Dirty John 3: Filthy

LOS ANGELES - He had lavished her with compliments, and now he savaged her looks. He had entered the marriage broke, and now he demanded half her wealth. He had been gentleness itself, and now he threatened her with "long-lost relatives" in the mob.

"Enough," Debra Newell texted him. "You are evil."

"Divide up the stuff and I never see you again," John Meehan texted back. "Your choice."

In March 2015, as Debra Newell studied the paperwork detailing her husband's long record of women terrorized and laws broken, she learned that he had a nickname. It went back decades, to his brief time in law school at the University of Dayton.

Dirty John, classmates called him. Sometimes it was Filthy John Meehan, or just Filthy. But mostly Dirty John.

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Ask John Meehan's sisters how he became the man who conned his way into Debra Newell's life - ask them where his story begins - and they point to their father.

Their Brooklyn-raised dad ran the Diamond Wheel Casino in San Jose, and imparted to John a series of illicit skills, like how to pull off bogus lawsuits and insurance scams. "How to lie," said one sister, Donna Meehan Stewart. "How to deceive."

Coupled with that was a cold-eyed ethos of leaving no slight unpunished. "If anybody did anything to John, my dad would tell us, 'You go there with a stick and take care of it,'" said Karen Douvillier, his other sister. "It's the Brooklyn mentality of you fight, you get even. If you want to get back at somebody, you don't get back at them, you get back at their family."

At Prospect High School in Saratoga, Calif., in the mid-1970s, John was a great-looking athlete, charismatic, a magnet for girls, an