Ep 5: Escape

a listener note. This story contains adult content and language. John Jolo can't be sure how John Mehan found him and he was apprehensive about taking him on as a client. His paralegal had done some research on Mehan and was so spooked that she told her boss she wanted no part of the case. Mehan had done prison time for stalking and terrorizing a Laguna Beach woman and now on April 8, 2015, Mehan was sitting in Jolo's Santa Ana Law office. Mehan wanted Jolo to sue the Laguna Beach woman, claiming she'd cheated him of a quarter million dollars. Mehan 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 Mehan's plan to win back the trust of his wife, Deborah, who was sitting beside him. He wanted Jolo to prove he'd been the victim in case after case, not at all the dangerous swindler portrayed in mountains of court papers. Jolo told me that he planned to turn down the case, even though he would be getting a $25,000 retainer. But meeting Deborah, listening to Deborah, gave him second thoughts. She seemed naive and helplessly in her husband's grip. 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 Mehan was scary. From the Los Angeles Times and Wondery, this is Dirty John. I'm Christopher Gofford. Part 5. Escape. So I've got this lady that's sitting there who just strikes me as wonderful woman. And this scary, scary guy that I could hardly look at him sometimes, because it just feels to me like the anger that he is holding inside is so intense. Deborah 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. 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, well, maybe it would ease your family's mind if we did a post-nup. Jallo began explaining how a post-nup would work. It would effectively cut John out of Deborah's fortune if they split up. 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. He didn't say anything like, "We don't need your goddamn stinking post-nup." I think 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 his 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 as coal. It's the kind of thing where you look at somebody and you swear. You swear you can hear. You can literally hear the seething cauldron that's inside their brain. And 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. John's response has became shorter, more clipped. But still, he didn't yell at him or threaten him. This was someone I wanted to get out of the room with. I just felt like, you know, this guy, his forehead is 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. Nothing that would result in a complaint to the police department that would ever stick to that. You can't file, you can't file a charge in a guy for that. 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, "Oh, no, you're fired. You're not doing this right, you're fired." After they left his office, Jollow says he told his assistant that he thought Deborah's life was in danger. That someone needed to protect her. "This lady, I don't want to be melodramatic, but this lady is, 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 it." Jollow got to work on the post-nupt. He sent financial disclosure papers to John to fill out, but John dragged his feet in returning them. Jollow also told him he'd studied the material he'd given him on the woman he claimed to defrauded him, including a big stack of emails, and couldn't see the makings of a lawsuit. He needed a lot more information. He went ballistic on the phone, and he started screaming and yelling, "You should have had that lawsuit filed by now. You should have 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. 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 Deborah to see, does that apply on the post-nupt?" He said, "You are fired. You don't work for me. You don't work for Deborah. You don't, we want nothing to do with you." Jollow 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. "She said, "No, fuck you won't. You are going to send me every god damn dollar back that type of thing." And he started screaming at me that I'm a fraud, that I'm a crook. I mean, he is just getting nasty beyond belief. I'm going, I'm calling. I have a check here for $25,000 tomorrow morning, or I call the bar association. And so I thought to myself, there in no way I'm giving this guy $25,000 back. I am going to figure out my time, and I am going to bill it, and I am going to give him the remainder back. And I don't care whether he goes to the bar association or not. I mean, I've got a retainer from him. I 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 attorneys, district attorneys 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, you know. It was around this time that Jollos started bringing a shotgun to work. I've got Bill. 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, you know, this is one guy I don't want to have out there thinking, you know, screaming and yelling that I cheated him. This is a guy who would do anything. So I agree to give him his money back. I should add that later, a couple of weeks later, he filed a complaint with the bar, even after he cashed a check. Absolutely. Absolutely. Jala wasn't able to get through John to reach Deborah, and he wanted to know her position on all this. All he could think to do is drive to her business in Irvine, Ambrosia interior design and leave her a note. I said, I'd like to leave this for Miss Newell. This is a personal matter if you please deliver it. And all I said was, Deborah, 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 can curve with it. That's all I asked. I didn't get a call from her. I got a call from him. Don't you, if you ever, ever contact my wife again, and this may be the one time where he did threaten me. You know, if you, you ever contact my wife again, you are going to regret it. You know, so I figured, no, no, no, I was a dumb thing. No, I pissed the sky off even more. 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, you know, where you need some and wholly and it changes your life. This is sort of the inverse of that. Like you looked into a void. That, 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. Deborah 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. He used to tell me that he would rather that he could date so many wealthier women than me that he would much rather be with me with no money living under bridge than with the wealthiest woman living in a mansion without love. Deborah 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. Deborah's kids thought it was flat out crazy that she had returned to John. And me and one of 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 Jacqueline. I was very angry that she had gotten back together with him because I just felt like of all of the evidence that we had. How could you believe, you know, how could anything, how could any story prove that this stuff is okay to be here? All of this evidence about John? John's hatred for Deborah's family did not seem to extend to Tara, Deborah's youngest and quietest daughter, even though she had clashed with him. He found her the least troublesome of his step-daughters. Tara 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. Jacqueline was upset with Tara for seeming to give him a chance. Tara's a lot more like my mom, where she wants to believe the best in people, rather than see any of the bad things. And 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. In the summer of 2015, Tara was living in Vegas with her boyfriend, Jimmy Grab. 