Julian Dorey Podcast - 😱 [VIDEO] - Serial Killers are Disguising themselves as DOCTORS | Bruce Sackman • 172

Episode Date: December 2, 2023

(***TIMESTAMPS in Description Below) ~ Bruce Sackman is an investigator, former federal agent, and author. For 25 years, Bruce was the Special Agent in Charge of the VA Inspector General Office. He specialized in hunting medical serial killers. EPISODE LINKS: - Get 15% OFF MudWTR (PROMO CODE: “JULIAN”): https://mudwtr.com/julian  - Julian Dorey PODCAST MERCH: https://legacy.23point5.com/creator/Julian-Dorey-9826?tab=Featured  - Support our Show on PATREON: https://www.patreon.com/JulianDorey  - Join our DISCORD: https://discord.gg/95eM7asP  - SUBSCRIBE to Clips Channel: https://www.youtube.com/@UChs-BsSX71a_leuqUk7vtDg  BRUCE LINKS: - BUY Bruce’s Book: https://www.amazon.com/Behind-Murder-Curtain-Special-Veterans/dp/1682617149  ***TIMESTAMPS*** 0:00 - Whistleblower Protection; VA Story of Pharma Company Fine 13:04 - Bruce’s 1st Investigation 15:02 - How Bruce became a medical murder investigator 22:10 - Notorious Medical Serial Killer: Dr. Michael Swango 35:14 - Bruce investigates Dr. Michael Swango 43:13 - How Bruce took down Swango 57:47 - Medical Serial Killer: Kristen Gilbert 1:08:31 - Hospitals moving around killers; Sacklers 1:19:56 - Medical Serial Killer: Nancy Cutting Trial of Kristen Gilbert 1:23:19 - Munchausen Syndrome; Why finding Medical Serial Killers is so hard 1:36:56 - How to prevent medical serial killers 1:42:58 - Medical Serial Killers: Lucy Letby & Richard Williams 1:58:31 - Medical Serial Killer: Niels Hogel of Germany; The Anthony D’Alessandro Narcotics Case 2:16:47 - Bruce’s opinion on the Sackler Case 2:21:21 - Doctor Predator: Dr. Robert Hadden 2:27:25 - Interrogation Tactics; Why Medical Serial Killers Victim List never truly known 2:35:23 - Did Bruce feel empathy for any criminals? 2:39:55 - Bruce’s Books CREDITS: - Hosted & Produced by Julian D. Dorey - Intro & Episode Edit by Alessi Allaman ~ Get $150 Off The Eight Sleep Pod Pro Mattress / Mattress Cover (USING CODE: “JULIANDOREY”): https://eight-sleep.ioym.net/trendifier Julian's Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/julianddorey ~ Music via Artlist.io ~ Julian Dorey Podcast Episode 172 - Bruce Sackman Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Lucy Lettby, she is one to start experimenting with killing these children. Little newborns, right? Yes, newborns. Killing by putting air, by using drugs. She would experiment to see what works best. And when they would pass, remember, they would go into a code. And you know who would respond to the code? See if this sounds familiar to you.

Her boyfriend. You see, her boyfriend would respond. Well, she was having an affair with a doctor, a married doctor. This married doctor would respond to the code as well. Your dad a mom? That's a whole different world we're talking about now. Court is a heavy, heavy thing. It is.

It is. It is a very heavy thing. And in England, well, we could talk about this. In England, they just changed the law that will now require defendants to be there at their sentencings and listen to the family. Even if they get tied and gagged, bound and gagged in court, They're going to have to stay there and listen to the families. There's people who didn't have to be there for it? Yeah, they could not. They don't have to be there. They could have been represented by their attorneys. They were already found guilty. Sometimes, you know, they could be in another room.

But the law in England at that time was that they didn't have to be there. They absolutely should be there. Now, I could tell you there are actually some killers who want to be there because this is more enjoyment for them. It's more enjoyment. And I'll talk about how some of them actually enjoyed torturing the families after they murdered the patient. Because that's their second bite of the apple. The first bite is actually torturing and killing the patient. The second bite is torturing the family.

So they get two bites of excitement out of what they did. And we're on air now, by the way. That was just very fascinating what you were talking about before we were hopping on but it is so what i mean you had a fascinating job let's start with that but it's also it's a dark job i mean you are seeing some of the one of the greatest breaches of trust that humanity could ever have. Oh, that's absolutely right. But along with that, you have to remember that I actually had an opportunity to meet some of the most wonderful, courageous professionals who had dedicated their lives to saving people. So I met that group of people along the way. And that group of wonderful people actually helped me solve those cases, even brought those cases to my attention. Because without these brave people coming forth and telling me what they suspected, I would have never known what was going on in the hospital. My office was outside of the hospital. So I had to rely on really brave and honest whistleblowers to come forth, and it took a lot of courage.

And we could talk about how much courage that actually took. We'll definitely talk about that today, but we're going to get to your background soon here, but just kind of on that same note, one of the things about whistleblowing in anything is that sometimes it can be viewed as cutting both ways. So a whistleblower, as we think of it, is someone who's doing the right thing. They see something wrong. They see no one's doing anything about it, and they go to people who they think can. And then there's also people who sometimes maybe are like vindictive. They don't, you know, they have a personal problem with someone else. And even if they actually believe something's wrong, it's because they want to believe something's wrong.

And I think that sometimes when that happens, people, you know, can also be discouraged in the future from whistleblowing. Because then they, you know, we hear about the blowback that happens to people so it's kind of like this seems like a closed cycle that makes it even more difficult over time for people from the inside to come forth the guys like you and and and report what's going on well that's the job of a really good investigator that's the job to separate fact from fiction I mean we had a saying on the job, it doesn't make a difference who's making the allegations if they're true, okay, or really what their motivation is if it's true. But as you said, there are some people who might exaggerate or even fabricate because

they want to cloak themselves in whistleblower protection. Because once you're cloaked in that protection, they feel there's nothing that management can do to them. Now, on my last job, and particularly, we used to treat whistleblowers like Fort Knox gold. And I'll tell you why. Because we wanted them to come to us, meaning the internal operations of the medical center,

rather than go out to some external source and have Health and Human Services, New York State Medicaid, God knows who, come in and do an investigation. So we wanted to encourage our employees to come forth to us and disclose their allegations to us, and we would protect them at least until we made a determination whether they were truthful or not. And I'll tell you this. In my experience, more often than not, they were right. More often than not. That's good to know. You know, I mean, they would say, you know, Bruce, something's going on.

I don't know exactly what it is, but I've been working in this job for the last 20 years or so. And I know my job and something's going on here that's not right. Could you take a look at it? And that's the way it often starts. And we were so happy to have them. Because what is the alternative? Well, the alternative is something called a key tam suit. Are you familiar with that? No. Okay. Well, this is very, very interesting. Key tam is a Latin term, and it actually means he who sues on behalf of the king and himself.

And this is the way it works. Let's say, Julian, you're working for a hospital or a contractor or anyone that deals with the government that has government money, all right? And let's say you know that your hospital is ripping off Medicare, all right? They're filing false claims. They're doing all kinds of things to get more money from the government. And you know that. Well, there's a couple of directions you could take. You could go to your supervisor who might just poo-poo the whole thing. You might go to the compliance department, which will hopefully investigate and correct the situation. Or you could do a third option. And this third option is called the key tamp suit. This is the way it works. You go to an attorney and you tell the attorney, look,

I work for the XYZ hospital. I know that the XYZ hospital is defrauding the government. You know how I know that? Because I'm actually involved in the process. I've seen them file these false papers. I've seen them file these false papers. I've seen them claim things that they shouldn't claim. So what does the attorney do? He goes to court, federal court, and he files this key TAM lawsuit known as a whistleblower lawsuit. And this lawsuit lays out for the government all your allegations, then the government has a limited amount of time to decide whether they want to conduct a criminal investigation, a civil investigation, or no investigation at all.

