Missouri pastor lived a lifetime of lies. How he was exposed as an abuser and fraud

Beaten emotionally and betrayed, gaslighted to near madness by the “godly” husband she once revered, Laura Beth Mahoney of Overland Park was uncertain even as she stepped up to the clerk.

“I think there’s an envelope here for me,” said Mahoney, who for nearly 20 of her 44 years had moved from state to state, city to city as Laura Beth Meier — mother of three, a traveling minister’s wife.

Except, by this day in April, Mahoney had long resigned herself to the truth:

She had been a dupe, and perhaps the first among thousands in Kansas, Missouri, Indiana, Pennsylvania and a dozen other states to fall victim to the charms of her ex-husband, pastor Justin Patrick Meier.

No one doubted Meier’s energy or charisma. Short, bald, with a graying Santa beard and twinkling eyes, the Salina native boasted an impressive resume — Kansas State University bachelor’s degree, Duke University Divinity School doctorate, family therapist — with a talent to pack pews and move souls. He was so trusted in Richmond, Missouri — a town of 6,000, an hour northeast of Kansas City — that in 2017, he was elected to the city council. He was named president of the chamber of commerce. He had been publicly honored in 2016 for his many good deeds: drug prevention, helping pregnant teens.

“He was a good council member,” said Tonya Willim, the town’s city administrator. “Very helpful. Outgoing. Community-minded. Ready to get in and make a change.”

Only what no one knew, including his family, was that Justin Meier had been living a lifetime of lies as a fraud, a cheat and a serial philanderer able not only to deceive thousands of parishioners in numerous states but also an entire Missouri town.

The Star interviewed Meier’s relatives, including two ex-wives and his children as well as the father and sisters who defend him; leaders of churches around the country where he worked and was forced to leave; colleges and universities where he claimed to earn degrees or worked and left in disgrace; law enforcement; and women he counseled and hoodwinked. The Star also reviewed a number of court records and other documents. While no criminal charges were leveled against Meier, this much is clear:

He never graduated K-State or any accredited college. Duke was a lie. He had no doctorate. With no license as a therapist, he unethically “counseled” vulnerable women as clients into sexual relationships, destroying their marriages. Accusations of child sexual abuse in his own family would come later.

“He was my best friend,” daughter and abuse survivor Lilly Meier, 21, said. “We were the closest and I loved him with my whole heart. He was my favorite person on the planet.”

But recently, she revealed the acts her father perpetrated against her and convinced her were normal. Her younger brother, Eli, now 19, also claims being sexually abused by his father.

“Flat out,” Lilly Meier said of her father, “he was a narcissist and possibly a sociopath. … I say this with all due respect to the people in (Richmond). They were mesmerized by the mirage of a person.”

And now, suddenly, the family was told that Meier was dead.

On Dec. 19, Mahoney, Lilly Meier and others — concerned about the damage Meier might continue to do, having started another church in Odessa, Missouri — collaborated on a website and two Facebook pages, “The Facts About Justin Meier” and the private “Victims of Justin Meier.”

“Mr. Meier is an accomplished liar and a natural con man,” the site declared, “a sexual predator who relies on charisma, fast talking, and emotional manipulation to control others and get what he wants.”

It came with an appeal: “Help us spread the word to prevent further abuse.”

Four days later, as Mahoney, who had remarried and acquired a new last name, was preparing for Christmas, she got a call saying Meier had died by suicide seated in his Ford Ranger inside a Grain Valley warehouse. Family close to Meier sent Laura Beth Mahoney a three-sentence excerpt from a five-page suicide letter.

“L.B.,” Meier wrote. “You win!! You have completely destroyed me and got others to do it for you. You are evil, and Karma will get you.”

Mahoney and others, however, still wondered if it was just another manipulation. For weeks they searched for an obituary and found none. Neither Mahoney nor the children received notice of a funeral. They saw no body, no cremated remains.

So Mahoney in April stood before a clerk at the Jackson County Health Department in Lee’s Summit to gather solid proof: copies of his death certificate. The clerk handed her a white envelope.

“The hard thing is, and it sounds insane when you say it out loud,” Mahoney recalled thinking. “Maybe he’s not dead. I think we all had this feeling: If anyone could pull off faking his own death in this manner, he could.”

