Ep 6: Terra

a listener note. This story contains adult content and language. John Michael Myanmar may or may not have had some connection to organized crime. Whether to intimidate people or to impress them with his dark glamour, he bragged frequently about his underworld ties. He claimed to trace his bloodline to the prolific east coast hitman who ran murder ink itself. He lied about everything so who really knew what unnerved people once they got in his bad side is how he talked about the mob's way of doing things with a touch of real admiration in his voice. Like the mob's tactic of getting back at enemies, they didn't go after the enemies themselves. A dead enemy couldn't suffer after all. You went after the loved ones. You went after their families. Jacqueline Newell was living with her mother Deborah at the Carlisle Apartments in Irvine near the airport. They were afraid of Deborah's estranged husband John. They kept waiting for police to charge him with lighting Deborah's car on fire but two months had passed and there had been no arrest, no restraining order. Deborah had cut John off from her money. She wasn't taking his calls or texts. She and her kids were looking after John's golden retriever Murphy which he'd left at a pound and Deborah had the Buick Enclave he'd been using which had been impounded after he ran it into a gate. John had been staying in Henderson, Nevada but nobody knew for sure when he might appear here in Irvine. Jacqueline felt he was watching them. He didn't have a car. He didn't have his dog and he was just spiraling out of control. He didn't really have much to live for. He didn't have anything to live for. Around 1130 on the night of Friday, August 19, 2016, Jacqueline was returning from dinner with a friend. They were pulling up to the front of the complex when she saw John in a car in the dark waiting. I could see his face from the reflection of his cell phone and instantly when I pulled in, we saw each other. We locked eyes and he ducked his head and I said that's him. That's him and the driver didn't know what I was talking about for a moment and I said follow him. John's headlights were off and he spent past the light when he realized that we were behind him. He went straight and made a right hand turn onto the freeway. John had smashed or removed the lights on his rental car as if to improve his ability to move furtively in the dark. Jacqueline thinks John was there to kill her or her mom that he had been hoping to catch one of them alone, an easy target, and the presence of her male friend scared John off. But now Jacqueline feared he would go after her younger sister Tera, who lived a few miles away at Newport Beach. I knew that this was game time. From the Los Angeles Times and Wondery, this is Dirty John. I'm Christopher Gofford. Part 6. Tera. Jacqueline told her friend to drive to the Coronados, the sprawling apartment complex and next door Newport Beach where Tera was living. Here's Jacqueline. I'd much prefer him to come back to my house because then we could, whatever he was going to do, we would have some sort of chance of catching his psycho-ass on camera. You were more worried that he would go to your sister. Yes, I was. Because she was unprotected. I felt like I had ruined something for him that looked like it was planned out. Now why did you not call the police? Because my mom didn't want to call the police and that made me feel like she just felt hopeless at this point. We'd contacted the police every time something happened and they never helped us out. Deborah tells me she was skeptical of her daughter's account about seeing John. She thought Jacqueline had an overactive imagination. Jacqueline says she circled her sister's apartment complex over and over that night. She went to check her sister's apartment door, but she didn't knock because she didn't want to wake her. She had a little cat with a jingle collar on it. I tried the lock until I heard her cat's little bell come to the door and kind of rubbed his little body against the door. And she took reassurance from the growl of Tara's miniature Australian shepherd cash. So I was like, okay, cool. She's in the home with cash. She's safe. I'm just tripping. I'm just tripping. So I would be like, I was kind of going through times that night where I was like, oh my gosh, am I going crazy? No, I'm actually not going crazy. This is really happening. Jacqueline says she was up until 4.30am, slept for an hour and a half and called Tara at 6am. I said, um, John's in the area, please be careful. I saw him last night. He had the lights off to the car. I followed him. He was in a white camera. How scared that she seemed. She was like, oh my gosh, you know, really like, okay, but I don't think that she took it that day as seriously as I did. But in the dark, she had misidentified the car, John, was driving. Tara would be watching for the wrong one. It's one of the hypotheticals now. Would he have otherwise been able to get close to her? Tara Newell was 25. Descriptions of her almost always included the words sweet. Her voice was so soft that