Now if the government collects fines, which they almost always will, whether there's a criminal prosecution or a civil prosecution, the person who filed that lawsuit, they're known as the relator. The relator could get up to 25% of all the money that the government collects in fines and penalties. And just to show you how much money that could be. When I was at the VA, we had a relator who worked for a pharmaceutical company who told us how the pharmaceutical company was ripping off the government and the VA. That pharmaceutical company got fined close to a billion dollars. The relator walked away with $25 million. He spent the year in my office working with my agents,

and he got $25 million. He couldn't throw you a mill? So you know what? The employees say, well, gee, you know what? I could go to the compliance department, and maybe I'll get a certificate suitable for framing, or I could go to an attorney, file a key TAM lawsuit, and if we win, I'll get this money. And there's another part to this. Let's say the government decides,

we're not interested in this. The relator could actually pursue the fraud case him or herself, and if they prevail, they could get up to 35% of the money collected. So they could actually go into court and claim that the XYZ Hospital is defrauding the government, lay out their case, and if they win, yeah, there'll be all kinds of fines to the government, but they will receive 35% plus attorney fees. That's 35% plus attorney fees. Plus attorney fees. That's 35% plus attorney fees. Wow. So what a tremendous incentive that is for reporting fraud.

Now, we're only talking about fraud here. We're not talking about suspicious deaths. Which is what you did. Correct. Now, you didn't really do – well, we're going to get to the full background as i said but you did all suspicious deaths even in your career post-government right yes did you also do fraud oh no fraud as uh i would say fraud many more fraud cases than actually suspicious death okay so you were directly heading that though yeah you see i covered the entire gamut

of crimes that can happen in a medical center and there are a lot because if you think about it medical centers well they're like small cities yes all right just look at the procurement that they do they procure everything from the most complex scientific equipment to diapers all right look? Look at all the construction. When you ride around, don't you always see hospitals building? There's always construction going on. So if you think about all the procurement, all the services that go on in a hospital, all right? All the narcotics that are in the hospital, the radiation, the research that goes on in the hospitals. Hospitals are an incredible place where crimes can occur. So security and internal investigations are extremely important. that cover uncover that entire smorgasbord of cases that I just laid out to you everything from drug diversion to theft to bribery hey look

let's say you have a construction company and you want to get into a hospital system they don't have just one hospital they have eight hospitals or North Shore LIJ they have like 20 hospitals. All right? So getting into a system like that could change your life. Absolutely. So maybe you would be inclined to do a little money under the table to the contracting office. In New York, they'd never do that.

Come on. I've heard it happens. Hey, guys, I need your help with three quick things. And if you're watching me on Spotify video right now, you can see this timer to my right. It is going to be fast. Number one, if you are not already following the show, please hit that follow button on Spotify or whatever audio platform you're on. Number two, if you're on Spotify right now on our show's homepage in the description, you will see a link to our Spotify podcast clips channel. That's right.

We are posting clips from this podcast every single day on there. There is a whole library. So go over there and follow. And finally, number three, if you are on Spotify or Apple, please leave a five-star review. It is a huge, huge help to the show. Now let's get to the episode. As a matter of fact, my very first case, my very first case when I left the government and went to the private sector. Which was 2005, 2006? Yes, 2005. First day, first case. This contractor says to the guy who's heading up the boiler room, he says, look, I want to do all kinds of work here.

And what does it take for me? And the guy says, well, you know, the hospital employee says, you know what? I really need like $25,000. I says, no problem. But he says, you know what? We're required to have three bids. So how do we get around that? Contractor said, no problem.

Oh, he's got that too. I'll submit one real bid and I'll make up two other phony bids, and I'll submit them along. And then when those dumb auditors, like me, come along and take a look, all we do is see, well, there are three bids. Oh, yeah, there were three bids. Okay, let's go on to the next contract. They'll never get the fact that I paid you $25,000, okay? Did he make up places as the other two bids? He made up places. He made up businesses. He made up letterhead because he thought,

hey, look, when the auditors come around, they're paper pushers. Yeah, they don't care. They're going to look at the paper. They have a checklist. Are there three bids? Check, check, check. Okay? Well, we fooled them because one of the first things I did when I won the private sector, I said, you know what we're going to do? We're going to start interviewing the losing bidders because when you interview the winning bidders, they're going to tell you everything is wonderful, everything is beautiful. Let's interview the losing bidders. So we got a hold of this contract. We couldn't find the losing bidders. All right. In fact, we found that all

the bids, including the losing bids, were faxed from the same number and the same machine. Lazy criminal work right there. My friend, Matt Cox, I call him the greatest fraud of all time. He was probably the most prolific mortgage fraudster in american history in modern american history but he's reformed now anyway he always talks about that's lazy fraud it's bad work i don't like that you know he likes he likes his details covered and every t crossed and i dotted he would not approve of that one so i had to throw that in there but But wow, man, what an opener. This happens a lot, like when someone's here before the podcast for a little while and we're having a long conversation, we kind of do like a podcast before the podcast.

So it's always good to warm up, but then I'm like, well that first part and throw it on Patreon, might have done that. But if I didn't do that and they heard the first 10, 15 minutes there, how did you get into this? Like what as a 22-year-old coming out into the world makes you say, I would like to be a medical murder-death investigator? Well, that's not actually what I had said okay because I always wanted to to be an investigator I always wanted to do this type of work probably just watching too many Columbo TV shows you know I said I'm not a big tough dirty Harry kind of guy but when I see a guy like Columbo I I said, you know, I think I could do this. I could do this. So it wasn't easy getting into the federal government.

You know, it was pretty hard at that time. But I started out working for an Army Reserve Unit as a civilian technician for an Army Reserve Unit. And then an opening came up in the Department of Defense as an investigator, and I started out doing background investigations, which is really a great way to start because you learn to talk to people, you learn to gather records, you learn how to put a case together. You could do that for a while, but not too long because you want something more challenging. And then I got involved in contract fraud. And the first contract fraud case I had was actually a firm in New Jersey called the Bradford National Company.

The Bradford National Company had a series of contracts. They had a contract with the Trident Submarine Program, and they had a number of commercial contracts. And these are what they call cost plus fixed fee contracts. In other words, there's a fixed fee, but also your labor and other costs you're able to add on. So the number of hours that you spend on a particular contract, you're able to bill in addition to the basic cost. So what they would say is, you know, commercial contracts are running out of money, but we've got plenty of money here in the Trident Submarine Program. So this is what we're going to do. Even though our employees may be working on commercial jobs, we'll charge their time to the Trident Submarine Program.

So what happened is that the Trident Submarine program actually wound up paying for things like writing the New Jersey driver's manual. They actually paid for computerizing a chain of pharmacy store records. They had no idea, but we knew about it, and that was the very first case, fraud case that I had, which was an introduction into the world of fraud and crime. What office did you say that was for officially again? That was for the Department of Defense. Okay. That was for the Department of Defense. Well, all of a sudden, Jimmy Carter – you remember Jimmy Carter.

I don't remember him, but I've heard about him. He did one good, really good thing, is that he created this Office of Inspector Generals in every major federal agency, and eventually even some of the lesser agencies. And the purpose of the Inspector General is to ferret out fraud, waste, and abuse in a particular agency. Now, this is done a couple of ways. There's an office of audit, which has CPAs and auditors, and they do what auditors do, and they're wonderful. And then there's an office of investigation, and that consists of criminal investigations, which I was one of them,

and we would do the criminal investigations, and we were full federal law enforcement, carried guns, makes arrests, the whole nine yards, all right? But the VA had a third component, which the other IGs don't have, and that's an office of healthcare inspection. This office of healthcare inspection, their mission was to go to the VA hospitals and nursing homes and make sure that they were doing what they were supposed to be doing and helping our veterans. So for me, it was a great honor not only to be in law enforcement, but to be in a law enforcement position that was dedicated to helping our nation's heroes. That was a pretty good position to be in. Yeah. And it is something, on a little side note here, you do hear a lot today, especially about

complaints about the VA and complaints about the way we take care of our heroes when they come home and they're retired from the military. Did you see a lot of positives up close, though, as well? Many, many positives. I could tell you that the VA improved dramatically from the time that I first came on board to the time that I left. And the overwhelming majority of veterans are happy with the care that they receive. But there are horror stories.

There are horror stories, but that's almost true in any hospital system. Look, there are over 100 VA hospitals. Not every VA hospital will be created equal. Not every department on every floor of the hospital is going to be created equal. Okay? So yeah, you're going to have some terrible things. But you have to remember a good number of VA employees are actually veterans themselves. And the overwhelming majority of them are really dedicated to helping veterans. And it's very sad when you hear some of these stories. And I get calls all the time. All the time I get calls from veterans about the problems they had at the VA hospital. But I know that the overwhelming majority of them get really, really good care, in my opinion.

