The OC Savior: Ep. 4, Better Than Everybody
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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.

Kay hasn't heard from her sister in seven years. 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. What was that? That was live audio of a woman's nightmare. Can Kay trust her sister, or is history repeating itself? 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.

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.

Jay Avery's company, Jack Wines, is scammed out of nearly $300,000 by CPA Lizzie Mulder. And Laguna Beach police detective Jordan Merakian is digging in. The bottom line is there are fake people who are accepting invoices on behalf of Lizzie Mulder and Jack Wines. And money is not going from Jack Wines to these people. It's going right back into Lizzie Mulder's account.

And around the same time that Jay Avery is getting scammed, Mike Cochran's print shop is con artist Lizzie Mulder's latest mark. I was talking to a gal. She was a dog trainer we used to print business cards for. She knew a girl, young lady, Elizabeth Mulder, and referred us. Said she's a tax preparer. Was like her second mom, she claimed. I leave a voicemail for this dog trainer.

Hey, my name is Jonathan Walton. And she calls me back the next day telling me I actually have it all wrong. Lizzie Mulder is completely innocent. I'm Jonathan Walton and this is Queen of the Con, the OC Savior. Episode 4, Better Than Everybody.

You know, the embarrassing part about us is we're one of the lower ripoffs, okay? She took $18,000 out of my business. She took a little over $20,000 out of my parents. It's been more than 10 years since CPA Lizzie Mulder first darkens Mike Cochran's doorway. He hires her in 2011 to do taxes for his Orange County print shop. My dad died about

three and a half four months after i met lizzy yeah i took my eyes off my business yeah i didn't give a dude you know i was wandering around and just so you know i have two older sisters my middle sister has mental health she lived with my parents her whole life things got worse with time so after my dad expired she blew a fuse i'm sure gosh and went into a facility and all that so i was in family mode yeah you're just in family mode and you're like well there's enough money in the bank

Payroll's going to go through with my crew. And Lizzie made you believe she's on top of things. Oh, yeah, yeah, no, I got it. Don't worry about it. Remote this, remote that. She'd send us information from the IRS saying things are moving along and then there'd be some emails. I mean, dude, the whips she played to create billing were all fabrications. Yeah.

Every one of them. So she would send you documents. Send me documents. From the IRS. But really, she created those documents herself. Oh, yeah. And they were payments to income tax payments. But the coup de grace was the checking account with the name income tax payments. And I had invoices from the IRS saying make checks payable to income tax payments. So it's kind of like you have an IRS document backing up the name of this account.

And when you say it out loud, you go, "That doesn't sound right." But at the time, it flew right through. Do you hold Bank of America responsible at all? Yeah, totally. That's bullshit, man. I mean, that's lack of moral accountability. Yeah. She can just go to Bank of America and open up an account called "income tax payments," and that doesn't raise a red flag for them? Yeah, no, that's just bullshit.

But then we also paid Mulder Financial Services, which was her tax preparing. Right. So we actually paid her to prepare. Oh, wait a minute. She didn't prepare taxes. Yeah. You paid her to scam you. We paid her to scam us. She even did a crazy thing. Probably about two years into working with her, she told us that there was an audit that she had to go to in L.A. to the main office. For your company. For my business. Yeah. Yeah.

Needed some information, provide all these documents, da-da-da-da. I'm going to go there. I'm going to have to take a girl with me just so you know it's going to be expensive. And, you know, oh, but this will take care of it. We're going to clear it all up. Fuck. Total bullshit. Okay. So she wanted to get money from you to go on this trip for the audit. Oh, it was $3,500 to go up and do the IRS audit in L.A. with her and one of her assistants. And there never was an audit. There never was an audit. Complete fabrication. Wow.

She did a series of phone calls, faxes information. Oh, I'm at the office right now. Hold on one sec. This agent's going to call you. He's going to talk to you. So you talked to who you thought was an IRS agent. Oh, yeah. But it was Lizzie Mulder. It was Lizzie Mulder. And what does that voice sound like? It sounded like a dude. You know, at the time, I didn't like...

imprinted in my brain. Okay? Right. Like, I should remember the sound of this voice because it's special. It was not a female voice. It had more baritone or... What do guys have? Adam's apple? Some shit? Something? There's some different tweak in a guy's voice than a girl's. What do guys have? Well, you know what I'm saying. No, yeah, yeah. No, it's like a deeper man... Like a man's voice. Like, you know a man's voice. Absolutely.

