A charismatic pastor who ‘mesmerized’ family and followers alike told his ex-wife she had ‘won’ as he shot himself dead, days after she revealed his lifetime of lies to the world.
‘Doctor’ Justin Meier, 43, left a suicide note telling Laura Mahoney she had ‘completely destroyed’ him after she set up a Facebook page exposing his bogus qualifications, sexual predation and investigations for child sex abuse.
‘While you are peddling some of these lies for your mom. I don’t blame you,’ he told his children who had revealed his sexual abuse of them.
‘You win!!’ he told Mahoney. ‘You are evil, and Karma will get you.’
Pastor Justin Meier ‘mesmerized’ the town of Richmond Missouri where he served as a council member and head of the chamber of commerce, his daughter said
Meier with then wife Laura Beth Mahoney, who he denounced as evil before taking his life when she exposed him as a fraud and an abuser
Meier had dragged his young family across more than a dozen states in the 20 years of his marriage through a series of short-lived jobs with a series of churches and denominations.
Along the way he falsely claimed to have become a licensed therapist and began counselling vulnerable women he met through his church work.
He painted himself as a progressive man of God and once wore a rainbow colored pro-LGBT sweater.
‘If he was talking to you, he’d make you feel like the most special person in the world,’ said Brandi Brash Pangborn who was working in the office at Grace Church in Richmond, Missouri.
Meier offered his counselling as she struggled to deal with the death of her mother in 2018.
‘He starts with like, ‘You know, I’m a pastor here. And this is not anything I should ever say, but, like, I’ve just always been in love with you’,’ Pangborn told the Kansas City Star.
‘And then he just kisses me. He goes, ‘I just couldn’t help myself. We’ve been such good friends forever. And I’m just so sorry you’re going through all this. I just love you and really, really care about you’.
‘I guess you would call it love bombing.’
Meier eventually moved in with Pangborn but continued seducing other clients, destroying a series of marriages in the process.
‘Probably, in a year and a half, at least five,’ Pangborn said.
The self-styled ‘bishop’ lied about a series of qualifications including a bachelors degree from Kansas State University and a Ph.D from Duke University Divinity School in North Carolina
He left a series of ministries over unproved allegations of child abuse
‘Outside of mine, he purposefully ruined two other marriages I know about.’
Meier and Mahoney had been schoolmates at Salina Central High in Kansas when they began dating in 1998 and they married in their hometown on the day a tornado touched down in May 2002.
Mahoney now says she believes the extreme weather event to have been a bad omen of what was to come.
‘I was blindly in love,’ she said. ‘He was attentive. He was kind, always making me feel OK.
‘He always joked in high school, he would be either a preacher or a politician. He didn’t know which.
‘He was a good speaker, especially when he was young. A lot of people loved him.’
The couple had three children Lilly, Eli and Josia, as Meier struggled to stay in work amid rumors of inappropriate behavior with children.
‘There was a boy in the church who was by Justin’s side all the time,’ Mahoney said of a 2003 posting in Clarks Hill, Indiana.
‘Then, all of a sudden, he wasn’t, and his mom saw a massive change in him. She went to the police and was like, ‘Something has happened to my child’.’
Meier had rapidly increased attendance at the kids’ ministry from 15 to more than 100.
He denied any sexual activity with the 13-year-old claiming simply that he had admonished him for bringing drugs onto church grounds.
‘The kid would not say anything, so the police had nothing,’ Mahoney said.
‘They had a mom’s hunch up against a community leader saying, ‘He is a socially and economically challenged kid with a lot of problems’.’
They left the town shortly afterwards but, as usual, Meier had no trouble convincing another church to employ him, this time in Frankfurt, Indiana.
‘I mean people in the church worshipped Justin,’ said daughter Lilly Meier, 21.
‘We made a joke that people worshipped Justin, not Jesus.
‘The second that he meets you, he’s going to give you a great big hug and tell you, ‘It’s so nice to meet you. I’ve heard so much about you.’
‘He literally makes the energy go up in the room, 100%. If you love fishing, he’s going to get you to tell him everything about it. Even if he doesn’t know a lot about it, he’s going to say, ‘I’d love to learn!’
He’s going to find that connection point. ‘Wow, he really cares about what I care about’.
‘But, generally, it’s just so he can make that connection so that he can use you later down the road.’
‘People in the church worshipped Justin,’ said daughter Lilly Meier, 21. ‘We made a joke that people worshipped Justin, not Jesus.’
‘He was a good council member,’ said city administrator Tonya Willim. ‘Very helpful. Outgoing. Community-minded. Ready to get in and make a change.’
Lilly Meir said her father abused her for years on end, often after one of his frequent bouts of drinking.