Real quick, to all my Discord people out there, the Julian Dory Discord is officially live. I put the link down in the description below. So go hit that, join the community, and say what's up. There's all kinds of features in there, and I look forward to hearing from you guys. Let's get it popping. Well, that's good to hear. Cause like I said, you usually hear the negative with that stuff. And I do try to check that because you know, it's like, it's like they say about some law enforcement and stuff. You only ever hear when something goes bad, you don't hear about all the things they thwart. And I guess that's just part of human nature but at what point did you start to focus

totally on actually investigating doctors nurses or people within the hospital systems who could be to be clear for our audience out there purposely killing people, let's call it what it is, serial killers in this case. Absolutely. So I'm sitting at my desk one day, and all of a sudden, I get a call from the chief of psychiatry at the Northport Long Island VA Medical Center. And she says, hey, Bruce, you're not going to believe this. But there's a doctor working here treating our veterans and there's a story that he spent time in prison for poisoning his co-workers so i look at the phone it's like and i look at the calendar i say is this april 1st like is this an april fool's day joke or something i said you mean to tell me that there's somebody that passed the government background investigation that's working at the Northport VA who spent time for poisoning their coworkers?

And she said, yes, Bruce. That's what I'm telling you. This is Dr. Swango? Yes, that's Dr. Michael Swango. And that's what started it all. Wow. You know, before that, I had done every other case but a medical serial killer case. And that was the first one.

So this is like the early 90s? Yes. And then I started to look in the background of Michael Swango, and it was amazing. What was his story? Well, when Michael Swango was in medical school, he was known as 00 Swango License to Kill. Come on. This is by his fellow students. Come on.

Oh, yeah. So the fellow students went to the dean and they said, hey, dean, you know, we don't think this guy, Michael Swango, should be a doctor. You know, we're very suspicious of him. It seems that some patients may have expired unexpectedly. And when we look at the notes and things he writes, we just don't feel good about it. Whoa. His classmates did this. Yes.

And the dean said, what the hell do you know? You guys are only students. I'm the dean. I think he just needs some more training. There's a freezing cold take. So you know what? We'll keep him on the job. We'll keep him here in school for another six months. We'll straighten him out. And then he'll graduate and he'll be a great doctor. He'll be a great doctor. So he winds up going to Ohio State University Medical Center for an internship, which is a wonderful hospital. It's an excellent hospital.

And all of a sudden, patients start expiring unexpectedly. Okay. I wonder why. Now, this one patient, her name was Cynthia McGee. Cynthia McGee was a student at the university, and she got in a car crash with another student. She's actually improving until she gets a visit from Dr. Swango. Then she expires unexpectedly. Now, was she like in the critical, the ICU at that point?

She was actually improving. She was actually. But she was still, like she was at least banged up. No, they expected her to improve and to be discharged so but swango doesn't get charged with that murder you see the student who hit her with his car he got charged with vehicular homicide oh no but he didn't kill cynthia mcgee cynthia m McGee was actually killed by Michael Swango. Did that guy end up going to prison? No, and I'll tell you exactly what happened to him.

So what happens is that Ohio State starts an internal investigation, but they can't prove that Swango had committed any crimes. They just couldn't prove it. That was an internal investigation. Did they call the police? No, you know, we don't really like to call the police. We don't want to do anything that might get in the newspapers or to harm the reputation of our hospital.

So you know what? We're just not going to renew him, and he'll leave and go somewhere else. And be their problem. And he won't be our problem anymore. Oh my God. So he says, you know what? He says, you know, one of the jobs I really loved was being an EMT, an emergency medical technician, because I love the excitement of pulling up to an accident and

actually seeing bodies all around and working on people. So I'm going to become an EMT for a while. Wait, and he's a doctor? Yes. And he asked to be an EMT? Yes, and they were happy to have him. Does that happen? On very rare occasions.

So they were happy to have him, and he's doing a pretty good job. And he gets along with his coworkers, and in fact, one day he invites his co-workers in and he says, you know, guys, you're such a hardworking group of people. I brought you some donuts. Here's some donuts on me. Enjoy them. And they eat the donuts. And that night they all get very, very sick. Oh, my God. And Swango's calling them up. Tell me your symptoms. Tell me everything exactly that happened to you. Were you throwing up?

Did you have diarrhea? Were you sweating? Tell me everything. He calls each one of them up. All right. Well, these EMTs were not stupid. They're not stupid at all, okay? About two weeks later, Swango comes in with some iced tea and he

says hey guys you know you work so hard and i really love you guys so i made some iced tea for you here take some iced tea and the emt say oh thanks doc i'll just leave it over there we'll take some later and they have the iced tea tested and it's loaded with arsenic and the donuts actually had arsenic on them. And they call the police and Swango is arrested and prosecuted and goes to jail for three years for poisoning his co-workers. Now, I didn't think that in the United States of America, you could spend three years in jail for poisoning your co-workers and come out and be a doctor, but I was wrong. Wait, he didn't get his medical license revoked for that? Oh, no. Oh, no, no, no, no. Did they even review it? No. Nothing happened. He, you know, they looked at

him as an EMT, I guess. Nothing happened. So he comes out. He comes out, and being a sociopath, such an incredible charm he could put on, such an incredible rap, that he convinced people the following. He says, you know what, guys? I'm an ex-Marine, which he was, and I'm a tough guy. I got in a ballroom brawl, and I really hurt somebody. So I got sentenced to jail, but the governor of the state restored my civil rights. Here's a piece of paper from the governor saying my civil rights are restored. Oh, he forged it. Yes.

Yes. And he had such a good line that he eventually was able to work his way back into a hospital on the West Coast. Now, this is – I'm just doing math in my head. This has got to be near the early 90s when he came on your radar, right, at this time. So there weren't some kind of like – I mean maybe I'm thinking wrong. This is pre-internet. Yeah, I know it's pre-internet, but there's not some kind of computer system. There was no Google.

There was no Google back then. Well, here's the thing. In many locations, there's a real shortage of doctors and nurses. You know, even today, there's a real shortage of doctors and nurses, especially some blonde-haired, blue-eyed ex-Marine doctors and nurses. Well, there's a real, real shortage of them, all right? So he gets a job on the West Coast, and everything's going well. He's actually doing a good job.

He's working in the emergency room. He's doing a good job. And he meets a nurse, and they get engaged, and everything's beautiful. Then all of a sudden, the story comes out that he spent time in prison for poisoning his co-workers now how did that come out some um oh i know how it came out he actually applied for admission into the ama and the ama checked him out come and that's how it came out and it got into the newspapers so all of a sudden his his fiancée and him, they break up. I mean, things are going terrible for him. He loses his job there. The fiancée flies home to Virginia, all right? Her

name was Kristen Kinney, just a beautiful, really wonderful, wonderful girl. And she goes back home to mom and dad, and she says, you know, I really love this guy, Michael Swango. I thought he was wonderful. And then I read what happened. And, but you know, when I was living with him, mom, I was getting these headaches. I was getting these headaches, but now that I'm home, I feel better. Then all of a sudden the doorbell rings, and it's Mr. Charming, Michael Swango, and he charms his way back into her life. All right? Well, go forward a couple of months,

and the next thing you know, of course, the headaches are returning, and she just can't take it anymore, so she takes a gun, she walks to the park, and she blows her brains out. Oh, my God. Well, you can't blame Swango for that murder, can you? Well, actually, you can.

Because even though the body was cremated, the family saved the lock of her hair, and we had it tested. It was loaded with arsenic. Yes, Swango was even poisoning his own fiancée because everybody was a target of opportunity. Question on that with arsenic because i'm not very familiar with dosages or how this stuff works but you know we hear poison we think

it's the layman we think like okay that's something that can kill you right away if it's not treated but as i understand it he could give it in small doses so people were just slowly sick would it eventually kill them though it? It would eventually. You know, arsenic used to be known as widow's powder because, you know, at the turn of the century, if you wanted to get rid of your husband, that was the way to do it. You know what? That was in – there was a little subplot of that in Boardwalk Empire. I remember that. The one – maybe it was the nurse for the guy was slowly poisoning the old

man. I thought it was like rat poison or something. Well, look, there's arsenic in medicine. There was arsenic in wallpaper. There's arsenic all over the place. It's all a matter of dosage, you know, and how much you take. Look, the definition of poisoning is too much of anything. You know, you

can have too much water and be hydro poisoning. So it's really too much of anything. You know, you can have too much water and be poisoned, hydro poisoning. All right. So it's really too much of anything. So he had actually poisoned her. All right. Make a long story short, he eventually winds up in my neighborhood at the Northport VA Medical Center. Now, how the hell did he get there?

