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True-Crime Producer in California Left Trail of Victims, Investigators Say · Murder Files Unsealed

• 0:00
  Speaker 1: Welcome back to the Deep Dive. We are looking today
• 0:02
  at a story that is it's almost hard to believe
• 0:05
  it's real, a true crime saga where the main character
• 0:09
  is the very person who produced these kinds of shows
• 0:12
  for a living.
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  Speaker 2: It's an incredible case. We're talking about Mary Carol MacDonald,
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  a TV executive from Burbank who spent her career chronicling
• 0:20
  human deception.
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  Speaker 1: And then allegedly became the master of it herself.
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  Speaker 2: The irony is just it's overwhelming. The expert on fraud
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  is now the subject of a massive international manhunt, a
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  seven year manhunt to be exact.
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  Speaker 1: And that's really our mission for this Deep Dog. We
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  want to go past the headlines and unpack how this happened.
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  We're looking at sources that break down the sophisticated deception
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  she allegedly used, right.
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  Speaker 2: And the financial mechanics of it. We're talking about a
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  fraud that hit at least thirty million dollars. But also,
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  and I think this is critical, the human cost, the
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  wreckage she left behind in her own office.
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  Speaker 1: Okay, so what's the current status. This isn't a cold case.
• 0:58
  Speaker 2: No, not at all. It's very active. McDonnell, who is
• 1:01
  seventy three now was just added to the FBI's Most
• 1:03
  Wanted Fusia's list on December nine, twenty twenty five.
• 1:07
  Speaker 1: Wow, most wanted. That really raises the stakes.
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  Speaker 2: It absolutely does. It shows you how serious this is.
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  After seven years, they are escalating, not giving up, and.
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  Speaker 1: The crime itself thirty million dollars between twenty seventeen and
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  twenty eighteen. That's an incredible amount of money and a
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  very short period of time.
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  Speaker 2: It is. And on top of being on the FBI's list,
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  she's also subject to an Interpol red notice.
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  Speaker 1: What does that actually mean? A red notice? Is it
• 1:33
  like an international arrest warrant?
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  Speaker 2: Not exactly, but it's close. It's basically a global alert
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  to law enforcement worldwide to find and provisionally arrest someone
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  pending their extradition. So I mean her ability to travel
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  is or should be effectively zero. Any country cooperating with
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  Interpol is supposed to detain her.
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  Speaker 1: And yet she's still out there. The sources point to Dubai, yes.
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  Speaker 2: And they describe it as a city of opulent excess,
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  which tells you something.
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  Speaker 1: It tells you she's probably not hiding in some rundown
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  apartment exactly.
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  Speaker 2: It suggests she's living well, likely on the money she stole.
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  But you know, as we get into this, the thing
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  that really stands out is the two groups of victims,
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  the double victim set.
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  Speaker 1: As the sources call it. Right.
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  Speaker 2: First, you have the banks, the big financial institutions that
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  lost millions. That's the headline number.
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  Speaker 1: But then you have this story that gets buried the
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  personal cost. We're talking about her own employees, the people
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  who worked for her production company.
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  Speaker 2: Yeah, people who claim they were cheated out of hundreds
• 2:30
  of thousands of dollars in wages. Their trust was completely exploited.
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  Speaker 1: No one of them even said it was a plot
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  twist I never saw coming.
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  Speaker 2: I mean, how could you. It turns this whole thing
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  from a simple white collar crime story into something much
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  more personal, much darker.
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  Speaker 1: Okay, so let's go back before the international manhunt, before
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  the fraud. Who was Mary Carol McDonald? How did she
• 2:56
  build this Hollywood empire she would eventually, you know, tear down.
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  Speaker 2: Well to understand the con you really have to understand
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  the character she built, and it was a complete fabrication.
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  She was born in Michigan in the late nineteen forties.
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  Speaker 1: The rust built so a world away from the stories
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  she would later tell.
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  Speaker 2: A world away. No inherited wealth, no airspace, dynasty connections, nothing.
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  She was from an industrial, working class background and.