I just assumed it was a guy and this sounded all legit and, you know, okay. And yes, I agree with that. And, you know, he was asking me questions in particular to our taxes. And, you know, I just soaked it all up. But looking back, you're like, Jesus, man, that's... That's sophistication. That is a person that is a professional. Yeah. And how does she steal the money from your parents? My dad was close to death. Wow. Okay.

He was in a... Like a hospice? Hospice care, yeah. Where everybody's trying to have you take the magic pill and go to sleep. Yeah. Okay. So he's winding down and he's trying to get his affairs in order. So he was selling stock. My dad had some inheritance, some houses. His brother and sister died. No kids. And he got the houses. So, you know, the boy built up some funds and was trying to take care of my mom. So he was generating some cash and so on and so forth. Lizzie was helping us. So we thought... Yeah. Yeah.

I told my parents, I only knew Lizzie for about a month, okay? She did the taxes for my mom and dad. Had them write five checks to her. You know where they all went. Income tax payments. Income tax payments. And so she filed the taxes, but she did not apply any of the payments. Of course, she took that money for herself. Then she was saying that she wanted to help them with their estate. So that was where Lizzie possibly could have stole millions of dollars. But my mom was like, nope, nope, nope.

My mom was an executive secretary. She used to do stuff for one of the VPs at Wells Fargo. So my mom had her shit together. Thank God. Thank God. You know, and basically said, no, baby, I'm in charge. I take care of this.

When you get stuck in one of these crappy situations, which I hope most people don't, okay, but there's millions of con people out there, in my view. There really are. Human nature is dirty, you know? Well, I don't think human nature is dirty. I think most people are good, fine people. Yeah, but Lizzie really got us. She fooled us the whole way.

Talking to Mike, it's clear that he's not over what happened to him. I mean, how could he be? This has been one of the biggest mistakes of my life. Well, you see, I don't think you should frame it that way. You didn't make a mistake. You were the victim of a con artist. Yes. The mistake you made was having a business and needing a CPA. That's not a mistake. Yeah, yeah. And then this dog trainer recommends her. This woman gave her a glowing recommendation. Yeah, yeah. Do you think she's in on it?

I question it highly because she was a woman of very simple means, I think is a nice way of saying it. And now she has quite a bit of means. But... A dog trainer. Yeah. But she met a nice man. Oh, okay. She never gave me any signals that she would lie or swindle me or anything.

Well, after my meeting with Mike Cochran, I get a return phone call from the dog trainer on February 8th, 2022 at 10 past nine in the morning. And my mouth is agape for our entire seven minute conversation. I wish I could play it for you, but she didn't agree to be recorded.

The dog trainer doesn't want to be interviewed for the podcast, and she says neither does Lizzie or anyone in her family. She goes on to tell me that Lizzie Mulder is not a con artist at all, and all those entrepreneurs she did the books for, the winery, the salon, Mike's print shop, are just bad business people who lose money and are now trying to blame poor Lizzie Mulder

I call up Mike Cochran to see what he makes of this interesting revelation. So it's a very suspect situation with her.

you know, her occupation of training dogs. Well, a lot of people have dogs. She could have come in and, you know, we have her up here and she trained our dogs. So she got a full look at our house and our assets and stuff. And maybe that's what prompted Lizzie to come on to us.

She was like doing reconnaissance. Possibly so. You know, I mean, you get, you know, all sorts of paranoia theories come into play. But when you start looking at Lizzie's body of work, nothing was out of bounds. Nothing was too far-fetched because look at all the methods she used to extort people.

Hi, it's Andrea Gunning, 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. Stories about regaining a sense of safety, a handle on reality 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. My next call is to the owner and operator of Jack Wines, who Lizzie scams out of nearly $300,000. Hello. Hey, Jay Avery. Can you talk now? I can't, man. I'm just driving. I'm in a fucking RV. Low and slow, baby.

Since Lizzie was almost like a sister to Jay, or at least she was pretending to be while she was scamming him, I'm wondering if he actually knows the dog trainer. Yeah, I've never met her, but I've heard that name before. So what's going on with that?

I talked to her and she doesn't want to do an interview, shocker, because the dog trainer tells me Lizzie Mulder is innocent. Lizzie Mulder is not a con artist. You and all the other victims are just making this up because you're bad business people. You lost money and you're trying to blame her. Wow. I mean, that is...