Brother’s keeper

This was no fake. At 43, Meier had taken his life.

To his defenders — his father and sisters prime among them — the accusations are viewed as a travesty and act of character assassination against a good man, carried out by a wife and ex-wife whom they view as emotionally troubled and who brainwashed Meier’s children against him.

Although now forced by facts to acknowledge that Meier lied about large portions of his life, they still refuse to believe the accusation of sexual abuse of his own children.

“It’s pure vindictiveness and wanting to destroy him,” Meier’s father, Randy Meier, of Salina said of the website. “When the accusation came up about the pedophilia, or whatever, I sat there for probably two seconds and thought, ‘Where is this coming from? This is crazy.’”

Taryn Vargas, one of three sisters, said her brother told her, “100%, I would never, ever, ever touch a child.”

“My brother wanted to conquer the world,” she said. “He wanted to fix everything for everyone, no matter who you were. He didn’t care where you came from. He didn’t care about the color of your skin, or what you identify as. He would have helped you no matter what — no questions asked.”

Meier, indeed, did much in the series of churches he ran, including in Richmond: opening day care programs, food pantries and after-school programs, organizing volunteers to mow lawns for older residents, coaching sports and sacrificing his own furniture, even opening his home, to homeless and addicted people in need.

“I mean he was, literally, one of the most down-to-earth, charismatic, empathetic guys or souls you would ever meet,” said Kelbi Stierwalt, another sister, who said she finds it all but impossible to reconcile the brother she knew with the man described on the website. “I have never in my life met someone or come across someone who hasn’t loved my brother.”

Vargas, calling her brother “one of the strongest people I know,” views him as so selfless that she believes he took his life as an act of noble, self-sacrifice to spare his family disgrace.

“At some point,” she said, “there’s a breaking point. You can only carry the weight of the world on your shoulders for so long before you collapse.”

Gaslighted lives

But those hurt by Meier insist that for two decades it was others who bore the weight of the minister’s lies and actions.

They posted the website, they said, not out of animus, but to reveal the truth and to create a resource for other potential victims — not knowing, even now, how many people may have been hurt over the years.

“I don’t want it to seem like I have a vendetta or, like, it’s out of anger or bitterness for the situation,” Lilly Meier said. “He literally destroyed people’s lives.”

Mahoney had another motivation: To recapture the truth of her life. Having lived with what she now sees as a pathological liar, Mahoney said she was thrust into the dizzying position of redefining huge portions of her adult narrative.

Not only did Meier lie about his resume and accomplishments, she said, he lied about the lies, about his actions, timelines and basic facts. He did so in such a consistent manner — taking credit for successes and blaming her and others for failures — that she gradually began to doubt her own memory, perceptions and competency to the point of falling into a clinical depression.

“It’s been extremely disorienting,” Mahoney said. “ We were so gaslit that it was a really difficult thing for me to put back together. … You have to realize that I’ve lived two completely different lives. I had the life that I thought we had. Then I realized that nothing was the way I thought it was.”

The truth in hindsight now is so much clearer, Mahoney said. She is shocked she couldn’t see the forest of red flags. Trouble appeared to surround them from the start.

‘Love bombing’

On May 11, 2002, a tornado touched down outside Salina. It was the afternoon of their wedding. A hundred guests were invited.

Laura Beth Mahoney was Laura Beth Hyberger then, days from turning 22. Justin was 21. Both were from Salina. Neither’s parents were overjoyed about the marriage.

“In fact,” Mahoney said, “my dad said to me, right before he walked me down the aisle, ‘It’s still not too late. We can walk away right now.”

“You probably can’t find a picture of me smiling, and they took a lot of photos,” Becky Hyberger, Mahoney’s mother, a Salina artist, said of the wedding. “I never liked him. There was an honesty issue there, even from the very beginning. It was always like he was performing.”

Meier’s father, meanwhile, judged his son’s fiancee as odd. “Even when Laura Beth and Justin were dating in high school,” he said, “I thought, ‘She’s a little off.’ I said, ‘Justin, you know, you made your bed, sleep in it. It’s your choice.’”

