Post Mortem | The Man with Two Names

0:09Erin Moriarty:Welcome back to another episode of 48 Hours Postmortem. I'm your host, Anne-Marie Green, and today we are talking about the man with two names. The first name, John Green. He is serving time for soliciting the murder of his wife in New Mexico. He was also convicted for forging checks and larceny. But more than 20 years earlier, this same man, then known as Ted Maher, was at the center of an international murder mystery involving a billionaire in Monaco. So joining me now to unpack this intercontinental criminal decades-long saga are 48 Hours correspondent Erin Moriarty and producer Josh Yeager.

0:52Erin Moriarty:Thanks for joining us, Erin and Josh. Hi, Anne-Marie. It's a pleasure to be here. It's great being here because I think Josh would agree with me. This is one of the more unusual defendants we've ever run into, wouldn't you say? I would say so. We've both been doing this job a long time and it's hard to get to know him, hard to know what to believe. And it's been an adventure covering him. So speaking of that, you all have actually been covering Ted Maher, John Green since 2002. Well, not exactly. I mean, we really thought back then when that story ended, when he was convicted, that we had seen the last of him.

1:28So, I mean, I think Josh and I were both surprised that he would come back into our radar screen with a whole other crime.

1:36Erin Moriarty:OK, so there is obviously a lot to talk about before we get going. Of course, a reminder for everyone, if you haven't watched or listened to this episode, it's called The Man With Two Names. Go check it out and then come on back for our conversation here at Postmortem. So first, we're going to take you back to the late 1900s, more specifically December 3rd, 1999. In the early morning hours, emergency responders arrived at the Monte Carlo penthouse of billionaire Edmund Safra. There had been a fire and both Safra, along with his nurse, her name is Vivian Torrente, they've died from smoke poisoning.

2:13Erin Moriarty:Well, soon after, an American, then known as Ted Maher, was arrested. Josh, Maher is working as a nurse. But how does this American nurse find himself involved in the life of an international financier, one of the wealthiest men in the world? It's just an amazing story and an incredibly lucky turn of events in his life. At least it seems so at the time. He had been working as a nurse in a hospital in New York City, and he was in the neonatal unit. According to his wife at the time, he had taken care of twins at the hospital, but when the babies were allowed to go home, the parents mistakenly left behind a camera, which turns out to have had the very first pictures of the babies on it, and he contacts them.

3:04Well, it turns out these parents, this couple, is a very wealthy couple who live in New York, who happen to be friends of Edmund Safra and his wife, Lily. And they're so grateful to Ted for returning their camera. And they say to Ted, we have someone we'd like to introduce you to. A friend of ours happens to need a nurse. And the rest is history.

3:32Erin Moriarty:His wife at the time, she said that she felt that part of Safra's attraction to someone like Maher was that he was also purportedly a Green Beret. Right, Erin? Yes. Anne-Marie, remember, Safra had Parkinson's, so he was sick. He wanted great care. But also, Safra surrounded himself with security because he believed he had enemies who might come after him. So the fact that Ted Maher told people that he was a Green Beret, this appeared to be a perfect fit. A nurse who also had a military background. So Ted took the job moving around with the Safras, sometimes going back home to New York and eventually ending up in Monica with the Safras.

4:13Erin Moriarty:But then there is this fire and there are all sorts of versions about how the events unfold, Erin. What do we know? We know for one thing that Safra and his nurse died from smoke poisoning, as you had talked about. And the two had locked themselves into a secure room when Ted Maher alerted them that there were intruders in the apartment. Maher was, in fact, found wounded at that time, he claimed he was stabbed by two intruders. He also said that the reason why he lit a small fire in a trash basket was because he thought that would set off the fire alarm and get help, thinking that the fire department, especially in Monaco, that small country, they would respond quickly.

5:00What did seem odd to observers at the time this became a big deal afterwards is that most of Safra's security wasn't there that night. So that seemed to be very strange. Maher's wife at the time told us that her husband was initially seen as a hero, but then later he was charged with arson. And in part because Maher signed a confession saying there were no intruders. He said he stabbed himself, then set that small fire. His lawyer, though, maintained that Ted never intended to kill anyone. He just wanted to look like a hero by saving his boss. And his attorney also said that no one would have died if the responders had gotten to the victims faster.

5:51But authorities blamed Ted because they said they did get to the scene in minutes, but they had to be careful and they slowed their response because Ted had told them that they were violent intruders inside at the scene. So he is arrested.