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  Speaker 1: She made her way out to California in the eighties,
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  like so many people do, to reinvent herself.
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  Speaker 2: And she did. She started at the bottom, working as
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  a production assistant on low budget docs. She learned the
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  business from the inside out.
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  Speaker 1: She was learning how to build a story.
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  Speaker 2: Not just how to build a story, but how to
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  make it believable. By the early two thousands, she was
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  successful enough to co found her own company in Burbank,
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  Bellam Entertainment, and.
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  Speaker 1: Bellum became a pretty big deal in the true crime space,
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  a very big deal.
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  Speaker 2: They specialized in those unscripted docky series that were just
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  exploding in popularity. You know, lots of traumatic reenactments in
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  tense narration.
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  Speaker 1: I remember those shows. What were some of their big hits.
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  Speaker 2: Well, there was Corrupt Crimes, which was about things like
• 4:02
  Enron or you know, espionage. Yeah, then you had bizarre murders.
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  But the real flagships were It Takes a Killer and
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  I Married a murderer.
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  Speaker 1: Those were huge. They were everywhere on cable exactly.
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  Speaker 2: They were staples. She perfectly timed the true crime boom
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  of the early twenty tens. By twenty sixteen, Bellam was
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  pulling in over ten million a year in revenue. They
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  had something like twenty different series in production.
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  Speaker 1: And with that kind of success comes a certain persona
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  What was she like?
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  Speaker 2: She cultivated this image of a silver haired matriarch, always polished,
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  always in a tailored suit. Sources say she had this
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  commanding voice, you know, the person in charge, visionary, the
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  visionary who was all about authentic storytelling.
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  Speaker 1: That was her brand, this public image, the trustworthy executive.
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  It was absolutely crucial for what came later, wasn't it?
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  Speaker 2: It was everything. The sources found this quote from a
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  podcast she did in twenty fifteen, and it's well, it's
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  chillin now.
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  Speaker 1: What is she say?
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  Speaker 2: She said? True crime isn't about the gore, It's about
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  the why, the deceptions that unravel lives.
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  Speaker 1: Yeah, the deception that unravel lives.
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  Speaker 2: She wasn't just making TV shows. She was studying the playbook.
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  She was learning what makes people believe a lie, what
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  makes them trust.
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  Speaker 1: It's like she was doing research for her own future crimes.
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  The facade seemed perfect, the successful company, the respected producer.
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  So where did the cracks start to show?
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  Speaker 2: Well? That brings us to the next chapter. The success
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  was real for a while, but the ground underneath Bellum
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  was shifting. By twenty seventeen, the whole industry was changing.
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  Speaker 1: So what happened. It wasn't just a bad quarter. The
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  sources say the company was heading for insolvency.
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  Speaker 2: It was a perfect storm. Really. Two big things. First,
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  the streaming wars were heating up. The old syndication model
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  that Bellum was built on, where you sell a showed
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  to lots of different cable channels.
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  Speaker 1: That was dying because everyone wanted exclusives for Netflix or
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  Hulu or whatever exactly.
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  Speaker 2: And Second, the ad money that used to flow to
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  those niche cable channels started moving online to Google, to Facebook,
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  to the big streamers.
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  Speaker 1: So Bellam's main revenue streams were just drying.
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  Speaker 2: Up, vanishing, and for a company with high production costs,
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  that's a death sentence. A ten million dollar company can
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  go broke really really fast when the cash stops flying.
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  Speaker 1: And that pressure on the outside started creating a really
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  toxic environment on the inside.
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  Speaker 2: Oh. Absolutely. The source material paints a grim picture a
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  super high pressure workplace, constant stress about deadlines. Fear was
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  a big motivator.
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  Speaker 1: And McDonald herself changed. She went from being the visionary
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  to this ruthless micromanager.
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  Speaker 2: Right. She was suddenly obsessing over every line in a script,
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  every dollar in a budget. And she kept telling people
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  she was delaying payments to vendors and freelancers to preserve
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  cash flow.
