not the most honest person that you know. Who called the Indiana board in nursing? Why am I going to tell you that? Don't, I'm not going to tell you who called. Why would I do that? You're the most vindictive person I know. I don't intentionally. Any of the things you've done haven't hurt me and you haven't done it properly to hurt me. What were you doing at Ford for kick? No. Did I protect my children? No, that's the whole different story. I spoke to my mom at Great Lancashire and I talked to you again. I don't, John. Why do you think that bothers me? Because we had a good long talk on all this stuff you've been telling you. I've been a special liar. The fact that me getting any half of your retirement isn't bothering you. You spoke to her at Great Lancashire and that's how it bothered me. I think it's wrong. But if you can sleep taking it and you can, you can live with that then go ahead. That's what I told you from the very beginning. Well, evidently. You know that it's wrong. Evidence. No, it's not wrong. In your heart, you know that it's wrong. No, I know that. And that's why, and that's why, from the very beginning, you were going to let me keep it. Yeah, that's right. And you just done things the way I asked you to, but no, you wanted to cause all this trouble. I'm not trying to cause trouble. I'm trying to find out the truth so I can protect my children. Your family. The children are the last. Your family? Yes. They are. Your family told me some very horrible things about the person that you really are. Oh, my mom now and let me, how honest and up front, these horrible things were. None of them were true. None of you. So your mom, your sisters. My mom. They all told me. Go ahead and call her now. Well, you know, if you threaten her and made her feel bad for telling me, then, of course, you're going to change. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. With the acrimony, they arrange for John to pick up the kids for a visitation. What compounds the awkwardness is that he's been living at Good Samaritan Hospital. I'll pick him up at 10 o'clock. Okay. I have a question. I mean, what about Abby's nap? She wouldn't bring her back after a couple hours and then just go out with him so that she can sleep. I mean, you're not going to have any place to lay her down. Yeah. I'll talk to her when I'm taking her up from my house. My house. I don't work Sundays anymore. Okay. I'm going to pick him up at 10 o'clock. Okay. And, you know, don't forget like a diaper bag instead. Okay. All right. Thanks. John's anger escalates and so do his threats. Tonya plays me more calls. It's about one or two. Oh, you just give rid of my laughter. I can't stand you using it. It's one other thing. I have it on excellent. Excellent. Excellent. Of course, you're the ones who could make it the phone call. This is the start. Sleep well. Hello. What is your problem now? What is my problem? Why are you calling me and leaving me these messages? I don't care what your excellent authority is. I didn't make the phone call. I know who did. What? What happened to the man? What happened to the big smile on my face? Hi, John. Because trust me, just trust me. Trust you, Wes. Trust me. It doesn't make any sense. It don't happen. You don't understand. But the mafia is coming after me again. Or what? What had happened, Tonya? You see it in your eye. You remember? It's gonna be okay. Remember Wes, John. Keep that in mind. It was me. Keep what in mind, John. Tonya, you enjoy your time left on this earth, okay? Because that's what it's gonna come down to. And who's gonna take care of your children? And if I'm wrong, John, I'll bite you a fucking Cadillac, okay? What do you mean if you're wrong? What does that mean? If I'm wrong, I'll bite you a Cadillac. If you're wrong about Wes. Keep that in mind. If you're wrong about Wes, you're not making any sense. Listen to me, John. I'm listening. I got a big smile on my face. You know why? Because it's gonna get done. What's gonna get done? Yeah, I'm making any sense. Well, you don't have to, you will understand when the time comes. And that's all I gotta say. Yeah, and who's gonna take care of your children? I'll take care. Right. Because I'll be in trouble. You're gonna have a big fucking group reliever with a 22-year-old when it happens. That's right. That's right. That's right. I swear to fucking get out. And there's a one thing that happens on this earth. It's a few. She thinks her crime, as he saw it, was in calling his mom. It was unforgivable to pierce the veil of his past. I mean, that's a big deal to John Mehan. He don't want people sharing information about him behind his back. Because that ruins everything. That ruins his stories. Because none of it's true. None of what he says is true. I gotta say, one thing that struck me about those recorded calls, though, was, like, he's making these threats to you. And at one point, you're like, come pick up the