That's interesting. Wow. My mind is blown right now. I can't even think. This is wild. I mean, that's cognitive dissonance like I've never seen before. I'm not even mad. I'm impressed. I just don't understand how you can even come up with a concept that is insulting and delusional like that. It's crazy. But the fact that, you know, we made it up, it's crazy.

I had no clue that she wasn't paying them.

So I'm still dealing with it five years later. So it's just, it's insulting to even think that someone could even go down that road of thinking that Lizzie is innocent, you know? Yeah, I know. Hey, Jonathan, how are you? I'm good, man. Thank you so much for... My next phone call is to Sergeant Jordan Merakian, the Laguna Beach police detective investigating Lizzie Mulder back in 2016. I want to know if he knows about the dog trainer.

Yep, sounds like what she said to me. So you talked to the dog trainer? Yeah, I talked to her. I tried to go out there and actually visit her in person. She wanted nothing to do with me.

She said that everyone was framing Lizzie and that Lizzie was innocent and we got it all wrong and she's a sweetheart. She would trust her dogs and her life with Lizzie. I said, I understand where you're coming from, but I have pages and pages of bank records that tell me different. And I left it at that. She wanted nothing to do with me.

This just reeks of a conspiracy to me. The dog trainer taking Lizzie Mulder's side means she's gotta be in on the scam, right?

But I realize, as the victim of a con artist myself, my lingering anger and emotion can sometimes get the best of me and blind me from seeing things clearly. So I reach out to a neutral third party who doesn't have a dog in this race, but does have decades of experience investigating complex criminality. Jonathan, I was a psychiatric nurse for 10 years.

when the FBI recruited me to be a special agent. And that looked like fun to me. So I turned in my stethoscope for a Smith & Wesson, and there I was.

Candace DeLong was a criminal profiler for the FBI from 1980 to 2000. She worked on some pretty groundbreaking cases, from the Tylenol murders... Johnson & Johnson is now offering a $100,000 reward for those responsible for spiking Tylenol capsules with deadly cyanide poisoning. ...to taking down the Unabomber. FBI agents are searching the Montana cabin of former mathematics professor Ted Kaczynski.

These days, though, Candice hosts a podcast called Killer Psyche, where she shares her expertise on the criminal mind. One of the most difficult situations is if you're in love with someone. Then you've got blinders on. Love is truly, truly blind. The emotion of it prevents you from seeing clearly or analyzing clearly what's right in front of you.

Because con artists, in a way, get their victims to fall in love with them. Even if it's not a romantic love. Yes. It's friendship. They groom them. And when you really love someone or like someone or consider someone a, quote, best friend, yeah, you overlook a lot. You'll believe a lot that you wouldn't believe if you had your full brain operating. Exactly. Exactly. So what's your take on the dog trainer?

that Lizzie did a hell of a job on her. She did a job on her, and it's the halo effect. It's with Lizzie Mulder. People saw a successful woman, successful with money. They believed she was a CPA. No one questioned her. She lived in a beautiful home, had nice cars, and they had the halo effect about her. In fact, she was a psychopath con woman.

It all boils down to trust. I, dog trainer, judged Lizzie to be a good and wonderful and successful and nice person. And she's hanging on to that. Despite overwhelming evidence and proof, it all boils down to, I see what I want to see and I know what I want to know. And I don't want to know bad things about Lizzie. And that's that go away. To me, she's...

Like in cahoots with Lizzie. Well, it might be or it simply could be she's married to her ideas. She's married to her beliefs. Jonathan, what we're talking about could boil down to we like to believe we are good judges of character. And this happens, let's say someone is arrested for molesting a child.

Maybe it's a coach. It turns out he's been arrested for molesting a 12 year old boy and maybe other parents come forward to go, well, I think this happened to my child. My child said it happened to him.

There is initially, especially in cases, I'm not talking about a stranger coming into a nice neighborhood and grabbing a kid. I'm talking about somebody who lives in the neighborhood, is part of the community, and is trusted by parents to be with their children. And then something like this happens. People circle the wagons to protect the accused. Nope, couldn't have done it, couldn't have done it. Because to accept that they were so wrong,

To trust that person with their child is painful. It shakes their world. And it's really easier to go, no, no, I think the kid's lying. It's a witch on, it's this, it's that. And to deal with these kinds of criminals, whether it be a child molester or a con artist, we have to accept, hey, we're human. And if you're a trusting person that's not a criminal, which fortunately most of us are not criminals...