She was in love.

The two had begun dating at Salina Central High School. She was in the class of 1998; Justin in ‘99. He’d asked her to the homecoming dance when he was a freshman and she was a sophomore. He had done some wrestling. Laura Beth was a competitive twirler. Later in high school, they’d compete as teammates in forensics and debate. Justin qualified for national competitions.

At first, Laura Beth said yes about going to the dance. Justin was cute, if not a little pushy. He had a big smile and was always chatty.

But then she changed her mind.

“I thought he was a little bit conceited and obnoxious,” Mahoney said. “I said, ‘I can’t go with you.’”

And there was something about him that just seemed too much. They hadn’t even begun dating, and already he’d bought her what seemed like a costly necklace, working to woo her.

In the years that followed, other women, including “counseling” clients with whom Meier later slept, would talk about his “ love bombing ” — showering them with what they’d later come to see as manipulative attention, compliments and professions of desire.

So it was in 2018 for Brandi Brash Pangborn in Richmond. In 2015, Meier and his family had come to the town to help resurrect a small, white-steeple church on Camden Street. Meier renamed it Grace Church. He had a way with people, homing in on what was important to them. Pangborn worked in the church office.

“If he was talking to you, he’d make you feel like the most special person in the world,” Pangborn said. “ I mean people in the church worshipped Justin. We made a joke that people worshipped Justin, not Jesus.”

Lilly Meier explained. “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.”

Pangborn was having a difficult time coping with the recent death of her mother. “Spiritually, it was a hard thing to deal with,” she said. Meier offered to counsel her. He did so alone the first time, Pangborn said. The more she shared, the more he raised questions about the health of her marriage. One counseling session later, Meier made an advance.

“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 recalled. “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.

“I don’t even know how to describe it. It’s surreal. He’s everything and you’re like, ‘Oh my gosh, he loves me.’”

Red flags

Mahoney’s rejection of Meier before the homecoming dance would became a funny piece of family lore. By the end of her junior year, they began dating.

She had broken up with a boyfriend. He’d treated her poorly. Meier was there on the rebound.

“He was attentive. He was kind, always making me feel OK,” Mahoney said. What she saw then as kindness, she now sees as an opportunist taking advantage of a vulnerable girl.

After high school, she started at Washburn University. She was the student in the sorority with the boyfriend back home.

“The expectation was that I would be home every weekend,” she said, “or find a way to see him throughout the week.”

He entered K-State the next year. Throughout Meier’s life, Mahoney said, he inflated himself. He regularly claimed that because of the advanced high school summer classes he took, that he had effectively entered college at age 14. At K-State, he claimed that his summer credits allowed him to enter as a junior.

K-State has no record of that. The university shows he attended for a year, the fall of 1999 to the fall of 2000. Mahoney, earning high grades at Washburn, transferred to K-State to be with him.

Nothing went well.

“I drowned at K-State,” Mahoney said. “There were a lot of issues.” An assault by an acquaintance at a fraternity party had left her reeling. She struggled with clinical depression and undiagnosed attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder. She found it hard to get to class. She was placed on academic probation.

Drinking, partying too much, Meier was struggling, too. He made a decision.

“He always joked in high school, he would be either a preacher or a politician. He didn’t know which,” Mahoney said.

A Meier relative had been a regional leader in the Methodist Church around Salina. As a teen, Meier excelled at giving youth sermons.

“He was impressive,” Mahoney said. “He was a good speaker, especially when he was young. A lot of people loved him.”

A plan unfolded. She would leave school and get a job near Wichita. His idea was that he would first take some classes at Manhattan Christian College to begin his education toward becoming a Methodist minister. (The college says he never enrolled.) After that, he’d head to Winfield, Kansas — not far from where his mother and stepfather lived south of Wichita. There, he’d acquire a job as a youth pastor at a church. Meanwhile, he’d finish his education at the Methodist-affiliated Southwestern College. (Southwestern also has no record of him enrolling).

Finally, Mahoney said, Meier told her that he’d found a different avenue to a degree. Trinity University would grant him one based on the college credits he had already earned, together with his “life experience.”

“He told everyone that it was Trinity University out of Texas,” Mahoney said.