kid. And don't forget the diapers. Like, you're even, even as you're, even as you're terrified of this guy, you have to, you have to do the child hand-off. That's completely, now it's kind of, it's kind of insane. Exactly. And if you don't turn your kids over, guess who goes to jail? You. Not them. The reason for even bringing up those things at the end was he was living in his call room at Good Sam. He didn't have a house. He didn't have a place to visit with the children. He didn't have a place to put a child down for a nap. She says he never hurt her. She says he got a day of anger management classes for the threats. And that's it. And police couldn't seem to make a case on the drugs he'd taken. I didn't really know what he was necessarily capable of doing. But I was scared out of my skin. I don't know if there's the whole thing made me nervous or it's just, you know, when you've, when you've been living a life for 12 years and, and one, one day or over the course of a few months, you find out that it's all been made up and, and wasn't true. I mean, it really rocks the chorus. Who you are and what you believe is true and honest and, you know, good in the world. And that's, that's something that's hard to explain to someone who maybe has never, you know, had to experience that. You can be smart in the brain and not smart of the heart. Or not have, you know, a lot of life experiences or street smarts to, you know, come across. You know, even characters who are 10% of what John was. You know, people who lie to you or cheat you or feel from you. I'd had a pretty easy, normal, you know, upbringing childhood and, and everything. And this was, this was my first experience with evil. Take the one you love, and you're my son. I really saw your name on. The incident was reported to a police agency on September 25th. 2000, okay? And we reported to the police agency when the wife had discovered the drugs. Dennis Luchin is a retired investigator on the drug task force of the Warren County Sheriff's Office in Ohio. Of all the criminals, Luchin studied, hunted and arrested during a four-decade career in law enforcement. John Mehan would come to occupy a singular place in his memory. He came to see him as a devil-tongued flimflam artist with a cold intelligence of a spy, a void where his soul should have been, and a desperate drug addiction that he would marshal his dark talents to feed. Luchin took over the case in January 2002. He says he found emails showing John had sent drugs to his brother, Daniel, who died of an overdose in Santa Cruz County in September 2000 at age 44. He couldn't make a case on that one, but he did manage to charge him with theft of surgical drugs. And what about this case fascinates you so much to the point where you've paid attention to developments in this guy's life long after your involvement in the Ohio case ended? Well, the thing is, it was so intriguing at the time when I began conducting it, and as Luch would have it, I got some breaks early on that I was able to confront John and charge him with one count of theft, and finding out about the emails to his brother where he was shipping drugs to him, just the most devious person I've ever met. And so we ran the thing on for a career cop. Yeah, it is, after a total of 40 years, I could say, he's the most devious, dangerous, deceptive person, and there are so many things that John has probably done that we will never, ever, ever have. It's just the fact that in talking with so many individuals, like I say, telling me about him having a gun in the operating room, having him withdraw down the walls, scoot down, and then come back up, and never see it administered to a patient as I read in one of the reports. Mehan pleaded guilty in 2002 to felony drug theft, and Luke ensought to it that he had his licensing inked in Ohio, Kentucky, Indiana, and Michigan. Mehan did not show up for his sentencing, and in June he was found at a comfort inn in Saginaw, Michigan. He was in a semi-conscious state surrounded by syringes and drug vials from another stolen anesthesia kit. They loaded him into the ambulance, and route to the hospital. He grabbed the drugs and jumped out of the ambulance. He ran into a JC Penny, climbed an elevator shaft, and scuffled with a cop who was trying to catch him. John spent 17 months in prison, and Luke and thought maybe the case was closed. But as the years passed, he would hear of a seemingly endless list of women he had scammed there was trying to scam. When John got out of prison in 2004, his sister Donna tried hard to help him. She says he was ordered into a drug treatment program in Ohio. She covered his overdue child support. She got his car out of impound and his house out of foreclosure, landscaped it, got it move in ready for him. This is on Lakewood Drive in Hamilton, Ohio. She gave him a credit card, too. His divorce was final, and he was going to learn to be a father again with