The OC Savior: Ep. 2, It's Totally Fine
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Hi, it's Andrea Gunning, the host of Betrayal. I'm excited to announce that the Betrayal podcast is expanding. We are going to be releasing episodes weekly, every Thursday. Each week, you'll hear brand new stories, firsthand accounts of shocking deception, broken trust, and the trail of destruction left behind. Listen to Betrayal Weekly on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

Hi, I'm Molly Conger, host of Weird Little Guys, a new podcast from Cool Zone Media on iHeartRadio. I've spent almost a decade researching right-wing extremism, digging into the lives of people you wouldn't be wrong to call monsters. But if Scooby-Doo taught us one thing, it's that there's a guy under that monster mask. The monsters in our political closets aren't some unfathomable evil. They're just some weird guy. So join me every Thursday for a look under the mask at the weird little guys trying to destroy America.

Listen to Weird Little Guys on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hello, and welcome to Haunting, Purgatory's premiere podcast. I'm your host, Teresa. We'll be bringing you different ghost stories each week, straight from the person who experienced it firsthand. Some will be unsettling, some unnerving, some even downright terrifying. But all of them will be totally true.

Listen to Haunting on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, y'all.

Dr. Joy here. I invite you to join me every Wednesday on the Therapy for Black Girls podcast, a weekly chat about mental health and personal development, where my expert guests and I discuss the unique challenges and triumphs faced by Black women through the lens of self-care, pop culture, and building the best version of you. So if you're looking for more ways to incorporate wellness into your life, listen to the Therapy for Black Girls podcast on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

Meet the real woman behind the tabloid headlines in a personal podcast that delves into the life of the notorious Tori Spelling as she takes us through the ups and downs of her sometimes glamorous, sometimes chaotic life in marriage. I just filed for divorce. Whoa. I said the words that I've said like in my head for like 16 years.

wild. Listen to Misspelling on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

Lizzie definitely wanted to be somebody that was seen. She was very charismatic. In 2014, Lizzie Mulder is a CPA in exclusive Laguna Beach, dazzling small business owners far and wide. And she came in and she said all the right things. She had the right look. She had this really great front office with ocean views. It was beautiful and beautiful.

She had this placard on the wall that said she went to Pepperdine. Oh, so she had like a degree on the wall. A degree. From Pepperdine. Yeah. With her name on it. Yep.

Pretty soon, Lizzie Mulder starts doing the books for the ultra-high-end salon powered by Tony and Guy in Newport Beach. She always let you know how great she was, how much money she made, how she just was so busy. But what she kept on selling to us was, what you guys are a small business, I can handle you. And not long after that...

the chaos kicks in. She said the direct deposit was set up. It never happened. My staff calls me saying the electricity's off. And I'm like, what? We had run out of all the money. The $10,000 check came out of the account. The credit card didn't go down. So she was supposed to use that $10,000 to pay down the credit card. Yes. And literally days after that incident...

A desperate phone call from Lizzie Mulder's husband, Jesse, blows a gigantic hole in who everyone thinks Lizzie Mulder really is. And he said, it looks like she's been stealing money from you, and she's been doing it for about a year and a half. Apparently, there's a detective there that's been looking into her. He was crying, and he said, I don't know what I'm going to do. We have these two little girls.

And I'm just, I'm afraid and I'm sad for them because their mother has done this. And she's done it to several businesses that I'm finding. I'm Jonathan Walton, and this is Queen of the Con, The OC Savior, Episode 2, It's Totally Fine.

Laguna Beach is not only a wealthy city and a breathtakingly beautiful city, but it's got a really low crime rate. There's only an average of one murder reported every year and 17 robberies. For a city of almost 25,000 people, that's not bad at all. But there's one type of crime that's egregiously underreported and underinvestigated in Laguna Beach, and that's fraud.

