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Mary Carole McDonnell was added to the FBI's Most Wanted list in December 2025.

Mark Harris for BI

Mary Carole McDonnell needed cash.

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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.

The McDonnell Douglas Corporation merged with Boeing in 1997.

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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. A 1966 St. 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."

A still from "I Married a Murderer," one of Bellum's many true-crime shows.

Bellum Entertainment

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.

James R. 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.

Retired criminal profiler James R. Fitzgerald described being a commentator for Bellum as "a cookie-cutter enterprise."

Donna Ward/Getty Images

"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 drove a Porsche. 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!'"

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