These things happen. Misjudging someone's intent, it happens. You know what's brilliant about you? You completely changed my mind just now. Really? You did, because I was convinced this dog trainer is in on it, when really that example illustrates perfectly how strong people don't want to believe that they were wrong because they played a role in hurting someone. Plus, and I think the stronger thing is, they have to accept that they...

made a mistake. Their judgment was inaccurate. I think that's the dog trainer. She doesn't want to believe it. I hope she never gets victimized. It's human nature, really. You just don't want to believe bad things about the people you love, the people you trust, the people you stick up for, and, as Detective Merakian points out, the people you have stuff in common with.

Lizzie likes to rehabilitate horses and the dog trainer likes to train and to some extent rehabilitate dogs. So they have a commonality, which is not unlike any of the cons that Lizzie accomplished. Like every single person that Lizzie scammed out of money, she found a commonality with them.

to make them feel like Lizzie was a part of their family or at least a very close personal friend and not a business associate. I have a little bit of background with people who love animals.

Yeah, that makes sense.

Thankfully, though, once the elaborate cons of Lizzie Mulder start going public, ardent supporters of Lizzie, like the dog trainer, are in the minority. She came to my wedding and my baby shower. Yeah. Jen Rodriguez is a forensic accountant at a company called Witham. She's whip smart with long brown hair and a hopeful glint in her eye. She exudes kindness and a perpetual curiosity about everything.

She's actually good friends with Lizzie Mulder, before she finds out Lizzie's a con artist. But looking back, Jen realizes it was far from a healthy friendship. She was the personality that was the one-upper. Everybody has that friend, right? You say, "Oh my gosh, I got this new car. It's really great." "Oh, that car? Well, I just bought this car."

She always was a one-upper. Oh, John, I'm so sorry you rent. Oh, she said that to you? Oh, yeah, she would say that often. Hi, it's Andrea Gunning, 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.

Stories about regaining a sense of safety, a handle on reality 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. Thanks ghouls 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 Misspelling 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. 8 p.m. 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. Jen's friendship with Lizzie starts like a lot of friendships do, on the job. I worked at a place that she was doing accounting, and that's how I first met her. They're both working for a website selling luxury experiences.

Ironically, we actually had many other crossings before even that, that we put together after the fact. For example, her uncle actually sang at my grandparents' wedding, believe it or not. Yeah. Her uncle sang at your grandparents' wedding? So like a long time ago. Like a long time ago.

And I even danced with her uncle because her uncle was an Armenian musician and I did belly dancing and all that fun. You did belly dancing? Yes, back in the day. So you're a belly dancing forensic accountant. There's a show here. I think Bravo would buy that in a second.

But when Jen first meets Lizzie in 2010, they're working for the same company. FYI, it's a different company than where Jen's working now. She would come to the office just like very sporadically, you know, for year-end taxes or things that were going on. At the time, my boss was married, so she also handled their personal taxes. So she would interact with my boss's husband. And I really thought she was just over the top, like, oh, like, yeah.

Literally, I had a sentence for her, oh, Lizzie, because she would say things and do things that you would think, wait, what? And oh, Lizzie, you know, that that was kind of my thought for her. And because she would say things so out of the blue, almost as if she didn't have filters. And then I struggle with that, too. So I get it. So I just kind of had compassion and just would be like, oh, Lizzie.

But she was gregarious. She was very outspoken and direct. And to be honest, I quite appreciated that. That's something I quite liked about her was that she seemed to be very direct and upfront and to the point. It's amazing you say that. I had the exact same feeling when I met Mare. She seemed like a woman who told it like it is, who didn't have a filter. And living in L.A. where everyone's fake...

It was so refreshing to see someone so, quote, honest. Yes. But now in retrospect, we both have learned the hard way. Right. That wasn't honesty. That was a con. Well, and probably the real truth of it was some of it was honest, and that's what makes it so believable. Right. It's like a kernel of truth. Yes. That's our biggest fall was because you would hear things, and as the story unfolded, you would get one nugget of truth, but then you would rationalize the things that didn't add up.

I mean, I trusted things that she said, like damning things about colleagues and people I work with, people that are now my closest friends.

