As Jon Green, He Tried to Have His Wife Killed and Make It Look Like an Overdose. As Ted Maher, He'd Already Been Convicted in a Billionaire's Death.

He Changed His Name. The Question is Whether He Changed Anything Else

Kim Lark’s dogs were the first to know that something was off about her husband. They were search-and-rescue dogs, bred and trained to read a human being in seconds, and from the beginning, they were uneasy around him. By the time the people in his life understood what the dogs had sensed, Kim’s husband was sitting in a jail cell, offering a fellow inmate twenty-five hundred dollars to kill her and stage her death as an overdose.

The dogs were not ordinary house pets. Kim Lark was a certified search-and-rescue handler, and one of her three dogs descended from the dog she had taken into the Pentagon after September 11. These were animals whose work was finding the missing and the dead, trained for years to decide, fast, who was safe and who was not. They never decided in his favor.

The man they were reading had two names, and both of them were real. On his driver’s license, he was Jon Green, a long-haul trucker who had come into Kim’s life in 2017. He was also Theodore Maher, the private nurse convicted in Monaco of setting the 1999 fire that killed billionaire banker Edmond Safra and a second nurse, Vivian Torrente. He served his sentence in Europe, came home, took a new name, and in 2020 married a doctor in the desert town of Carlsbad, New Mexico.

Everyone who has told this story has been most interested in the first man, the one from Monaco. This is about the second one, and whether he was ever a different person at all. The dogs already knew.

A Bank Camera Caught Him Forging His Wife’s Name

Kim Lark was his fourth wife. For the first year or so, it was good. Then, by her account, his behavior turned erratic, and she grew afraid of him, afraid enough to go to court for a restraining order.

Most people leaving a marriage take their own things and go. Green took hers. From her office, he took her checkbook, an iPad, and a handgun. Then he began forging her name, trying to cash and deposit checks drawn on her accounts, including one for $44,000. He was charged with burglary, larceny, fraud, and forgery, and was eventually convicted of forgery and larceny.

None of that, by itself, would have made him anything more than a local crime-blotter item: an estranged husband forging his wife’s checks as the marriage fell apart. People do ugly things when a marriage dies, and most of them are not dangerous.

Two things from that stretch stand out. One is the bank, where a man with two names was caught on camera forging his wife’s name. The other is what he took on his way out.

Felony, Zero, and Storm. Zero, who was heavily pregnant when she was taken, had given birth to eight puppies who are now also with Dr. Lark.

He Stole the Dogs She’d Trained to Find the Dead

He took the dogs.

Kim Lark was not a woman with a couple of pets in the yard. The dogs were Storm, Zero, and Felony, the product of thousands of hours of work and the kind of bond that only forms between a handler and an animal she has trusted in dangerous places.

In May 2022, Green stole Lark’s vehicle with the three dogs inside and drove east toward Texas.

A burglar takes the television and the laptop. Green took the animals that Kim Lark had spent her life training. In a relationship that has already become dangerous, going after what a person loves most is rarely about the object itself. It says that the relationship is not over on her terms, and that the man she is leaving can still reach her.

He was in custody. The danger should have ended there.

It didn’t.

The Inmate He Tried to Hire to Kill His Wife

I focus most of my forensic research on deaths that were built to look like something they weren’t: a homicide dressed as a suicide, a killing staged as an accident, an overdose that somebody arranged. So when I read what prosecutors say happened next, I knew exactly what I was looking at.

While Green sat in the Eddy County Detention Center on the forgery and theft charges, he met an inmate named Greg Markham. According to Markham’s testimony, Green wanted Lark dead, and he had thought it through. The plan was to force her to drink water laced with fentanyl. Her death would then look like an overdose.

Markham said Green told him to hold a gun to the head of one of her dogs to make her cooperate, that he described where money was hidden in her home, and that the plan ended with her body buried in Mexico and a coded message sent back to confirm the job was done. The price was twenty-five hundred dollars, framed as bond money for Markham.

Another inmate overheard and contacted Lark. Detective Garrett Silva of the Eddy County Sheriff’s Office investigated. In March 2025, a jury heard the case and convicted Jon Green of solicitation to commit first-degree murder. They deliberated for about an hour. In June 2025, Judge David Finger gave him the maximum sentence allowed for the offense in New Mexico: 9 years. With credit for time already served, he could be out in under three. His conviction was later upheld on appeal.

Green denies all of it. He says he never tried to hire anyone, that Markham took advantage of him, and that the twenty-five hundred dollars was to help rescue Markham’s dog, not a payment for murder. He did not testify at trial, and his defense called no witnesses. Markham was a jailhouse informant with a record and a motive to please prosecutors, and that is exactly the kind of witness a jury should be careful with. The jury was careful and convicted anyway.