A little divine intervention. This is what happens. He ran into the sacrament. Stony Brook University out on Long Island has a teaching arrangement with the VA where they send their doctors to the VA for training and learning, and it's great. It's a great arrangement. VA hospitals have that. In Manhattan, they have it with NYU. It's wonderful. So he goes to Northport, and he's looking for a residency.

And guess what subject that residency is going to be? What specialty? It was actually in psychiatry. So that meant he had to go in front of a board of trained psychiatrists and convince each and every one of them that he should be in the program. You know, with that cock and bull story about, you know, being in a barroom brawl and getting his civil rights restored, and they bought it. And this is after all the newspaper story and everything? Well, they didn't know about that. They didn't know about it. This is pre-internet. they didn't know about that oh they didn't know about

this is pre-internet they didn't know about it they had no idea about it was he so you keep describing him as as a charmer someone who could really talk his way into any situation i would think though that like a the board of it's called the board of psychiatry i would think obviously since they're like psychiatrists, they'd be able to spot that, no? You would think so. But look, they're not perfect people either. I guess, yeah. You know, you have to remember this.

Most of the residents at that time were foreign residents, a lot of Indians, Asians. So here comes this blonde-haired, blue-eyed resident. Boy, they haven't seen one of them in a long time. So I don't know if it was reverse racism or not. I really have no idea. But I think they were happy just to have a blonde-haired, blue-eyed ex-Marine in their program. After all, he's going to treat veterans, and he's an ex-marine, and he was an ex-marine.

So he goes to Northport, and that's when I get the call that I tell you because the story eventually came out. So I said, I have to go meet this guy. Oh, the doc. Yeah. So I hop in the car with one of my agents. I was in Manhattan, my office in Manhattan. We drive out there.

And I meet this guy and he looks like a movie star. He looks like he just came off the golf course with sunglasses and well tanned and I'll tell you something. We'll put his picture

in the corner of the screen, by the way. There he is. Yeah, you can see the one with the sunglasses and that's the way I saw him, just like that one over there. Save both of those if you can, Alyssa.

Thanks. Well, if I didn't know, let me tell you this. If my daughter brought him home and said, hey, Dad, here's my new boyfriend. He's a doctor at the VA hospital, an ex-Marine. I'd say, welcome to the family. Wouldn't you? Yeah. I'd say, welcome to the family.

And so handsome and so charming, you know? Well, when I went there to meet him, he gives me that same story, you know, the bar and brawl stuff, the whole thing. And then I said, wow, you know, Doc, thank you for clearing this up. I said, thank you very much. You knew about the story that had come out, though, right? Yeah, I knew. He didn't know that I knew, but I knew. And I said, you know, while I'm here, just so I could kind of close things out,

can I have permission to just search your room? And that's when he wasn't Mr. Personality anymore. That's when he said, mr personality anymore that's when he said no and had us leave and then i called up the u.s attorney out on long island she said look bruce you don't have any evidence yet that he committed any crime on long island so i can't even give you a search warrant or anything yet next thing you know swine goes gone wait can we stop for one sec i want to go back to that when you were in there with him so you're having this full conversation he's nice as could be you're playing the role trying to make him feel comfortable and then you ask him to search the place which you know if you don't have probable cause it is a constitutional thing but he you said he changed

up and he said, no, was there any, you know, we think of this like from the movie sometimes, but it does happen in real life. Like I think of the movie and glorious bastards, that first scene where, you know, Christoph Waltz is sitting with a guy who's Christoph Waltz is a Nazi. He's sitting with a guy who is harboring Jews who have not been taken to the camps and the nazi thinks it but the other guy is playing like he doesn't and then there's a moment where the face breaks and the nazi sees it and and it just all like did you have a moment like that where you saw where you knew oh this this isn't just a constitutional thing this isn't just my suspicions tinkling like that's he's doing this i would say that's a great analogy i would say absolutely and not only me but the agent that was with me we both felt the same way but there wasn't anything we could do with the time he

packed up and left he went to zimbabwe africa because there's a real shortage of doctors in zimbabwe africa oh god and when he's in Zimbabwe, Africa, he killed women and children and pregnant women and poisoned his landlady and just did all kinds of terrible, terrible things there. Well, he was ready to move on. He was ready to move on to another country, but he had to return to the United States to renew his passport. And that's when we arrested him, but not for murdering anybody, because we didn't have any evidence that he murdered anybody on Long Island, all right? But we did have evidence of every federal agent's

favorite crime, lying to the government. U.S. Code 1001 is everyone's personal favorite in the government. If you lie to the government, if you lie on a form, if you lie to an agent, it's a felony. Many police departments wish they had that, but they don't. But we had it in the federal government. What did he lie about? So he lied about his background because he wasn't in jail for that barroom brawl. He lied about just about everything on his background and his paperwork, and then he lied to me, and then he was able to prescribe medication,

which he shouldn't have been able to because he shouldn't even have been a physician at that particular time. So he gets three years in jail for lying to me, which I kind of felt okay about, but I knew what's going to happen at the end of three years. So the assistant U.S. attorney out in Long Island, two guys that were just wonderful guys, they said, Bruce, this is your window right here to try to prove that he murdered some of our nation's heroes right here at the north port va get working right now you have

a clock yep now i had never done a case like this before never done a homicide case with all the other cases i've done never done so I called up my boss in Washington, D.C., and he says, Bruce, don't worry. We're going to hook you up with the right person. Dr. Michael Barden, Dr. Michael Barden. Oh, the goat. The goat. Is a forensic medical examiner. He was a forensic medical examiner for the city of New York, for Suffolk County. And he's always on TV. He had his own show called Autopsy.

This is the guy who did, I believe, Michael Jackson, Jeffrey Epstein. Yes. I'm missing a ton in there. Actually, he was involved when they redid the Kennedy assassination the second time. Oh, that's right. That was his claim to fame. Yeah. Actually, I had a woman in here a year ago, Nancy Solomon, who did an amazing job reporting on this wild case in New Jersey.

And she talked with him because the family brought him in. He does, like, a lot of private. He does. He's still working, close to 90. Still working. Crazy. He's an amazing guy, really amazing guy. So I went to the state police and

the state police said well bruce we can't really uh help you but michael bond said i don't care if the state police is going to help you or anybody else is going to help you i'm going to help you and he says this is what i want you to do he says we are going to assemble a team. And this is who's going to be on this team, he says. I'm going to be the forensic pathologist. Then you have to find a physician who's expert in chart reviews, who can review all these charts and make a determination, in his opinion, whether the patient should have expired when they did or not. All right?

Then there's this relatively new profession at that time called forensic nursing. These are nurses that are trained in both forensic science and nursing. And they were wonderful. I didn't know that was a thing. Oh, yeah, because they could bridge the gap between what these high-level scientists are saying

and what lay people like myself could actually understand. They were just amazing, amazing people. And then we need toxicology. So we asked the FBI lab to do the toxicology. They turned us down. They turned you down? Yeah, they turned us down. You see, there had been another case that they had worked on,

and it didn't have a successful conclusion, so they didn't want to get involved in another one of these cases. So we had to go to a private lab, a private lab known as National Medical Services in Pennsylvania. They're the largest private forensic lab in the country. is, could you find traces of these certain poisons in embalmed tissue? Because most of the victims had already been buried and, you know, embalmed and buried. And are we able going to find what we think may be poisons in their body? And they said, yes. So we assembled this team. How do you do that? Well, I'm going to tell you exactly how they did it. Okay. So we assembled this team. How do you do that? Well, I'm going to tell you exactly how they did it.

Okay. So we assembled this team. And the first thing we did is we pulled every medical record of every patient that was at the Northport VA when Swango was there. Why? Because he used to like to roam around the entire hospital. So we didn't know actually who his victims may be. Okay. And we narrowed this team, narrowed it down to about six good cases where they felt that these patients should not have expired when they did.

And also something interesting. The families never suspected that the patient would die when they did. And also something interesting, the families never suspected that the patient would die when they did. You know, if you ever had a loved one in the hospital that's near death, well, you kind of, the family kind of knows, the staff knows. Death doesn't come as a total shock to you. In these cases, it was just the opposite. These people were actually sometimes improving, and the family would say, hey, Dad's getting better. We could go on vacation now. We'll come back, and we'll see Dad when we come back, only to get a phone call from Swango that Dad had expired. Oh, he'd make the call, too? Oh, yeah, because, you see, this is his second bite at the apple.