waiters had to lean in and ask her to repeat her order. As a kid, she was usually the smallest one on the recess yard. And so uncompetitive and softball games that she didn't even bother swinging at pitches. She had a huge heart for the smallest things. Yeah, that would describe her perfectly. So the classic wouldn't hurt a fly personality? Yeah, she wouldn't. Something that wasn't causing her any harm, no way. She's not very feisty. Tara was a child of affluent Orange County suburbs, but she adored country music. And she liked the songs about drinking beer, having a good time and still loving God. Like the company of dogs, music made her forget her anxiety. For years, Tara had lived with a vague sense of dread. When she was around six, she woke up screaming convinced that someone had climbed through her bedroom window to try and snatch her. She says the intruder dropped her and disappeared out the window. Her parents didn't call police. Her mother thought maybe it was a dream, the function of Tara's distress over what was happening in the house. Her parents were fighting a lot and soon her dad left the house for good. Tara had frequent nightmares at that age. She'd see dark shapes and become convinced they were ghosts or aliens. Over the years, she says she wondered whether she was a little crazy. In therapy, she questioned whether the abduction memory was a real one, but became convinced it had actually happened. When she was a teenager, a guy she'd been dating flipped out and rammed a car into her leg. She says he was on meth. She got a tattoo on her foot that said Psalms 23. The Lord is my shepherd with a heart she'd seen in a Taylor Swift video. Early on, Tara's sense John was dangerous. She had sobbed uncontrollably at a Christmas gathering, saying there's just something wrong about him. I don't like him. Trying to convince people. But not everyone felt what she felt for the longest time her mother certainly didn't. Tara did not want to be alone in her Newport Beach apartment, even though as far as she knew her stepfather did not know her address. As often as possible, she had friends over to crash at her place. Well, the gate was always broken, so he could he could follow me and just like be on the street and probably see where I parked. To be honest, I kind of feel like he was watching me for months. Just off and on, you know, so I would always like look back and see if anyone was there. Tara had premonitions of death. She wrote out a note and put it in her drawer. If anything happened to her, it said she wanted her ex-boyfriend to get her dog. She said she had a dream that John was attacking her, and she had a knife and she had to stab him to save herself. She wasn't a fighter and had no background in the martial arts, though she studied television violence with uncommon intensity. The Walking Dead was a reservoir of survival techniques like biting. As demonstrated in the season 4 finale when a character escapes a tight spot by opening a bad guy juggular with his teeth and they got surrounded by these group of guys and they were trying to harass and do other stuff to them and then Rick just bit off this guy's neck. So that reminded me of my teeth or a weapon? Uh-huh. Like you pick up stuff from watching stuff or like hearing stuff I'm aware of a visual person so like how they hold the knife I guess and you had a hold on knife automatically and because if you hold it the other way it's more easy to fall out of your hand and stuff and then you mean hold it the right way like well you got to hold it tight so that you don't cut yourself and then also you hold it like kind of like you make a fist where if you hold it like a different way then it's less control over the knife and so on's more easy to take it from you. And you learned all this from the show? That show and then dexter and like all the other CSI shows. An important feature of zombie combat is that the enemy is undeterred unless you get it in the head. A stab to the head or a shot to the head and then you kill the zombie. They're already dead but then they're undenned and you need to re-kill them right? Yeah. You need to kill their brain. But it sounds like you absorb a certain like mindset from a show more than a specific technique necessarily. Yeah. How would you describe that mindset? I'm killer, be killed. Tara was working in Newport Beach at Rebel Run at Dog Kennel. A man called with what sounded like a French accent. The man made it sound like they had met at some point and wanted to know if she would be working tomorrow. He wanted to bring in his Rhodesian Ridgebacks for her to groom. She didn't recognize the voice or remember having met him or think too much about the fact that most of the grooming requests came from women, not men. She told the stranger her work schedule. Yes, she would be there tomorrow till about 5 pm. The next morning was Saturday, August 20th, 2016 and Jacqueline called to warn her about John being in town. It would be a good idea to keep her pocket knife handy, her sister said. That morning at the Dog Kennel she greeted the labs and