Eighteen years would pass before Mahoney — separated from Meier and ready to divorce — would discover from his papers that his “degree” was not from Trinity University in San Antonio. It was from “Trinity College and University,” a diploma mill out of Spain that sold degrees through the mail for as little as $300.

“I didn’t know,” Mahoney said.

She recalled asking about a graduation ceremony. Meier loved to be celebrated, she said. It would later become a joke in the family that his birthday celebrations lasted a month.

“There was no graduation,” Mahoney said. Texas was too far away and too expensive to travel to, he told her.

“He was like, ‘I don’t need to go to my graduation,’ which was not like him at all,” she said.

Then, not far from their wedding date, Meier’s youth pastor position came to a sudden end.

“I don’t know what happened,” Mahoney said, other than what she recalled Meier telling her. He said he’d had irreconcilable philosophical differences with the leadership over issues like baptism and ordination. “He was like, ‘I’m done with the church.’ He blamed the fact that the senior pastor was a woman.”

Looking back, she can only see red flags.

“I think that was an excuse to get out of the Methodist Church because he knew he wouldn’t be able to finish the academics,” she said. “Everything I see now, I don’t know, I see an underlying motive.”

Blame game

The experience would become a pattern.

Over the next 20 years, the couple and their children (they’d eventually have Lilly, Eli and Josiah, now 16) would set forth on an odyssey, traveling east and south across the country, as Meier went from one minister job to the next. He’d change churches, change denominations. With his charm, community outreach and a warm message of love and inclusion, he improved membership at numerous churches. Then, he’d suddenly be forced to leave.

Many positions lasted only months. If there was blame to be cast, Mahoney said, Meier never failed to cast it on others. And Mahoney believed him.

“I was blindly in love,” she said.

From Winfield, in May 2002, the couple headed to the First Reformed Church in Lafayette, Indiana, for another youth pastor position. There, he would begin to study Christian, pastoral counseling through a local church, although he never completed the work.

The job ended in six months. Meier again said it was because he refused to baptize an infant.

“But there were rumors,” Mahoney said, “about Justin being inappropriate with kids.”

At the next church, 15 miles south in Clarks Hill, Indiana, he faced not a rumor, but an accusation.

Meier, again, was the youth minister. With their new baby, Lilly, the couple were living in a $500 per month mobile home. They’d started a day care at the church. Meier had quickly grown the kids’ ministry from 15 children to more than 100.

“There was a boy in the church who was by Justin’s side all the time,” Mahoney said. “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 would say that nothing sexual was involved and that he had simply caught the boy, age 12 or 13, with drugs on church grounds.

“But 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.’”

The Clarks Hill police told The Star that they have no record regarding the incident, but that records prior to 2006 are also incomplete. After her own children’s accusations of abuse, Mahoney “absolutely, absolutely” believes that something wrong happened in Clarks Hill.

Six months after they started, they were gone — rent unpaid on the mobile home.

The next job in Frankfurt, Indiana, apparently went well. And nine months later, they were in Martinsville, Illinois. Eli had been born in September 2004. The job came with a lovely home with a mural in the nursery.

“We had kids over for youth group for like pancake breakfasts,” Mahoney said.

Six months in, they were told to leave, immediately.

“I was crushed,” Mahoney said. “He went to a board meeting one day. He was gone for 12 hours. There was a letter.”

She has no idea what it said, what reason for his dismissal was given.

But Meier, she said, explained the rift as an ugly matter of church politics: His youthful and positive changes had upset the church’s old guard.

“He was told, ‘If you don’t resign, we’re going to fire you,’” Mahoney said. A church elder verified that Meier was let go but could not provide further details.

Helpful and hellish

In the 10 years that followed, 2005 to 2015, Meier’s ministering would take the family to at least a dozen other states.

They lived for four years — the most in one place at that point — in Lawrence, where they would eventually begin The River City Church of Lawrence from scratch. It has since closed.

Broke, unable to pay for housing, they initially became live-in helpers to adults with cognitive disabilities. Later, in their own apartment, their Christian instincts would prompt them to open their doors to recovering addicts. Mahoney began running a program to help house the homeless.

