It’s the new true crime drama that everyone is talking about – and there’s likely to be a lot of people binge-watching the gripping series this weekend.
Dirty John was released on Valentine’s Day on Netflix,which is kind of ironic, as the story makes us want to run kicking and screaming from any relationship, thanks to the lies and violence of John Meehan, the real life criminal the thriller is based on.
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Everything you need to know about Dirty John
When John is introduced as a suave “perfect” man for wealthy 50-something Debra Newell, there should be alarm bells ringing, as it eventually turns out he’s a dangerous con artist.
The series is based on a true crime podcast of the same name, by journalist Christopher Goffard and the Los Angeles Times. But what’s the true story of John Meehan?
John Meehan’s history
Meehan was first branded with the nickname “Dirty John” or “Filthy John” by his classmates in the University of Dayton, Ohio, as he would brag about the girls he was sleeping with, and because he was just a pretty shady character.
According to the podcast, he was given the name as it suited him: “Like the way hetook money for roofing jobs he didn’t complete. Like the way he rented his housemate a deathtrap truck with no brakes, and claimed not to know. Like the way he used fake names on the credit cards that filled the mailbox, a swindle he would boast about.”
First marriage
In 1990, he married his first wife, Tonia Sells, in St Joseph’s Church in Dayton. She was 25 and he was 31 – but he told her family that he was 26, and that none of his family could attend the ceremony as they were addicts. Meehan and Sells went on to have two children together.
Ten years later in 2000, Meehan told Sells that he wanted a divorce, so she tracked down his mother, Dolores, who revealed he had lied about his birthday and his real name and that he had previous drugs charges against him. When Sells then searched their house, she found that he had been stashed anaesthetic drugs that he had stolen from the hospital where he worked as a nurse. She called the police and they started investigating him.
His arrest and drugs charges
In 2002, another police investigation was opened on Meehan when someone reported him bringing a gun into the operating room and also stealing Demerol he should have been giving to a patient. He was stripped of his nursing license and arrested when police then found a loaded gun and 45 containers for prescription only drugs in his house.
He pleaded guilty to the drugs charges, but then fled to Michigan, where police tracked him down again, but he tried to escape arrest by kicking a policeman in the face and running into a department store. He was caught and sentenced to six years in prison, but was released in 2004 after just 17 months.
There’s not too much exact information about Meehan’s activities for the next 10 years, but what we do know, as Goffard says, is: “He had seduced, swindled and terrorised multiple women, many of whom he had met on dating sites while posing as a doctor, court records showed.”In this time, three separate women around Southern California had standing restraining orders against him and at least three others had requested them.
He meets Debra Newell
Meehan was released from prison in October 2014 – where he was serving time for breaking a restraining order – and two days later, he met Newell, a Californian interior designer, on an over-50s dating site.
He charmed her from the off – lying thathe’d served as an anaesthesiologist in Iraq and spent a year with Doctors Without Borders – and Newell was smitten. They married just two months later, much to the horror of Newell’s daughters, who felt that he was suspicious and was after their mum’s money.
In March 2015, Newell’s nephew, Shad, told her that her husband has been lying about being a doctor and also has spent a considerable amount of time in prison. She hired a private detective who revealed the true extent of Meehan’s behaviour and his violent past.
She moved out and the couple split briefly, but Meehan managed to convince her to get back together. In April 2016, Newell ended the marriage and filed for a restraining order against him – but a judge denied it as “there was no imminent threat”.
Meehan turns psychopathic
In June 2016, Meehan stole Newell’s car and tried to burn it, but failed. Two months later, he attacked Newell’s daughter, Terra, in a carpark with a knife, thought Terra fought back to defend herself, and managed to kick the knife out of his hand, grab it and started stabbing him.
Terra toldFox5:“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’.”
Meehan died four days later in hospital, on 24 August, aged 57.
What happened to Debra Newell?
She opened up an interior design business called Ambrosia Home, which currently has two locations and plans to open a third.
Newell has been involved in the TV series based on her life, and told US Weekly: “Some of the family members were not for this. So it was really hard being able to know if we should do it or not. They were going to do it without us so we felt like, ‘Wouldn’t it be better if we were able to have an opinion or share our story?’ At that point it was pretty easy.”
She also saidher 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.”