Dirty John · LA Times Studios

Ep. 1: The Real Thing

May 14, 2025·40 min·3 clips

A prosecutor reads an autopsy report aloud — 13 stab wounds, one fatal, and a young woman who 'fought like hell.'

The episode opens with host Christopher Goffard sitting with Newport Beach assistant district attorney Matt Murphy, who reads aloud from an autopsy report describing 13 stab wounds on a young woman, with wound number 13 — a puncture to the upper left eyelid — identified as fatal. Murphy observes that the wound pattern shows the victim fought hard. Goffard establishes Newport Beach as a wealthy, low-crime city where murders are rare and often motivated by greed or lust. The narrative then rewinds to fall 2014, when 59-year-old interior designer Deborah Newell, divorced four times, begins using the dating site Our Time. After unremarkable coffee and dinner dates, she connects with John Michael Meehan, 55, who presents himself as an anesthesiologist, a Christian who attends her church, a father of two, and a humanitarian just returned from working with Doctors Without Borders in Iraq. Their first date at a Newport Beach restaurant called Houston's is described in detail: John is physically imposing at six foot two, intensely focused on Deborah, and moves aggressively — kissing her that night and refusing to leave her apartment. Deborah's interior design business is depicted through a tour of her Irvine warehouse, where she stages model homes with furniture, art, and hardback books sorted purely by color, their content irrelevant. Goffard draws an explicit parallel between this performance of an ideal life and the performance of early romance. Despite a disastrous first night, John calls the next day to apologize and Deborah gives him another chance. Within weeks he is telling her he loves her and wants to marry her, and within five weeks he has moved into her new $6,500-a-month rental on Balboa Island in Newport Beach — with his name kept off the lease, citing tax problems. Deborah's 24-year-old daughter Jacqueline, who shares the Irvine penthouse, is immediately hostile, describing John as looking homeless and scanning the apartment as if casing it. Her 23-year-old daughter Tara, quieter and more trusting, drives from Las Vegas with her boyfriend Jimmy Grob for Thanksgiving and forms her own uneasy impression of John, noting that he refused help moving furniture and seemed to be performing for an audience. When Tara discovers John's belongings in her mother's bathroom, a confrontation erupts in which John screams at Tara, accuses her of snooping, and threatens that his own children would have been physically punished for such behavior. Deborah and John expel Tara and Jimmy from the house on Thanksgiving night. John frames the daughters' hostility as jealousy over Deborah's money and explains his nursing certificate by claiming he also holds a PhD. A family Thanksgiving gathering the next day is strained by Tara's absence, though Deborah's mother Arlene finds John charming if sloppily dressed. At Christmas, a fragile truce collapses when John arrives at the family gathering and plays with the grandchildren, causing Tara to break down crying. Deborah, advised by a psychologist to set firmer boundaries with her daughters, increasingly sides with John. In early December, while driving to Las Vegas on business, Deborah and John stop at a courthouse and marry in a brief ceremony; they have known each other less than two months. Deborah keeps the marriage secret from her family for weeks. Jacqueline, growing more suspicious, notices money disappearing from Deborah's wallet and receives text messages from her mother's phone that don't sound like her mother. She begins tracking John's movements by attaching a GPS device to Deborah's Tesla in February 2015, monitoring his routes to distant clinics, a warehouse, post offices, and fast food restaurants, and speculating he may be obtaining and selling prescription drugs. The episode closes with a brief disclosure: in 1984, Deborah's older sister Cindy was shot and killed by her controlling husband, a family trauma that explains Deborah's deep aversion to guns — a detail the narrator flags as significant to the story ahead.

As heard by us

A tense, patient opener that finds John's menace in bad manners, rushed intimacy, and Tara's wary read of the room.

The Real Thing starts in the uneasy middle of a romance that has already moved too fast: Debra settling into a rental on the water, John effectively in the house after five weeks, and Tara arriving with her boyfriend to take the measure of him.

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Why you'd press play

You meet John through Tara's wary first impression: good on paper, odd in person, and hard to read.

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