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  Speaker 1: That phrase preserving cash flow sounds like a pretty big
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  red flag.
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  Speaker 2: It was a smoke screen. The truth was there was
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  no cash flow to preserve. We know this because it
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  wasn't just vendors. She stopped paying her own employees for
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  how long, for weeks at a time. The California Labor
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  Commission has records of multiple very serious complaints against Bellam
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  for unpaid wages all through twenty seventeen.
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  Speaker 1: So this is the moment the company is collapsing, The
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  walls are closing in.
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  Speaker 2: She's cornered, completely cornered. The threat of bankruptcy, of losing everything.
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  It was real and it was immediate, and for someone
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  like her, who had built this entire persona of success,
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  the humiliation would be unbearable.
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  Speaker 1: So she needed a lifeline, not just a small loan,
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  but a massive injection.
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  Speaker 2: Of cash, a massive one, and to get that she
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  needed collateral. She needed to look like someone who didn't
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  just need money, but someone who was already incredibly wealthy.
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  Speaker 1: So she wrote a new script, the best one she'd
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  ever written, the story of her phantom fortune.
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  Speaker 2: And this is where we get into the nuts and
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  bolts of the thirty million dollar fraud. The central lie
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  was brilliant in its simplicity and its audacity.
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  Speaker 1: She decided she was an heiress to the McDonnell douglas
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  Aerospace fortune.
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  Speaker 2: That's right, a name that just screams old money, power
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  and credibility, especially in southern California, where the company was
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  a legend.
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  Speaker 1: It's not just that she claimed to be related, right,
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  This story was much more specific.
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  Speaker 2: Oh, it was very specific. She told the bank she
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  was the beneficiary of an eighty million dollars secret trust
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  fund locked away by family elders.
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  Speaker 1: And the key part wasn't just the eighty million, It
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  was that a payment was coming exactly.
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  Speaker 2: That was the master stroke. She wasn't asking for a
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  loan against some far off inheritance. She claimed a distribution
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  of twenty eight million dollars was imminent. That was the
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  collateral to a bank. Money that's about to be paid
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  out from a known family trust is practically as good
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  as cash.
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  Speaker 1: But a story like that needs proof, It needs paperwork.
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  Speaker 2: It does, and this is where the crime went from
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  a simple lie to a full blown conspiracy. She had help.
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  Speaker 1: The sources mention a complicit employee at a trust company.
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  Speaker 2: Yes, an insider, someone who could generate official looking documents
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  on actual company letterhead. This person drafted fraudulent letters confirms
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  that the eighty million dollar trust was real and that
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  the twenty eight million dollar payment was scheduled.
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  Speaker 1: That inside help was the key that unlocked the whole thing.
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  Speaker 2: It was because if the paperwork looks legitimate from a
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  real company, even a big bank might lower its guard.
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  Speaker 1: And it worked. The first big target was Bank of California, and.
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  Speaker 2: They fell for it completely. By May twenty eighteen, she
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  had secured loans from them totally fourteen point seven million dollars.
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  Speaker 1: That's incredible. How does a major bank get fooled so badly?
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  Didn't they do any due diligence like checking her family tree.
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  Speaker 2: It's a great question, and it points to a major
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  institutional failure. The sources suggest they were taken in by
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  a combination of things, her own polished executive persona.
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  Speaker 1: Power of the McDonald Douglas name for sure.
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  Speaker 2: In these very very convincing forged document from the trust company,
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  they probably verified that the trust company was real, but
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  they clearly didn't dig deep enough into her actual connection
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  to the McDonald family. They saw a golden client with
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  what looked like ironclad collateral.
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  Speaker 1: And once that first fourteen million came through, she didn't stop.
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  She went bigger.
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  Speaker 2: She immediately escalated experts estimate. She went after another fifteen
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  million from other institutions, pushing the total up to that
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  thirty million dollar mark.
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  Speaker 1: And her methods got even more brazen. The charges included
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  aggravated identity theft. What did that involve?
