Mary Carole McDonnell built a true-crime TV empire. Then the FBI came for her.

The veteran TV executive, whose company carved out a niche as a prolific producer of true-crime shows like “Corrupt Crimes” and “Motive to Murder,” had racked up more than $1 million in debt in 2017 and was on the hunt for a cash infusion, court filings show.

McDonnell was used to hustling: She told people she was heir to a famous aerospace fortune, but she started her television career from the bottom like everyone else, working her way up from secretary to chief executive over more than four decades in the business.

Her employees whispered that the queen of true crime had done it while scarred by a terrible tragedy of her own: the murder of her 11-year-old sister in a botched kidnapping.

When McDonnell approached a bank for a lifeline, she leaned on a dramatic backstory, claiming she was related to the founders of the McDonnell Douglas Corporation and was soon due $80 million from a family trust.

Thanks to allegedly forged documents, she eventually obtained $14.6 million in loans.

Not long after, McDonnell vanished, leaving behind her California life — her mansion, her Porsche, her adult sons — and a string of lawsuits from a bank and unpaid employees in her wake.

The details of her past — the kidnapped sister, the bloodline, the inheritance — were revealed to be a fiction.

She was, authorities said, a fraudster and a fugitive believed to have fled to Dubai.

She was indicted on federal charges in 2018 and added to the FBI’s Most Wanted list in 2025, becoming one of only 32 people to land on the list for white-collar crimes.

How did a TV executive end up the star of a legal drama that could have been fodder for one of her own shows?

Is McDonnell really in Dubai, and what happens to the cases against her in her absence?

Business Insider reviewed hundreds of pages of court records and interviewed staff, producers, and ex-FBI agents who were on her payroll — along with someone who says they befriended her in Dubai — to reveal how McDonnell’s story and her business unraveled.

Mary Carole McDonnell is not actually an heiress or related to the family that built the McDonnell Douglas Corporation, the government and others have confirmed.

A funeral notice for her father, Russell McDonnell, lists her as the fifth of six children born to Russell and Eva McDonnell, who owned McDonnell’s Market Place, a beloved corner grocery that operated in Kirkwood, Missouri, for 75 years.

After graduating from Principia College in 1974, McDonnell embarked on a career in television, bouncing around local stations and working her way up the ladder from secretary to producer to director of programming.

By the 1990s, she’d moved to Los Angeles and become the vice president of programming and marketing at Argyle Television, now known as Hearst Television.

In 1999, she became the vice president of programming at Raycom Media.

While at Raycom, McDonnell launched her own production and distribution company, later called Bellum Entertainment, around 2005.

It focused on shows on alien sightings like “Unsealed: Alien Files,” the home remodeling show “Fix It & Finish It” starring soap star Antonio Sabato Jr., and shows stations needed to fill their Saturday morning educational and informational blocks like “Animal Atlas,” “Zoo Clues,” and “The Coolest Places on Earth.” In 2014, McDonnell left Raycom to focus on Bellum full-time and needed funding.

In 2015, she received a $2.7 million loan from Pacific Business Capital Corporation, according to a 2017 lawsuit Pacific later brought against her.

When she applied for the loan, the lawsuit alleges, McDonnell claimed she had an $80 million trust, but couldn’t provide details about the trust because of a tragic family story.

A letter from McDonnell’s attorney to the bank, viewed by Business Insider, said that McDonnell was unable to disclose any information or documentation related to the trust due to a court order issued after the “kidnap and murder” of her sister, Holly.

In 2019, an arbitrator awarded Pacific Business Capital Corporation close to $6.8 million.

McDonnell has not paid the judgment.

There’s no evidence that Holly was kidnapped.

Louis Post-Dispatch article says she was fatally stabbed in the back by a 14-year-old boy while playing in the yard of the McDonnell home.

The two children knew each other from the schools for children with disabilities they attended.

As McDonnell focused her full attention on Bellum, a lucrative trend in entertainment emerged: true crime.

In the fall of 2014, the podcast “Serial” became a record-breaking phenomenon.

Shortly after, the zeitgeist-defining success of two landmark docuseries, HBO’s “The Jinx” and Netflix’s “Making a Murderer,” proved audiences had an insatiable appetite for the genre on television, too.

An energized McDonnell was ready to position Bellum as a true-crime factory.

Bellum began producing docuseries that could be made cheaply and syndicated widely.

One of the first to take off was “Deep Undercover,” which debuted in 2016 and was hosted by Joe Pistone, the FBI agent who famously went undercover in the mob using the name Donnie Brasco.

Soon, Bellum was pumping out true-crime shows that aired everywhere from The CW to Investigation Discovery. “Motive to Murder,” “Murderous Affairs,” “Corrupt Crimes,” “It Takes a Killer” — these weren’t shows that were going to win Emmys, but they fed the industry’s growing thirst for crime content.