So when you work the fraud desk, which is what I was assigned, that's the desk that nobody wants. Why is that? Today, he's a sergeant in the Seal Beach Police Department. But back in 2015, Jordan Marakian is a fraud detective for Laguna Beach PD. Fraud is, you're essentially an accountant with a badge. It's a thinking man's game. Correct. It's like chess. 100%. There's no blood at the crime scene. There are no prints. Yeah.

It's like numbers, numbers, numbers. You follow the money. Yeah. Yeah. That's a lot harder to do. It is hard to do because you're dealing with people who either A, are smarter than you, or B, think they're smarter than you.

So it's a very complicated web, especially with the ability to wire money, internet, credit cards, identity theft. There's so many pieces that go into fraud. Yeah. It's hard to find the right evidence to get a conviction. Correct. Detective Merakian is a muscular guy in his 40s, clean cut with piercing blue eyes, a real G.I. Joe type.

In the overarching fight of good versus evil, Merakian is the epitome of the good guy. To me, though, and I think to all victims of con artists, he's a freaking superhero. They say in my line of work, you shouldn't take things personal, but I made it personal. Just the arrogance of Lizzie Mulder, it made it easier for me to go after her because I just didn't like her.

By the time Lizzie Mulder's husband, Jesse, calls to warn the salon that his wife is stealing from them, Detective Merakian has already been looking into Lizzie for months. It was listed on my 31 cases that I was already investigating. Jesus, one cop is investigating 31 cases. One detective. Yeah. Wow. Now, most of those are cases that we close out immediately. You know, someone stole my credit card and used it at Target.

Did the bank reimburse you? Yes. Okay, then you're no longer a victim. That's a good point. As complicated as fraud is, fraud is also, if you're lazy, which some detectives are, fraud is a good place to hide because you can take a ton of cases and close them out. You never have to really do anything. And you don't do anything. And it looks like you're closing cases. Right. Go to Target, pull the video, post the video somewhere, case closed. Yeah. Yeah.

And everybody's happy. The bank doesn't care that they reimbursed their client. Right. The client got the money back in their account. Nobody cares. Except the bad guy just gets away. Bad guy gets away. And bad guys in the fraud game and white-collar crimes get away every single day. God, that's annoying. It makes more sense to commit white-collar crime than it does to go in and rob a liquor store or a bank. Yeah. Because you're probably not going to get prosecuted.

And I'm guessing Lizzie Mulder knows that and is actually planning on it. What she's not planning on, though, is her husband Jesse calling her victims up to warn them.

Geneva Mendoza was stunned when her business partner, Lauren, got that call from Jesse explaining that his wife, Lizzie Mulder, is robbing them blind. And what are you thinking as this is, you're hearing all this? I said, I effing knew it. I don't want to say that on the podcast. You can say effing. I, yeah, I literally, that's what I said. Just was shaking my head and I was fuming and Lauren was crying. And I mean, that's just our dynamic anyway. Yeah.

So I was so upset. So immediately I just started acting and I started going through our accounts and I started going through check by check by check. I had found 47 checks. And then when we all, when we really went through it, it was 77 checks. When all was said and done, how much money did she get from you? $291,000.

But that theft doesn't happen all at once. In the same way that my con artist, the Irish heiress, scams me out of nearly $100,000 a little at a time, Lizzie Mulder does the exact same thing to the Newport Beach Salon.

It was so chaotic. Every two weeks, it gave me so much anxiety to even go into work. Remember the payroll problem where every two weeks, the salon's employees were supposed to get their paychecks deposited into their bank accounts by ADP? The company Lizzie supposedly hires to do payroll? Every two weeks, it never happened. She would even send us emails saying, see, they said that it was...

set up and we would get all these emails from ADP but I'm using quotation because you thought it was from ADP it was really accountancy created yeah so she would create emails from ADP from all kinds of people saying like showing proof that she did talk to these people she would show full email threads of back and forth and these people never existed

So it was just a way, again, for us to kind of shut up and go, okay, well, I don't know what's going on. So then we would call on our behalf and say, that's what I would do. I would say, Lauren, I'm just going to call ADPNC, what's going on, without Lizzie. And they would say, nope, we haven't talked to anybody. And I'm like, really? Well, I have an email. Well, we don't see any emails on our end. And I said, well, what are we going to do to get this direct deposit set up? And they said, well, we have to do A, B, and C.

