John Looker does not have cancer. But everyone thinks he does. He is so committed to his lie, he takes an entire town, nearly an entire state for a ride.Big Time is an Apple Original podcast, produced by Piece of Work Entertainment and Campside Media in association with Olive Productions. Follow and listen on Apple Podcasts.apple.co/BigTimePod
Chapter 1: What childhood story sets the stage for the episode?
Remember back in elementary school and some poor kid would come in with a broken arm in a cast? And during recess, everybody took turns signing it in different colored markers? Now, the hurt kid could rely on their friends or even the teacher for help writing, eating, and buttoning their jackets. Sometimes you might have wished that you were in their shoes, right?
I mean, who wouldn't want the attention? Well, this story is about a man who couldn't let go of his aspiration to be the suffering kid. A man who was so committed to being unwell, so damn good at it, that he took an entire community, nearly an entire state, for a ride.
I'm Steve Buscemi, and this is Big Time, an Apple original podcast produced by Peace of Work Entertainment and Campside Media in association with Olive Productions. Reporter Abby Ellen is here to tell us more.
Chapter 2: Who is John Looker and what are his aspirations?
Ben Addison never expected to fall in love as quickly as he did. But when he met John Looker in the early aughts, in an AOL chat room no less, they hit it off. They lived within a three-mile radius outside Columbus, Ohio.
He loved singing. We were into similar movies. I remember it was 2001. Moulin Rouge had just come out. He had the cassette. He wanted me to cassette tune. We would sing, you know, Elephant Love Medley and all the other songs from Moulin Rouge. I think our first date was actually going to the movies to see that.
It's a love story set in Paris in 1899. But it's also a tragedy, because Satine, the main character, is very sick. What made the whole thing feel kind of poetic for Ben and John was that John also had a fatal illness. What kind of cancer was it, do you remember?
Chapter 3: How did John Looker and Ben Addison meet?
Oh gosh, what didn't he have? At some point, there was cancer everywhere. And at one point, they were going to cut his leg off because he had bone cancer in his leg and all this other stuff and ended up with stage four terminal brain cancer.
But even though John was sick, it never occurred to Ben not to continue the relationship. He liked being with John. After about a year of dating, John moves into Ben's house. John had never had a lot of money. Ben's place was a lovely, warm, suburban home. The sort of place where John could be comfortable in whatever time he had left. And John wasn't afraid to talk about death.
John said he wanted to be cremated. We talked funeral plans and filled out all these things, what he wanted to do when he died. To have someone carry his ashes with them when they were in Pelotonia.
Pelotonia. That was one of the main things keeping John alive. It's a non-profit that raises millions of dollars for cancer research, mainly through a huge annual bike race in Columbus every August. It's sort of like the Relay for Life or the AIDS ride. Thousands of people cycled hundreds of miles and even more donated money. Essentially, it was a massive citywide festival.
This is not a race. It's a tour these bicyclists will ride together. They all have one goal, to beat cancer once and for all.
John got involved with Pelotonia in 2009, and it became his entire mission in life. Pelotonia even asked him to be the face of a video in 2011. It was this motivational PSA inviting people to join the ride. John sits on a couch in a dark room. He's bald, serious, and looks straight at the camera. He has a message. If he can do the Pelotonia ride, so can you.
You can make excuses and say, I'm too tall. Too short. I'm not athletic enough. I'd really love to, but I can't. My mom said no. I don't have a bike. Work is crazy right now. I'd get last place.
He wanted everyone to join in.
Let me make this short and sweet. I have stage four terminal brain cancer. I will ride tomorrow and I won't be making any excuses.
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Chapter 4: What role did Pelotonia play in John's life?
Michelle Merlino worked with John at a furniture supply company called Continental Office Environments. John Looker was always doing something to raise money for Pelotonia. He held fundraisers in pubs, morning pancake breakfasts, and bake sales where he'd sell cookies he made himself. He called them Lookies.
100%.
He was poster boy for Pelotonia.
One year, Michelle was a bartender at one of these events. There were tons of people there. The room was packed. They all came to buy drinks from John Looker.
Beers, drinks were flowing like it was St. Patrick's Day. You have to understand that the Pelotonia craze was just, it was over the top. It was like a rock star party.
I had friends in Columbus who rode in Pelotonia and knew exactly who John Looker was. It was like everyone in Columbus knew who he was. John was a local celebrity, and thanks to him, Pelotonia was the celebrity charity cause.
It still is a very big deal in the city, and it's reaching outside of the state, too. I mean, I drive through Kentucky, and I see Pelotonia stickers on people's cars to this day.
Lance Armstrong gave a speech at the first Pelotonia ride in 2009. NFL player Chris Spielman, whose wife had died of cancer, spoke the second year. And John Looker took over in 2011.
You know, that's when he became the star. Ben says everyone wanted to be around John. I jokingly said, you know, he was the queen and I was Prince Philip. I walked five feet behind him and carried the purse or the bag when he's shaking hands and autographing.
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Chapter 5: What were the suspicions surrounding John's health?
They did not want him to take pain medication because in case he would stroke out or have something, they didn't want the pain meds to override any pain that he should have to know that he needs help. So his story was they give him the pain meds through his IVs when he was down there. But at home, even when he seemed like to be in the most excruciating pain...
What about losing weight or losing hair?