supervised visitation of his kids. I mean, there was nothing he would have had to do except to be a better person and go get help, and he had medical insurance, and dental insurance, and to take this time, and if you're really sorry for everything you did and you want to be a better person, there would have been no excuse, money, nothing. She was heading to the door about to catch her flight home to California when she looked over her shoulder. I said, "I'm leaving now," and his back was towards me, and his laptop computer was open, and I saw match.com, and I knew, "Oh my God, is this what we're going to do your first night home? Is this it?" Match? Really? Ugh. What signal did that send you? Women. Women. What was important to him was getting a date right away. Women. How did you even impress him in that? I didn't know about match.com. And the reason I mention that is because that was his vehicle for picking all of his victims, these dating sites. John's neighbors told her they saw a parade of women coming through the house. He was racking up credit card debt and didn't seem to be looking for work. He moved to California where Donna gave him a spare bedroom at her new port beach house and a job at a real estate business. So John needed to re-enter the workforce, and he did that half hazard late. It was a disaster. He would never show up. I don't know what he was doing, he was going to the doctors all the time, he was going to hospitals, he says is back, I need to get my back fixed, my back hurts. And this is 2005 now. We had a difficult time with him because he was constantly seeking drugs. And I told him, I said, "John, if you're doing this for drugs, I'm not going through this again. I can't. This is it." John found out that her insurance premiums had skyrocketed because of John's claims. In 2007, she decided to move to the Palm Springs area with her husband. He wasn't going to get better. He was going to do to me what he was doing to everybody else and just suck them dry. John followed her to the desert and she says he stayed with her for about eight months. She says he rented a house and opened up shop doing RV repairs. I stopped helping him, he became pretty self-supportive, but I couldn't figure out where all money was coming from. "Wow, you're doing really good, oh my gosh," Molly was stealing it. She says he bragged about pulling off a swindle with a Ford Explorer she gave him. He waited outside a bar and slammed on his brakes so a drunk would rear end him. He collected a personal injury settlement then filed a bar complaint against the lawyer who'd represented him to avoid paying his bill. Apart from dating sites, John met women at the hospitals he had checked himself into. Donna remembers an ER nurse calling her. "She says I need to talk to you, it's about your brother and I'm sure you know about us and we've been dating and it was pretty serious and I'm just so confused I don't understand and there's silence on my end and she says to me you have no idea who I am do you and I said no." He got another call from a Riverside County woman who sued him for taking $50,000 of her money. "I drove to the Riverside Courthouse, I pulled the case, I copied the complaint, I read it, I went over to his little office he had on Peret and I remember I threw it at him and I said, "John, this is it, this is the end. You're off our medical, I don't want anything to do with you and you've got to give this girl her money back." "No, no, you don't understand, it was a business deal, it was a business venture and I said nothing you do is a business venture. I was hysterical, I was really upset, I was crying, I just felt crushed, I felt sick, sick, sick, sick." Still she allowed John to put his trailer on her RV lot in Cathedral City but months went by and he refused to leave. He began waging a legal battle against his sister, the person who had tried hardest to help him. He claimed the lot was his, he complained to the DA, he wrote to the Department of Real Estate. "I was trying to take what I had given him to use for his own benefit, I was crushed, my husband was crushed, he was pissed, so I thought, "Okay, alright, I'm a good girl, I'll fight, it's hard as I fought for you, I'm going to fight you," and I did. I got a restraining order, my daughter had to testify, I had a hearing, my aunt had to show up. "John team straight out and threaten to kill you?" "Yes, in an email to my daughter." She managed to get a court judgment against him, for money she had lent him and he had promised to pay back. "I knew I'd never see that money but I did it to protect myself because John left me alone after that, it was never the money, it was leave me alone, it was all I had to me that was stronger than a gun." best glistening. glimpse into how John Meehan perceived himself, the best account of how he framed a life littered with self-made disasters, might be in a letter he wrote in June 2012, asking a friend