So, of course, I had to go through Lauren. Lauren asked Lizzie, where's this document that we need? You know, so it just became this whole thing where she had to get looped back in. And then that's what would create the whole thing again. So every two weeks, she would rush in because the direct deposit wasn't there. Of course it wasn't there because she wasn't doing it. She created that drama herself. Yes. So she can come in and write manual checks to the staff. And save the day.

Yes. But what she was doing was she would do this entry into the ADP platform and it wouldn't save. So all the taxes were still left in our account. The staff thought their taxes were being taken out and documented, but they were just receiving a manual check.

So at least they got paid, but their taxes were left in our account. And what Lizzie did with that extra money, which was sitting there, you know, it was a substantial amount of money. She would write these checks that would say income tax payments. And at any time we had 200 checks a month because of all these payroll checks. Yeah. It creates a lot of confusion. Yeah. Once in a while I would see a payroll or a income tax payment check. And she said, yeah, that was just going to pay the taxes.

And that made sense to you? Of course. Like, you know, why would I doubt that? Of course it's going to pay the taxes. It's got to be going to the IRS. Yeah. But lo and behold, she had created a bank account called Income Tax Payments. And so she was just, you know, taking the money that way. And that was all the staff's taxes. If you, like most of us, don't totally grasp how payroll taxes work, let me break it down for you.

Because that confusion is a big part of why Lizzie's scam worked here.

Your employer withholds a portion of your paycheck and holds onto that money in order to pay taxes to the government on your behalf. Those payments for things like Social Security, Medicare, income tax, etc. get tallied into the W-2 forms you use to file your taxes. But at Geneva's Salon, none of those payments were being made to the government. They were being made to Lizzie's phony company.

And you don't have to be a CPA to understand that is a big problem. So come time for, you know, getting the W-2s out, the first set that they got was completely off. They were very wrong. They were all numbers based on what Lizzie had phonily created. It's like she just randomly went through and created a whole bunch of numbers and they were not accurate. So it took a lot of time and a lawyer to get it all compiled.

That whole scam that she created where she pretends to be doing your payroll with the direct deposit was just a way for her to get those income tax payment checks into her own account. Yes. But that's not the only way Lizzie Mulder tricks money out of the salon. Remember the blackout? My staff calls me saying the electricity is off. And I'm like, what? So I start looking on my phone for Edison's number and I get an 800 number start calling in.

And it was very muffled. It sounded really strange. This is Edison calling. We heard that you got your electricity shut off. We wouldn't do that. You're actually on auto pay, so there's no reason why that would happen. This is a fraudulent action. So what was the real story?

So we weren't on auto pay. Lizzie actually used a service that was a phone service where you can change your voice. You can change the number. You can say the numbers coming from whatever. So Lizzie had Googled Edison's number and she found that generic one 800 number and put that in as the call number for me. Right. And she disguised her voice saying whatever she needed to say. And so of course I looked it up and it,

went straight to Edison's website. It was Edison's, yeah, it was Edison's phone number. Yeah, so I still... And what does she use, like an app? Yeah, it's like some kind of app or something that you can pay, I don't know, $5 or something to disguise your voice and do phony calls. My God. And I'm sure she did that for the bank, you know, now that I think about it. She probably did it for any of the other vendors that we talked to. Yeah. Because there was a lot of times we would have, well, let me get Lizzie on the phone and the call would drop.

