A NOTORIOUS con artist ambushed his stepdaughter, which ultimately led to his death.
Terra Newell, alongside her boyfriend, Collier Landry, who is also a survivor of domestic violence, have since used their trauma to help others.
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Who is Terra Newell?
Terra Newell is a podcast host and trauma survivor from California.
She is arguably best known for taking down Dirty John John Meehan, the subject of the 2018 Golden Globe-nominated Netflix series of the same name, and a Los Angeles Times true crime podcast.
What happened to Terra Newell?
The daughter of Debra Newell, Terra was once the stepdaughter of John, a conman whom her mother met on a dating site.
Debra and John's relationship moved quickly, and within two months, they were married.
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Debra's nuptials never sat well with Terra, and she, alongside her adult siblings, would go on to discover John's questionable past, which included drug-related charges, abuse, and scams.
This led John to confront Terra in the parking lot of her Newport Beach apartment on August 20, 2016.
It is not known why John went after Terra, but she was able to fight him off and fatally stab him 13 times.
"It's poetic justice in the strongest degree," Orange County prosecutor Matt Murphy told People in 2018.
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"He victimized women for so long, and at the end of the day he got bettered by a woman."
Where is Terra Newell now?
The 2016 events that unfolded caused Terra to develop a form of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), but she has since used that trauma to help others.
She hosts The Survivor Squad podcast and is now a trauma and toxic relationship coach.
"I have to use my trauma … as my empowerment, because what I went through, there's not a lot of people that survive that," she told People in 2023.
On the podcast, Terra and Collier interview fellow crime survivors as they tell their stories.
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Who is Terra Newell's boyfriend, Collier Landry?
Terra met Collier in March 2022, after he invited her to be a guest on his podcast, Moving Past Trauma.
He is a producer and cinematographer, and like Terra, is also a crime survivor.
At the age of 11, his father murdered his mother, Noreen Boyle, and buried her body in the family's basement, according to People.
"I woke up in the middle of the night on New Year's Eve 1989 to the sound of a scream, and then I heard two loud thuds," Collier recalled.
The next morning, Collier asked his father where his mother was, and he said: "'Well, Mommy took a little vacation, Collier.'"
Collier worked with detectives to build a case against his father and later testified against him during his murder trial.
His testimony helped send his father to prison for 20 years to life, People notes.
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"My father's a psychopath. What can I say?" Collier quipped.
The case of Noreen's death is documented in the 2017 documentary, A Murder in Mansfield, which can be streamed on Hulu + Live TV and Amazon Prime Video.