The first bite is actually poisoning the people. The second bite is calling up the families and reliving the experience in front of them or on the phone on how their dad suffered the last 30 minutes of his life. Could you imagine getting a call like that? What is that? That's his second bite of excitement and power. His power. His first bite of power is actually murdering people. The second bite is shoving it in their family's face. Pretty scary, terrible things.

Terrible things. So we narrowed it down to these six cases, all right? What do we do next, Doc? He says, now you're going to have to go to the cemetery and dig up their bodies. I said, do we really have to do that? And he said, hey, Bruce, you don't ask a forensic toxicologist if you need an exhumation.

It's like asking a barber if you need a haircut. He says, no, we got to do it. So how do we do this? Well, we got a court order, and then we would go to the families. And me or one of my agents would knock on your door, and they would say, you know, excuse me, sir, my name is Bruce Sackman. I'm with the inspector general of the VA hospital. We have reason to believe that your dad's death may have been of a suspicious nature.

Can we have your permission to go to the cemetery and dig up his body and run some tests? But how confused are people right away? I'd imagine pretty confused. Yeah, the families were wonderful. They were wonderful. Sometimes the families would want to be there at the cemetery to see when we actually exhumed the bodies. And if like a daughter came or a mom came, my agents would bring flowers for them. You know, we try to be very, very respectful. So all of a sudden, I find myself at a cemetery. I've never done anything like this before. And I find myself at the cemetery, and there's the backhoe, and it's digging up, digging up the grave. And then the coffin is coming out of the backhoe and it's digging up the grave and then the coffin

is coming out of the ground and all this water starts coming out of the coffin. And then I see Michael Michael Barton jump into the grave site and starts taking soil samples. I said, what are you doing? He says, well Bruce, if there's arsenic in the soil

and we find arsenic in the body, they're going to claim that it just creeped into the body from the soil. How does that – but how would it even get through it? It could get through because unless there's like a concrete crypt, you know, which there wasn't in these cases, they could get through. I was going to say because I never knew about that, but I had a guy on who explained that. He said there's always a crypt, so I guess back then there wasn't. Well, a lot of people didn't have crypts.

That was an extra cost. So it's just the... Yep, just put it. So then I find myself at the Suffolk County Medical Examiner's Office. Now, this is a cultural experience for people who have never done anything like this before. There are bodies open, body parts on the side. You know, they do that Y incision.

It didn't bother me. When we brought some of the assistant U.S. attorneys in there, they had to turn around and walk out. They couldn't handle it. Not everybody could handle it, you know. So Michael Barton, through one of these patients, he takes out a heart and he says, Bruce, you see this heart? Yeah, I said, some. There's nothing wrong with this heart. This patient didn't die from heart disease, like it says on the death certificate. There's something else that killed this patient.

There's nothing wrong with this heart. This heart is fine is fine wow so he's pulling a heart out of a patient that you just pulled out of the ground yeah it might have been in there for a couple years at this point and you can make that determination he made the determination and they took a number of samples of tissue and blood to send to the lab for toxicology. Now you ask me, how could the lab determine, especially in embalmed tissue, whether there's actually poisons in them? So I asked Dr. Frederick Reedus, who at the time was the president of National Medical Services, just a great guy. And he said, Bruce, don't worry. He says, we have this brand new machine. It's called the Liquid Chromatography Tandem Mass Spectrometer.

How's it work? Hey, Bruce, you wouldn't understand. You couldn't understand. Maybe you shouldn't understand, but I'm just telling you. We put a little sample in. To me, it's like Willy Wonka. They put a little sample in, and it goes around and around and around. First thing he says, Bruce, we found traces of succinylcholine.

What's that? Well, in the hospital, they call it succs. It's actually a paralytic. If they want to put a tube down you, it temporarily paralyzes you. So they could put that tube down you. Too much of it will kill you. And the other drug we found in different patients is epinephrine. Epinephrine, you know, speeds up the heart,

and if not used properly, it could kill you, and we found traces of that. Wow. Okay. Swango's about to get out of jail, and he's just ready to hop on that plane plane and he's ready to go to Saudi Arabia. That's going to be his next place. All right.

At the same time, he's about to get out of jail. Boy, we got lucky. Wait, he can go to Saudi Arabia right away after getting out of prison? Well, that was his plan. That was his plan. You know, there was a real shortage of doctors there and he may have finagled his way. Oh, he's still a doctor. Yes, he's still a doctor. They still haven't revoked him. He's still a doctor.

Oh my God. So he gets on so he gets out. But anyway, a good thing, a really great thing happened just when he was about to get out. The government of Zimbabwe entered into an extradition treaty with the United States, and they had a warrant for his arrest, charging him with the murders of women and children

and pregnant women. And they were just anxious as all hell to get their hands on that guy. So Swinehill gets out of jail jail and he's given this offer. He says, look, you know, you could plead not guilty and go to trial. But even if you win, well, this guy over here, me, is just going to put you on a plane and drop you off on the tarmac in Zimbabwe because we have an extradition order for you right here all right quick quick question understand though so he was he was getting out of jail you thought he was going to go to saudi arabia the way you just made that sound though is you guys charged him with all these crimes but he was like living at home no no no no he was still

in jail still in jail but just about to get out okay just about to get out no still still in jail just about to coming up on release coming up on release okay and uh so he decided to plead guilty and he pled guilty which he didn't want to go to jail in zimbabwe i guess yeah well i if was him, I would have pled guilty myself. You know, besides, he was guilty. Did you have the conversation where he said in there,

fuck it, I'm going to do this? Like, I'm going to plead guilty? Were you there for that? No, I actually wasn't. I actually wasn't. I wish I wasn't. But the prosecutors were there. So now it's time for the sentencing. Alright? And the sentencing, you know, he pled guilty to multiple murders at the Northport VA Medical Center and eventually pled guilty to murdering that Cynthia McGee in Ohio State University.

So that student that was charged with vehicular homicide, all those charges were dropped. But this is years later. Yeah. So had that kid gone to prison? No. He didn't get prison. He didn't get prison. But this is years later. Yeah. So had that kid gone to prison? No. He didn't get prison. He didn't get prison, but he had a conviction. He had a conviction, and that conviction was actually overturned.

Wow. Okay. So now it's time for sentencing. And the families are there. And this is when the whole human side of these cases really come to light. Yeah. All right? Because the families have an opportunity to talk about their dad,

because in this case they were all men, they were all veterans, how dad served in either Vietnam or Korea and received this medal and this honor, only to be murdered at a VA hospital, the last place on earth you'd think that somebody would actually be murdered. And how they got this phone call from Swango and how he seemed to enjoy talking about how dad spent his last half hour on earth. The families were, it was very, very emotional, as you could imagine. And I remember sitting there with my boss, the Inspector General, who came down from Washington, D.C., because this is the first time our agency ever had a case like this in the history of the Inspector General.

First time. And I dare say probably for all inspector generals. And Swango's attorney has his arm around Swango like he's a poor defendant. My boss, who was ex-secret service, I thought he was going to get up and strangle this guy. I mean, he, it was all a show. But anyway, so the judge says, Michael Swango, I am sentencing you to three consecutive life terms without the possibility of parole, and you'll go to Supermax Federal Penitentiary. You know, that's where all the baddest of the bad, bad, bad boys are in Florence, Colorado. Ooh, yeah, that without the possibility of parole. If Congress should change the law and have parole, your parole is denied in advance. Is that even legal?

I don't know. I didn't question it. I never heard it before. Never heard it since. Wow. But I'm telling you, that was a great, great, great sentence. I assume he had absolutely zero remorse. Remorse?

Yeah. Let me tell you, he stood up at attention. Kind of reminded me of like a Nazi war criminal in Nuremberg. And he just, the judge asked him, tell me what happened. And he said, I used a paralytic to murder these patients. Like, you know, like I took a walk in the park, I used the paralytic to murder these patients. It was like nothing. Because it's not about the victims.

It's what the incident does for the killer. All right? And in some ways, I think he actually enjoyed being there and listening to the families. To me, that was like a third bite of the apple for him. To actually hear, and to him, it's reinforcing his successful murders. I think in some strange, weird way, he actually liked hearing the family. He just sat there, motionless. And all my medical serial killers follow the same route.