The work was godly and fulfilling, she said, but exhausting.

In March 2008, they had their third child, Josiah, born three months early. At 13 months, he was diagnosed with cerebral palsy. It would leave him with a mild learning disability. Physically, he would have problems with his legs, knees and feet, requiring surgeries and years of therapy.

“From the time Josiah was born, Justin started checking out,” Mahoney asserted. “By checking out, I mean, he would go to speak at church-planting conferences. He was getting national notoriety for what we were doing in Lawrence. I would be the single mom with a household full of people who needed help — serious help.”

Meier, at that point, had connected with the Churches of God, General Conference, a Christian denomination based in Findlay, Ohio, that was started in 1825 during the Second Great Awakening.

“He would be gone for days,” Mahoney said.

Given to grand gestures, Meier — out of goodness, or to inflate his image, Mahoney said — began populating the house with people they were unqualified to help.

“The last six months were hell,” Mahoney said of Meier’s absences and the overwhelming pressures. “I don’t know if it was power- or fame-hungry. By the time we left, he was bringing home random people. I had a bit of a mental breakdown. We were not a drug-treatment center.

“He brought home a girl who had just had a baby — like she had just had a baby and was being released from the hospital. She was saying they were going to separate her from her baby.

“I don’t know if you’ve ever seen somebody come off of meth. It’s horrendous, horrendous! And it should be done in a treatment facility. Justin brought her home — with the baby. We have three children, all under the age of 7, who are watching this girl — a girl! — go through the throes of detox in our home.

“That’s not healthy. That’s not good. That’s not helpful. I was furious.”

Sexually abused

Lawrence ended.

In 2010, the Churches of God, General Conference offered Meier a new job, traveling the country, with his family alongside, as a church expansion strategist, teaching others how to plant a successful church. The Meiers took off in their new home, a 42-foot, A-Class, Diesel Pusher recreational vehicle.

“It was a huge relief,” Mahoney said. The kids would keep up their education online through the Lawrence Virtual School. “We’d get to be together as a family.”

Over the next year, the RV took them to churches in Tennessee, Arkansas, North Carolina and South Carolina, Virginia, West Virginia, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, Pennsylvania and Florida.

In that time, Mahoney said, another pattern emerged, one that gradually eroded her sense of self. To her husband, she said, any successes were his. But when things went wrong, he’d convince her, she was to blame. His facts were right. Hers were wrong. The message was that she was the problem.

“I was the crazy one,” Mahoney said. “I was the one with the memory problems. I was the one whose instincts couldn’t be trusted, whose mind isn’t trustworthy.”

Mahoney said she turned inward, unsure and “submissive.” She says she was “lost.”

“I look back now at journals and stuff and I just want to weep,” she said. “Writing things like, ‘God, please make me a better wife and a better mom.’ I wasn’t myself.”

A year later, the church leadership decided that the Meiers should settle down.

In Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, they worked to save a faltering church near the capital dome. It failed.

Meier still traveled, sometimes taking Eli. It was on some of those trips, and even before, he now says, that his father abused him.

“There was definitely some sexual abuse growing up,” Eli said of events that he said he suppressed until about a year ago. They emerged during therapy. “My earliest memories of it happening would have been when we lived in Lawrence.”

He was 5 years old.

Lilly Meir said that her abuse occurred over numerous years, often after her father had been drinking, which was common. She knows that some of her father’s defenders don’t believe her.

“The only thing I can rely on ever is my memory,” she said. “And there are some things you simply don’t forget.”

Ph.D. fraud

None of them will ever forget Richmond. In 2015, it became home.

Mahoney never wanted to live there. “I was like, there was no way in hell,” she said. Neither did the kids.

There had been a few stops before. Rankled by leadership, Meier left the Churches of God, General Conference in Harrisburg. He picked up the family and moved to Clarksville, Tennessee, for a position with Grace Communion International to help grow a small congregation there, Grace Fellowship.

The denomination had unusual roots. Founded in 1934, it was based on the teachings of Herbert Armstrong, a once-popular radio and TV evangelist who held a number of pseudo-historical beliefs including that the people of Britain and the United States were descendants of the 10 Lost Tribes of Israel. Over the years, the denomination became far more mainstream, casting off and evolving beyond Armstrong’s doctrines.