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  Speaker 2: It means she allegedly stole the actual identities of real,
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  living members of the McDonald family. She used their names,
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  their credentials to make her own fake persona even more believable.
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  Speaker 1: And using a stolen identity during another felony like bank
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  fraud is what makes it aggravated exactly.
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  Speaker 2: It carries its own mandatory prison sentence on top of
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  any other sentence. It's a very serious charge.
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  Speaker 1: The sources mentioned one specific example that just shows how
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  bold she was. An Orange County credit union.
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  Speaker 2: Yeah, they lost five point two million dollars, and in
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  their case, the fraud was almost crude. It was based
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  on photoshopped bank statements she created that showed huge balances
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  in a cant that just didn't exist.
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  Speaker 1: After hitting the big banks with the sophisticated trust story,
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  she used simpler methods on the smaller guys.
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  Speaker 2: Right, and for a credit union of five million dollar
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  loss is a potentially catastrophic event.
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  Speaker 1: So the thirty million is secured. She uses some of
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  it to prop up Bellam to stop the bleeding. But
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  where did the rest of it go?
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  Speaker 2: Well, this is where you see her true motivation. It
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  didn't just go to the company. A huge chunk of
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  it went to funding the lifestyle of the heiress she
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  was pretending to be.
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  Speaker 1: She was living the part completely.
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  Speaker 2: Court documents show she was renting luxury homes in Newport Beach,
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  taking expensive international trips. She even got into horse breeding for.
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  Speaker 1: A while, the classic hobby of the super rich.
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  Speaker 2: It's all part of the performance. It's a strange cycle,
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  isn't it. The business crisis was the reason for the fraud,
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  but the money from the fraud went to sustain the
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  personal fantasy, not just to fix the business.
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  Speaker 1: It really supports the prosecutor's observation that she webinized her
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  expertise in deception. She knew how these stories worked because
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  she told them for a living.
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  Speaker 2: She knew exactly which psychological buttons to push to get
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  people to ignore their doubts and just believe.
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  Speaker 1: Okay, let's shift focus from the banks and the system
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  to the people. The human cost here is just staggering.
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  Section five, the wreckage in her own bullpen.
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  Speaker 2: This is really the heart of the tragedy because these
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  weren't strangers. These were people who worked for her, who
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  looked up to her. The sources say twenty seven former
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  employees are owed to combined four hundred and fifty thousand dollars.
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  Speaker 1: Half a million dollars for people in production. That's life
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  changing money. Why were they so vulnerable.
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  Speaker 2: It's the nature of that industry. So many of them
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  are freelancers working gig to gig. Your reputation is everything.
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  If you make waves, if you complain about not getting paid,
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  you risk it getting blacklisted.
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  Speaker 1: So you just keep quiet and hope the check comes
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  through you.
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  Speaker 2: Do, and MacDonald knew that she exploited that fear. She
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  built this culture of loyalty, of being a family all
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  while she was draining the company dry.
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  Speaker 1: The sources focus on one person in particular, Joshua Kaufman,
• 13:02
  a line producer. His story is just awful.
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  Speaker 2: It's devastating because he didn't just lose his salary. He
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  was so manipulated by her story about the imminent trust
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  distribution that he loaned the company one hundred fifty thousand
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  dollars of his own money, his life savings, his life savings,
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  to make payroll for his colleagues. She convinced him it
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  was a short term loan that would be paid back
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  with huge interest as soon as her inheritance came through.
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  Speaker 1: And when that inheritance turned out to be fake, the
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  fallout was catastrophic.
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  Speaker 2: He lost the money, he lost his house, and the
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  financial stress was so extreme it was cited as a
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  primary cause in his divorce.
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  Speaker 1: That's what a thirty million dollar bank fraud actually looks
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  like on a human level. It's not just numbers on
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  a spreadsheet.
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  Speaker 2: No, it's a ruined life and he's trying to process
• 13:47
  it now, writing a memoir. The title He's Chosen is
• 13:51
  produced to ruin.
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  Speaker 1: That says it all. And he wasn't the only one.
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  There was also Sarah Lindon, an associate producer.