6:08Erin Moriarty:And Josh, you were in Monaco in 2002, and you are able to briefly film him in prison. You throw him a few questions, but I need to hear that story about how you even managed to do that. Well, as a producer, you encounter lots of obstacles in the field and your job is to get around them, over them, under them. In this case, we got got over above one. Exactly. Exactly. Monaco did not make Ted Maher available to the press for interviews, and we were afraid we weren't going to get to talk to him. But over the course of the trial, I noticed that when the court wasn't in session, he would come out into the prison yard, which was a sort of an asphalt surface with a cage around it at roughly the same time every day.

6:55And there was one building right up next to the prison yard, which happened to be something like 10 stories tall. And so I took the crew and we somehow managed to talk our way through the lobby of this building and get permission to go up on the roof with our camera and our tripod. And right on schedule that day, he came out and he was by himself in the prison yard. We started filming immediately. I leaned over the wall and started yelling questions at him. And I said, did you do it? He heard me and started answering.

7:28Erin Moriarty:Oh, my gosh. I assume he said he didn't do it. he said he was, as I recall, I'm innocent as charged. And I'm not responsible for the death of two people. That's my recollection of what he said. That is fascinating. See, that's the kind of work that goes into getting these sort of amazing interviews. And this is next level. So in the end, Ted Maher was found guilty of arson leading to the death of two people. He was sentenced to 10 years in prison. But then weeks later, he escapes. And we actually learned how he escaped from this prison because years later, he wrote a book about it, Erin. Yes, that was the book framed in Monte Carlo.

8:14According to that, he had cut the bars of his cell. This story is just so crazy. Then he used a rope made of trash bags and scaled the wall. He claimed that he had had hacksaw blades smuggled in, hid them in the lining of his fridge, hid the trash bags in the prison library. I mean, doesn't sound like there was great security there. Right. And then he had to saw through multiple layers of bars. Again, according to the story he tells, it took five and a half weeks to cut his way out. There should have been a movie made about this. Really? So crazy. You think you've seen everything in this job, and I've seen a lot since then, but this still ranks up there among the most bizarre things that have ever happened.

9:04This is about a month or two after he's convicted. And it just so happened that Aaron and I were back in Monte Carlo, sort of tying up loose ends on the story. And I'm in my hotel room fast asleep. It must be 2.30 or 3 in the morning when my phone rings. I sit up in bed and I answer the phone and it is Ted Maher's wife. She said, my husband escaped. He just called me from outside of the prison telling me he was out and asking for my help. Oh my gosh. I grabbed my mini DV camera and ran up to the prison. Wasn't very far away from the hotel. And I look up and I see a window on the side of the prison that's been pried open.

9:52So I film the open window and I head back to my hotel room, lie down in bed, and there's a knock on the door. And I'm suddenly surrounded by police. I speak enough French to know that they wanted me to come down to the station.

10:08Erin Moriarty:Wow. It's by now probably four in the morning. I remember the detective sitting there had a sort of cigarette with a long ash dangling off the end, and there was smoke curling up towards the ceiling. It was very, it's sort of something out of film noir. And I was sitting there. Absolutely. I said, what's going on? And I think I got the feeling that what they were worried about was why did the American inmate escape on the same night that the American TV producer was up lurking around the prison in the middle of the night? Finally, we cleared everything up and I got home and I saw Erin in the lobby, filled her in.

10:45I remember the look on her face. And that was just yet another weird little chapter in this.

10:51Erin Moriarty:I would have loved to see Erin's face when you were like, guess what I've been up to over the last six hours? Guess what Ted has been up to? I know. Freedom was not long for him. The next day, he was back in custody. and that is where sort of the story sort of ends, you think, for you two, right? Decades pass. But then, Josh, you just happened to be digging around recently. So I'm sitting there in my office probably two and a half months ago, three months ago, and it just popped into my head. I wonder what some of the truly outlandish people you have covered in your 30 years at CBS, what some of them are doing now.

11:37And the name that went immediately to the top of the list was Ted Maher. So I literally Googled him. I put his name into Google. And the first thing that popped up was about a documentary made primarily on the Monaco case that happened to be dropping that night. But then I looked below that on the Google search, And I learned that Ted Maher got out of prison in Monaco, came back to the United States, changed his name to John Green. And just last spring, the spring of 2025, was convicted for soliciting the first degree murder of his wife in New Mexico. and my next move was immediately to call Aaron and say and say remember Ted Maher so now Maher is charged with a new crime you would think that he would come back to the United States he would go back to nursing or something like that but he would lead a straight and narrow life but now this put a whole new wrinkle to the story.