Mahoney was thrilled to be in the town.

“I loved Clarksville,” she said. The job came with a wonderful house and a six-figure salary. Vanderbilt University Medical Center was less than an hour away in Nashville. Great for Josiah.

“A friend of mine from high school was living there,” Mahoney said. “Eli had good friends. Lilly was at a school she was interested in. Josiah had friends. It was just amazing.”

Six months in, it was over.

“I was furious,” Mahoney said. Whether Meier quit or was fired, she never found out. “Again, these are things where I got one story and then was immediately isolated.”

A church elder, who was willing to speak freely although not for attribution, confirmed to The Star that Meier was fired, although not for anything untoward. The words he used were “rude,” “overbearing,” “not being completely honest with us,” describing Meier as having a “his-way-or-the-highway“ attitude and “manic-depressive personality.”

The news that Meier took his life did not surprise him.

“He’d be really high, really high, really high and then, boom, he would hit the bottom,” he said. Mahoney confirmed that her husband would periodically suffer dire lows in which he would speak of taking his life.

Soon after Clarksville, Meier returned to a new job with the Churches of Christ, General Conference at its Ohio headquarters. It was there, Mahoney said, that her husband was suddenly declaring himself to be a “doctor,” claiming a Ph.D. from Duke.

Meier’s defenders insist that Mahoney knew her husband was lying. But Mahoney maintains that she was utterly confused to hear her husband suddenly declare himself “Dr. Meier.”

In Tennessee, she said, he talked about taking online classes at Duke, for what she thought might be a certificate program, although she never saw him doing any work. He would later claim and convince her that he got his doctorate in cooperation with the Florida Bible Institute and Seminary. (The school, whose original address placed it on an industrial road in Bartow, Florida, was registered as a nonprofit with the Florida secretary of state in 2013 and dissolved five years later.)

Listed among the Florida school’s former officers: Meier. The school’s official business address had become a P.O. box in Clarksville, Tennessee.

Meier, Mahoney said, would leave for days to attend what he told her were classes on the Duke campus. She still has no idea where he actually went. Meier also asked her to do “research” for him on theological topics. He spoke about needing money for “graduation.”

There never was one.

“When I confronted him after he started using ‘doctor’ in Ohio, 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.’”

Sleeping with clients

A divorce was not far off.

The Meiers came to Richmond in the summer of 2015, sprucing up a tiny sanctuary they would call Grace Church and making the house next door their home.

Mahoney, to her surprise, found new confidence in town and, in 2016, a new career helping lead the Ray County Board of Services, a nonprofit that contracted with the state and county to help individuals with disabilities.

In the first year, the leadership of the Churches of God became aware that Meier was saying online that he had earned a Duke Ph.D. Leaders asked him to stop, knowing it was false.

“Justin always had a sense of trying to, you know, be more than what he was, to be more impressive than what he was,” Lance Finley, the denomination’s executive director, 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.”

Not completely. In 2016, he was being handed a plaque by Richmond’s mayor for his good deeds.

“Dr. Justin Meier Recognized for City Leadership,” a 2016 city press release declared . He won a city council seat in 2017 and, in 2018, became president of the chamber of commerce .

It also wouldn’t be long before he began misusing his power, counseling couples and, against all rules of care or ethics, sleeping with the women and breaking up their marriages. Eventually, he would move in with Pangborn, with whom he was having an affair.

“Guess what? While he’s living here,” Pangborn said she came to discover, “it’s not just me he’s sleeping with. He’s also counseling and sleeping with lots of other women.” And also destroying their marriages.

“Probably, in a year and a half, at least five,” Pangborn said. “Outside of mine, he purposefully ruined two other marriages I know about.”

Worse still, Meier — who against his wife’s wishes had also acquired a position with the Ray County Board of Services — had been conducting his counseling sessions out of the organization’s county offices. That prompted an organizational response from the nonprofit’s board.

“Certain board members were asking to see his doctorate. ‘We need to see his credentials for counseling,’” Mahoney said. “He couldn’t produce them, obviously. I mean, he tells (them) he can. That lasts for months. He starts avoiding going into the office, and avoiding anyone who might ask about it. He’s going into the office at weird times where he doesn’t have to run into people. …

“It’s all collapsing.”