They just sit there, motionless. And I really think maybe some of them enjoy it, maybe some of them don't. Did you learn much about his childhood or background? Yeah, yeah, we did. I mean, we looked into everything we possibly could. You know, his father had been an ex-Green Beret, kept a scrapbook of these gruesome incidents, we'll call them, in Vietnam.

Kept a scrapbook. Yeah, yeah, kept like a photo book of all these incidents in Vietnam that I think he was involved with. And he had a somewhat troubled past, but he actually was a good student. And he was honorably discharged from the Marines. So I believe that this was all a matter, in his instance, I think it was all about power. He just craved having the power of life and death over individuals. It was a real turn on for him. Other medical serial killers, I think, share that, but others have other reasons. But for him, he just absolutely craved the power of life and death over an individual. He's not the only one that have said that. You know, there was a VA medical serial killer back in the 70s. His name was Donald Harvey. Donald Harvey murdered a number of people in the VA hospital and outside of the VA. And this is what Donald Harvey said. He says,

after I murdered the first 15, excuse me, yeah, the first 15, and nobody even questioned me, I believe that I was ordained by the Almighty himself to commit these murders because, hey, I'm committing murders and nobody's even questioning me. Okay? And I think that he just got off on in the same way. Do you think that that's like – there was a show – I was telling you about this before we got on air, but there was a show several years ago on Netflix called Mindhunter, and it was about the – it was a somewhat fictionalized version but based on true events about the FBI's basically like godfather of serial killer profiling. And so it shows a lot of real cases that he worked, famous serial killers and him getting inside their brains and stuff. But he would come up with these profiles, things that happened to them, things that caused them to break. And one of the questions I always asked myself though when I would see this or read about other cases outside of the show and stuff is, is it something that you have to be born with?

One little switch just slightly off or is it strictly from your environment building it? Do you have an opinion on that? Yeah, I'd say one size doesn't fit all. I'd say there may be some people that fit that scenario you just laid out. But I think there are others that I've seen that things happen in their lives. Sometimes they become addicted to drugs. Sometimes they get involved in really bad breakups. Sometimes it's other external factors that have driven them to this.

So, you know, when I was on the job, we used to refer to these guys as the Silence of the Lambs guys, you know. The investigators. Yeah, you know, but we didn't really utilize them because we pretty much knew who the target was. And we didn't really need to know exactly why they did it. We just needed to know how they did it and how we could prove that they did it. We just needed to know how they did it and how we could prove that they did it. And then later on, we would let the PhDs, you know, decide on their life and their background. But the immediate concern, of course, was identifying the person, investigating,

getting that person out of the healthcare setting, and prosecuting them. So we didn't really utilize that service much at all. I gotcha. But once this case came to a close, I would imagine this took place over a bunch of years. So during this time, were you starting to take on other cases of a similar vein? Yeah. Well, all of a sudden, you know, when you're on the job and once you successfully do a case, now all of a sudden you're the expert. So all of a sudden I'm the VA's expert on medical serial killers because I did one case. All right. Well, lo and behold, what comes up next is a nurse named Kristen Gilbert at the Northampton, Massachusetts, VA Medical Center. And she allegedly murdered about 30 of our nation's heroes. A very, very, very interesting story because Kristen Gilbert, if you look at her, well, she looks like a typical mom, a typical soccer mom. All right. As a matter of fact, you know, my vision of a serial killer had always been like a Charles Manson type.

You know, a guy with a crazy haircut and a swastika on his forehead. No, here comes a typical soccer mom. Oh, hi, Bruce. Yeah, I'll talk to you after I take the kids back from soccer. You know, like a typical soccer mom, not somebody that you would suspect necessarily is capable of killing 30 or more people. How did she come onto your radar again? Well, through very, very brave whistleblowers, all right?

Because in my office in New York, now we have to remember, I was responsible for all major criminal investigations involving the VA from West Virginia to Maine. Now, how the heck am I going to know what's going on in every hospital from West Virginia to Maine, okay? The only way I'm going to know is if people come forth and call us and trust us to do the right job, all right? So there were a number of nurses on the ward with Kristen Gilbert, and this is the way many, many cases around the world

start like this they start like this you see every time this nurse Julian is on duty the death rate goes up nurse Julian takes a week off the death rate goes down does that mean nurse Julian is a serial killer no maybe nurse Julian has the most complex cases. Maybe there are other reasons for that. But, you know, there's something also very interesting about these cases that Nurse Julian has. You see, it seems that these patients were not expected to expire when they did. In fact, many of them were actually improving. Then all of a sudden, we find that they're in a code.

Well, what is a code? A code is a cardiac arrest, and the bells and whistles go off, and nurses and doctors come running in with a crash cart. It's very, very exciting. It's a very exciting experience to be in, much more exciting than your routine nurse duties, all right? And it seems like these people that all expired, they went into code when Nurse Gilbert was on duty, and she was only a part-time nurse, and the death rate went up dramatically. In fact, you know, something very, very interesting is that when you looked in Nurse Gilbert's evaluation, she was like an average nurse until it came to a code. Then she got an A-plus rating.

She was outstanding. In fact, the doctors would say, you know, if I ever coded, I would want Nurse Gilbert there. Oh, shit. So she wanted to be able to save them. She put them into code to try to become a hero. And whether they died, they died. If they didn't, they didn't. Just to bring attention not only to herself, not only to herself. But when a code was called, a number of people had to respond.

One of these people was actually her boyfriend, even though she was married, her boyfriend who happened to be a VA police officer because the protocol called for a VA police office to respond to a code. And people testified that during the code, these two would be like grabbing each other, like grab ass going on and all during the code. To her, it was almost like a sexual experience as well so not only is she showing off of the staff and her boyfriend but she's getting off on these things as well well these brave whistleblowers went to management and of course

and this is true throughout the world not just the va throughout the world, not just the VA, throughout the world. And I could talk, I could give you many, many examples of this. Whistle blowers go to management and they hear something like this. Nurse, did you actually see Kristen Gilbert harm anybody? Well, I didn't see Kristen Gilbert harm anybody, but I told you when, you know, how these codes come and she always responds to the codes and I told you when, you know, how these codes come, and she always responds to the codes, and I told you all that. Can I ask you a question about your own background, nurse? Is your license up to snuff? Is everything in your background up to snuff? Because if you make these allegations, in some ways, you, like, become under investigation yourself. If I drug tested you right now, are you going to turn out positive? You know, I ask this just for your own protection, nurse, just for your own protection.

Because once you make these allegations, you know, she's going to come back. And she's going to start saying all kinds of things about you. Are you prepared for that? And by the way, nurse, what do you think would happen if the word got out here that we had an employee killing people? I'm going to tell you what happened. There was a hospital in New Jersey. One doctor wasn't killing his own patients. He was killing the patients of another doctor.

All right? So they went to trial. The story went out. You know what happened to that hospital? They changed their name three times, and they had to go out of business. Do you want that to happen here, nurse? Do you want to lose your job?

Do you want her to lose her job and her to lose her job and me to lose my job? So you know what, nurse? Just go back. Just go back to your office and don't say anything now it just so happened that these whistleblowers they're human beings and they had problems with their background they had some drug issues they had some problems but in spite of that incredible courage incredible courage they called my office and that's how we got involved and that's what started the investigation of Kristen Gilbert if it wasn't for these two brave whistleblowers if I had to rely on the management I would have never even known about it and this is true i could give you many examples of how management has covered up

for medical serial killers throughout the world do you think it do you think it's more because they just assume oh no that can never be happening here it's just it's just a shittier doctor and we don't want the attention well i'm sure there's some willful blindness because who wants on their watch, on their watch, to have a story come out that their doctors and nurses are intentionally

look, doctors and nurses kill people all the time, but that's not intentional. I mean, things happen. All right? Whether it be malpractice or accidents or God knows what. All right? But I'm not talking about that. I mean, things happen, all right, whether it be malpractice or accidents or God knows what, all right? But I'm not talking about that. I'm talking about intentionally murdering their patients. If you've seen the TV show The Good Nurse or read the book, it's about Charles Cullen was a nurse that started out in, not VA, started out in Pennsylvania,

went through New Jersey. When the first hospital suspected that he was harming patients, they were happy to move him on to the second hospital, which was happy to move him on to the third hospital, which suspected killing, which was happy to move him on to the fourth hospital, to the fifth hospital, to the sixth hospital, to the seventh hospital, to the sixth hospital, to the seventh hospital, to the eighth hospital, to the ninth hospital, to the tenth hospital. Ten. Where finally, finally, a brave whistleblower called the authorities.