You know, for different various things. Because it is Lizzie on the phone. Yes. Yeah. So you're talking to a vendor who you think is a vendor, but it's really Lizzie pretending to be the vendor using this voice changing app. Yes. And then another thing happened where they called Lauren and it was some Southern accent. It was a Southern woman accent that called Lauren for another, some kind of thing that we had to bill pay, you know, and kept on saying like, it's totally fine.

And that's a statement that Lizzie would always say. It's totally fine. So even though the voice is different... Lauren knew that that's the way that Lizzie would say that. Yeah, that's her catchphrase. It's totally fine. Wow. So at that point, Lauren was like, yeah, that's weird.

But never in a million years would you think, oh, that's Lizzie with the voice changing technology app. No. Even when Jordan told us that, we said, oh, okay, that makes sense. But it just, it was weird. I thought that she called a service. And had an actor call or something. But it was actually her. So the depths of deception, she knows no bounds.

And that's certainly not news to Detective Jordan Merakian. She was using voice disguising technology where she would call people with a voice like as a male.

And how did you find this out? Did you witness her do that? Or you found the app on her phone? We found the app during the search warrant for her phone. But we had a number of victims say, you know, just... They spoke to someone at the IRS. They spoke to someone at the bank. Yes. It sounded like a weird voice, but it was a man. And it sounded like Lizzie Mulder. Because we all have certain dialect things that we say. Like certain phrases gave her away. Yeah. That tip people off like, wait a minute, it's a different voice, but that's a Lizzie phrase. Right. Huh. Yeah.

Yeah. God, because my con artist impersonated people with texts and emails, and she created this whole life. She was best friends with Jennifer Aniston. She had an inheritance coming in, and she's barristers in Ireland who were sending her emails, but it was all her. But she never had the skill set to use voice-changing software to actually talk to people as different people. Right. But that Lizzie Mulder, like, one-upped her on that.

After your entire world is flipped upside down,

From unbelievable romantic betrayals... The love that was so real for me was always just a game for him. To betrayals in your own family... When I think about my dad, oh, well, he is a sociopath. Financial betrayal...

This is not even the part where he steals millions of dollars. And life or death deceptions. She's practicing how she's going to cry when the police calls her after they kill me. Listen to Betrayal Weekly on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hi, I'm Molly Conger, host of Weird Little Guys, a new podcast from Cool Zone Media on iHeartRadio.

I've spent almost a decade researching right-wing extremism, digging into the lives of people you wouldn't be wrong to call monsters. But if Scooby-Doo taught us one thing, it's that there's a guy under that monster mask. I've collected the stories of hundreds of aspiring little Hitlers of the suburbs, from the Nazi cop who tried to join ISIS, to the National Guardsman plotting to assassinate the Supreme Court, to the Satanist soldier who tried to get his own unit blown up in Turkey. The monsters in our political closets aren't some unfathomable evil,

They're just some weird guy. And you can laugh. Honestly, I think you have to. Seeing these guys for what they are doesn't mean they're not a threat. It's a survival strategy. So join me every Thursday for a look under the mask at the weird little guys trying to destroy America. Listen to Weird Little Guys on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. ...schools and girls, and welcome to Haunting, Purgatory's premiere podcast for all things afterlife.

I'm your host, Teresa. We'll be bringing you different ghost stories each week, straight from the person who experienced it firsthand. Some will be unsettling. When she was with her imaginary friend, she would turn and look at you, and you felt like something else was looking at you too. Some unnerving. The more I looked at it, I realized that the thumb looked more like a claw, like a demon.

Some even downright terrifying. The things that I saw, heard, felt in that house were purely demonic. But all of them will be totally true. Listen to Haunting on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you live and get your podcasts.

Meet the real woman behind the tabloid headlines in a personal podcast that delves into the life of the notorious Tori Spelling as she takes us through the ups and downs of her sometimes glamorous, sometimes chaotic life and marriage. I don't think he knew how big it would be, how big the life I was given and live is.

