A Complete Timeline of the Events of 'Dirty John'
However gripping and terrifying you found Bravo's new thriller series Dirty John, it's nothing compared to the real-life story that inspired the show. When Debra Newell met John Meehan for dinner at a candlelit California restaurant in October 2014 following a string of uninspiring first dates, something felt different. He was handsome, charismatic, accomplished, and seemed genuinely interested in her. After four failed marriages, she felt maybe she had found "the real thing."
But over the subsequent weeks and months, Meehan slowly revealed himself to be the very opposite: A pathological liar with an ugly temper, a criminal past, and a long history of conning, manipulating, and abusing women. In a six-part story for The Los Angeles Times and the accompanying podcast Dirty John, reporter Christopher Goffard chronicles how Debra's dream guy became a waking nightmare for her and her family.
If you haven't read Goffard's articles or heard the podcast yet, rectify that immediately. Seriously. Do it now. With that disclaimer in mind, here’s a chronological timeline summarizing the key events in the horrifying true saga behind Dirty John.
March 8, 1984
Cindi Newell is murdered by her husband of 13 years.
Twenty years before the events of Dirty John, Debra Newell's sister Cindi was shot and killed by her husband, Billy Vickers. The couple was in the process of separating, and the murder took place in the kitchen of the home they had just sold in Laguna Niguel, California. Billy shot Cindi in the back of the head at close range, then shot himself in the stomach and called emergency services.
At trial, Cindi’s mother Arlane Hart testified in Billy’s defense, explaining that she loved him and did not believe he had been in his right mind when he shot and killed her daughter. Per The LA Times, prosecutor Thomas Avdeef was stunned by Arlane’s testimony, which he interpreted as painting Cindi in a negative light. “They threw her under the bus,” Avdeef said, referring to Arlane and other family members who gave testimony. “I don’t know the dynamics of the family. I could never understand that. Why say bad things about the victim?”
The jury acquitted Billy of murder, but deadlocked on the lesser charge of voluntary manslaughter, which Billy ultimately pleaded guilty to in exchange for a five-year sentence. He was released in 1986 after serving less than three years in prison.
Cindi’s death, as you’d expect, had a profound impact on her younger sister Debra. “It was the reason Debra hated firearms,” Goffard writes. “It was the reason she refused to have one around, long after people began warning her that she needed one."
November 1990
John Meehan marries his first wife.
John married nurse Tonia Sells at St. Joseph Catholic Church in Dayton, Ohio. At the time, she was 25 and he was 31, though he told her that he was 26. None of John's family attended the wedding; he explained that his parents were addicts and he didn’t want them to ruin the wedding. The couple had two daughters, and Tonia helped put John through nursing school.
July-September 2000
Tonia discovers the truth about John.
After ten years of marriage, John told Tonia he wanted a divorce. Tonia tracked down John’s mother, Dolores, though he had always forbidden Tonia from contacting her. Dolores revealed that John lied about his birthday and his full birth name, and that he had a drug charge against him in California.
After searching the Ohio home they shared, Tonia found John’s hidden supply of surgical anesthetic drugs, which she knew he had no reason to possess outside the hospital. She informed the police, who began an investigation of John in September 2000.
January 2002
Another investigation into John begins.
Dennis Luken, an investigator for the Warren County Sheriff’s Office in Ohio, began looking into John after hospital workers reported seeing him bring a gun into the operating room and steal Demerol he should have been administering to a patient. Per The LA Times, Luken later called John “the most devious, dangerous, deceptive person I ever met.”
April 2002
John is stripped of his license to work as a nurse anesthetist.
Police searched his house and found a loaded gun and 45 empty containers for six different prescription medications, per The Dayton Daily News.
June 2002
After attempting to evade arrest, John goes to prison.
John pleaded guilty to felony drug theft, but rather than surrendering to authorities, he fled the state and checked into a hotel in Michigan, where police found him unconscious and surrounded by drug vials. Here’s how Goffard describes what came next:
The ambulance was rushing him to the hospital when he unbuckled his restraints, grabbed the drug kit and jumped into the road. He fled into a nearby J.C. Penney, scrambled atop a cargo elevator and into the shaft, and kicked a cop in the face. They finally handcuffed him when he tumbled to the ground, covered in grease, and knocked himself unconscious.
John was sentenced to up to six years in prison in Michigan for resisting arrest and possession of drugs. He served 17 months and was released in 2004.
February 2014
John begins his rein of terror against other women.
John pleaded guilty to stalking a Laguna Beach woman, whom he met in the hospital when she was recovering from brain surgery. He introduced himself as her anesthesiologist, and they dated for a period, until she became uncomfortable with his suggestions that she transfer money into his bank account “to hide it from her estranged husband." When she ended their relationship, he sent her threatening messages and intimate photos of her to her family.
October 2014
John meets Debra Newell.
John was released from prison on October 8 after serving time for violating a restraining order. Two days later, he met interior designer Debra Newell on an over-50s dating site.
John and Debra went to a restaurant in Irvine, California, for their first date. He told her he'd served as an anesthesiologist in Iraq and spent a year with Doctors Without Borders. “He tended to have everything on my checklist that I was looking for,” Debra told Fox5. “I liked that he was a doctor, that he had been successful helping people, and then when he said he had been to Iraq, Doctors Without Borders, that impressed me also.”
Their relationship developed quickly, and Debra was “swept off her feet because he knew what to say. Everything was so calculated.” She was willing to overlook some strange quirks-John wore his medical scrubs everywhere, even to formal events, and claimed to have no money because all of his income went to his children-but her daughters were instantly suspicious.
