Warning: Spoilers ahead for “Dirty John”
“Dirty John” has finally dropped on Netflix and the most terrifying thing about this show is it’s based on the terrifying crimes of John Meehan, a con artist and sociopath.
For those who may not have already binge-watched (or listened to the podcast by the same name) John Meehan was a compulsive liar, master manipulator and violent criminal whose final target would be the Newell family, more specifically its successful matriarch.
When wealthy Californian decorator Debra Newell first met John, a man she’d been chatting to online, she believed he was a successful anesthetist who’d just returned from a year in Iraq with Doctors Without Borders.
Deborah was smitten with John, tall and strapping. She quickly brushed away any red flags that showed themselves early in the relationship and would eventually go on to have a Vegas wedding to a man who told her his ex-wife had falsely tarnished his name, threatened his medical career and unfairly kept him away from his two daughters — all of which was untrue.
While the eight-part series goes on to detail the businesswoman’s life unraveling at the hands of Meehan — a show that ends with Deborah’s young daughter Terra stabbing John to death in a harrowing instance of self-defense — it only touches on John’s earlier family life and two biological daughters he left behind.
Years before John sought to swindle Debra and her daughters, he married Tonia Sells, a woman who met him when she was a 25-year-old nursing student, they and married in 1990.
According to Christopher Goffard — the LA Times reporter who created the popular podcast about John’s crimes — John was 31 when he met Tonia but he’d claimed to be 26.
In footage from their wedding, John’s friends, who seem shocked he’d found himself a sweet woman, are seen musing, “Let me start by saying that John Meehan’s, John Meehan’s nickname is ‘Filthy John Meehan.'”
To Tonia, John was an “intelligent, articulate, decent-looking guy who seemed to have a life together”, she told Goffard.
During their 10 years of marriage, Sells supported Meehan through nursing school. Like his wife, John went on to become a nurse anesthetist, meaning a nurse with special training to administer anesthesia. The couple also went on to have two daughters together, Emily and Abigail Meehan.
One day in 2000, John told Sells he wanted a divorce. She was so shocked at the news she tried to find answers and called her husband’s mother and sisters — he’d previously forbid her from ever contacting his family.
John’s mother reportedly told Tonia, “I always knew you would call me. I always knew that this would happen.”
Through asking about his past, Sells discovered she was married to a convicted drug dealer and someone who’d been a regular drug user himself. Concerned, she searched the family home and found stashes of prescription drugs, which she’d rightly suspected John had stolen from his job at the hospital.
Following an investigation, Meehan was fired from the hospital. Soon after John’s persistent threatening abuse began to make Sells feel like her life was at risk.
“I didn’t really know what he was necessarily capable of doing, but I was scared out of my skin. I don’t know if the whole thing made me nervous or… It’s just when you’ve been living a lie for 12 years and, one day or over the course of a few months, you find out that it’s all been made up and it wasn’t true, it really rocks the core of who you are,” Sells told Goffard.
After reporting Meehan’s threatening behavior he was told to attend anger management. He also pleaded guilty to felony drug theft in 2002 and was in jail until 2004.
John’s eldest daughter, Emily, was just 5 years old her father became an absentee parent.
While appearing on the Murderish podcast she says she recalls her dad not being there for important life events but says she got the occasional gift in the mail from him.
“I wonder if it would’ve been different if I was a son,” she said. “It seemed that John didn’t like women.”
“I’m like, ‘I’m his daughter, I’m his blood. Like, I’m half of him.’ And it hurts my self-esteem when I talk about it and when I think about it,” Emily told Murderish. “But then again, I’m like, well, if anything I have a golden mom, who I would want to be – I want to be just like her.”
Her sister Abby has done a similar introspection of her infamous blood relative.
“Sometimes I kind of think, ‘What if I’m like him?’ But then I just know who I am and I’m more like my mom. And I’m a good person and I’m just not like him at all and I just tell myself that,” she said on “Dateline.”
In an interesting twist, following the release of TV series “Dirty John,” both Emily and Abby went to the premiere, along with their mother, Tonia.
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