For Ethan LeCuyer, who started working at Bellum as an associate producer in 2015, life at Bellum at that time was good.

It was a small, family-run operation, with McDonnell’s nephew, Peter McDonnell, overseeing production on all the true-crime shows, and her twin sons, Sean and Mackenzie Carroll, working in post-production and sales and distribution, respectively. “There were only eight of us in total, including editors, so it was very tight-knit,” LeCuyer told Business Insider in an exclusive interview about his time at Bellum.

Everyone called Mary Carole ‘MC,’ even her sons, he said.

He can’t remember them ever calling her “mom.” LeCuyer was drawn to Bellum’s scrappy, unconventional style: If he had to shoot B-roll for a show, he grabbed a camera and stole shots throughout Los Angeles, permits be damned.

He often shot interviews at MC’s mansion in La Cañada, an affluent suburb north of Los Angeles. “The house never seemed lived in, and it’s filled with all this gaudy furniture.

It almost felt like a set, but with the exception of maybe four or five pictures of Sean and Mack as kids,” LeCuyer said.

One aspect of the job concerned him: He said he rarely got paid on time, and when he did, the checks sometimes bounced. “The first time it happened, I was like, ‘That’s never happened to me before,’ but you almost became numb to it a little bit because everybody was in the same boat,” LeCuyer said. “It always cleared eventually.” The Bellum playbook was simple: Shows were made by a scrappy few and done on the cheap.

MC would go back out to buyers with new show ideas, get them sold, and use that money to fund the low-budget process all over again, LeCuyer and two other former Bellum executives told Business Insider.

The strategy worked so well that by 2017, McDonnell had grander aspirations.

That January, Cineflix, one of the UK’s largest independent TV distributors, signed a distribution deal with Bellum.

The same month, Bellum locked a multi-show deal with international distributor Red Arrow International, now known as Seven.One Studios, for over 200 hours of content.

Between the new deals and existing ones with Sky Networks and Sinclair Broadcast Group, McDonnell was on a hot streak.

Bellum would have to deliver a lot of fresh content — and fast.

The company needed 26 episodes done in six months, said Andrew Nock, who was hired as the showrunner of season two of “Corrupt Crimes,” a new Bellum show that would also be repurposed internationally under the name “Motive to Murder.” The workload “seemed impossible,” he said.

So Nock hired extra people for several positions, reducing the favorable margins that Bellum had made the key to its success.

Bellum also streamlined its operations with expert commentators, often retired FBI agents, who were hired to weigh in on the crimes discussed on shows.

Instead of having them talk off the cuff about a case, producers crafted scripts they would memorize and repeat on-camera to save shooting and editing time.

Interviews were moved from studios to the dingy basement of Bellum’s office to save money.

Fitzgerald, a retired criminal profiler and forensic linguist whose work at the FBI led to the arrest of the Unabomber in 1996, was surprised to learn that he would be reading a script — and sometimes had to correct inaccuracies. “It was going from Broadway to off-off-off-Broadway,” Fitzgerald said, comparing Bellum to his previous commentating gigs. “It was a cookie-cutter enterprise.” At one point, the company had 80 shows and 180 episodes in production, Nock said.

Yet even when things were rocky, and paychecks came late, he said, “it seemed too big to fail.” McDonnell made it seem that way, too.

MC liked the finer things in life: She had a 4,805-square-foot, 5-bedroom La Cañada estate.

She owned a 39-foot boat docked in Newport beach.

Every workday morning, she had a makeup artist do her glam in the office, two former Bellum employees told Business Insider.

Her extravagances fomented frustration when paychecks were late.

When they finally came, it was a struggle to get the money in hand.

Nock and two other former Bellum employees said the checks would often bounce, and they would run to another bank that would sometimes cash them. “It was always a race to try to get there first to get your money,” Nock said. “There was a woman at the… bank who would start laughing: ‘Oh no, not more of these again!'” Equipment and location vendors also clamored for their money. “We were doing this one story about a guy who killed his family on Christmas with a flamethrower, and I lent my Christmas tree for the shoot at this person’s home in Burbank,” Nock said.

The homeowner “never got their check, and so they held my Christmas tree hostage.” By the spring of 2017, it had become common for MC or her nephew, Peter, to make excuses as to why the staff wasn’t getting paid on time, according to two former Bellum workers.

In one instance, Deadline reported MC informed the company in a series of emails that Bellum had been a victim of bank fraud.

In another, Peter told the staff there were issues with wire transfers, former Bellum story producer Bethany Jones said.

Peter told Business Insider via email that he was unaware of any bank fraud. “I had no access to or information about the company’s finances,” said Peter, who left Bellum in July 2017 and says he’s still owed over $10,000. “I began to suspect her explanations were lies,” he said of his aunt. “The promise she made to everyone was that the company would soon receive a huge loan that would right the ship.

