Ray William Johnson: True Story Podcast - He's Not Really Dead - The Ari Squire Story

Episode Date: March 2, 2026

In February 2008, facing massive debt and a Medicare fraud conviction, 40-year-old Lake Barrington contractor Ari Squire hatched a plan to fake his own death to collect on a $5 million life insurance policy. He lured 20-year-old Justin Newman to his home with the promise of a high-paying construction job, then murdered him and staged a horrific scene in his garage.

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Now the guy's name is Ari, and Ari's about 39 years old, and he's living in Illinois. And Ari has a problem. He's broke. I mean, he's in a lot of debt. But instead of doing anything about it, he keeps spending all his money on his hobby, which is working on these diesel pulling trucks. But then one day, in 2008, things get really bad for him. because the housing market crashes.

So his construction business goes under, and now he's almost $400,000 in debt. So of course, Ari is now freaking out. I mean, he doesn't know what he's going to do. And that is when he comes up with an insane plan to get a bunch of money and start a brand new life. He's going to just fake his own death. What could possibly go wrong?

So he goes to his wife, this woman, Denise. So he goes to Denise and he's like, Honey, I'm gonna fake my own death and collect the insurance money. And I guess Denise is like, Cool. Then Ari goes out and he buys a $6 million life insurance policy on himself. Now, in order to fake his own death, Ari needs to first find a body that's about his size and weight to replace him.

Which means he's gonna need to kill someone. And so he goes out and he's, starts scouting around looking for guys that kind of look like him. And he ends up at Home Depot. And there he meets an employee that kind of sort of looks like him, you know, same height and build. So Ari approaches the guy and he offers him a gig working construction on one of his jobs for $60,000. He even gives the guy a job application. So the guy fills out the job application and he agrees to do the gig and he agrees to meet Ari at Ari's house. And then, some time passes and the day of the meeting comes and Ari he's waiting at his house for this guy to show up

and he waits and he waits and he waits and the guy just never shows up he just flaked out apparently his kid got sick and he just couldn't make it so now Ari is all pissed off I mean how's he gonna fake his own death if people are just flaking out on him so he goes back to Home Depot and he looks for yet another victim. And that is when he meets this guy, Justin. And Justin is 20 years old and like the last guy, he also works at Home Depot. So Ari approaches Justin and he offers him double his income to quit the job and come work for him. So Justin's like, all right. And he agrees to meet Ari at his house. Days later, Justin shows up. And the two of them, they get to chatting and Ari tells Justin that he wants to show him something in the shop. And so they go out to the shop and once they're in there,

suddenly, boom, Ari attacks Justin with chloroform. And once Justin is all knocked out, Ari swaps clothes with him and wallets. So now Ari's wearing Justin's clothes and Justin is wearing Ari's clothes. Then he takes Justin's body and he places him underneath a truck in the shop that's propped up on a jack. He then somehow moves the jack and he lets the truck fall on Justin which unfortunately crushes him. After that, he gets a can of gasoline and he pours it all around and he sets the shop on fire. And then he leaves. Once Ari is gone, his wife Denise calls the fire department and she says,

There's a fire in the garage. And the fire department comes and they find Justin's body. But it's super burned up and crushed underneath a truck. Although the body is wearing Ari's clothes and has his wallet, it, so they think it was Ari who died in this fire. And thus, Ari has successfully faked his own death. Meanwhile, Ari goes out and he buys hair dye and color contacts so that he can start looking more like Justin, because he's going to assume his identity now. Then, Ari steals Justin's car and he drives from Illinois all the way over to Missouri, to lay low for a while. And he starts

preparing for his new life as Justin. However, immediately, things start to go wrong. So pretty quickly, police are all over this case and they start investigating. And they notice some things that don't really make sense. Like the shop, like it smells like someone dumped gasoline everywhere. But it shouldn't smell like gasoline because the trucks Ari normally works on are all diesel. Police also find other things wrong, like they find a propane torch in the shop that had been left on, making it seem like the place was lit on fire on purpose. So now the police start to suspect someone may have intentionally set this place on fire. Now, as you probably know from watching like a million of my videos,

a common motive for burning a place down on purpose is insurance money. So police, they go to Ari's wife Denise, and they ask her if Ari had an insurance. policy set up. And Denise just straight up lies to them. She's like, nah. But like that's kind of stupid because police have the ability to just go and check. And that's what the officers do. They go and check. And they discover that Ari did in fact have a life insurance policy set up for him for $6 million. So police now know that something weird is going on. Like none of this is adding up. But as of right now, they don't have any hard evidence that anyone did anything wrong, so there's not much they can really do. But then, something unexpected happens.

The medical examiner, who's in charge of examining the burned body, he starts having trouble identifying this body. I mean, he had been led to believe that this body belongs to ARI, but the tattoos he's supposed to have aren't in the right place. Plus, this body looks more like it's that of a 20-year-old than a 40-year-old. Meanwhile, ARI, the real ARI, he's still hiding out in that hotel room in Missouri. And he's like communicating with his wife, Denise. They're all sending emails back and forth, checking on things. He's like helping her plan his own funeral.

And she's letting him know how many people attended his memorial service. There's something wrong with these people. But while he's hiding out in that hotel room, he's also got Justin's phone that he stole off him. And he's using it to text Justin's mom while pretending to be Justin. And he's saying like, I'm fine, mom. I'm just taking a new job over in Missouri.

Because I guess Ari wants Justin's mom to think he's still alive so that she won't report him missing to the police and police won't come looking for him, which is all kinds of fucked up. Regardless, at this point, no one suspects Ari murdered someone in order to fake his own death, so he might just end up getting away with all this. This episode is brought to by Colagard.

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And a forensic dentist confirms That the burned up body they found Does not in fact belong to Ari So now they got to go find Who this body belongs to Well as it turns out A young man named Justin Who has a similar heightened build

As the burned body Was recently reported missing by his mother And so police run a DNA test. And there's a match. The body does in fact belong to Justin. So now police put the information out to law enforcement around the greater area. And pretty quickly, boom, police find Justin's car parked at a random hotel in Missouri. And so some officers go there and they ask the front desk clerk at the hotel which room the person who owns the car is staying in.

And the clerk tells them. So they go and knock on the door to that room. and Ari is inside. But he's not answering. In fact, he's in there freaking out because he knows he's about to get busted. And once he feels like there's nothing left for him to do, he takes a gun that he brought with him

and he unalives himself. And unfortunately, police never really find enough evidence to show that Ari's wife Denise was involved with the actual murder, so she's never charged with anything.