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. Something that Tara and I bonded over 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, goes in the second season, where a character is trapped in in a bathroom of an RV, and you know, is just basically death is knocking at the door right there. It's relentless and won't stop. It's, you know, menacing. And then she gets handed a screwdriver from one of her mates up top and ends up, you know, just stabbing the thing to death in the face. And it was just, you know, that fight or flight moment. And it's like, what are you going to do when something that menacing just won't stop? We would watch that show, then we would watch it again, and then we would watch talking then. I just thought, if there's a zombie apocalypse, then maybe I might know what to do. A zombie is an uncomplicated dream of evil. Almost everything else in the world is ambiguous. There's good and bad people and bad and 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 men has seemed to lengthen, this was the feeling of oched and people who had come to fear him. Terace, she got a zombie kit for Jimmy with food, water, a flashlight, a filter straw, matches, a thermal blanket, and knives. I told him to take it just ever had zombies in his life. Where did you get all this stuff? I went to, there's a zombie apocalypse star in Vegas. 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 break up, Terra got cash, their Australian shepherd. She had a tighter bond with cash than Jimmy did. Deborah 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 grimmer. She loved the company of animals. John and Deborah were living in a luxury apartment near the Irvine spectrum and 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. 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. So there was this, I mean, obviously, it feels good. So you, you hold onto that. I think it times. 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 him? 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. 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 a such a major mistake. And so what happens? Do you tell anybody like, "Hey, I need to get out of this?" I didn't want anyone to worry. So I kept it to myself. I did call psychologist a few times and talk to them. They said, "You need to protect yourself. So it's best not to just jump out of it real quickly but to plan it. Deborah would have to play the role of the happy wife for now. Sometimes he seemed to sense that something had changed. He said he don't look at me in the same way. He said 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, and the evening he'd put on the TV while she sat reading beside him. He'd like to 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. Deborah had begun hiding money from him. She'd take $2,000 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 Jacqueline, 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 Jacqueline again, he'd throw Jacqueline in the ocean and make sure she didn't come out. I'd say, "Oh, you know, stop being so dramatic," or things like that. There were just comments like about his wife, ex-wife, about Jacqueline, about. 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 gonna happen. It wasn't happening. By December 2015 they'd been married a year. John sat down to type her a two-page letter. It was a trickly bond bond with a core of arsenic. It reminded her of what he required. Between her family and her husband, there was room only for him. 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's 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 have ever known with the biggest heart imaginable. I wish I was more like you. I wish I could see the world like you do. He went on to say, "I love the way you smell and the way you drift off to law-law 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. And I felt very torn. Here's my family and here I go again. Another failure. So I didn't think I wanted 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. 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 that Deborah had been secretly giving Jacqueline money to attend real estate classes. 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. "Of all the people in the family, you are the one who you most identified as an enemy, right?" Yes. John and I really had it out for each other. John started sending Jacqueline nude 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. "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 and it's like she's right next to me and we're reading your emails together. "She reads me a couple more from John." "Mommy wants nothing to do with you and that will kill you." Jumping off a tall building would make me smile. Head first will work. I said leave me alone you sick pervert. "Yeah I jump head first. At 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 that. But I really had to protect myself and my kids." Deborah had been married to John a year and three months at this point. She withdrew $120,000 from her bank account hoping he would 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. "He put it in front of me and said, "What's this?" So I said money and he went into my accounts and said, "Why are you withdrawing all this money? He'd been tracking all my accounts." "When he plopped that stack of cash in front of you, what did you say?" "It's mine. It's mine before you. Just don't want you to have it." And he says, "No. Everything that is yours is mine." And I said, "No. Anything that was mine before you is still mine." And that's when he said, "And we were getting heated up. And I'm not going to even raise my voice if you know who I am." And he said, "Hit me, hit me. Because if you hit me, I'll make sure you never get up again." He said, "I'm not going to hit you." And I packed a bag and I laughed. And I said, "I want it to pour as I'm out of here." So that was the end of the end. I think I grabbed one shoe, some of my makeup, and left. You mean one pair of shoes? No, one shoe. I'm taking stuff and I'm leading. Deborah and Jacqueline 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. Deborah put tape over the camera lenses. They brought professional movers and they worked quickly packing up Deborah's stuff, stacking it into the big truck. It was March 29, 2016. Jacqueline