It never came.” As for the wire transfers, “I may have relayed an explanation from the CFO or Mary Carole about a payment delinquency,” Peter wrote in his email. “Those delinquencies were becoming more common.

If I added a reason for the delay, it was always based on the information I received.

I stopped passing on explanations because I stopped trusting them myself.” Some producers and crew members started taking drastic measures to get paid.

Retired FBI special agent Bobby Chacon, who worked as a writer and technical advisor, said he saw a cameraman take an expensive camera home as collateral after a shoot, saying he hadn’t been paid.

Jones, who was a story producer on “I Married a Murderer” in 2016, said she stormed into the office one day with her IRS-credentialed tax preparer and confronted McDonnell, who turned pale and threatened to call the police on them. “It was an f-you,” Jones told Business Insider in an exclusive interview as to why she confronted McDonnell. “We all knew we weren’t going to see the money.” Nock said one day, officials from the California Labor Commissioner’s Office walked into Bellum unannounced.

They “showed up one day with business cards and passed them out to everyone’s desk because someone must have reported what was going on,” he said.

Aaron Cadieux took a different approach.

After months of waiting for the $2,000 he says he was owed for working two-and-a-half days on an episode of Bellum’s “Mysteries of the Unexplained,” the filmmaker bought the domain name MaryCaroleMcDonnell.com and designed a disparaging webpage with a picture of McDonnell’s head on a pig’s body. “I basically said, ‘Look, I want my money.

I own the domain name MaryCaroleMcDonnell.com.

If I don’t get my money by Friday at 5 o’clock… this website is going to go live,'” Cadieux said, adding that he gave the company a week’s notice of his intentions. “At like 4:55 p.m. on that Friday, they wired me my money.” Cadieux still went live with the site in solidarity with the others who were never paid.

Amid the workers’ revolt, McDonnell gradually stopped showing up to the office, and the reality had sunk in that Bellum was on the verge of collapse. “That was the joke among us: You know the ship’s sinking when Mary Carole will stop having her hair and makeup done every morning,” Jones said.

Around this time, the government alleges, McDonnell was trying to get money from banks.

In March 2017, Reliable Fast Cash, which specialized in offering capital and merchant cash advances to small and midsize businesses, began to loan Bellum over $2.5 million, according to court documents.

After months of partial payments, Bellum defaulted by July and again in August.

Because McDonnell and her sons had signed documents agreeing to be liable for the debt in advance, a judge awarded Reliable over $3.3 million in September of that year, and the company immediately began collecting the debt.

Over $550,000 in money and assets were seized from Sean and Mack, though they said they were unaware their signatures were on the loan application, according to court documents.

The brothers filed a motion in 2019 to vacate the judgment, alleging that their mother forged their signatures on the loan.

They settled with Reliable in 2020, with Reliable keeping the money it had already collected but agreeing not to withdraw any more.

The family dynamic has been fraught ever since.

People familiar with the family told Business Insider that Sean and Mack have not been in contact with their mother for years.

Sean declined to comment; Mack did not respond.

With her debts mounting, in December 2017, McDonnell applied for another loan, this time from Banc of California.

Though McDonnell eventually secured over $14.6 million, it didn’t solve Bellum’s problems: By the end of the year, employees said, Bellum was effectively defunct.

Records show Bellum officially became inactive in 2020.

Close to 50 employees filed wage claims with the California Labor Commissioner’s Office.

In 2018, McDonnell was hit with both civil and criminal allegations.

In July, Banc of California sued McDonnell in federal court, alleging that she falsely claimed to be an heir to the McDonnell Douglas Corporation aerospace fortune and was seeking millions to tide her over until she received a cash distribution from her family’s $80 million trust.

The bank said in court documents that it loaned McDonnell over $14.6 million after receiving loan documents it claims were false and forged.

Banc of California later refiled the case in California state court, and a judge ruled in their favor in 2021 and awarded the bank over $17 million.

On December 12, 2018, McDonnell was federally indicted on charges of bank fraud and aggravated identity theft.

With a warrant out for her arrest, McDonnell remained at large.

McDonnell’s exact movements are unknown, but the FBI has said it believes she had set down roots some 8,300 miles away from Hollywood, in Dubai.

Dubai entrepreneur Thili Brady is used to rubbing shoulders with the wealthy and powerful.

But when she met an older American woman nicknamed MC, something stood out: She introduced herself as an heiress and always brought it up.

Brady struck up a friendship with McDonnell and her husband, Jeffrey Nilles, in 2019, after seeing them around the Dubai luxury hotel where she had an apartment.

They shopped together, went to the movies, and had dinners.

