John Meehan pinned his stepdaughter, Terra Newell, to the ground in her sister’s driveway, but he dropped his knife, which she grabbed and then used to stab him 13 times.
“I heard him gasp and fall on me when I started to make contact,” Newell told Fox News Digital in an exclusive video interview. “I held his head like a zombie so he wouldn’t bite me, and then the last two stab wounds I actually gave thought to.Â
“I stabbed him in his forehead, and the last (stab) was through his eye, which is the softest point of entry to the brain which was the one that made him brain-damaged … I pushed him off of me. I tossed the knife away from his body, so he couldn’t grab it, and then studied a way to get away from him.”
Several neighbors in the sunny southern California city of Irvine rushed to Newell’s aid, but none of them knew that day — Aug. 20, 2016 — was the end of a manipulative conman’s multi-state reign of terror.Â
JOHN MEEHAN’S FIRST WIFE RECALLS HOW ‘DIRTY JOHN’ TERRORIZED HER IN NEW PODCAST: ‘I WAS SCARED FOR MY LIFE’
Meehan, nicknamed “Dirty John,” was the focus of Los Angeles Times reporter Christopher Goffard’s true-crime podcast after his extensive coverage of the case, which was later depicted in documentaries and a Netflix series.Â
After the attack, Terra said, “I just remember saying, ‘My name is Terra. That was a stepdad. He tried to kill me. My name is Terra. That was my stepdad. He tried to kill me.’ And I kept repeating it over and over.”
‘DIRTY JOHN’ VICTIM DEBRA NEWELL TELLS ALL
Meehan was a former anesthesiologist nurse who preyed on women that he felt were easy targets, which included Newell’s mother, Debra Newell, who he met on a 50s-and-over dating site in October 2014.Â
That was shortly after a stint in jail for violating a restraining order against another woman.
When he met Debra, Meehan told her he was an anesthesiologist who worked in Iraq with Doctors Without Borders, among other lies, to sweep her off her feet.Â
The…
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