Whether the plan could ever have worked is beside the point. Killing her was not the whole plan. He wanted her death to read as her own doing.

A staged overdose works on everyone who comes after. It hands investigators a tidy explanation that points away from the man with the strongest motive and toward the victim herself. A doctor found dead of fentanyl becomes a doctor with a secret, a problem, a habit nobody knew about. The investigation starts in the wrong place, the family gets a false ending, and the dead woman absorbs the suspicion while the man who arranged it stands behind the story he wrote for her. The fentanyl was for Kim. The story was for everyone else, and it was built to outlast her.

This is the same impulse, twenty-three years apart, that ties Jon Green to Ted Maher. In Monaco, prosecutors said he staged an emergency so he could be the one who handled it. In New Mexico, they said he tried to stage her death so it would look like an overdose. The crimes are different. But the same habit runs under both: arranging a scene so it tells the story he needs.

The Fire That Killed a Billionaire

Edmond Safra was one of the richest bankers alive. He had Parkinson’s disease and a serious fear for his own safety, and he employed a small team of private nurses around the clock in his fortified Monaco penthouse. Ted Maher was one of them.

Early on December 3, 1999, a fire broke out in the apartment. Maher first told investigators that two masked intruders had attacked him and set the blaze. That story did not hold. He was charged, and the prosecution’s case was that Maher himself had started a small fire and faked an attack, possibly to look like a hero who had saved his employer. Safra and the nurse on duty with him, Vivian Torrente, retreated into a secured bathroom and died of smoke inhalation.

In 2002, the international press called Monaco’s trial the trial of the century. Maher was convicted of arson causing death and sentenced to ten years. In 2003, he sawed through the bars of his cell and escaped into France on a rope made of garbage bags. He was recaptured within hours. He was released in 2007, after serving about eight years, and he has insisted ever since that he was coerced and that the real story was never told.

The Monaco case is contested, and people who have studied it far longer than I have are still arguing about it. This article is not an attempt to retry it. Whatever you conclude about the fire, the harder question is the one that comes after, when a man with that history walks out of prison and tries to become someone else.

There is nothing suspicious about wanting to become someone else after prison. For most people who manage it, that is the whole point, and that’s why we don’t learn their names.

How a Monaco Convict Became a Carlsbad Husband

While Maher was in prison, his life on the outside fell apart. His marriage ended. His wife had custody of their children. His nursing career, the thing that had defined him, was finished. Employers learned his history. By 2013, Texas had revoked his nursing license. At some point in there, Theodore Maher became Jon Green.

A name change is not, on its own, sinister. People change their names for a hundred ordinary reasons, and a person leaving prison may have more reasons than most. A criminal record follows you into every job interview, every apartment application, every first date, for the rest of your life. If we believe in second chances, we have to allow people some way to live one. Plenty of people walk out of prison, change everything they can change, and never hurt anyone again. We rarely hear about them, because a quiet, lawful life does not get a documentary.

The name was the easy part to change. Whoever Maher had been had walked into the new life with him.

By 2017, he went to a Carlsbad physician for a routine exam, and the physician was Kim Lark. They started talking, then dating, and then got married. He was, as far as the people around him could tell, a man who had built a second life out of the wreckage of the first one.

The public record does not tell us what Lark knew, or when, about the man she was marrying. It does not tell us how much of Ted Maher she ever met. What it does tell us is the sequence that became visible once the marriage failed: the forged checks, the two names at the bank, the flight, the stolen dogs, the cell, and then the plan. All of it came from inside the marriage, aimed at the one person who had seen the second life closely enough to know whether it was real.

What is terrifying about intimate-partner violence is that the offender never has to break in. He already knows the house, the routines, the dogs, the hiding places, and which death the people around her would believe.

The Difference Between Changing Your Name and Changing Yourself

There is a real difference between a person who has changed and a person who has changed the subject.

The second one is easier, and it is everywhere. A new town, a new name, a new marriage, a new job, a new way of telling the story of the old crime. In good times, the two are almost impossible to tell apart. The difference shows up only when the new life stops paying off, when a partner leaves, when money runs out, when the truth is about to come out anyway. That is when you find out whether the old way of solving problems is still in the building.

Researchers who study how people leave crime behind have found that it is a process, not a moment, not the day you finish your sentence or the day you change your name. Robert Sampson and John Laub spent decades following offenders. They found that what pulls people out are the ordinary anchors of adult life: a real marriage, steady work, something slowly built that a person is unwilling to lose. But the anchor only holds if someone grabs it. A wedding reforms no one, but investing in the marriage year after year sometimes does.