12:53Who was this guy?

13:04Erin Moriarty:Welcome back. So you were able to interview some key figures in the life of John Green, as he's known now. Chief among them, his now ex-wife, Kim Lark. She's a retired physician in Carlsbad, New Mexico, and also the trainer and owner of Search and Rescue Dogs. She met Green when he came into her office for a biopsy. She said they really hit it off. And Kim marries him in 2020. Did she know about his past? And did any of that give her pause? That was one of my first questions, Anne-Marie, because, you know, she's a very smart woman. She's a doctor. but she said that very early in their relationship, John, cause he went by the name John Green by then he told her his real name, Ted Maher.

13:52And then he gave her the book framed in Monte Carlo. And, and of course that book is all his side of the story. And she said to me that she believed him. And she thought that it, in fact, he may have been unfairly blamed for the deaths, but I think she really wanted to believe him too. Right. Kim Lark said, I'm paraphrasing her, whatever I wanted my best friend to be, he was. And he had a way of just being who you needed him to be. And that resonated with me as something he perhaps has always known how to do. He's a chameleon. That's what I think he is. He's a chameleon.

14:31Erin Moriarty:I mean, the guy looks good on paper, right? Nurse former Green Beret. And he loves dogs. But even with all of that, Kim is starting to have suspicions about this new man in her life. And I want to play an unaired clip of your interview with Kim. Did you over time start thinking he would tell stories that put him in a good light? Always. He liked to still tell stories and brag about things that he had done. And just little by little, I realized that a lot of them were stories. Like what? Do you remember any kind of story or anything that seemed to be a red flag? We took a concealed weapons permit.

15:21Now, supposedly, Ted is a Green Beret. and I'm no Annie Oakley, but I really outshot him with my right and my left hand. What did you think? I thought, oh dear God, he's lying about that. When Kim told us that, we started doing research and the Army told us there was no evidence that they had served in the Special Forces. So when I got a chance to talk to him, I asked him directly about that. This is a man who can talk a lot and never give you a straight answer. So I kept asking him, were you a member of the special forces at the Green Bray? And he would say something like, well, I was never assigned to a unit at the Green Bray.

16:09So I then go, so you never served as a Green Bray? Because, yeah, yeah, I did. I was so confused, but I'm going with the Army on this one. Yeah. I mean, one of the things we see a lot is in this job is people who know how to talk a lot while saying almost nothing.

16:31Erin Moriarty:Very little. That's so true. Well, I'm sure when you're living with him, then this stuff pops up more and more. And no surprise, his marriage goes south, really south. Green is charged for forging checks. He also receives several other charges that were later dropped. Kim then initiates divorce. But about a month after Green received those initial charges, Kim said he drove away with her dogs in the car. Why would he take them? Okay, so the first thing I think you have to bear in mind about Kim Lark is she doesn't just love these dogs. Lots of people love their dogs. These dogs are the most important thing in Kim Lark's life.

17:16But they are also very valuable. very highly trained as search and rescue, disaster response, cadaver dogs. In fact, one of them is a descendant of a dog that Kim took to the Pentagon soon after 9-11 and helped look through the rubble of the Pentagon and respond to that disaster. And one of the dogs, whose name was Zero, was even pregnant when Ted took them. So these dogs are everything to Kim. She was very scared that he might sell the dogs. I don't think she worried about him hurting the dogs because he cared about dogs as well. But she was scared she'd never see the dogs again.

18:00Erin Moriarty:Green is arrested and then he ends up in this detention center. But then, of course, things get even worse. There's another person that is introduced into the story. Green's jailmate, his name is Greg Markham. What did he say happened? So this is another unusual character. Greg Markham is a guy who was detained on drug charges when John Green got to the Eddy County Detention Center. So they were in jail together. And Markham said they struck up a sort of a casual friendship and started playing chess every day. Until one day, Markham told us that John Green asked him, do you know anyone who could and would kill my wife?

18:49Referring to Kim Lark. So immediately what happens, according to Greg Markham, is he said to John Green, if you help me get money for bail to bond out of jail, I'll do it. He said that he never really planned to kill Kim Lark, but he wanted this bail money. As for who would get him the money, Green convinced one of his co-authors on the book to send the money to an intermediary. She had control of his finances while he was in jail.