Okay. Well, when the police went back to hospital number one, number two, and number three, do you think the hospitals cooperated with the police? No, it's not their problem anymore. Just the opposite. They did everything they could to hide information from the police because they didn't want to show that they had internal investigations that knew this guy was doing it, but they didn't call the police because they were so happy, so happy to move this guy on to the next hospital and the next hospital. And there are cases like this throughout the world. And ask yourself this question. Have you ever read, have you ever read anywhere that any of these managers,

whether it be a nursing home or a hospital where numerous patients died were criminally prosecuted for aiding and abetting these murders I've never personally read that well best course it doesn't exist all right and until it exists this is going to continue because where's the financial incentive well we know unlike fraud cases where there's a financial incentive for employees to file lawsuits and get money, there's no financial incentive if you report that a nurse is killing people. There's no key term. There's no financial incentive for that. If you're a manager, all your financial incentives are based around saving the reputation of the hospital.

That's where your financial incentives are based around saving the reputation of the hospital. That's where your financial incentives are. So until a manager somewhere in the world is criminally prosecuted for aiding and abetting these murders, and we change the whistleblower laws, this is going to continue. There are a number of cases ongoing right now, right now as we speak throughout the world. Can you point to – and I do want to get to some of the ones you are consulting on internationally that are pretty crazy because you're world-renowned for this. But can you point to hardcore evidence with some of the cases you're thinking about with managers where it's aiding and abetting. And what I mean to be a little more specific on that is if people who are not law enforcement but are in a job, they're running a business, they get way too caught up in just I'm running a business here. It's not my problem, right? If they have reason to suspect that a doctor or a nurse could be killing people that that's i mean you're almost more likely to hit the power ball than that actually happened so could it be that

in their head i'm not saying they did the right thing at all i completely agree with you but it could it be that rather than actually aiding and abetting in their head they're like there's no way that's happening i just don't want this guy in my problem anymore put him on someone else he's probably just a shitty nurse shitty doctor whatever and move on with their lives like if that person were then charged in court i feel like that is a really tough precedent to set because now you're going to have administrators everywhere questioning every little thing that a doctor or nurse does, including things that happen day to day in a hospital in what is a very high-charge, difficult job and potentially hurting the care of patients. Well, this is my particular view. We're talking about murders here.

We're talking about multiple murders. This is a very, very unique situation. Different than many of the other tough, tough decisions that medical center directors have to make. This is very unique. When you have evidence and you don't call the police, when you tell staff to shut up and go back to your office and not continue investigating these matters, yeah, then I think you've really crossed the line. I really think you've aided a bit. The case in England, Lucy Letby?

Yeah, let's talk about it you know for those that are not familiar with it it's most recently in the newspaper Lucy let be was convicted of murdering a number of babies not the first nurse in England by the way to be convicted of that all right when you read the newspaper articles about the case the whistlebl, not only were they told by management to shut up, they were told to go to Lucy and apologize for even bringing these allegations forth. So when you continue to obstruct both an internal investigation and a criminal investigation, yeah, look, we've seen how prosecutors could be very creative recently,

particularly regarding some of these election laws. Hey, it is what it is, all right? I want to see some of this creativity now used to punish management where there's multiple deaths. Right here in New Jersey. Right here in New Jersey. Two New York State veterans' homes. These aren't VA homes. The state actually homes for veterans.

Two of them, hundreds of patients died during COVID. The Justice Department just issued a report saying that the care was so bad, intentionally so bad, that these veterans were denied their civil rights. That comes from the Justice Department. So what happens to the managers? Are they fine? Does it cost them anything? Do they lose their job? What happens to them? Nothing. Nothing.

They're still in their jobs. Well, look, if you're a manager, the incentive is to save the reputation of the hospital at all costs. Now, I'm not saying every manager feels this way. I actually had the privilege of working with one manager who didn't feel that way, and he said, there will be no cover-ups, and we will do the right thing here. But throughout the world, and I mean throughout the world, this is more often than case, where management will actually cover up these crimes in an attempt to save their own reputation and the reputation of the hospital.

And I want to see one of these very aggressive prosecutors, very, very aggressive prosecutors out there, to finally take the leap. Because if we have just one successful prosecution anywhere in the united states one successful prosecution of a manager who obstructed these investigations who aided and abetted the murders that's going to put a quick end to this because then the manager's going to go whoa you know all of a sudden i could go to jail for this? Yeah, you can make a good case for it. I ain't going to jail for this, guys.

Uh-uh. We're calling the police. We're calling the authorities. We're doing everything. Right now that incentive doesn't exist. We have to incentivize that kind of behavior. Yeah, like they charged. I might get the terminology of what the charges were here wrong,

so maybe you can check the lessee. But different kind of case, but similar type idea. They charged, like, the president of Penn State with some form of obstruction on the Sandusky trial and stuff like that. They charged, I believe, the athletic director, too, because they had very good evidence or reports behind the scenes that this had been going on and they didn't they didn't bring it to the cops and we can't do that when our nation's heroes die by the hundreds i think you i think you make a good argument there i i think it's i think the burden has to be really high when you do that oh i agree like the burden in the penn state case was high enough for them to do that i i i didn't say it's going to be easy. Yeah, yeah. I said

there's got to be one good one out there, even if it's somewhere in the world, one good one, where all of a sudden the manager is brought to task. You know, these nursing homes in New Jersey, hundreds of veterans died during COVID. Yeah. There was no need for them to die. Oh, yeah. So the state had to pay millions of dollars in civil penalties. Nobody was charged. Oxycodone. All right?

Oxycodone, the Sattler family. Did anybody go to jail? Even worse than that. They're not really even, like, the way the payments are set up in the civil case. And I think this is being re-litigated now, thank God. Hopefully something good comes of it. But, like, their interest, their family interest would basically cover the payments on a yearly basis.

Yeah. Come on. Time to cut the crap. We have to start criminally prosecuting these people. It seems like if you're responsible for one murder, oh, you're going to wind up in handcuffs two weeks later. But when you're responsible for hundreds, is this just money paid?

What's that old quote? I think it's a stone quote. One death is a story. A thousand deaths is a statistic or something like that. Exactly right. Yeah. Yeah. I might have

messed it up a little bit but the idea is that that's the idea yeah it's yeah it's the idea i mean so you're the cases you've been talking about are brave whistleblowers coming forward who i guess knew the truth and and felt like they they had to say something about it which is great and it seems like if i understood this correctly the examples you were giving with the the latest one with with kristen yes with kristen gilbert those nurses it sounded like they had just noticed that there seemed to be more deaths consistently it wasn't so did they when they came and also, if I may, also that the patients weren't supposed to expire when they did. Let me give you an example. And I always challenge people to pull the court records and read this because they think it's unbelievable, but it's true.

There was a patient. His name was Kenneth Cutting. Kenneth Cutting was one of the younger veterans there. And Nurse Gilbert is on the ward, and she says to her supervisor, if Kenneth Cutting over here should expire like around 6.15 or so tonight, can I go home early? And the supervisor says, what are you talking about? We don't expect Kenneth Cutting to expire. I suppose if he did, you could go home early, but we don't expect that.

Well, guess what happened to 615? No. Yeah, and she went home early, okay? And this is part of the actual trial transcripts, and I always invite people to read this because they think I'm making this up. I can't make this up. This is absolutely true. Absolutely true. Well, that was part of what I was going to ask there, too.

Like when these nurses, the initial whistleblowers, not later at the trial, but when the initial whistleblowers came forward, did they discuss some of these behaviors you've mentioned that were later mentioned at trial? So they had noticed personal things that they're like, she's fucking crazy. No, because I wouldn't say that because, remember, most of these people are sociopaths, and they could be very charming and likable. But these very experienced nurses realized in short order that something strange was going on.

They knew that she was in the process of a divorce. She had problems with her husband. She was dating this VA police officer. So there was a lot of other social context involved here. But that's what got us started. And there was a lot of work to do. It was the same thing. We had to do the exhumations,

and something interesting came up here. Did you have Biden again for this? Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah. He's been in all my cases. Wow. All right. You know, learning forensics from Biden,

it was like learning physics from Albert Einstein. You really couldn't get much of a better teacher. Yeah, that guy's amazing. Yeah, he is amazing. So, yeah, we had to go to the families and exhume the bodies, the whole nine yards. And then the lab came back and they said, epinephrine. Okay. And we were told that she used to walk around with this EpiPen in her pocket

because she said she needed it in case she got bee stings. But we knew that she was actually giving epinephrine to these patients that brought them into a code, and then she would go to the code and behave. Would she stick it in their tube? Yeah. So she wouldn't actually print. Exactly. Right.