So she was telling you crap about other people. Yeah. What, to keep you away from them or keep you disliking them? I think to keep us autonomous. Yeah. So that way there weren't checks and balances. You know, as an forensic accountant now, I know the number one thing is you always have checks and balances, right? Internal controls. But she drove in between those internal controls. She interrupted them because she acted as a control. Right. Right.

And that's a classic con technique. Totally. That's what Mayor Smith did to me. She kept me separate from people by telling me my neighbors are murderers, one in Canada. Right. So I avoided them. Meanwhile, she's scamming them. She's scamming me. And we're avoiding each other. Oh, my God. Yeah. Like so awful too, right? Like they're murderers. Yeah. But Lizzie did the same thing to you. Told you lies about friends and colleagues to keep you separated. Right. Yeah. There is a technique to these people. Yeah. Yeah.

There was one party that we went to, my husband and I, we went with her, and she was so socially awkward. It was very interesting, and that was actually right before things really started unfolding. It was kind of like, you know, when you're picking up the crumb pieces and you look back and you're like, wow, how did I not see that before? And there was a party, a dinner party that she had before we knew anything that happened, and she was so over the top.

trying to be cool and trying to be fun. And she was taking shots and making a big deal that she couldn't swallow Jell-O shots. It was just very high school. Like somebody that hadn't really evolved and matured and grew up and went through that in high school. Were you ever suspicious of Lizzie Mulder? Like before everyone figured out she's a con artist and she stole all this money from all these people.

There were things that didn't add up, but I fell into that trap that it was, you can justify it. You know, like, oh, well, maybe she's just really stressed out or maybe she has a lot going on or maybe I just misread that. My husband, on the other hand, knew from the get-go. Did he? Did he?

The minute he met her, he knew something was up. What gave her away in his eyes? What was he saying? Her arrogance. I hear that again and again. She was arrogant. Very arrogant. She was always telling you how great she was. Yes, yes, yes. She was better than everybody. And something about that rubbed him the wrong way. And in the end, cracks started really showing up.

But she always had an answer for them. She could explain it. So if something didn't add up at the time, my counterpart that's based out of state, she blamed a lot of the things that were coming up on her. And so I would have never thought to put it that she was lying to me or putting it on this person. I just thought, man, this person sucks at their job, which ironically, she's the polar opposite of that. She's amazing at her job. But Lizzie had built up this...

persona that I believed was this person. And then probably about three weeks before everything really started coming out, I caught her in some big lies. And that one I couldn't justify. And one of them was a really big lie. And I couldn't even talk for a whole night because there was no justification. The only justification was that she was doing something really wrong.

And what was that lie? So we use a program like a lot of companies, a CRM program, and it was Salesforce at the time. And it was like a $5,000 subscription that you pay annually. But if you don't pay on time, you know, they shut down your database. So you lose everything. So my reps are down, everybody's down. And I had told her, Lizzie, you need to pay this bill that I'm shut down. And she had told me I'm on the phone right now with the guy.

Well, I was on the phone with the guy and she had said that she was paying with, I can't remember now if it was that she was paying with a credit card or with the check. I can't remember whatever it was that she said she was paying with. They don't take that. And the guy's like, nope, that could have never happened. Nope, she's not on the phone with anyone. So she was texting me blow by blow, but I was on the phone with Salesforce and there was just no response.

So you knew every single text at that point was a lie. A lie. Mm-hmm. Wow. Yeah. So at this stage in the game, Lizzie Mulder scams $40,000 from print shop owner Mike Cochran and his parents, while she's scamming $285,000 from Jay Avery and Jack Wines, while she's also scamming $291,000 from Geneva Mendoza's Newport Beach Salon.

But Lizzie's biggest swindle by far actually comes out of Jen's boss's pocketbook. How much money did your boss end up losing? Millions. Next time on Queen of the Con, the OC savior. Sometimes I feel like a bad mom because I opened my family up and, you know, I kind of invited the devil into the den.

And dealing with the devil causes Jen Rodriguez to take matters into her own hands. I happen to have a stack of her mail, and I ripped open a big statement right then and there, and I literally almost vomited, like vomited. But Lizzie has a plausible explanation for everything. My boss would never listen if I would say, hey, this doesn't quite make sense. One of the things Lizzie was famous for

in a roundabout way, making people feel stupid. And Lizzie kind of browbeats people into, hey, you stay in your lane. And that's how Lizzie operates.

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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