But not quite yet.

Mahoney filed for divorce in April 2019. Meier stepped down from Grace Church. Mahoney took over for a short time until the congregation, having already dwindled in membership, closed. She moved to Overland Park and, in 2023, married her current husband, musician Sean Mahoney.

Meier’s deception wasn’t over.

The final fraud

Sarah Ann Miller of Odessa wasn’t looking for a new relationship in 2019. After 18 years, her marriage was ending. She had four children. Meier was soon taking part in a divorce Facebook support group for people just like her.

“So, what he was doing in there was saying, ‘Hey, if you can’t afford therapy, I’m a therapist,” Miller, now 39, said. “He would do therapy for free. … I was super vulnerable, super lonely.”

Meier, she said, messaged her privately saying that he lived nearby in Richmond and that he, too, was going through a divorce. Only later would Miller find that Meier was still involved and possibly even living with Pangborn at the time. At Meier’s suggestion, they met.

That Meier was a therapist appealed to Miller, who herself worked as a peer support specialist. Alcoholic, she had been in recovery for years and had a job helping others. “I told him I wasn’t dating,” she recalled. “I was four months into separation.”

But over time and online, he seemed charming and understanding and she grew to like him. They went on a date; she invited him to a friend’s wedding.

“Just think of the person that would fit perfectly right into your life. That’s who he became,” Miller said. “It was love bombing. It’s like, ‘You’re the most good-looking person I’ve ever seen. You’re such a good mom. I meet people all the time in therapy, and you’re doing such a good job as a single mom.’ All the things I wanted to hear.”

He went further.

“He told me he loved me on our first date,” she said. “I like froze. I was like, ‘Oh, this is bad news. I never want to see this guy again.’ I had high anxiety. And he’s very touchy. I was just very uncomfortable the whole time, but also, still, like, needed him to like me for some reason. But that’s manipulation.

“He said, ‘You don’t have to say anything back. I just know you’re going to be in my life.’”

She was. They spoke or were together every day after that. One year later, they were engaged. Six months after that, in April 2021, they married. “My kids liked him because he was exciting. He was loud. He always wanted to do water balloons and everything. He knew how to get kids to like him.”

She got to know Lilly, Eli and Josiah. All the kids got along.

“I was completely, obsessively in love with the guy.”

Then, once again, Meier decided to begin a church. He called it The Journey and, ultimately, it would be affiliated with a different denomination, The Anglican Diocese of the Emmanus Way, part of Anglican Free Communion International.

Together, Miller and Meier started the church in a park, then moved to a community building, then to an Odessa shopping center storefront.

They were doing good work: paying people’s bills, opening a food bank, moving needy people into their home. But it was massively stressful and nearly broke them financially. It drained Miller of her savings. For a while, they went on food assistance. Her parents helped her with money. She worried constantly.

“Everyone was praising him,” Miller said. “I thought, ‘How selfish am I?’ Literally every single day someone told me how great my husband was.”

Because Lilly Meier had yet to reveal her allegation of sexual abuse, she still maintained a relationship with her father. She was attending Graceland University in Lamoni, Iowa. Meier would drive up at least one day a week, sometimes several, telling his wife he was helping with campus ministry.

When Miller got angry over the separation, the dwindling money and the pressures, Meier would break down, she said, playing on her compassion.

“Whenever I would start getting mad — ‘This isn’t working for me’ talk — he would get depressed. He would say, ‘I’m just so stressed. Everyone’s pressuring me. I don’t want to live anymore.’ And it would kill me, because he was my world. So I would just back down.”

Until she later learned what was happening in Iowa.

“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. He died before Christmas.”

In a statement to The Star, Graceland University said the university had been “stunned” by the allegations against Meier, conceding that he had been a volunteer until November 2023, although not as a counselor. “(I)t is shocking to now learn we are among the victims of his alleged fraud,” spokesman Shane Adams said.

The university, which has a “zero-tolerance for sexual impropriety,” received no complaints “of any kind” about Meier as a volunteer, Adams said. Adams said the school is now reviewing its process of vetting volunteers. “We are praying for the family and those impacted by this tragedy,” he said.