He told me that he would find lumps of hair on his pillow. At the time, a lot of this because of him having cancer, getting up and whatever, we had separate rooms just so that he would not interrupt my sleep. There were other places, you know, like eyebrows, eyelashes, pubic hair, other places that people were like, well, normally it affects hair.
every hair not just the hair in your head but you know that was getting into all these new medications and part of it was pelotonia i mean pelotonia's goal in life is to raise funds to find cures for cancer and part of what he was telling us is that they found this new drug that will not make you lose all your hair which made sense but not really ben's but not really is pretty significant
It's hard to hear all this and not think, there must have been so many things that didn't add up. But their life worked for him. Ben traveled and John took care of the home and their social life. Ben didn't want to rock the boat. So he didn't. But someone else finally did. Erica Decker was a friend of Michelle Merlino's.
Erica's daughter, Lily, had been diagnosed with brain cancer when she was four. In 2014, Lily was 10 years old and still undergoing treatment. So Erica knew cancer. Years later, her husband would get sick with multiple myeloma.
As I tell everyone, everyone in my house is actively trying to die.
Erica didn't know John Looker personally. But like everyone else in Columbus, she knew his story and saw him at a Pelotonia event one year.
There was a guy on stage and one of my friends said, oh, this guy's amazing. He's beaten cancer like three times.
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Chapter 6: How did John deceive those around him?
Not only was he beating the odds, he was thriving. To the mother of a seriously ill child, he was an inspiration.
I think when I first learned of him, I mean, that's all you listen for when you're a parent or a family member or loved one of someone with cancer. That's all you need to hear is someone made it. And if this guy could beat cancer and ride 180 miles on his bike, I thought, okay, all right.
One day, Erica was on Facebook and a message popped up. It was from John Looker. He'd read about Lily in the Columbus Dispatch and was moved to write. I never responded to that first message. A month later, Erica received a second message.
He would love to come and meet us and visit with Lily. And I thought, well, who, what?
She's thrown off. So while she's spending the night in the hospital with Lily, she stays up reading John's Facebook page.
I read all of his posts back to the very beginning, and he'd been posting for years at that point. But it moved around a lot, the cancer and his tumors and his different treatments and biopsies and all the things he was having done, and it was astonishing.
Here's a taste from a post in 2014. Although still far from the main path that will lead this arduous journey out of the denseness of this forest of night. And then there was this, addressed to his supporters. Your words, your actions and deeds serve as a bomb for wounds so deep they never see the light of day. What really threw Erica off was the complete lack of medical knowledge in these posts.
After you're in the world of cancer for five years, you understand the mechanics of diagnoses and biopsies and lab work and treatment and how the appointments go and the different specialists that are involved and the terminology and everything. You could teach a course on it after five years. They made absolutely no sense.
She noticed something else about his Facebook behavior. He would change his profile picture to photos of sick patients he knew. Erica feared he wanted to use Lily for a photo op.
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Chapter 7: What impact did John's story have on others?
And these posts that you're putting on social media that read like a bad harlequin romance novel were every night, but yet you were deathly ill sleeping in your bathtub because you were vomiting all night. But something is wrong here. And I kept thinking to myself, am I a bad person for thinking this way?
Oh my gosh, Michelle, I cannot believe that you are thinking that this guy who is all over the city and people basically fall to his feet when they see him and he has thousands of followers. It was almost like he was Jesus.
But then Michelle runs into Erica Decker at a dinner party.
Something was said about John Looker and I think she and I just looked at each other and I thought, she knows. She knows what I know.
Afterwards, Michelle sends Erica an email.
I said, Erica, I've got to bring this up to Pelotonia and tell them, you know, their poster child and their voice to the city, I think, is lying. What are we going to do? How do we do this? So.
There was a lot of F-bombs, a lot of cussing. Then we just devised a plan, and we were not going to let Pelotonia dismiss us.
John was Pelotonia's golden goose. If he was exposed as a fraud, that could seriously hurt the organization's reputation and its fundraising. Michelle consulted with her then-wife about her plan to expose John.
She was not on board with it at first. I think it scared her for a minute, but I was able to talk to her about it and say, you know, something's wrong here, and people's lives are being manipulated by this guy emotionally and financially. And I know it, and I cannot sit back and watch this happen. I just can't let this happen. I have to tell these people something is not adding up here.
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Chapter 8: What revelations were made about John's cancer story?
So I'm thinking, okay, we're going to do a surprise birthday party for John for his 50th and all these other things. Well, I go in, I'm like, hey guys, I said, yeah, I'm excited. We're going to, you know, let's plan John's 50th birthday party. They're like, what are you talking about? They told Ben straight out. We believe John does not have cancer.
I'm like, oh, I've been kind of waiting for five years for someone to come and tell me this, or at least to confirm my suspicions.
So they decided to confront John directly. These friends declined to talk to us, but one of them corroborated this next part of the story.
They picked this one Saturday. It was like at 4 o'clock, and they're like, we're coming over, you know, it was like a full intervention type of thing.
The inner circle arrived at Ben and John's house around 6. Ben tells John... Look who's here, our friends.
We're all sitting in the living room and I'm actually sitting in the dining room in a chair kind of looking in. I'm like, I don't know if I really want to be full part of this. And they just started asking questions and literally, you know, what's the name of your doctors? He would never even tell me the name of his doctors or anything.
He gave them a name and they Googled it and there was no such person. The person just did not exist. They ask, can we see medical bottles, pill bottles, receipts? You know, you go to the doctors just for a checkup and they give you a 10 page printed copy of all your vitals and your history and everything. And then they're like, OK, well, then go down to the hospital and get it.
Well, I can't get it without my doctor. I was like, what are you talking about? Well, you said you just had chemo. Show me the scar. Show me the hole. Show me the whatever. And there was nothing. And we're on for, like I said, about an hour. He kept denying it. No, no, no, I have it. And then at one point he just said, I can't do this anymore.
That's when Ben knew for real. For real, for real. It was true. He'd been duped all these years. John went outside on the back patio. Ben could see him through the window.
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