Christopher Goffard - Dirty John and Other True Stories of Outlaws and Outsiders

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Praise for Christopher Goffard and the Dirty John podcast

This collection is journalism at its finest. Incisively reported and eloquently written, these stories reveal heartbreak and heroism and the frayed fabric of life. As gripping as any novel could ever be, every one of these stories cuts down to the bone. Christopher Goffard is a storyteller for these times.

Michael Connelly

Christopher Goffard is a master of literary journalism. His gracefully nuanced stories, full of feeling and finely observed detail, are always heading somewhere, always unfolding with an exquisite sense of narrative. They are about seekers and searcherspeople who want something, who need something. Goffard wonderfully conveys their quietly desperate worlds.

Barry Siegel, Pulitzer Prizewinning journalist

Christopher Goffard, one of the worlds most beguiling journalists, searches among the forgotten and the invisible for insights into how all of us live, how we die, and how we piece together whatever meaning we can along the way. His stories are so unforgettably vivid and heart-stopping that they refuse to let the reader go until the last word of the last sentence.

Thomas French, Pulitzer Prizewinning journalist and author of Zoo Story

Extraordinary and terrifying... This case has everything a noir drama ought to: suspense, deception and plenty of twists... Veteran reporter Christopher Goffard pursued the story with a rigor that other true crime podcasts simply dont have.

Time

A kind of journalism noir, blending entertainment and news in powerful, sometimes unnerving ways... The shows final episode is thrilling, horrifying, and expertly done, with a final scene likewell, like a bonbon with a core of arsenic... In the end, the series leaves you with a powerful set of thoughts and emotions about the darkest sides of the human need for love.

The New Yorker

This is as gripping and unsettling as true crime gets.

Esquire

More than a murder mysteryits a portrait of a family fractured and how they put the pieces back together.

Entertainment Weekly

True crime hit a new high with the story of how Debra Newells online romance with a charming man spiraled into horror...[Will have] you screaming: Noooo! Dont trust him! into your device.

The Guardian

The immediacy of the story and the representation of the reporting in audio, print, and web formats helped it become another step in the evolution of podcasts as a valuable element of the modern journalistic landscape.

IndieWire

[The] Dirty John approach to true-crime storytelling doesnt limit expectationsit keeps them on their toes.

Rolling Stone

An epic story involving several generations of two families, with an incredibly juicy ending. For a podcast, youll be as hooked as if you were watching the new American Crime Story or a documentary as crazy as The Jinx.

Vogue

The audio equivalent of a page turner.

The Atlantic

ALSO BY CHRISTOPHER GOFFARD

Snitch Jacket

You Will See Fire: A Search for Justice in Kenya

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Copyright 2018 by Los Angeles Times Communications, LLC

The stories The Prisoner, The Rookie, and The $40 Lawyer were originally published in slightly different form in the St. Petersburg Times . The other stories originally appeared in the Los Angeles Times , some under different titles. Mai Tran contributed reporting and translation to How She Found Him, and Hannah Fry contributed reporting to Dirty John.

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First Simon & Schuster trade paperback edition November 2018

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Interior design by Carly Loman

Cover design by Gregg Kulick

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available.

ISBN: 978-1-9821-1325-4

ISBN: 978-1-9821-1326-1 (ebook)

For My Parents

After college in the mid-90s I had an English degree, no job, and a bed in my dads apartment. I was trying ludicrously to get around Greater Los Angeles without a car, and increasingly convinced of the Harry Crews observation: The world doesnt want you to do a damn thing.

I thought journalism would be a good job for someone without means to see the world. Reporters never had to apologize for their curiosity, and I always wanted to know more than it was strictly polite to ask. Night after night, I stood at Kinkos mass-photocopying application letters to newspapers around the country while speakers pumped easy-listening Muzak into the recycled air of the bright, empty room (a serviceable image of purgatory, it seems to me). No one wrote back.

I bought a 1978 Camaro for $300 and promptly destroyed the front half by running into other cars. Because it kept going, I kept driving it.

An accidental meeting at a YMCA swimming pool led to a job in Hollywoods nameless nether ranks. I fetched coffee. I photocopied script revision pages for a Pittsburgh-based cop drama (you will not have heard of it) in myriad obscure hues. I read a bad script a day, every day, and wrote coverage assessing its filmability. There was a porn publisher downstairs, which seemed a more honorable living.

I was encouraged to attend weekend parties and make contacts in the industry, which is hard to do when you are parking your cracked yellow muscle car three blocks away so no one will see you pull up in it. I was out of my dads apartment, but after a year I had made no contacts or friends and my brakes were so bad I started standing on them a half block from the stoplight, to avoid hitting any more cars.

In near despair I called the editors at my tiny hometown paper, the Glendale News-Press . No, they wouldnt hire me as a reporter. I lacked experience. Experience is what Im looking for, I pleaded. They had an opening they seemed a little embarrassed even to mentionas a typist. Readers would submit handwritten letters that needed to be typed up for the Letters Page Editor to peruse.