Maher had every one of those anchors. A nursing career, four marriages, the whole outward picture of a man going straight. None of it took, because the change Sampson and Laub describe happens on the inside, and the outside can be fully built while nothing behind it has moved.

Shadd Maruna found the same split in the stories people tell about themselves. The ones who stop for good tell what he called a redemption script: the crime stays in, but it becomes the hinge, the reason they now owe something back. The ones who keep offending recite a condemnation script, in which they are stuck, doomed, acted upon, the perpetual victims of other people and bad luck, never the authors of their own harm. The two can use the very same words about remorse. The difference is who the story blames, and whether a man has taken his past in or is still running from it.

This matters in my work because so much of what we have to go on is a man’s own account of himself, and that account is weakest exactly where he is best at producing it. There’s a name for that skill, positive impression management, the work of presenting yourself as lower-risk and more reformed than you are. In one study, Gillard and Rogers found that the offenders who were best at it were the ones highest in the interpersonal traits tied to psychopathy: the charm, the glibness, the smooth front with little behind it. A polished, moving redemption story is no more trustworthy for being polished and moving. If anything, it deserves a harder look. A man can hit every right note about remorse and still be running the same play he has run his whole life.

Two cases mark the edges of this.

He Wrote His Way Out of a Life Sentence. Then, Killed Again.

In 1976, an Austrian court convicted a man named Johann Unterweger, who went by Jack, of murdering an eighteen-year-old woman named Margaret Schäfer. He had strangled her with her own bra. He was sentenced to life.

In prison, Unterweger began writing. Poems, stories, plays, and a semi-autobiographical book that cast him as a man broken by a brutal childhood rather than a man who had killed a teenager. The book became a bestseller, and Austria’s literary and intellectual class fell in love with the story it told. Here, they decided, was proof of what they already wanted to believe: that art could redeem even a murderer, that the right kind of attention could remake a violent man into a useful one. Writers and academics championed him. The future Nobel laureate Elfriede Jelinek was among those who pushed for his release.

It worked. In May 1990, after about fifteen years, the minimum sentence his life sentence allowed him to serve, Unterweger was paroled. The prison governor said they would never find a prisoner so well prepared for freedom.

He came out as a celebrity, working as a journalist and a playwright, giving interviews about crime and rehabilitation. An assignment took him to Los Angeles to write about the city’s red-light districts, and he rode along with police while he was there. He had become the public face of the idea that people can be remade, living evidence for it.

Within months of his release, women began turning up dead, strangled with their own clothing, the same signature as the young woman he had killed in the seventies. The bodies appeared in Austria, in Czechoslovakia, and in Los Angeles, the very city where he had ridden along with police. He was arrested in 1992 and tried in Graz in 1994. The jury convicted him of nine murders. That night, in his cell, he hanged himself with a cord from his clothing, tied in a knot close to the one he had used on his victims.

Unterweger is not Ted Maher, and the crimes are not the same. One is a serial killer of strangers; the other is a man convicted of arson and, decades later, of trying to have his wife killed. What connects them is not the violence. It is that each built a version of himself that he thought the people around him would believe.

Maher’s was private, a name and a marriage in a small New Mexico town. Unterweger had a public, literary career and a country full of admirers. Both exploited the same thing: the ordinary human wish to believe a person can change.

The talent and the charm were both real. The writing was really good enough to fool serious people, including those who go on to win Nobel Prizes. But it was impression management with a publishing contract, the same performance a persuasive offender runs in a parole hearing, scaled up to a whole country.

And the book itself, read now, is not a redemption script at all. Unterweger cast himself as a man circumstance had done things to, a product of a brutal childhood, more acted upon than acting. That is the condemnation script, the doomed-and-blameless story of the men who do not stop, and an audience hungry for redemption heard what it came to hear. Almost no one noticed the difference until he started killing again. The charm was never proof of change, only proof that he could perform it, and what he was underneath showed up later, while the applause was still going.

He Killed a Man at Nineteen and Never Hid from It

It would be easy to paint a story in which every former prisoner is a time bomb and every redemption story is a con. That is not what the evidence says. There are men like Shaka Senghor. In 1991, at nineteen, Senghor shot and killed a man on his doorstep. He was a Detroit drug dealer with a temper and a gun, and he went down for second-degree murder: nineteen years, seven of them in solitary.

What turned him around was not a program. It was reading, then a letter from his young son, then years of writing his way through how a boy who wanted to be a doctor had become a man who killed someone. He came out at thirty-eight, wrote a bestselling memoir, and went to work mentoring kids on the road he had walked. He built all of it on the killing rather than around it. He says plainly that he took a life. He does not pretend someone else was driving.