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  Speaker 2: Her story shows that day to day exploitation, she had
• 14:01
  racked up eighty thousand dollars in unreimbursed expenses on her
• 14:05
  personal credit cards.
• 14:06
  Speaker 1: Eighty thousand how.
• 14:08
  Speaker 2: For things like flights and hotels for shoots in New
• 14:10
  York and Atlanta. In production, you're often expected to float
• 14:14
  those costs yourself and get paid back, but the reimbursements
• 14:17
  never came. She had to max out her credit cards
• 14:20
  and even defer her student loan payments just.
• 14:23
  Speaker 1: To do her job, and McDonald was feeding her lines
• 14:25
  the whole time.
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  Speaker 2: Oh yes, Linda recalls McDonald telling her family sticks together,
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  right before another one of her paychecks bounced. The emotional
• 14:33
  manipulation is just it's sickening.
• 14:36
  Speaker 1: It's one thing to defraud a bank. It's another to
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  look your employee in the eye, call them family and
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  steal from them.
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  Speaker 2: It's a different level of betrayal. But there's one more
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  victim who was maybe the most shocking of all.
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  Speaker 1: The retired FBI agent Agent r.
• 14:50
  Speaker 2: As he's identified. He was consultant on one of their
• 14:54
  cold case shows. He brought his decades of real world
• 14:58
  law enforcement experience.
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  Speaker 1: To her program, and she stiffed him for twenty five
• 15:02
  thousand dollars.
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  Speaker 2: She did, but it was worse than that, much worse.
• 15:06
  She actually used him as a pawn in her fraud.
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  Speaker 1: Wow.
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  Speaker 2: She knew his background gave him immense credibility, so she
• 15:13
  asked him as a favor to vouch for her character
• 15:16
  and her heiress status to one of the lenders. And
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  he did. He trusted her. He had no idea he
• 15:22
  was lending the weight of his FBI credentials to a
• 15:24
  massive criminal scheme.
• 15:25
  Speaker 1: I can't even imagine the humiliation. His quote in the paper.
• 15:29
  I spent twenty five years chasing crooks. She made me one.
• 15:32
  Speaker 2: It's just heartbreaking. And the sources say he's sixty eight
• 15:34
  now in dealing with health problems because he had to
• 15:36
  delay medical care due to the financial hit. It shows
• 15:39
  she had no moral boundaries whatsoever. She used everyone.
• 15:43
  Speaker 1: So with all this happening, how did it all finally
• 15:45
  come crashing down.
• 15:46
  Speaker 2: As these things always do under scrutiny. In late twenty eighteen,
• 15:52
  auditors at Bank of California were just doing a routine
• 15:55
  review of their lone portfolio and they found, well, they
• 15:58
  found irregularities.
• 16:00
  Speaker 1: What kind of irregularity.
• 16:01
  Speaker 2: It was almost laughably simple. In the end, the auditors
• 16:04
  did the one thing the original loan officers failed to
• 16:06
  do a deep dive background check, and they found absolutely
• 16:10
  no link, no connection at all between Mary Carol McDonald
• 16:14
  and the founding McDonald brothers of the aerospace company.
• 16:17
  Speaker 1: The entire eighty million dollar story just evaporated instantly.
• 16:21
  Speaker 2: The phantom fortune was exposed.
• 16:22
  Speaker 1: And the legal system moved fast. A federal grand jury
• 16:25
  in Santa Anna indicted her in November of twenty eighteen.
• 16:28
  Speaker 2: It was a huge indictment, twelve counts, wirefraud, bank fraud,
• 16:32
  aggravated identity theft. Each count carried up to thirty years.
• 16:35
  She was looking at effectively a life sentence, but.
• 16:38
  Speaker 1: They never got to arrest her. She was gone.
• 16:40
  Speaker 2: She had a plan. She was always one step ahead.
• 16:43
  In a few days between the indictment being filed and
• 16:45
  the warrant being served.
• 16:46
  Speaker 1: She vanished, and she took the money with her.
