Update:
Green was arrested in San Antonio, Texas on June 13, 2022, Jon. He was arrested on 3rd degree felony charges for burglary, larceny, forgery, and fraud. According to NBC affiliate News 4 San Antonio, the FBI captured Green at the VA hospital after receiving a tip that led them there.
Green has been remanded without bond and is currently waiting to appear before a judge where the charges against him will be explained.
Felony, Zero and Storm, the three search and rescue dogs Green kidnapped in May, were all found safe by a private investigator hired by Dr. Kim Lark. Dr. Lark was reunited with the dogs on June 13. Zero, who was heavily pregnant when she was taken, had given birth to eight puppies who are now also with Dr. Lark.
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A few weeks ago, a Dateline viewer contacted us with a tip about a crime in Carlsbad, New Mexico involving stolen checks and stolen dogs. Not your typical Dateline, or so we thought. But that tip led us back to a story we aired nearly 15 years ago about a crime in a very different place – ritzy Monte Carlo – and the mysterious man at the heart of that story. He’d come on the show in 2008 hoping to clear his name of a terrible crime.
We always wondered what happened to him.
Captain Jessie Rodriguez of the Carlsbad PD thinks he has the answer. “It was almost like he was hibernating. Almost like he was suppressing this version of himself until he finally stepped out and became himself.”
On the morning of May 12, 2022, Dr. Kim Lark walked into a meeting at the Carlsbad hospice where she was the medical director. As she had done many times before, she left her three dogs in her locked car with the AC running.
The dogs meant everything to her. There were her two border collies: 7-year-old, Storm, and 4-year-old, Zero. And an 8-year-old Dutch Shepherd named Felony, who had flunked out of police training as a puppy because she didn’t like to bite people.
All three dogs loved hanging out with patients at Dr. Lark’s family practice. And all three were nationally certified search and rescue dogs. Dr. Lark, a former FEMA certified canine handler, had been deployed several times over the years to disasters across the country. Most famously, she and Storm’s great-great-grandmother had searched the rubble of the Pentagon after 9-11. “I know all dogs are special,” Dr. Lark told Dateline. “But once you train these dogs to the level I have, it’s a different kind of partnership.”
Dr. Lark says it was the dogs who first warned her something was wrong that May morning. She’d left a door open from her meeting room onto the parking lot to let in some air. That’s why she thinks she could hear it when the dogs suddenly started barking. She says she ran to the door just in time to see her car – a maroon 2015 Ford Expedition – backing up and speeding out of the parking lot. She says the man driving it was someone she’d been living in fear of for weeks – her estranged husband, Jon Green.
The Carlsbad Police Department put out an APB, alerting nearby law enforcement to the dognapping and asking the public for tips about the stolen car and the missing dogs. At the bottom of their press release was Green’s photo.
It was a photo of someone Dateline producers knew well because, back in 2008, Dateline correspondent Sara James interviewed Green for an episode called “The Mystery of the Billionaire Banker.”
But Green had a different name then. It was Ted Maher.
Maher had been the subject of a sensational, international criminal case. A former Green Beret turned nurse, he had been caring for Edmond Safra, a wealthy financier, in his Monaco penthouse, when a fire broke out that killed Safra and another nurse. Maher was accused of starting the 1999 fire deliberately and served eight years in a Monaco prison after being convicted of “deadly arson.”
In our interview, Maher protested his innocence. He said far from killing his boss that night, he had tried to save his life. He told us he had been jumped at the nurses’ station by masked men, one with a knife. He claimed he had fought them off and then started a fire in a trash can to set off the smoke alarm and summon help for Safra, who was barricaded in a bathroom with the other nurse. And he told us he was a victim, too, railroaded by investigators and the Monaco justice system. He seemed determined to clear his name.
So what happened to Maher next? Public records show Maher tried to pick up his nursing career when he got back to the United States, but it didn’t go well. In 2013 the Texas Board of Nursing revoked Maher’s license on the grounds he had covered up his Monaco conviction and lied about his employment history. Maher lost his nursing privileges in other states, too.