terriers and dobermans and puddle mixes. She unlocked the cages. She carried the big bag of dried high protein pellets between the cages and filled the bowls. She hosed out the cages and the concrete dog runs. For this reason, and this is an important detail, she wore rain boots. The French sounding guy who was supposed to bring in his Rhodesian Ridgebacks never showed, but she didn't think much of it. She was distracted, preoccupied by the concert at Irvine Meadows that night. She had bought $200 lawn seat tickets to see one of her favorite country stars, Jason Aldin, and was bringing a girlfriend. She left work in her Toyota Prius just after 5 pm for the three-mile drive home. Cash, the miniature Australian shepherd, was in the back seat. It was still full daylight. There was someone backed up into a parking spot. It was a dodge dart, I believe. And there was a man fidgeting in the back. I saw him with a tire arm and my dog started to grow and bark at him. But I kind of thought it was a homeless man, just like living in his car and going through his stuff. So I just parked in my spot in a parked face forward. And we don't have a sign parking but a parking same spot every single day. She said she carried bear mace in her car, a gift from her sister, and pepper spray in her purse. And a pocket knife, but at the moment, when she pulled into her parking spot, the knife was up in her apartment. John Mehan had removed the license plate from the gray 2016 Dodge Dart he had rented from Enterprise. Inside the car, he had assembled what police would call a kidnap kit. An Oakley backpack, camouflage duct tape, 13 cable ties useful for binding wrists and ankles, and six knives from a Belgian cookware set. He had a passport as if to flee the country. In his cup holder, he had a vial of injectable testosterone. He had been formidable big six foot two and 230 pounds of steroidal muscle, a survivor of jail and prison cells in at least three states. He had lost serious weight over the months. He was down to 163 pounds, but his intended victim would still be a foot shorter and 33 pounds lighter. He would have the element of surprise. He would have the knife. It bore no resemblance to a fair fight. And then I got out of my car. I got my dog out of my car. And then I walked to the back license plate and John came up and grabbed me by the waves, put his arm around my waist, put me in the eyes, and he said, "Do you remember me?" And I didn't even respond to that. I just tried to get away from him. And he started grabbing me, trying to put his hand over my mouth. I bit him. I was pushing him, trying to get away from him. He started to punch me. I thought, but it turns out he was stabbing me. And one of my automatic reflexes was to put my arm up to protect me chest. And I also had my purse with me. So he stabbed my purse a few times, I believe. And then he also got one in my arm that was one inch deep. We were just kind of wrestling for seconds. But it seemed like forever. It seemed like minutes. And I was just trying to run away from him, but he kept on grabbing me, kept on trying to stab me. He fell to the ground. My dog was also attacking his ankles and biting him, just going off on him. And I fell onto the ground, I fell on my back. And he was on his knees with the knife, just trying to stab me. Three floors of apartments flanked the elevated outdoor parking lot at the Coronado's apartment complex. Overlooking the scene where John Meahan attacked Terranuel, were long rows of windows and balconies. Dozens of them, even scores, afforded a clear view. It was a clear, bright day. Blonde, small-bone, Skylar Sepulveda, 14 years old, didn't know Tara, but looked like she could have been her little sister. She had just peddled home from junior lifeguard training at the Balboa Pier on her beach cruiser. She was in apartment T302, wearing only a t-shirt covered swimsuit when she heard the screaming and went to the window. She saw Tara struggling on her back on the far side of the parking lot a few hundred feet away. And John Meahan above her. I will never get those screams out of my head. He had a knife. The knife was a long silver blade that was shining. He was holding it over his head, and that was the last thing that I saw out of the window before I started running. Skylar told her mom to call police and grab her beach towel. New purpose 911. There's a man up here with a knife and a girl screaming. Barefoot, she bolted out the door and rushed down two flights of apartment stairs. My daughter is taking a towel to her right now because some of the girls she's bleeding. So we're running over there right now. Okay, didn't go to T30, she's bleeding. It's really bad. All right, I understand. We have officers on the way. Like mom and somebody screaming, somebody screaming, and then she saw this guy just raising a hand up and down up and down. Okay, all right. Skylar at wrists, so thin, a grown man could have enclosed them with a single hand. She did not pause long enough to worry that the attacker might turn the knife on her when she got to the scene. She just knew that