I think he was like, oh, yeah, things come and go. But with me, it never came and went. Is she Donna Martin or a down-and-out divorcee? Is she living in Beverly Hills or a trailer park? In a town where the lines are blurred, Tori is finally going to clear the air in the podcast Misspelling. When a woman has nothing to lose, she has everything to gain. I just filed for divorce. Whoa, I said the words. Yeah.

That I've said like in my head for like 16 years. Wild. Listen to Miss Spelling on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. I've been thinking about you. I want you back in my life. It's too late for that. I have a proposal for you. Come up here and document my project. All you need to do is record everything like you always do. One session, 24 hours. BPM 110.

120. She's terrified. Should we wake her up? Absolutely not. What was that? You didn't figure it out? I think I need to hear you say it. That was live audio of a woman's nightmare. This machine is approved and everything? You're allowed to be doing this? We passed the review board a year ago. We're not hurting people. There's nothing dangerous about what you're doing. They're just dreams. Dream Sequence is a new horror thriller from Blumhouse Television, iHeartRadio, and Realm.

Listen to Dream Sequence on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

Geneva and Lauren get sucked into the whole Lizzie Mulder runaround bait-and-switch scam for two years. Money earmarked to pay the electric bills, pay vendors, and pay taxes gets diverted into Lizzie's bank accounts instead. She steals nearly $300,000 from the salon that way. But in reality, the salon ends up losing much, much more.

Not only did she take that cash from us, that was actually, you know, for various vendors, like I said, there's lines of credit all over the place. We ended up having to take another $250,000 in loans to pay all these big things, you know, pay the bank back, pay all the taxes.

We had to send all that to ADP. We had to send it to IRS, Social Security. Everything that you have on your check, we had to write big checks to that. It's what happened as a result of what she stole. All that extra money. All the extra money we had to take loans out and that we have another $300,000 of new debt on top of not having any money. That's not money that we could use for putting back into the business. That's just staying afloat.

And then we have to pay that money back. And then we start losing staff because they don't trust us. So then it's even harder to make that money back. So we end up being basically slaves to our business because we have to earn enough money to provide for our staff and provide for ourselves and pay it all back.

It's going to take the span of our lease, truly, to pay back what Lizzie stole from us. And it's just insane to go through that kind of thing. And it's part of our story. And that's what I try to say to anybody that if you have something that you might be embarrassed about because you were vulnerable and somebody took advantage of you, you have to get the word out. You have to tell people because you could be saving somebody else from the same thing. And I know for a fact that this has happened.

Whatever we've said has resonated for somebody. Absolutely. And they've said,

That sounds familiar from something that I've gone through with my bookkeeper or my whatever they are. Because the red flags are all the same. Exactly. Yep. All con artists are using the exact same playbook. Only the names and places change. But scamming the salon isn't what puts Lizzie Mulder on the radar of the Laguna Beach Police Department. In fact, by the time Detective Jordan Merakian starts investigating the salon scam in 2016...

he's already knee-deep, untangling a wide array of Lizzie's cons based on other victims' complaints. This is the first interview I've done where I've been able to really talk about all the things involved in this case.

And it all starts in October 2015, when a man by the name of Jay Avery and his wife Marla walk into Laguna Beach PD. Everybody thought we were crazy when we would tell them what happened. So many people made me feel like I was nuts. But that's how it started. I catch up with a couple over Zoom. They're living in Utah now. Is it the Zoom for us and it's just a podcast or will people be able to see us?

- Us. - Us. - Oh no, yeah, it's just audio. I mean, the Zoom is so we can look each other in the eye and talk. - Yeah, yeah, no problem.

But if ever a couple should be seen, it's these two. They look like they stepped out of a fashion magazine. Jay Avery, tall, tanned, and tatted. His wife Marla, a former Playboy model. Though their movie star good looks seem to have zero sway when they try to report what happened to police. And we went to a number of police stations trying to get them to take the case. I called the police station in Napa Valley or wherever. St. Helena. I just was going all around.