19:21Erin Moriarty:So Markham says that sort of this is the plan. Green describes a layout of Kim's home. There's a diagram that's drawn out. And the idea was to make her drink water laced with fentanyl, which seems like a plan that's got, you know, a few holes in it. More than a few holes. I mean, what if he doesn't drink the water? Markham, as Josh said, is quite the character. He says that Green told him that the way to force her to take fentanyl is by pointing a gun, not at Kim, but at her dogs. And that she cared about her dog so much she would do whatever she was ordered. And then the whole idea was once the deed was done, there was this like code phrase and it was supposed to be, I walk the dogs.

20:12I mean, as you point out, Emory, it was a ridiculous plan. When I asked him about the plot and remember, she's she's a tough chick. She said she would have refused to drink anything and she would have fought like hell for her dogs if she had to. And of course, then when we talked to John Green, he denied all of this.

20:30Erin Moriarty:And the thing about Markham is that he's certainly no Boy Scout at all. Well, Markham called himself a con man, not a hit man. One thing that he was unequivocal about, though, was that I may be a lot of things, but I'm not an assassin and I would never kill anyone. So then how was the plot ultimately uncovered? So you have Green and Markham in jail, and there's another inmate who apparently overhears Green and Markham talking about this plot. That inmate takes it upon himself to write Kim Lark a letter. And in the letter, the inmate is saying to Kim, your husband is someone who's in jail with me, and I have the feeling he's planning to do something to you.

21:23if you want to know more details, I'm willing to tell you and also even get up in court and testify to this and do the right thing if you pay me. So what happens is he sends that letter to Kim and she immediately gives it to authorities who track down the author of the letter and interview him. He leads them to Greg Markham, who corroborates the story and alleged plot.

21:51Erin Moriarty:So then Green goes on trial in March of 2025. He's charged with criminal solicitation to commit first degree murder. Markham testifies against him. Green's found guilty. He's sentenced to nine years in prison. But with time served, he could actually get out in less than three years. Aaron you managed to talk to Green you get an interview with him his attorney sets up a video conference and you can ask him some questions I imagine you must have mapped out your questions and you were ready to hit him well and remember I he's with me but he's on video it's almost like a zoom interview it really is and so it's frustrating because while we could see him on screen it's not quite the same.

22:38In many ways, even though he had aged definitely over the years, he was the same guy after all these years, denied any kind of crimes, just as he always had. And as we've been saying throughout this, he has a way of saying a lot without answering your questions at all. It's very, very frustrating.

23:00Erin Moriarty:It's always so frustrating talking to people like that, especially when you know your time is limited. We saw some of the interview in the hour. Let's play some more of your conversation. I have followed your life for the last 25 years. I mean, when you read your book, you seem to blame everything on somebody else. Was I not framed in Monaco? I'm just saying, what I'm saying is that when I look at your life over everything in Monaco and then here. You're always blaming somebody else. It's Kim and not you. Do you take responsibility for any of this? Well, I took the responsibility for what I did when I took the dogs, but what I did in most actions was community property.

23:50I didn't take a gun to anybody's head. I didn't do anything that was going to harm anybody. Ted, somebody listening to right now is listening to what sounds like a very angry man. I mean, did you want Kim Lark dead? No, absolutely not. I mean, you sound very angry. You sure you didn't, like, bring this up with Greg Markham? No, absolutely not. Like I said, you don't pay somebody$2 ,500 to kill somebody. That's a convenient thing for him to say. You don't pay$2 ,500 to kill somebody. because Greg Markham said the$2 ,500 payment was only the initial installment of what he allegedly was promising to Markham.

24:32And I just want to remind you, Anne-Marie, even though he says he never wanted to see his wife dead, the judge at sentencing who had listened to all the evidence said that he was worried about Kim's safety. Green had appealed his conviction was denied, but he was going to get out at some point. As for Kim, she told us that even now, even though Green is still behind bars as we speak, she still keeps a shotgun within easy reach. And she also keeps those dogs around, too. She has the dogs still. Yeah, and you know what's so great is that Felony and Storm are back with her. Zero has a new home. And I just want to remind people that because Zero is pregnant, she had puppies.

25:21So there were a lot of dogs and there were people who benefited from Zero and her puppies.