Brady described her bond with the couple as parental and said MC opened up to her new friend. “Each and every time she would get into my car, she would say, ‘Oh, I had a Porsche back in the US,'” Brady said.

MC said her kids would never call her, Brady added. “She’d get upset on special occasions and start crying.

So I was feeling sorry for them.” MC approached Brady about getting into business, inviting her in 2019 to be part of a $7.5 million investment to develop three TV shows, according to an email Brady provided to Business Insider. “I have done these deals through banks before but this one requires private investment because of the immediate product demand,” MC wrote.

MC mapped out the path to generating revenue using the Bellum show “Motive to Murder” as an example, saying it generated $2 million in international sales in one year. “Crime series easily generate 4 to 5X return after recouping costs,” she wrote. “The key to this is producing the shows in an ‘evergreen’ fashion so that the show easily has a 10 year amortization arc.” MC estimated that in the US, she could sell each episode on cable for between $15,000 to $50,000, and sell an entire show to Netflix for $1 million a year.

With revenue coming from cable, streaming, and syndication, MC predicted that it was “certainly doable” for investors to see a return on the $7.5 million within a year.

Two former Bellum executives told Business Insider the figures in MC’s email appear to have been inflated.

Brady said she passed on the proposal after discussing it with a lawyer.

Brady remained friends with MC and Nilles until 2022, when she said the couple attempted to secure roughly $80,000 from her, then sued her for the money when she declined to pay them.

Brady said she won the case and that Nilles appealed in 2024 and lost.

Business Insider couldn’t obtain detailed records of the case, but a public notice of appeal in Dubai shows Nilles appealed a case involving Brady in 2024.

Nilles did not respond to a request for comment.

After Brady fell out with McDonnell and Nilles, she did research and found a Facebook group for former Bellum employees.

After she shared her experience with a member of the group, she said, the FBI interviewed her.

Months later, Brady said, she bumped into McDonnell and Nilles in a parking lot. “They were like, ‘You have insulted MC,'” Brady said.

Brady said her parting comment to them was, “Karma is a bitch.

This is going to come back to you.” In December 2025, the FBI added McDonnell to its Most Wanted list.

Suddenly, what had been a local story about unpaid employees in Hollywood was now national and international news: “Fake aerospace empire heiress, 74, lands on FBI’s Most Wanted list for defrauding millions from banks,” the New York Post headline blared. “A prolific true crime producer was truly a criminal the whole time, the FBI says,” wrote The Guardian.

A photo of McDonnell circulated by the FBI shows her blonde hair pulled back from her face, revealing pearl studs in her ears.

She smiles broadly, appearing not to have a care in the world.

FBI spokeswoman Laura Eimiller told Business Insider that the case is ongoing. “She’s still a fugitive, and we believe she may be conducting fraud currently,” she said.

Eimiller also said the FBI believes McDonnell is in Dubai.

If McDonnell is in Dubai, arresting her isn’t as simple as sending American authorities to the UAE to serve a warrant. “Dubai is not a magic invisibility cloak, but it presents a significant legal and diplomatic obstacle,” said Tom Simon, a former FBI special agent who now works as a private investigator with a specialty in fraud investigations. “The FBI cannot simply travel there, serve its warrant and put her on an airplane.

Any arrest in Dubai requires the cooperation of Emirati authorities.” However, arresting McDonnell wouldn’t be impossible, Simon said. “Her location may provide protection from immediate arrest, but it does not provide permanent immunity.” Back in the US, most ex-Bellum employees have since moved on with their lives.

LeCuyer, who says he’s owed over $10,000, worked as an EMT after Bellum and now works at a visual effects company.

Fitzgerald, who still works as a commentator and co-hosts a true-crime podcast, says he’s owed $10,000.

Jones, who says she’s owed $30,000, is working as a producer.

Chacon, who says he’s owed $36,000, is still a story consultant and expert commentator.

One former Bellum contractor is still hoping he can get closure.

Before McDonnell landed on the FBI’s Most Wanted list late last year, Tim Clemente, a retired FBI counterterrorism agent who worked for Bellum as one of its crime experts, started hatching a plan to track down McDonnell.

Clemente, who says he’s still owed around $5,000, described himself as a unique victim. “I got a lot of friends in the Middle East, I got a lot of friends in Dubai, Abu Dhabi, all over that area — special operations guys, foreign nationals that are over there working with United Arab Emirates special operations.

I’ve done a lot of training.” With the FBI now on the case, Clemente has stood down.

Still, he dreams of giving the ordeal its own Hollywood ending. “I want to do it as an unscripted series,” he said of the FBI’s manhunt for McDonnell. “She used us for an unscripted series, and she made a lot of money.

We would like to return the favor.” Additional reporting by Jack Newsham.

Advertisement