Sometimes I think I’m the only person I know who hasn’t listened to Dirty John yet.
The six-part true crime podcast only been out for less than two months, and has already hit 10 million downloads. So I’m guessing a whole lot of y’all are keen to see creator, writer and host Christopher Goffard when he tours Australia.
Goffard is a Pulitzer prize winning novelist and veteran reporter for the Los Angeles Times. He specialises serial murderers, prison gangs, psychopaths and contract killers, spent nearly a year researching and writing the Dirty John podcast – his first. This man has some stories, that’s for sure.
But back to Dirty John, the reason we are all here. Here’s what the series is about, in a nutshell:
The story follows Debra Newell, a successful interior designer in Southern California, who meets a man named John Meehan on an over-50 dating website and quickly marries him. Charming, handsome, and doting, he tells her he is an anesthesiologist. But he harbors secrets about a dark past, plus a thirst for vengeance and control, as she discovers to her horror.
It’s a true story of deception and cruelty, of a con-man who exploits the fraught dynamics of a California family that has its own troubled past. The podcast features Goffard’s interviews with Newell and her family, Meehan’s sisters and ex-wife, and the veteran policeman who hunted Meehan and called him “the most devious, dangerous, deceptive person I ever met.”
Goffard will be hitting our shores in March for a series of live conversations, where audiences are promised a behind-the-scenes glimpse into the making of Dirty John and the challenging reporting process.