Mary Carole McDonnell swept through the glass offices of Banc of California in Los Angeles in 2018 holding two homemade pies in her well-manicured hands. The 66-year-old was dressed elegantly, though understatedly, in a white-collared button-down shirt and crisp blue jeans. Like always, she wore her signature set of pearls and went heavy on the perfume. In an endearing gesture from a multimillionaire who ran a thriving entertainment production company specializing in true-crime shows, McDonnell was coming to offer a sweet form of thanks to the bank’s sales team.
She was in a jam only the top one percent would know. As heir to the fortune of the McDonnell family, one half of the St. Louis-based McDonnell Douglas airplane-manufacturing business that netted $14 billion after the company merged with Boeing in 1997, McDonnell was finally set to come into her $81 million trust. But until the funds were distributed the following year, she needed a quick bridge loan to hold herself over.
The Anatomy of a High-Stakes Grift
The bank saw the opportunity to play the long game. McDonnell was the head of a thriving $125 million company; had a $1 million stockpile of jewelry, antiques, and artwork; and held a number of investment properties, according to her bank loan application. In all, she placed her net worth at $77 million. Under the impression that McDonnell would eventually transition all of her business accounts and incoming $80 million windfall over to it, Banc of California happily fulfilled a $15 million loan.
Within six weeks, McDonnell had ransacked the account, withdrawing nearly the entire loan amount, $14,660,255.09 to be exact. When alarmed bank officials dove into McDonnell’s purported financials, they discovered they had been duped. The padded accounts McDonnell had claimed to hold at another banking institution—backed by reassurances from her lawyer, a separate banking official, and notarized paperwork—were nonexistent. By the end of the year, McDonnell had hightailed it out of the country with her husband, the majority of the funds disappearing with her.
A Web of Deception
It’s almost too fantastical a tale to be true: An older woman who produced television series about criminals being the villain all along? When the FBI slapped McDonnell’s smiling face on its Most Wanted list last December, accusing the now-74-year-old of defrauding numerous financial institutions to the tune of around $30 million, it led to internet memes and jokes. Some hailed McDonnell as an Anna Delvey-type scammer, justifying her brazen ripoff of faceless lenders by scoffing at the idea that society should feel sympathy for giant corporate entities.
But McDonnell’s financial casualties include her twentysomething sons, who discovered their mother forged their signatures on quick-payday loans that left them on the hook for nearly $3 million; family friends whom McDonnell allegedly milked for hundreds of thousands of dollars; and dozens of employees and freelance workers who claim she stiffed them on paychecks.
“She was the most devious, sinister operator I have ever encountered. An absolute sociopath.” — Ted Eccles
The story has all the makings of a viral documentary replete with breathless details, similar to the ones McDonnell’s company produced. Her backstory is littered with half-truths and deceptions, including a lie that her mentally disabled younger sister was murdered after being kidnapped. Questions remain on how she was able to pull off such a brazen heist. And it has sparked an ongoing hunt among the FBI, banking institutions, a true-crime podcaster, and television producers to see who can unravel McDonnell’s tangled history, track her down in a foreign land, recoup the financial losses she caused, and perhaps bring the unbelievable tale to screens.