Detective Merakian explains that turning scam victims away at police stations is actually a very common occurrence. He had already come in to the Laguna Beach Police Department prior to me taking over the fraud desk. He'd been there before and they sent him away. They sent him away. That's what they did to me. Right. It's like, Jesus. Well, because Jay was not that unlike any other fraud victim. He walked in with a box of paperwork and said, this person's stealing from me.

And when you're a detective or even when you're a beat cop, you know, assigned to patrol, most of the time it's the result of a bad business deal, which most of the time is

is a civil matter. And that's exactly what the cop told me. Right. It's a civil matter. This isn't a criminal matter. You gave her the money. Go to civil court. Good luck. Right. And they told Jay the same thing. They did. I heard he tried multiple times. He did. If memory serves, he had been in and out of the police station at least three times. And then the fourth time he comes in,

So the fourth time he comes in, you know, I had a routine where I would get there early and leave a little bit early so I could miss traffic and go to the gym, which is where I'm coming from today. And he walks in and he says, I need to speak to the fraud detective. And I happened to walk right by him when he said that. And so I looked at him. I said, oh, that's me. He's standing there with his then fiance, Marla. And he's like, I need to talk to you.

You know, there was something about him. I just, I felt like I needed to hear his story.

So we went back and we sat down and talked. How amazing is that, though? You're walking out. You're not even listening. You hear, oh, I need to speak to the fraud detective. And you're like, that's me. And most people in your position would have ignored that because you're going home. You're going to the gym. Correct. But you felt something. You felt like an urgency from him or an energy from him. Like what made you decide to, let me talk to this guy. I mean, candidly, I have a full sleeve. So I have tattoos all over. I saw his ink.

And I was like, that's some nice ink. Like, that was my first reaction when I saw him. Yeah, he pulled down his sleeve because he was on duty and they have to cover up their tattoos in Laguna. So he pulled down his sleeve to show me his tattoos. I vividly remember that part of the conversation. There was just some kind of aura about him. He's a very charismatic dude. We're about the same age. And I just, I felt bad for him. I wanted to at least...

hear him out and not make him feel like we didn't care. Right. At that point, you didn't think there was any crime? No, at that point, I thought, you know, okay, fine. I'm going to listen to this guy. I'm going to deliver the bad news that it's a bad business deal. Good luck in civil court. Good luck in civil court. Go get an attorney. You're probably not going to win a dime. Have a nice day. Regardless, Jay and Marla are beyond grateful that Detective Merakian even seems interested in their case at all.

Because no one else is. The truth of the matter is, without your tattoos, you would have gone to the police ten more times and nothing would have been done. Nothing would have happened, yeah. But it's not long after talking to Jay and Marla that Detective Merakian figures out one possible reason police keep turning them away. The problem that Jay was running into is he was telling people that he was a recovering addict.

So when you tell a cop who is salty, jaded, burnt out, you think, oh, here's another drug addict. Yeah. You brought it on yourself. I don't have time for this. People are dead somewhere. I got to go deal with that. Correct.

But on that day, back in January of 2016, Jay is clean and sober for almost three years as he starts telling Detective Merakian about his ordeal with Lizzie Mulder. Probably lost a couple million over like a seven-year period. Wow. Yeah. Yeah.

This was like a low time in your life. Yeah, 100% because I went, you know, from maybe not ever really having to worry about money again to, oh no, what am I going to do? And I felt like a failure. I felt, you know, just lost. I got to a place to where I wasn't sure if I really wanted to continue moving forward with life, you know.

As a victim of a con myself, I know that feeling all too well. And I've since learned it's exactly the way a con artist wants to leave you feeling so they can make their escape. And you're too hurt and devastated to do anything about it. But I'm getting ahead of myself.