“He had it rough,” according to Michael Griffith, one of Maher’s defense attorneys in the Monaco trial. “The massive publicity of this case promoted his face and his reputation, and he lost job after job.”
By the time Dr. Lark bumped into him, she says Maher was working as a long-haul truck driver. She says they met when he stopped by her office with a medical question. They started texting and then dating. A few months later, Dr. Lark says, he moved into her home. She says she paid for everything after that – Maher’s food, his clothes, equipment for their ski vacations. But they were happy.
Dr. Lark says Maher told her who he really was early in their relationship and gave her the same version of events he gave us. She believed him when he said he’d be vindicated one day.
But three years in, she says their relationship started to fray. She says Maher was yelling a lot and his behavior was erratic. And she says her dogs seemed to be treating Maher differently, too, especially her border collie Storm who, she says, would lunge at Maher’s face if he tried to kiss her. Things got so bad, Dr. Lark says, that she applied for a restraining order against Maher – which was granted temporarily when he didn’t show up to the court to defend himself.
According to a criminal complaint, Maher did something else – he broke into Dr. Lark’s office and stole several items, including her checkbook. Then, the complaint continues, he showed up at a bank and tried to withdraw nearly $50,000 from her checking account. When a police officer asked him to step outside the bank to explain what was going on, Maher allegedly headed for his car and drove off, not even stopping after the officer tased him in the stomach.
That got the attention of veteran Carlsbad Police Detective James Devlin. “My eyebrows were raised about what he was capable of doing,” he told Dateline. The detective says he quickly discovered that Maher had visited several other banks, apparently trying to move Dr. Lark’s money around without her permission. “He’s a very calculated criminal,” the detective said.
On April 7, 2022, the local prosecutor charged Green on 12 counts, including larceny, burglary, fraud and resisting an officer, but the police couldn’t find him to arrest him. In fact, there was no sign of Maher until six weeks later when he showed up in the hospice parking lot.
Detective Devlin says it shocked him that Maher came back. “The first thing in my mind, to speak bluntly,” said the detective, “I thought he’d crossed the line. He’s going to be to the point of close to feeling like he’s got nothing left to lose.”
The detective thinks Maher planned the dognapping down to the last detail and possibly had an accomplice. He says shortly after Dr. Lark left her home that morning, someone kicked down her door and stole her spare set of car keys. Someone who knew exactly where she kept them.
Detective Devlin believes Maher also knew exactly where Dr. Lark would be – at that weekly hospice meeting. Minutes after Dr. Lark had gone inside, Maher was outside in the parking lot ready to steal her car.
Carlsbad Police Captain Jessie Rodriguez told Dateline the last confirmed sighting of Maher was on May 12, in Amarillo, Texas. He says Maher has ties to multiple other states.
Captain Rodriguez warns anyone who spots Maher to stay clear and call the police. “As time moves forward, he becomes more dangerous,” he said. “Because any time free is bonus time for him.” He adds that Maher could be armed.
Attorney Michael Griffith doesn’t represent Ted Maher anymore, but he has a different perspective. “For me, this isn’t a crime,” he told Dateline. “This is a messy divorce -- almost like a custody battle --between a husband and a wife over the kids.” He doesn’t think Maher intends to hurt the dogs.
Dr. Lark isn’t so sure. She recently started going through Maher’s belongings at their home and found things she didn’t understand, ranging from a stash of unopened medication to a book titled, “Combat Secrets of the World’s Deadliest Fighters.” Stuffed at the back of a closet she says she found a box of latex masks. “What were they for? They looked like the kind of masks you’d use to rob a bank,” she said. “It was creepy.”
She questions whether she ever really knew Maher, whether their relationship was some kind of long con. And of course, she is desperately worried for her dogs. She says Zero was heavily pregnant when she was taken and has probably given birth by now.
Above all, she says it’s hard not to blame herself, for trusting Maher. For giving him that second chance. “I feel disgusted at myself for believing him,” she said. “It makes me wonder what else he did I don’t know.”
Anyone with information should immediately call the Carlsbad Police Department at (575) 885-2111 ext. 0 or Crime Stoppers at toll-free (844) 786-7227.