she would blame herself if something awful happened that she could have stopped. And I had to run up another long flight of stairs up to the top of the parking structure. And once I got to the top, I had to run almost diagonally to where they were. And it probably took me under two minutes to run there. I thought it was incredible that people could let and witness other people being abused or just even their life being possibly taken away. And just watching it happen and not stepping in to try and help. I think the majority of it was just the kind of place that it was. By that she means it was a big, anonymous, block long apartment complex where it was common to overhear domestic arguments and common to ignore them. They thought it was just another altercation that was happening there. They just dismissed it and thought it was normal. Brainboot's terror war that day were her sturdy pair with thick tread. And it's possible that played a role in what happened next. She was on her back using her feet and legs to protect herself as he stabbed at her. And I kept on pedal kicking him and trying to block the knife. And then seconds later, just doing this, I knocked the knife out of his hand. The knife flew through the air, it landed on the pavement. It landed inches from her right hand. It landed with the handle pointed toward her. I didn't give it a second thought and it just started willing on him and stabbing him. Because I know that if I didn't fight back and wound him, he would continue to try to hurt me and possibly kill me. She connected again and again. His shoulder. His shoulder blade. His triceps. His shoulder blade. His upper back. His shoulder blade. His upper back. Between his shoulder blades. His forearm. His triceps. His shoulder. His chest. His left eye. And through it. Into his brain. She heard him gasp as he fell heavily on top of her. The last one was in the eye. The very last one. And so I guess that was my zombie kill. Someone's been stabbed and he had touched the girl. It's a girl in her dog and then a guy is on the ground. I'm not really sure what happened. We just heard a scream. You just got a blood? Yeah. And you guys just on the ground. When she reached the scene, Skyler supolved a found John Mehan face down bleeding and convulsing. Sarah was crawling away, shaking, screaming about how he had stalked her and tortured her family. She was terrified that John would get up and attack her again. Skyler saw the wound on Tara's forearm and she began to wrap it with her beach towel. Tightly, the way they taught her in junior life guards. There was a gas where you could see blood and muscle and tissue. For sure, it was the deepest cut that I've ever seen in real life. And I knew that she just needed to calm down in order to properly get better because screaming and flailing her arms would not have helped the bleeding. So I was doing my best to try and tell her that it was okay and that he wasn't going to hurt her anymore and that she was safe. She started talking and she also tried to calm me down and just started asking me questions. And then I realized I was just an hysteric so she started to ask me random questions about other stuff. Like, when's my birthday, like, where were you going to go tonight? Others that arrived to help. And then the other guy went to go check on John and that's when I called my dog back over to me and I ran down the hill because I couldn't be around him. I was scared. He was going to wake up and try to hurt me again and hurt this guy and just, like, low passing and try to get me. So I ran down to the hill with my dog and with my arm, like, wrapped in the towel and then I asked her to get my phone. She ran and she got me a phone and I just called my mom and I told her I'm really, really sorry. I think he killed your husband and my mom was in hysterics and she was like, what? I don't understand and then I just kept on telling her I think he killed your husband and tried to kill me and he stopped him and she was like, okay, I'm on my way. John Mean was not breathing when the police arrived and had no pulse but they administered CPR and soon his pulse was back and he began to take small short breaths on his own. They rushed him to Orange County Global Medical Center in Santa Ana. Paramedics tried to load Tara into the ambulance for the trip to Hogue Hospital. I wouldn't let them put the IV in near anything until they gave me my dog back and so cash came with me and then I let them put the IV in and he wrote it with me in the ambulance and they were asking me questions and I just told them I really wanted to go to the Jsnalding Concerts. They told me I don't think you're going to be able to go tonight and so they felt bad for me and then they turned on some country music to just try to calm me. I asked if he was dead, if I killed him and they said that I did but then they revived him and he was brain dead. I was kind of upset that they tried to revive him and waste like time and effort and medical dollars and all that just to keep this evil man alive but then they told me that it's good to keep him