After your entire world is flipped upside down,

From unbelievable romantic betrayals... The love that was so real for me was always just a game for him. To betrayals in your own family... When I think about my dad, oh, well, he is a sociopath. Financial betrayal...

This is not even the part where he steals millions of dollars. And life or death deceptions. She's practicing how she's going to cry when the police calls her after they kill me. Listen to Betrayal Weekly on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hi, I'm Molly Conger, host of Weird Little Guys, a new podcast from Cool Zone Media on iHeartRadio.

I've spent almost a decade researching right-wing extremism, digging into the lives of people you wouldn't be wrong to call monsters. But if Scooby-Doo taught us one thing, it's that there's a guy under that monster mask. I've collected the stories of hundreds of aspiring little Hitlers of the suburbs, from the Nazi cop who tried to join ISIS, to the National Guardsman plotting to assassinate the Supreme Court, to the Satanist soldier who tried to get his own unit blown up in Turkey. The monsters in our political closets aren't some unfathomable evil,

They're just some weird guy. And you can laugh. Honestly, I think you have to. Seeing these guys for what they are doesn't mean they're not a threat. It's a survival strategy. So join me every Thursday for a look under the mask at the weird little guys trying to destroy America. Listen to Weird Little Guys on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. ...schools and girls, and welcome to Haunting, Purgatory's premiere podcast for all things afterlife.

I'm your host, Teresa. We'll be bringing you different ghost stories each week, straight from the person who experienced it firsthand. Some will be unsettling. When she was with her imaginary friend, she would turn and look at you, and you felt like something else was looking at you too. Some unnerving. The more I looked at it, I realized that the thumb looked more like a claw, like a demon.

Some even downright terrifying. The things that I saw, heard, felt in that house were purely demonic. But all of them will be totally true. Listen to Haunting on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you live and get your podcasts.

Meet the real woman behind the tabloid headlines in a personal podcast that delves into the life of the notorious Tori Spelling as she takes us through the ups and downs of her sometimes glamorous, sometimes chaotic life and marriage. I don't think he knew how big it would be, how big the life I was given and live is.

I think he was like, oh, yeah, things come and go. But with me, it never came and went. Is she Donna Martin or a down-and-out divorcee? Is she living in Beverly Hills or a trailer park? In a town where the lines are blurred, Tori is finally going to clear the air in the podcast Misspelling. When a woman has nothing to lose, she has everything to gain. I just filed for divorce. Whoa. I said the words. Yeah.

That I've said like in my head for like 16 years. Wild. Listen to Miss Spelling on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. I've been thinking about you. I want you back in my life. It's too late for that. I have a proposal for you. Come up here and document my project. All you need to do is record everything like you always do. One session, 24 hours. BPM 110.

120. She's terrified. Should we wake her up? Absolutely not. What was that? You didn't figure it out? I think I need to hear you say it. That was live audio of a woman's nightmare. This machine is approved and everything? You're allowed to be doing this? We passed the review board a year ago. We're not hurting people. There's nothing dangerous about what you're doing. They're just dreams. Dream Sequence is a new horror thriller from Blumhouse Television, iHeartRadio, and Realm.

Listen to Dream Sequence on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. How did Lizzie Mulder first enter your life, Jay?

So I was a personal trainer for years and I had a client that ran a pretty big well development company and she ran his books. And when I started the wine business, things started to pick up a little bit. I needed help with the accounting. So he referred her to me and then that's how we met in about 2009. And she was a big part of helping me get organized. So you were like a trainer, like training guys, like working out, lifting weights, stuff like that. Yeah. Yeah.

And it was one of your clients who you were training recommended, "Hey, I know this great CPA, Lizzie Mulder." Yeah. Yeah, exactly.

