New Mexico murder-for-hire case links to Monaco banker fire mystery

The same man moved through two notorious cases under two names, and the paper trail between them was only visible in fragments for years. In New Mexico, Theodore Maher, who later legally took the name Jon Green, was convicted of soliciting the murder of his estranged wife, Dr. Kim Lark, after prosecutors said he worked with his Eddy County Detention Center cellmate, Greg Markham, to stage her death as a fentanyl overdose.

A New Mexico jury found Maher guilty on March 3, 2025. He was sentenced on June 17, 2025, to nine years in prison on a single count of solicitation to commit first-degree murder. The conviction was later upheld by the New Mexico Court of Appeals, leaving in place a case that exposed how a former identity, a prison cell connection and a domestic dispute converged into a murder plot.

The New Mexico case reached back to Monaco, where Maher had become infamous decades earlier. In December 1999, billionaire banker and philanthropist Edmond Safra died at age 67 in his fortified Monaco penthouse after a fire and smoke inhalation, and his nurse, Viviane Torrente, also died. Maher had been hired only months earlier as a nurse and bodyguard. He first claimed masked intruders attacked him, then later confessed that he had started the fire in a wastebasket while trying to stage a heroic rescue and win favor with Safra.

Monaco convicted Maher in 2002 of arson causing death and sentenced him to 10 years in prison. He served about eight years before being released in 2007, then returned to the United States and legally changed his name to Jon Green. By the time he settled in New Mexico, he had built a new life in Carlsbad, where he met Lark in 2017 and married her on Valentine’s Day in 2020.

That reinvention did not hold. CBS reporting said the couple shared an $800,000 retirement account and a home on four acres outside Carlsbad before the relationship unraveled. Prosecutors said Maher then turned to Markham and tried to engineer Lark’s death as an overdose, a grim echo of the Monaco case in which he had once tried to control the story after a fatal fire. The through line in both cases was not just violence, but a system that let one man move across borders, names and institutions while the full pattern stayed scattered until the damage was already done.