“I told my mom she’d better get this creep out of the house or I don’t plan on living with her,” Debra’s older daughter Jacquelyn said on the Dirty John podcast. Debra’s younger daughter Terra was also uncomfortable with John, but initially was less vocal.
November 2014
Tensions rise with the Newells as Debra and John move in together.
Debra and John moved into a house together on Balboa Island in Newport Beach. The house was in Debra’s name alone because John didn’t want his name on the lease. The tension between John and Debra’s daughters came to a head the day before Thanksgiving, when Terra discovered the couple were living together and confronted her mom. Goffard describes this incident:
Here came John, instantly transformed by rage. Why was Terra snooping through his stuff? Why was she trying to steal Debra from him? Did she realize that kids should be smacked for this?
Terra screamed at her mother: “How could you let this guy talk to me like this?!”
Terra left, badly shaken, with the sickening feeling that her mother was choosing John over her.
December 2014
John and Debra marry.
Despite the ongoing family tension, Debra and John married in Las Vegas after less than two months of dating, while Debra was there on a business trip. The ceremony took place at a courthouse, and no guests were invited.
March 2015
Debra discovers the truth about John.
Debra’s nephew Shad-Cindi’s son-called her to raise concerns about John, revealing that he had served time in jail and had lied about being an anesthesiologist.
Though Debra acted unconcerned to Shad, she privately began looking through John's documents, and found evidence of his long history of seducing, conning and harassing women. Per Goffard:
From 2005 to 2014 - from about the time he got out of prison in Michigan for drug theft to the time he met Debra Newell in California-he had seduced, swindled and terrorized multiple women, many of whom he had met on dating sites while posing as a doctor, court records showed.
By the time they married in December 2014, three separate women around Southern California had standing restraining orders against him; in recent years, at least three others had requested them.
Debra found printouts from websites on which women shared information about dangerous men, with scores of warnings about John: “Do not let this man into your life,” one comment said, while another called him a con artist and a “classic psychopath." She also discovered that he had a nickname, dating back to his brief time at law school: Dirty John.
“He was basically this strange, lone-wolf guy that did all kinds of scandalous-type things, and it wasn’t just with women,” a former classmate of John’s, Kevin Horan, told The LA Times. “‘That guy, you can’t trust him for nothing. He’s rotten top to bottom.”
Disturbed, Debra moved out of the Balboa Island house, taking advantage of John’s absence while he was in hospital for back surgery.
June 2015
Debra and John reconcile.
After months of messages and phone calls in which John begged Debra to take him back and told her he needed her, the couple got back together. He had an explanation for everything, Debra explained on the Dirty John podcast. “He always had a story. He told me that he had lied because he thought he’d lose me, that he feels so lucky that I’m such a forgiving person, I’m the love of this life, that I’ve made him a better person.” Debra and John moved into a new apartment in Irvine.
March 2016
Debra cuts John out of her life.
After a year and three months of marriage, Debra’s still has suspicions, and is increasingly uncomfortable with John’s behavior and her estrangement from her own family. The tension between Jacquelyn and John had worsened, as Goffard writes:
He didn’t even want her seeing her kids, particularly Jacquelyn, who had been so vocal in her contempt for him. One day he caught Debra sneaking away to see her and said he’d throw Jacquelyn in the ocean if it happened again.
Debra reached her breaking point in March, and filed to annul the marriage in April. John, now living in Nevada, began sending her threatening messages, demanding money and promising to ruin her. She requested a restraining order, but an Orange County judge denied the request. There was no imminent threat, they ruled, because John lived in another state and had never physically harmed her. She cut John off and stopped taking his calls and messages.
June 11, 2016
John steals Debra's car in an attempt to destroy it.
Debra’s Jaguar disappeared from its parking spot in front of her office in Irvine, and surveillance footage showed John stealing it. The car was later found a block away, soaked in gasoline and with mild fire damage-John had tried and failed to set it completely alight.
August 20, 2016
John attacks Terra outside her apartment building.
Jacquelyn called Terra to warn her that John was in town; the previous evening she'd seen him waiting outside her (Jacquelyn’s) apartment building in Irvine. That evening, Terra returned home from work and parked her car in the lot outside her Newport Beach apartment building. As she got out of the car, John approached her from behind and attacked her with a knife.
"He was trying to push me into the car," Terra told Dateline. "I tried to get away from him, I was screaming, and he put his hand over my mouth and I bit as hard as I could."
“It bore no resemblance to a fair fight,” Goffard noted: John was 6’2”, and though he had lost significant weight over recent weeks, he was still much larger than Terra. But as she and John wrestled on the ground, Terra was able to defend herself in part thanks to the heavy rain boots she was wearing, which had a thick tread. During the fight, she kicked the knife out of John’s hand, then managed to grab it herself and stab him 13 times, including once through the eye.
“I just started stabbing him. I started to push him off of me and then I got him right here [shoulder] and I also got the last one in his eye and the last one I kind of did give a second thought. I was like ‘I don't want him to get back up, I don't want him to try to hurt me again. If he gets back up he's gonna kill me,” Terra told Fox5.
After a neighbor wrapped Terra’s wound in a beach towel, Terra called Debra and broke the news: “I’m really, really sorry. I think I killed your husband.” But John wasn’t yet dead. Paramedics administered CPR and his pulse returned.
August 24, 2016
John Meehan dies.
John Meehan died in the hospital at 57, four days after his fight with Terra. After he was declared brain dead, his sister Karen made the decision to take him off life support. His body was cremated and no memorial service was held.
Debra told Fox5 that her nightmarish experience with John inspired her to try and help victims of domestic abuse. “There are women that are probably scared to death to leave,” she said. “[They] don't see any other way of getting out of the relationship and I want to have a voice for them.”
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