And what business was your client in? And he was a pretty big web developer, so it was a pretty legit referral. So Jay starts moving away from being a personal trainer in a gym to owning and operating a winery. It's a dream come true for him. His family's in the beer business. And now, using his own money, Jay starts Jack Wines.

an up-and-coming label in Napa Valley with a bright future. Jay's business model was, to me, rather genius. Detective Merakian is impressed with Jay's savvy and entrepreneurship. He would buy overstocked wine

When they make wine, they make too much. Yeah. So he would buy those barrels and re-bottle them and re-label them and sell them. Ooh, so he never actually had to make wine. No. He just had to get the extra from others. Right. That is a genius idea. It's a great idea. And he was doing well. Well, until... Until a confident blonde with a warm smile and convincing pedigree enters the picture. How does she come across to you?

outgoing, very pleasant, sharp, with the correct response for the questions that I was asking. She seemed like a go-getter. Was she likable? Oh, yeah. Yeah, her and I were close. And I lost a lot of friends through my addiction, right? A lot of people that I grew up with from the age of five, six, and seven, that was the end of that, right? Jay's drug problem, though, doesn't start in the streets. It actually starts in a doctor's office.

So my drug of choice is opiates. It started out after a bunch of surgeries. I had about five surgeries in two years. Wow. Yeah, two hand surgeries and three knee surgeries. And were these injuries from like? Yeah, from hockey. I played hockey growing up and I was a big, you know, brawler, so to speak.

And during those three years, in the throes of drug addiction, when all of Jay's friends desert him, Lizzie Mulder sticks by him.

In his eyes, and even in his wife Marla's eyes, she's like family. The impression that I originally got was that they're kind of like a sister, like an older sister type. But when Jay's addiction becomes untenable, things change quick. No one really knew that I had an opiate problem at that point. I ended up

getting a DUI in 2011, which crashed my car and sustained some injuries. And then it kind of was the cat was out of the bag that, hey, I in fact have a drug problem. And then at that point, I told her I was going to get help and she was very supportive.

She was helping me find detoxes, intensive outpatients. And I went to an intensive outpatient to do kind of an intake assessment. And they told me that I needed full-blown inpatient when I gave them my history and what I was currently using. So Jay checks himself into rehab. And what happens next is literally unbelievable. Well, there's so much more about Lizzie that goes into the level of...

Diabolical, sociopathic behavior. Next time on Queen of the Con, the OC Savior. She created a website. She created a 1-800 number. She created a guy named Brent Harrison using spoof software. And I'm thinking I'm talking to a guy overseas that wants to invest into my winery. And really, I'm talking to that woman in Orange County that is just scamming me the whole time.

And it sounded like a man. It did. It sounded just like a man. Lizzie Mulder uses her close relationships to her victims to bleed them dry. Probably lost a couple million. Wow. And shockingly, most victims refuse to believe what's happening right in front of their own eyes. And they were basically saying, I think you got the wrong girl. Lizzie's a sweetheart. I've been at her house. I've met her kids and her beautiful family. And, you know, she's amazing.

Queen of the Con, The OC's Savior, is a production of AYR Media and iHeart Media. Hosted by me, Jonathan Walton. Executive Producers, Jonathan Walton for Jonathan Walton Productions. And Elisa Rosen for AYR Media. Written by Jonathan Walton. Consulting Producer, Evan Goldstein. Senior Associate Producer, Eric Newman. Sound Design by Baked ZD Media.

Mixed and mastered by Cameron Tagge. Sound editing, audio and studio engineering by Matt Jacobson. Legal counsel for AYR Media, Gianni Douglas. Executive producer for iHeart Media, Maya Howard.

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Listen to Betrayal Weekly on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hi, I'm Molly Conger, host of Weird Little Guys, a new podcast from Cool Zone Media on iHeartRadio. I've spent almost a decade researching right-wing extremism, digging into the lives of people you wouldn't be wrong to call monsters. But if Scooby-Doo taught us one thing, it's that there's a guy under that monster mask. The monsters in our political closets aren't some unfathomable evil. They're just some weird guy.

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