alive so that we could possibly use his organs and help save other people so at least his life wouldn't be completely erased. It's a testament to the impression that John made that even now he seemed larger than he was, not a human being but a horror movie villain who might spring bolt upright from his deathbed animated by sheer rage to attack again. Word of what happened reached Tara's cousin Shad Vickers, he rushed to the hospital to be sure Tara was all right. John sister Donna who would try more than anyone to help him over the years. Who would see him turn viciously on her to got the news from her lawyer. At first she didn't rule out the possibility of some trick, John knew every kind. Donna didn't go to the hospital where her brother lay unconscious, covered with 13 stab wounds, I never saw John, I never did, I didn't want to say goodbye, I had already said goodbye. John's other sister Karen Duvelet was summoned to the hospital. Deborah Newell did not want to be responsible for pulling the plug on her husband. She thought Duvelet should decide. Duvelet is a nurse, she looked at the brain scans and realized her brother had no chance. She gave the okay to pull him off life support. A transplant team tried to harvest his organs, but years of drug use had ravaged them. John Michael Mehan, drug addict, failed law student, disgraced nurse anesthetist, fake doctor, prolific grifter, black-hearted lethario and terror of uncountable women, was declared dead at age 57 on August 24, four days after he attacked Tara Newell. Deborah and Karen were led to a room in a Santa Ana funeral home where his body lay in a long plane cardboard box. They watched the lid go on the box and the box go in the oven. The door closed. He turned into black smoke and that was all. There was no memorial service. Tara struggled with guilt. It helped to talk to Mehan's sisters. This is Donna. I brought her flowers and I think her. I said he could have made it a lot worse for a lot of people the rest of his life. You know, he did a good thing. Sound weird, but he was a bad person. But I think it helped. I don't know. Everyone who heard the story had the same question. How did she prevail? And I asked Chad what sense he could make of it. When I first met Chad, he used a sentence that's hard to forget. The last person on earth I'd ever think would send John to hell would be Tara. And so, what is it that's something that was in you that gave you the ability to just talk about that? Well, I had a genuine hate for him. This guy was taking away my mom. It's possible to make some educated guesses about what else contributed to the outcome. John's body was likely weakened by his drug use and fatigue. The autopsy report reflected how much his health had deteriorated over the last year. At 163 pounds, he was 67 pounds lighter than he was listed on his driver's license. Tara had the gift of adrenaline, and she probably didn't know what kind of fight she had in her until she needed it. Her gentle demeanor was deceptive. Her size was certainly deceptive. For years she'd worked with big aggressive dogs. Her upper body is built like a swimmer's strong round shoulders. I think of him as pure evil I think that if there is a devil, then he's probably the devil or the devil's son. I like, I hadn't dreamed about it this moment, and I would actually stab and kill him. But then I never knew what would happen, and I never thought like, "Oh, I'm watching the show, and maybe this show might help save my life one day." I just thought if there's a zombie apocalypse, then maybe I might know what to do. Detectives told the prosecutor, Matt Murphy, that it looked like a clear case of self-defense. 99 times out of 100, the nice person is the one that winds up dead. I can't tell you how many times this guy's on the run after this, and we find this poor woman dead and duct taped in the desert or on the side of a freeway, because that's usually the way these things end. I don't think this went according to plan for me. What he expected to do, I believe, was to pull out the knife, and she would do, again, what we see on TV, she would, you know, maybe at worst he's got a muffler of scream, but he'd be able to, with the knife, get her into his vehicle, and kidnap her, which is what all the stuff was doing inside the car. So he's got a mover from, you know, her world into his, and she decided to fight, and that's what things went wrong. I think it's basically an illusion fostered by the movies we love and our need for comprehensible narratives governed by cause and effect, that people's personalities can never really be explained by an event or two. Still when you're writing a story, you're always looking for some burning insight, some skeleton key that might unlock a person's personality. You rarely find tidy answers, and sometimes nothing resembling any answer at all. You're not going to get the incinerated sled at the end of Citizen Kane, the convenient image that makes you say, "Ah, so that's what warped this guy's soul." What made Dirty John Dirty John? The prosecutor did not seem vexed by the elusive