It’s a long way from Monaco to Los Lunas, New Mexico, where Ted Marr languishes in the prison’s medical facility. The convicted arsonist is reportedly undergoing treatment for throat cancer while he appears in court June 21 on criminal solicitation charges for trying to recruit a hit man to kill his wife last year.
Maher, now known as John Green, was once Monaco’s greatest enemy.
In 2002, reporters from around the world flocked to the glamorous principality after a former Green Beret went on trial for his role in the suspicious death of his former boss, Edmond Safra, a legendary Brazilian-Lebanese banker.
Mr Safra, the billionaire founder of Republic National Bank in New York and the Trade and Development Bank in Geneva, died in a fire in his spacious penthouse in December 1999, along with his nurse, Vivian Torrente.
Maher was convicted and sentenced to 10 years in prison. Jailed in Monaco even before his trial began, Maher told all who would listen that he had gone on a two-week hunger strike to expedite his trial and that he had been forced by authorities to sign a confession immediately after his arrest and recovery from the stabbing at Princess Grace Hospital.
Maher served eight years in prison and was subjected to daily strip searches, but was released in 2007 after a Monegasque judge ruled his trial had been fraudulent.
“Honestly, I think everything that comes out of his mouth is a lie,” said Kim Lark, a doctor in Carlsbad, N.M., and his now-estranged fourth wife. “He’s a con man. He can be anything.”
After returning to the US in 2007, Maher’s life fell apart. He was divorced from his third wife, banned from seeing his three children, and living in a trailer in Connecticut while working in an elderly care facility.
“I had several interviews where I was told I had more experience than 10 nurses, but when I told my story, I got a letter in the mail saying I wasn’t hired because I needed more experience,” he told The Washington Post in a 2008 interview.
Maher lost that job and several others: In 2013, the Texas Board of Nursing revoked her nursing license for concealing her Monaco conviction and lying about her work history, according to reports.
At one point, he legally changed his name to John Green, apparently in an attempt to escape his past.
Ms. Lark met Maher several years ago when he, then working as a long-haul truck driver, visited her clinic for a biopsy. After he was diagnosed with melanoma, she referred him to another doctor, Ms. Lark said.
But the two stayed in touch, going on cycling and skiing dates together. Maher told her his version of what happened in Monaco, and Lark told The Post that she initially believed it but then called him a “stupid guy” for not telling police she’d been kidnapped before the fire.
The two married in 2020, but she now admits there were warning signs early on.
“The girls never liked him,” she said of her dogs.
In addition to her work as a physician, Lark also raises and trains rescue dogs for the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA). She and her dog, Sage, were part of a FEMA team deployed to the Pentagon to search the rubble after the 9/11 terrorist attacks.
But her border collie, Storm, a descendant of Sage, would pounce on Maher every time she tried to kiss him, Lark said.
“Three years into our relationship, things started to fall apart,” she said, adding that she filed a restraining order against him when she began to notice his erratic behavior.
According to a criminal complaint filed in Eddy County Magistrate Court, Maher broke into her office and stole an iPad, $600 in cash, a 9mm handgun and a checkbook in April 2022. Maher also tried to cash $44,000 at a local bank but was unsuccessful when the teller called Lark, according to the complaint.
When police approached him at the bank, Maher fled despite an officer using a Taser in his abdomen, according to the complaint.
On the morning of May 12, 2022, Maher returned to Carlsbad and stole a Ford Explorer that was parked outside the clinic while Lark was attending a brief meeting. Storm, Lark’s dog Felony, and Zero, a pregnant border collie, were relaxing in the air-conditioned back seat.
Police arrested Maher a month later at a veterans hospital in San Antonio, Texas, after receiving a tip that he was there. When Lark found the dogs, Zero had already given birth to eight puppies, Lark said.
Lark said he no longer has sympathy for Maher, especially after learning in September that she paid a fellow inmate at the Eddy County Detention Center in Carlsbad to kill her.
Maher’s former cellmate reportedly wrote a letter to Lark saying that Maher was planning to attack her. Carlsbad Current Argus. Maher is due in court on Monday to plead to a charge of criminal solicitation. Court Records.
Now, Lark regularly sees her estranged husband on her computer screen as she holds Google Meet sessions with her lawyers to finalize her divorce.
Maher was convicted of two counts of forgery in 2023. Other charges of resisting arrest, concealing identity and fraud were dismissed, according to court records.
Lark said Maher has terminal throat cancer, a diagnosis he told The Washington Post he learned from another person. Maher was transferred from the Eddy County Jail, where he had been held since his arrest by police in 2022, to the Central New Mexico Correctional Facility outside Albuquerque for treatment, Lark said.
The Post was unable to reach Maher either in prison or through his lawyer.
Maher, a former neonatal nurse at NewYork-Presbyterian Hospital, was one of 12 nurses with Parkinson’s disease employed at Safra Hospital.
He initially told authorities that he had fought off two intruders who had broken into Safra’s penthouse in the early hours of December 3, 1999, and claimed he had started the fire to set off a fire alarm and alert emergency forces.
The signed confession also said that Maher stabbed himself to ingratiate himself with Safra, who feared that his cooperation with the FBI in a money laundering investigation at his bank had made him a target of the Russian mafia.
The medication that was treating his illness had made him so paranoid that he was surrounded by more than a dozen Mossad-trained bodyguards, and on the night of the fire, his socialite wife, Lily, had inexplicably given them the night off.
Years later, Maher would add to this bizarre story, saying that he had been kidnapped the day before the fire by mysterious Eastern Europeans who had threatened to target his family if he did not allow them into Safra’s apartment.
The new story was published in his book, “Monte Carlo Frame: How I Was Wrongfully Convicted in the Burning Death of a Billionaire,” published in 2021. Maher went on to say that he had been made a scapegoat by Monegasque authorities, for whom the death of one of the country’s wealthiest residents was a public relations fiasco.
“The obligatory and apparently ‘meddling’ investigation into the deaths of Edmond Safra and Vivian Torrente has generated more head-scratching questions than answers, but nobody really cares,” Maher writes. “In that damn sun-baked country of shallow consciences, everybody treated the evidence in this case with less concern than they did the score in third division football.”
Michael Griffiths, Maher’s U.S. lawyer during his Monaco trial, told the Post that Maher’s treatment in Monaco contributed to his erratic behavior in the United States.
“Ted was treated badly in Monaco,” said Griffiths, an attorney who specializes in representing Americans imprisoned overseas. “Monaco changed its court practices and would not allow cross-examination in English.”
“Instead, I had to submit my questions through the two lawyers I inherited from Monaco. Both were incompetent. One of them drank a bottle of wine with lunch every day and was always drunk. The other was an American lawyer who had once tried a misdemeanor case in a small French court. He was unwilling or refused to translate my questions relevant to Ted’s defense.”