If Unterweger wrote a condemnation script the world mistook for redemption, Senghor is what the real thing looks like. He never changed his name. He changed something harder to fake: the relationship between who he is now and what he did at nineteen. That is the part that rebranding can’t reach.

Three Men Changed. Only One Meant It

Three men changed three different things. Senghor changed what he would admit to. Unterweger changed what the public believed about him. Maher changed the name on his license. Only the first is rehabilitation. The other two just look like it.

There is no clean test that sorts them in advance. If there were, parole boards and clinicians and the people who marry these men would all be using it. What you have instead is a pattern that shows itself under pressure. You watch what a man does when a lie is cheaper than the truth, when he is rejected, when he is caught, when the comfortable version of his life stops paying off. Does he treat the consequence as something he earned, or as one more thing the world did to him? When the easy story stops working, does he reach for a new way through, or for the oldest one he knows?

We know how Jon Green answered. When the marriage failed, he did not grieve and let go. He emptied Kim’s accounts and forged her name at banks around town, until one of them called to ask whether she had really written a check that size. He took her car and her dogs. Then, from a jail cell, he tried to have her killed and staged as an overdose.

And through all of it, his account of his own life never changes shape. Monaco was a frame-up. The forgery was a misunderstanding. Markham manipulated him. The money was for a dog. Twenty-three years of events, and in every one of them, he is the only person who is never to blame. That is a condemnation script, and he has been reciting it the whole time. He changed his name. He has never changed the story.

Which leaves the person this story was about all along.

Her Dogs Never Trusted Him

Kim Lark has been a family physician in Carlsbad for more than thirty years. That is her job. The dogs are the rest of her.

She is a certified search-and-rescue handler who spent years deployed with FEMA and the Department of Homeland Security, loading her dogs into a truck and going toward the scenes everyone else runs from. Hurricanes. Drownings. Bodies at crime scenes. In 2010, she went to Haiti after the earthquake. In 2001, she went to the Pentagon.

The dog she took with her was Sage, who belonged to another New Mexico handler, Diane Whetsel. Whetsel had been hurt in a horse wreck two days before the attack and could not deploy, so Lark went in her place. The two of them worked the section of the wreckage the responders called the pit. There is exactly one known photograph of them inside it, because cameras were confiscated before anyone was allowed into the debris. Sage searched the rubble of the Pentagon, and the line did not end with her. One of the dogs Green drove off with was Storm, her great-granddaughter.

They were the most valuable thing Kim Lark owned and the least replaceable, which is presumably why Green took them. Felony, the Dutch shepherd, had washed out of police-dog training as a puppy because she did not like to bite people. All three were nationally certified, and all three had spent their lives doing the same job: reading human beings, in collapsed buildings and at the worst moments of strangers’ lives, for any sign of who was still there and who was not.

“The dogs never trusted him,” Kim said later, about Green. “Reading people” was their job. People are easier to fool than dogs.

When Green drove off with them, it was the search-and-rescue world Lark had spent her life in that answered the call of alarm. Volunteers organized online, divided the country into sections, and sent photos of the dogs to veterinarians, shelters, and rescue groups. The same machinery that finds a missing child was now looking for three dogs.

A private investigator Lark hired tracked the Ford to Texas. On June 13, 2022, the day Green was arrested at a San Antonio VA hospital, she got them back. Zero, pregnant when she was taken, had given birth to eight puppies along the way.

He had spent his whole adult life trying to control his own story. The last thing he reached for was control over how Kim Lark’s ended: a quiet overdose, a doctor with a private problem no one had known about, a death written over her by the man she trusted. He did not get it. She is alive and back at work. The dogs came home. And the eight puppies Zero delivered while half the country was looking for them carry forward the line that went into the Pentagon. Ted Maher spent his life deciding how stories would end. He did not get to decide this one.

A note on sources

The New Mexico case is drawn from CBS News 48 Hours (2026), reporting by Adrian Hedden for the Carlsbad Current-Argus and Artesia Daily Press on the trial, the June 17, 2025 sentencing, and the appellate affirmance, People, and the 2022 criminal complaint filed in Eddy County Magistrate Court. Kim Lark’s search-and-rescue background, including her 9/11 deployment to the Pentagon with the dog Sage as part of New Mexico Task Force 1, is drawn from the Journal of the American Veterinary Medical Association (2011) and the theft and recovery of Storm, Zero, and Felony from NBC News Dateline and the Carlsbad Current-Argus (2022). The Monaco background is drawn from contemporaneous coverage of the Safra case and the 2002 trial. The Unterweger account follows John Leake’s reporting and standard published sources; the Senghor account follows his memoir, his 2014 TED talk, and his own interviews.

As always, thank you for reading this issue of The Mind Detective. If you enjoyed this article, please pass it along to a friend. See you next week.

References

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