Miller said the true turning point for her arrived last year after Meier slipped during a conversation, complaining about the pressures he felt because of “the investigation.”

Unbeknownst to Miller, leaders within the Diocese of the Emmanus started having doubts about her husband.

“They smelled bull***t,” she said. The church’s leadership did not return calls and emails from The Star regarding Meier. “These are educated people. They asked for his credentials. He said, ‘I’ve sent them to you. They’re on file.’”

But they weren’t.

“Things blew up,” Miller said.

In March last year, the diocese completed a report detailing Meier’s multiple lies.

“It is with an incredibly heavy heart and broken soul that I must present the following for consideration,” an investigator wrote. “Bishop Meier has falsely represented himself as a Licensed Professional Counselor to the Anglican Free Communion International.”

They contacted Meier that April.

“They sent him a formal letter and an email that said he was a fake, a fraud and a liar and he was kicked out of the diocese,” Miller said. “He was spiraling.”

Miller stood by him, until she couldn’t. The church opted to leave the diocese. Meier, who had been doing therapy out of a local pharmacy, stopped. He took low-paying jobs. He began drinking heavily. The couple were regularly fighting. Lilly and Eli, meanwhile, told Miller that they were cutting off contact with their father, although they didn’t reveal why.

“I decided, I don’t want to be in this marriage anymore,” Miller said. She filed for divorce in November. She finally read the full investigation against Meier. Lilly and others filled in what else he had done.

“Not just a maybe, I knew it was true,” Miller said.

She echoed what Mahoney had said about all the odd feelings she’d had, all the questions.

“What I really thought is that everything actually finally made sense,” she said. “I’d been confused for four years straight, sent off in circles and gaslighted. You know, just really not knowing what’s going on. It all came together.”

The finished website went public.

Confessions and condemnations

Meier’s final five-page letter is a mixture of regret and rage, confessions and qualifiers.

“To my family and others —, ” he begins, before telling what he called “the whole truth.”

“First, let’s start with the messy. I am a fraud as a secular counselor,” he concedes, admitting that he never held a state license, but arguing that “I do have certain trainings and certifications to call myself a therapist.”

He cops to going to a diploma mill to get both his bachelor’s degree and master’s degree, but then insists that he did get a master’s in divinity and Ph.D. from Florida Bible Institute and Seminary. He doesn’t mention Duke or that he helped lead the defunct Florida school.

He insists that any accusations of child sexual abuse are false. He asks that his parents forgive him, saying that it would take too much time and money to clear his name. Repeatedly, throughout the letter, he places the blame for his death on Mahoney, “LB” for Laura Beth.

“This is not your fault. I truly believe it’s LB’s,” he writes his siblings.

“To my kids, I want to apologize that I didn’t have the awareness of my own wounds. And that got in the way of me being there for you and supporting you the way you needed. I wish I could change time and make you know how loved and treasured you actually are. While you are peddling some of these lies for your mom. I don’t blame you. Just remember if any of this is true, your mother knew about it & did nothing for years. She is just as evil as I am. Be careful of her.”

To Miller, he writes that he loved her more than his own children and was faithful.

“I don’t know how LB got (her) claws in you but she did. … 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 asked to divide whatever is left of his estate into thirds: one-third to go to his father, another to his sister Kelbi Stierwalt, and the final third to Miller. “She deserves it,” he wrote, “even with what she has done.” Meier requested to be cremated, and his remains placed with a cherry blossom tree. The family eventually published an online obituary . It does not mention either Mahoney or Miller.

“In this time of sorrow, we remember Justin’s life not just for its tragic end, but for the robust, loving journey it was,” the obituary reads. “‘We loved you yesterday, love you still, always have, and forever will.’ Rest in peace, Justin. Your memory lives eternally within all those you’ve touched.”

After receiving Meier’s death certificate, Mahoney walked outside and sat in her car.

“OK, it’s real,” she said she thought. “He really is gone. We really don’t have to worry about him playing games anymore, or hurting anymore people.”

If you or someone you know is at risk of self-harm, the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline provides 24-hour support at 988.

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