• 16:49
  Speaker 2: She did. She sold a condo in Newport Beach that
• 16:51
  she'd bought with the loan money and immediately started wiring
• 16:54
  funds to offshore accounts in the Cayman Islands.
• 16:57
  Speaker 1: A classic move. So how did they track her?
• 16:59
  Speaker 2: Through Internet national cooperation? The first solid lead was CCTV
• 17:03
  from Heathrow Airport in London in December twenty eighteen. They
• 17:07
  saw her using an alias, one that was probably linked
• 17:10
  to the identity theft she'd committed, and from London to Dubai.
• 17:15
  By January twenty nineteen, immigration records in the UAE confirmed
• 17:18
  she had arrived. And that's where the trail went cold
• 17:21
  for a while.
• 17:22
  Speaker 1: And you mentioned Dubai is a very difficult place to
• 17:24
  get a fugitive back from. Why is that?
• 17:26
  Speaker 2: It comes down to the extradition treaty between the US
• 17:28
  and the UAE. It exists on paper, but in practice
• 17:31
  it's a spotty. They often delay or deny requests, especially
• 17:37
  for nonviolent white collar crimes. For a wealthy fugitive with
• 17:41
  good lawyers, it's a place you can fight extradition for years,
• 17:43
  maybe forever.
• 17:44
  Speaker 1: So she set up a new life there. The sources
• 17:47
  say she rented a villa on Jumira Beach right.
• 17:49
  Speaker 2: And she did it using a shell company, another classic technique.
• 17:53
  To hide assets and make it harder for US authorities
• 17:56
  to freeze her money.
• 17:57
  Speaker 1: So the FBI, led by a special agent Maria Torres,
• 18:00
  has been playing this long game ever since.
• 18:02
  Speaker 2: A very long, very patient game, and they've had these
• 18:04
  little glimmers of her over the years. These sightings like.
• 18:07
  Speaker 1: The equestrian event in twenty twenty.
• 18:09
  Speaker 2: Exactly her old hobby is, shows she wasn't exactly living
• 18:12
  in fear. She was out socializing Dubai's wealthy expat circles.
• 18:16
  Speaker 1: And then there was the art purchase in twenty twenty two.
• 18:19
  Speaker 2: A two hundred thousand dollars painting bought from a London dealer.
• 18:23
  The money was wired from one of her offshore accounts.
• 18:25
  Speaker 1: Unbelievable. While her victims are filing for bankruptcy, she's buying
• 18:29
  expensive art.
• 18:30
  Speaker 2: It really shows a mindset. And then as recently as
• 18:33
  twenty twenty four, they got pings from a burner phone
• 18:36
  she was using in Abu Dhabi. So she's still moving,
• 18:39
  still communicating, still managing her money.
• 18:41
  Speaker 1: Which brings us to the big development. December twenty twenty five,
• 18:45
  she's put on the most wanted list. Why now after
• 18:48
  all this time.
• 18:48
  Speaker 2: Because the FBI got new intelligence, and it is a
• 18:51
  wild twist.
• 18:52
  Speaker 1: What's the intel?
• 18:53
  Speaker 2: The FBI believes she is planning a comeback. Specifically, she's
• 18:58
  trying to launch a new true crime t podcasts from
• 19:01
  Dubai using a pseudonym.
• 19:02
  Speaker 1: You cannot be serious. A fugitive from justice wants to
• 19:06
  start a podcast about crime.
• 19:08
  Speaker 2: It's the ultimate act of hubris, isn't it. She can't
• 19:11
  let go of the narrative. She spent her life producing stories,
• 19:15
  and now she wants to produce the story of her
• 19:16
  own life on the run, probably frame herself as the victim.
• 19:20
  Speaker 1: And the FBI is using that ambition against her.
• 19:23
  Speaker 2: That's the strategy putting her on the most wanted list
• 19:26
  offering a fifty thousand dollars reward. It's all designed to
• 19:29
  blow up her anonymity, to make it impossible for her
• 19:32
  to launch some new media venture without being exposed.