to help him get his nursing license back. In it, John cast himself as the brave, often betrayed, long-suffering victim in his life's twisted narrative. He was the victim of his parents, who used him as a pawn in their divorce and treated him coldly. Of his ex-wife, who called police on him and kept his daughters from him, of his mother, who fed damaging information about him to his ex, of false accusations that he supplied prescription drugs that killed his brother, of a herniated disc, which necessitated drugs to escape his pain and depression. To be honest with you, I was abusing this stuff not to get high or feel good, but because it allowed me to sleep, he wrote, "My job, putting people to sleep." He explained that he checked into the Sagina Hotel room with the intention of killing himself, and he'd taken a shower with the aim of leaving, quote, "a good looking body." He injected himself with versed and fentanyl, he said, but didn't get the fatal dose right. This is likely a lie, the man who put people to sleep for a living would have known the right dose. In state prison, his suffering continued. You don't even want to know what being in a Michigan prison is like, he wrote. When guy came at me thinking I was going to be easy, they found him in the shower the next morning. I did what I had to do, several times. And they finally figured out I was not worth the effort of the trip to the ER. I learned fast, and always had that ability to turn it on when needed. The letter had the trappings of a confession, but at heart it was a long snarl of self-justification. It was stingy with insights into what created its author. Donas says John was bitterly preoccupied by the past. He once told her about visiting their hometown in 2012, the old neighborhoods, and the cemetery where their mother, who died a few years earlier, was buried. And I said, did you go to mom's grave? And he said, yes, I sure did, and I pissed on it, and it made me feel really good. And I said, John, that's sick. Any laugh. That's the way he did. So that's a pretty intense level of hatred that he had for her. He did. He did, but didn't you do that with every woman in his life? Basically, you know, if you look at the behavior, because I only know the ones I know. I don't know the ones I don't know. She says John hated his father intensely too, and that when their father was dying of cancer in Southern California in 1997 in a hospice bed, John came to visit. Donas says her dad had a little time left, and she'd been keeping watch by his bedside. But when John arrived, and she left to take a shower, John was left alone with him briefly. And when she returned, her dad was dead. She has never been able to shake the feeling that John had something to do with it. Is there any way to prove that he injected your father as he was dying with morphine or some kind of opioid that would have killed him? Your father was cremated, so there's no way to know. No, and he took the ashes, and he said that he'd spread them out over the bridge, but none of us ever knew. And so you literally just left your father's bedside for five minutes, and John was alone with him for five minutes, and that was it. Yep, yep. And my sister's the one that talked to the doctor, she called the oncologist. And gave him too much morphine or something. My brother wanted any money that was due to him, and my dad's death was his illness was taking any longer than it was supposed to be. Just be over it. I want to go. I don't want to be here. Yeah, hated my dad. Back in Orange County, California in March 2015, the woman who had been married to John Mehan for four months did not know all of this. Debra Nuel hadn't talked to John's law school classmates or his ex-wife or the Ohio cop. In order to get the history of his life and crimes from his sisters, but she did have a stack of documents outlining a history of arrests and restraining orders and swindles more than enough to scare her. His threatening texts amplified her fear. But as he lay at Hogue Hospital in Newport Beach, his tone became conciliatory, repentant. He begged her to see him. He wanted to explain everything. I still love you and simply can't live without you. I don't want this. I want us without anyone else, John wrote. I am flawed, but I'm not so easy to give up on you. When I met you, it was simply you. I helped you to get back on your feet and stood up for you. I love you and need you. Please. On the next episode of Dirty John, he found me anyway possible. He would text me. I'd block him from his cell phone. I'd blocked him from my aunt's cell phone. I'd blocked my aunt's cell phone. I'd blocked him from email. I'd blocked my aunt's email. I'd blocked Facebook. I got off Facebook. I got Instagram. I got every social media possible. He still found me. 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 Hernan Lopez for Wondering. During 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.