origins of John's consummate dirtiness. The fact is, some people are just born bad. They just are. And from everything I wrote about Mr. Mehan, he's one of those guys. There's no traumatic event in his life. There's no head injury. There's nothing that happened that I'm aware of, that you can look at and say, "Look, his whole, everything went bad for him at this point." Murphy even has a phrase for it, which he picked up during his ears, prosecuting sex crimes. He says, "Certain predators just have, quote, "green worms in the brain." You can't explain how they got there, and you can't get them out. I talked to Deborah's family law attorney, Michael O'Neal. I just think he was so wrapped up in the quest, the stalking, and there is like, I have Kinnit, two sharks, is their behavior. What was his endgame? Each one of them was to get money, but I tend to think that the endgame, it was the game. John Mehan never left a note explaining what he had intended to do. Maybe he had planned to kidnap Tara and hold her for ransom to get Deborah's money. Maybe he wanted to punish Deborah by killing Tara, which is the explanation that seems most plausible to me. And that's what my uncle and my dad would say. If you want to get revenge, you don't put revenge upon who you're mad at. You hurt harm the people they love. This is Donna again. And if anything comes out of this, Chris, that if there's any women out there that just feel, oh my God, how did I not see it? How did I not know? You know, it happened to me too. I was the only one that ever helped them, and he did it to me. Do you think that there are a lot of women out there who don't know that he's dead, who are still living in fear of them? Yes. There have to be, there has to be. Tara had to quit her job at the dog kennel because the anxiety was paralyzing. Barking dogs triggered memories of the attack. Sometimes she'd see a man roughly John's age and she struggled to breathe. For a while, she smoked pot to get to sleep, but it made her paranoid and irritable. So she quit, but then nightmares flooded her sleep. She told me she found a therapist who's helping her. She says part of it is learning not to use animals as an emotional crutch quite as much. And part of it is imagining a safe spot where she can go in her mind when things feel overwhelming. And for me, it's a lake where I was fishing when I was little with my father in Montana. And then my dog wasn't with me then, but I put him in the picture as my protector. Deborah Newell still struggles with guilt that she brought John into her family's life. There is much about him she will probably never know. After his death, she went to the house in Henderson, Nevada where he had been staying and found it strewn with needles and painkillers. On a laptop he had used, she found a list of women and their phone numbers. There might have been 200 of them, some were identified by their anatomical parts. On the day they were married it turned out he had been on three dating websites. He had about 15 winks or comments at day from girls. And he had sent some and I thought we're getting married. Who in the world does that? And that's what made me feel like none of this was real. She says she doesn't have any desire to date a year after his death. She's content with her life. She's close with her kids again. She recently bought her daughter's stun guns, pepper spray and rape whistles. They talk every day sometimes just to say I love you. She doesn't need a boyfriend or a husband. She says she feels like she's over John. She's concluded that he didn't know how to love, that he was some kind of sociopath. But it took her a long time to understand that. In the months after his death it was hard, trying to figure out what was real and what wasn't. Was it possible that he had been lying every time he touched her and every time he smiled at her? One of the first times I met Deborah, she showed me footage of their Las Vegas wedding on her iPad. She clicked on it. There they were at the altar exchanging rings. She was rubbing his hand. He was smiling at her tenderly. Watching it now she had to turn away. She had a catch in her throat. She made John to be a wedding husband to live together in Bosnian marriage, we love him, comfort him, honor and keep us so long as you both show up. Yes. She asked me. Doesn't he look happy? I love you ever my son, I'll be so you'd be mine. Dirty John is reported and written by me or host Christopher Gofford for the Los Angeles Times. Karen Low is our producer and editor, audio designed by Jeff Schmidt, executive producers Jeffrey Glazer and Hernan Lopez for Wundery. During this production, our LA Times team has included Shelby grads, Steve Cloud, Robert Meeks and Devon Maharaj. Thanks to Rick Loomis and Sound Engineer Ravi Carmen. We owe a special acknowledgement to the work of Hannah Fry, the reporter who broke the story of Mehan's death for her newspaper, The Daily Pilot, and who contributed research to this project. You can read the story at LA Times.com. This is a special version of Dirty John, remixed and remastered by Salt Audio.