• 19:36
  Speaker 1: Agent Torres said they're trying to strip away her anonymity
• 19:38
  one tip at a time.
• 19:40
  Speaker 2: Right, money can buy you a lot of silence, but
• 19:42
  maybe not from an entire expet community when there's a
• 19:45
  fifty thousand dollars reward on the table. They're trying to
• 19:47
  make her world smaller and smaller.
• 19:49
  Speaker 1: So as we wrap up here, let's talk about the
• 19:51
  legacy of this whole just insane story. What are the
• 19:55
  bigger ripples from this?
• 19:56
  Speaker 2: Well, on one level, it's this incredibly dark cautionary tale
• 20:00
  about Hollywood's hustle culture. You know, that pressure to project
• 20:04
  success at all costs. Ye, she's the example of when
• 20:07
  that goes completely off the rails.
• 20:09
  Speaker 1: And there's the weird legacy of her actual work. Her
• 20:12
  shows are still out there streaming, and.
• 20:14
  Speaker 2: Now they all have this this unintended asterisk next to them.
• 20:18
  If you want it takes a killer and see her
• 20:21
  name in the credits. Yeah, can't help but think about
• 20:23
  all this, it makes you question the whole genre. Really.
• 20:25
  Speaker 1: The financial world also had.
• 20:27
  Speaker 2: To react, Oh, definitely. The banks in California in particular,
• 20:31
  they now have what they call aerosphification protocols.
• 20:34
  Speaker 1: They actually call it that.
• 20:36
  Speaker 2: Internally, Yes, basically much much stricter rules for any big
• 20:40
  loan that uses a family trust as collateral. They are
• 20:43
  not getting fooled by that one again.
• 20:45
  Speaker 1: And Bank of California the first victim they had to
• 20:48
  pay for their mistake.
• 20:49
  Speaker 2: They did. They settled a ten million dollar class action
• 20:52
  lawsuit from their own shareholders for the damage the fraud
• 20:55
  cause to the company's reputation and stock price.
• 20:58
  Speaker 1: But the most important legacy I might be the one
• 21:00
  her victims are trying to build.
• 21:02
  Speaker 2: I agree. Labor advocates are now using the Bellum case
• 21:06
  as a key example in their fight for better protections
• 21:09
  for freelancers and.
• 21:10
  Speaker 1: Gig workers to stop other executives from using delayed payments.
• 21:14
  Speaker 2: As a weapon exactly, and the victims themselves, people at
• 21:18
  Joshua Kaufman, they haven't given up. They have the Bellum
• 21:21
  Betrayed Facebook group.
• 21:23
  Speaker 1: What are they trying to accomplish with that?
• 21:25
  Speaker 2: It's part support group, part activist hub. Their main goal
• 21:29
  is to push for asset forfeiture, to make sure that
• 21:32
  if and when the Feds catch her and seize her money,
• 21:35
  that the four hundred and fifty thousand dollars there owed
• 21:37
  gets paid back to them first before anyone else.
• 21:41
  Speaker 1: So for them, the story isn't over. They're trying to,
• 21:44
  as Kaufman said, rewrite.
• 21:45
  Speaker 2: The ending, which leaves us with the big question will
• 21:48
  they get to or will she just live out her
• 21:51
  days in luxury? In Dubai Untouchable. She used her knowledge
• 21:55
  of criminal psychology to pull this off. She knew the
• 21:57
  script better than anyone, and that.
• 21:59
  Speaker 1: Leads us to our final thoughts, something for you to
• 22:01
  really think about. McDonell used her understanding of the why
• 22:05
  behind crime to fund her escape. So if she really
• 22:08
  is planning a podcast, how would she use her new
• 22:10
  experience her life as a fugitive as content. What does
• 22:14
  it say about the true crime genre when the criminal
• 22:16
  herself tries to package and sell her own story of evasion.
• 22:20
  It's a deeply disturbing thought, and it's why the FBI
• 22:23
  says justice is an optional. It's the only satisfying twist.
• 22:26
  Thanks for joining us for the deep dive.