used her iPhone to record the condition of the house as they prepared to leave, just in case John complained that they damaged her stolen his things. - You got your phone? - Then I just hopped like a video looking back, you can see the truck and the guys moving, the staff and then her driving home. - Yeah, it got really ugly, really fast, which I knew it would. (dramatic music) - Jigalo is the perfect term for this guy. He had nothing, nothing, and portrayed himself as having everything. - Debra had approached a family law attorney who spoke to John Mehan 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'Neill, 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 and esthetist, had lured her in, then managed to keep her even after he'd been unmasked the first time. - You take the victim away, the con man's nothing. He asked to eat, he's got it, like a shark, he's got to eat, and that's what he is, he has a shark, and he looks for his prey. They select these people, you know? You don't just nilly, really bump into somebody and go, wow, you'd be a great victim. They know exactly about their victim. And she finally realized then 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 spelt shark stuff and he became a big fat sea bass, you know? 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 hold it all to you. Well, that is more the chameleon of the guy. - I wonder how far you can take this fishman for. - Oh yeah, I guess I can hold it. But that's what he's done. He's just, you have to find somebody that will swallow that line, hook, line and sinker. - So when I ask about the specific nature of the con that the general run, by that I mean, his goal was to get into people's lives, marry them, and then take half their stuff, right? - No, to take all their stuff. He didn't want half, and he believed he was an after all, he was entitled to it, he was entitled to it. - She filed for divorce in April 2016. If Deborah had glimpsed a frightening side 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 listened 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 nephews whose mother Cindy, Deborah'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. Deborah says he forged her name on $17,000 worth of checks and he accused her of assaulting him. - Dad, 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 $7,000 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 blood 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, Deborah, 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 soulmates, 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 church-going 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 rapsidized 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 clients, builders who used her interior design business, and threatened 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 and for her three oldest children, including her 26-year-old daughter, Jacqueline. She did not list Tara, who was 24 on the request. John seemed not to be a threat to her. - I mean, I submitted an inch worth of documentation. I worked day and night for like two or three days, both with Debra and without Debra, to put together the entire package. - O'Neill cited more than a decade's accumulation of mayhem. The theft of hospital drugs, the Indiana board of nursing calling him, quote, "A clear and immediate danger to the public," end quote. The time he 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. - In order to get a domestic violence restraining order in the judicial system and 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 perpetrator, 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. - Plus John lived in Henderson in another state and there wasn't what the court thought of as fresh blood. O'Neill was surprised but understood the court's reasoning. - In retrospect, it would have been nothing more than a piece of paper and that piece of paper wouldn't have slowed down me hand at all. - John had never been violent to Deborah before. O'Neill thought his threats were probably idle. He hoped. - I hadn't seen anything where he had made any over gestures to get hands on her. I just thought this is a sick puppy. I mean, that was my position all along. You're just a sick son of a bitch, you know? And that's what I thought. - The judge told them they could come back in 14 days to apply for a permanent restraining order. Deborah did something inadvertently to sabotage it. she says another lawyer told her she would save on legal fees if she could do Get John to settle. Would he accept a certain dollar about 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. She 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 said she slept on a mattress on the floor that night. I'm dying, Deb, slowly dying. Please just come up with something so he 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? 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. 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 1pm on Saturday, June 11th, she got there to find her blue sport model 2015 Jaguar XF, who 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 wreaked 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 torture 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. Granny surveillance footage showed John and 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'Neal thought if police could connect him to the Jaguar torching, he could finally get the restraining order. 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 within consistencies in his story. O'Neal'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 a Santa An office. I just thought he was the boogie man. I don't mean to say that I was intimidated or I was scared. I'm going to be shocked and sit 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 and then he became a hands-on. Deborah blocked his texts and emails in this scene to enrage him. Deborah changed phones. She refused to 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 Jacqueline who had found a new apartment near the John Wayne Airport. It had a security gate, but Jacqueline worried about John following her into the parking garage. After the car torching, he seemed capable of anything. I felt like I needed some protection as far as the weapon because what am I going to do when some six two guy comes at me and five two? I'm full fit. You know, I'm 95 pounds. Jacqueline says she got herself a Smith and Wesson revolver. Of all John's stepkids, she knew he hated her the most. On the final episode of Dirty John. 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 Schmitz. Executive producer is Jeffrey Glazer and Hernan Lopez for Wondering. Over the course of this production, our LA Times team has included Shelby Grad, Steve Cloud, Robert Meeks, and Dave on Maharaj. You can read this story at LA Times.com. This is a special version of Dirty John. Remixed and remastered by Salt Audio.