Hi, it's your host Christopher Gofford.

Thank you so much for tuning in to the first season of Crimes of the Times.

While you wait for season two, please enjoy a special featured episode of my show, Dirty John,

the story of a Newport Beach family whose life is upended by a manipulative predator who is not what he seems.

This is episode one of Dirty John, The Real Thing.

A listener note, this story contains adult content and language.

There are a total of 13 stab wounds which have penetrated the body.

They are all arbitrarily numbered from 1 to 13.

There are eight wounds noted in the left side and upper back in the shoulder and scapular area,

where wound number one is on the top of the left shoulder.

I'm sitting in the office of a man who prosecutes murders for a living.

His name is Matt Murphy.

He's a veteran assistant district attorney who handles homicides out of Newport Beach, California.

If you're from somewhere else and have a mental picture of Orange County about an hour south of L.A., Newport Beach is probably part of that

image. It's the side of the county that the tourist guides want you to see. Pacific Coast Highway

runs through it, luxury shopping, piers and surf shops and plastic surgeons, yachts and

cliffside mansions. I used to cover the city as a crime reporter for a local

newspaper. There weren't a lot of murders, maybe one a year, two or three in a very bad year.

Greed or lust figured prominently in the most memorable ones. These days, if you're one of the

rare people who meet a violent death in Newport Beach,

Matt Murphy is the prosecutor who will hear about it.

The homicide case that landed on his desk in the summer of 2016 was particularly violent,

...