‘He was a narcissist and possibly a sociopath,’ she said.
‘I say this with all due respect to the people in (Richmond). They were mesmerized by the mirage of a person.
‘I don’t want it to seem like I have a vendetta or, like, it’s out of anger or bitterness for the situation,’ she said.
‘He was my best friend. We were the closest and I loved him with my whole heart. He was my favorite person on the planet.
‘He literally destroyed people’s lives.’
Younger brother Eli, now 19, says he was abused from the age of five, sometimes on church planting trips for the Churches of God, General Conference based in Ohio.
‘There was definitely some sexual abuse growing up, my earliest memories of it happening would have been when we lived in Lawrence.’
By 2015 the family had settled in Richmond where Meier started to be seen as a pillar of the community.
The following year he was elected president of the chamber of commerce, but his fraudulent past was starting to catch up with him.
The Churches of God had spotted Meier claiming in his online profile that he had a Ph.D from Duke University Divinity School in North Carolina, a claim they knew to be a lie.
Justin always had a sense of trying to, you know, be more than what he was, to be more impressive than what he was,’ the churches’ executive director Lance Finley told The Star.
‘We just encouraged him, ‘You have gifts that are valuable. That’s enough. You don’t need to do this.’ At that time, he took the information down.’
Mahoney says her husband had spoken vaguely about taking online classes at Duke and later claimed that he won a doctorate from the Florida Bible Institute and Seminary.
It later emerged that Meier was a director of the now defunct Bible Institute
‘When I confronted him after he started using ‘doctor’, I mean I hadn’t seen him that aggressive,’ Mahoney said.
‘It was really scary. I did it one time and it was like, ‘If you don’t believe me, we might as well get a divorce! How could you not believe me on these things? Why would I lie about this?!’
‘It was major. I was just like, ‘OK, OK, I guess you did’.’
By now their marriage was starting to break up.
Mahoney filed for divorce in April 2019 and Meier, still involved with Pangborn, enrolled in a Facebook divorce support group where he met Sarah Ann Miller, 39.
She had four children from her 18 years of marriage and he offered her free counselling.
By April 2021 they were married, but Miller was already having serious doubts about her lover.
‘Just think of the person that would fit perfectly right into your life. That’s who he became.
‘I was completely, obsessively in love with the guy.’
The couple decided to start a new church affiliated to the Anglican Diocese of the Emmanus Way.
But the work was expensive and the couple began to quarrel.
‘Everyone was praising him,’ Miller said. ‘I thought, ‘How selfish am I?’ Literally every single day someone told me how great my husband was.’
By now Meier’s daughter Lilly was attending Graceland University in Lamoni, Iowa, where her father would drive at least once a week and, unknown to university authorities, conduct counselling sessions with students.
‘I have personally talked to at least five students who were in ‘therapy’ in quotations with him,’ Miller said.
‘Five girls. One of them admitted to having sex with him. Before he died, she was considering pressing charges, but she wanted to wait until after Christmas.’
And Meier’s new diocese was starting to become suspicious, launching an investigation into their new self-styled ‘bishop’.
In March 2023, the diocese issued a bombshell report detailing Meier’s lies.
Miller filed for divorce in November 2023 by which time she was in contact with Meier’s former wife and his children.
She helped Mahoney set up the ‘Facts About Justin Meier’ Facebook page, detailing his lives and abuse.
‘Mr Meier is an accomplished liar and a natural con man,’ it declared, ‘a sexual predator who relies on charisma, fast talking, and emotional manipulation to control others and get what he wants.
‘Help us spread the word to prevent further abuse.’
It went live on December 19, and four days later Mahoney received a call telling her that her former husband had taken his life in his Ford Ranger inside a Grain Valley warehouse.
Meier’s father and sisters maintain he was the victim of a witch hunt and do not recognize the portrait painted by his wife and ex-wife.
He left a five-page suicide note, in which admits both his bachelor’s degree and master’s degree were bought from a degree mill, and that ‘I am a fraud as a secular counselor’.
He tells Miller that he still loves her, and denies sexually abusing students at his daughter’s college.
‘I don’t know how LB (Mahoney) got her claws in you but she did,’ he writes, ‘I also would never hurt any of the girls.
‘If one actually said I raped her, then get a polygraph test. Find out the truth and get her a therapist. ‘Because knowing that that helped push me over the edge could really mess her up.’
He tells his children he loves them and denies all allegations of sexual abuse against them.
But he tells them that if he did abuse them, they should blame their mother.
‘Just remember if any of this is true, your mother knew about it and did nothing for years,’ he claimed. ‘She is just as evil as I am. Be careful of her.’