Some medical serial killers will actually experiment they'll try different ways to see they think is maybe the best way to get over you know on the science and everything so anyway we're about to go to trial and i get a call from the lab, Dr. Reed is, and he says, hey, Bruce, I got some bad news for you. You know that machine I told you about, the high-performance liquid chromatography tandem mass spectrometer? Yeah, I know that one, Doc. Okay. I was impressed about how fast he said that. He says, we can't really say for sure that it was epinephrine, but have a nice trial. So we had to disclose that to the defense, of course, you know.

So we go to trial, and we don't have the toxicology. But what we had was a number of scientists, including Dr. Bonin, who would testify that the deaths were consistent with epinephrine poisoning, even though we didn't have the toxicology. And the jury bought it, and she was convicted of murdering a number of patients at the VA Medical Center. Now, interesting, this case was in Massachusetts, which does not have the death penalty. But because the murders occurred on federal property, it was actually a death penalty case

because it was a federal case not a state case but i'm looking right here on your wikipedia that's not a good picture of her yeah that is not a good she looks like a uh yeah that's not the way she looked when i knew her you could see some of the younger pictures that's uh that's a much better that's not her no the younger one right there on the much better. That's not her. No. The younger pictures. The one right there on the left. Yeah.

No, no, no. On the left of the new selections. Yeah, that's kind of, although she was thinner because she had lost weight while she was dating her boyfriend. She was actually thinner. But, I mean, that could be a neighbor. That doesn't look like Charles Manson, the serial killer. Right. So this is a death penalty case in a state that doesn't look like charles manson the serial killer right right so this is a death penalty case in a state that doesn't have the death penalty but they didn't

i'm just saying like they looking by lessee of the wikipedia up right looking at that i just seen that when we look she didn't get that she got what does that say four consecutive life sentences yeah yeah but it was still so they were it the table, though, that she could get it. Oh, well, this is the way it worked. In the federal system, after the trial and after you're convicted, there's a separate trial with the same jury to determine whether the death penalty is the correct punishment or just get life imprisonment without the possibility of parole. And this is extraordinarily moving, as you could imagine, because this is the families, and we would show pictures of the victim, pictures of the victim when they were in the service, picture of the victims at home with their grandchildren, even smiling in the VA hospital, only to be murdered at the VA hospital.

And Kristen Gilbert sat there, didn't say a word, didn't say a thing, didn't show any remorse. In fact, you know, during the trial, the trial lasted six months, every day for six months. Every day she couldn't wait for her defense people to bring her the day's newspaper so she could read about herself, because she was still looking for this attention, even though she's on trial for murder. And she

just couldn't wait to open up the newspaper and read about herself every day at the trial. So we go and the jury came back and they said no death penalty, life imprisonment without the possibility of parole. And we were actually fine with that because, you know, she's a mom. She had two kids. I i'm not going to bring anybody back if you execute her you know i mean i don't know how i'd feel if it was my dad that was murdered maybe i would want this the bitch to be uh executed to tell you the truth i might actually feel that way but we didn't feel that way we didn't really feel that way and um you wouldn't know it though by reading the newspapers because they pictured us as bloodthirsty gestapo trying to execute her in the town square

and believe me that was nothing could be further further from the truth how many people did you suspect her of killing over 30 and you know this is interesting because about a month ago I got a call. I got a call from a daughter of a patient who was at Northport when Swango was there. And she calls me up and she goes, Bruce, I think you missed one. I probably missed more than one, to tell you the truth. And she laid out the story. There's nothing I could do now all these years later. I mean, there's no more evidence, no, everything.

Nothing I could do now. But it's incumbent upon the investigative team to grab the very best cases they can and concentrate on those cases and make those cases. But is that the total universe of people that they murdered in the hospital? I doubt it. In fact, many medical serial killers, when it's all over, and even if they want to cooperate, they can't remember themselves who they killed because they killed so many people they can't even remember. I mean, this fellow in Germany admitted to killing over 100 people. He can't remember all their names, when it happened. Who was that?

The detail, Niles Hogle. Is that a case you consulted on? Yes, that's the case in Germany. So what happened there? Oh, he was convicted, and the German police did an incredible job. And here's an example of hospital one suspected something. They never said anything to hospital two. They never said anything to hospital three. And then finally, he was caught through brave whistleblowers, even though the first hospital and the second hospital had done an internal investigation and they suspected something. They were so happy to get rid of him. See, this is not just in the U.S. or the VA. This is worldwide.

He admitted to killing over 100 people. We think he actually killed closer to maybe 300. He killed people in many countries. We had to, we, actually the German police, not we, but the German police, who were very, very thorough. They did a fantastic job on this. They had to exhume bodies in three different countries. I mean, this, it was a Herculean effort.

And at the end, when he wants to cooperate, he says, well, I think I killed maybe a hundred. Charles Cullen in New Jersey says, well, maybe 60, but I don't really remember who they were. So there's no what it seems to me is that with the ones you're talking about right now it's it's not i'm trying to think the right way to word this but these aren't as personal killings as they are them just looking for the rush.

Does that make sense? See, now look, it depends because like I say, not every size fits all. I'm certainly not a Silence of the Lamb of God guy, but I will tell you what I've learned over the years. This is from a layperson. I don't have a PhD or anything like this. I feel like you know a thing or two, no? Street knowledge. The majority of cases that I've seen, these people suffer from something called Munchausen syndrome by proxy.

Not all, but many of them. And Munchausen syndrome is when a person will intentionally harm themselves and go into the hospital because they want to get attention. Nobody's giving them attention, so they'll harm themselves. Munchausen syndrome by proxy is sometimes a mother will intentionally harm a child. Bring that child into the hospital and show the staff what a caring parent they are. Oh, I'm so concerned about my child and all, even though they cause sometimes even unnecessary surgeries and things like this to happen to the child. That's Munchausen syndrome by proxy. You know, in the VA, we had this case of a guy, a veteran. We called him Major Munchausen. He started on the West Coast

and ended on the East Coast. And this is what he would do. He would see what particular research was going on in the hospital. And he would study what the symptoms of that particular disease were. And then he would go into the hospital and claim he had all these symptoms. And the researchers would go, Eureka, I found the patient that I want. He's got all the symptoms. And then after a while, the doctors would say, what? This guy isn't for real. And once that happened, he would just discharge himself and move on to the next hospital and the next hospital and the next hospital. And he worked his way from the West Coast to the East Coast. And we called him Major Munchausen.

That's an example of Munchausen. Munchausen's syndrome by proxy is something like this. Nurse Gilbert wants to bring attention to herself. She wants to bring attention to her boyfriend, who's responding during the code. Doing the mundane chores is not going to work. But during the code where she gets rated outstanding, where everybody looks at her as a code superstar,

that's where she's going to get her attention. So she will intentionally put people in the code, show off to the staff, and show off to her boyfriend what a talented nurse she was, even though she intentionally put people into that. That is not uncommon, not uncommon in the world of medical serial killers. Okay? Let's fast forward now to England. With Lepi? Right.

We talked about her. Yeah, but I don't think we got too deep into it. What were the full details there? How did she get suspected and what specifically? Okay, well, again, it's almost the same story. This really gets me angry. It's almost the same story all over the world. It's not when there are one or two deaths, but when there are multiple deaths. There was a case in Italy

where a person, yes, it was a nurse actually, who was using blood thinner to kill patients. And the story began with after there was a statistical anomaly that showed 14 deaths, a statistical anomaly, well, how would you like to be a statistical anomaly? How would you like somebody in your family to be a statistical anomaly? But this is what happens. There has to be multiple deaths before flags get raised. And this is why medical serial killers successfully kill so many more people than your traditional serial killers. A traditional serial killer, five, seven people.

Well, you know, they're actually amateurs compared to my medical serial killer. The average kills maybe 30, 60, 100. There was a doctor in England who killed 300 patients. 300? Yes, sir. That we know of. That we know of. That's right.

Harold Shipman over 20 years. So this is such a terrible, terrible thing because so many people have to expire. Now, you know, we were getting back to the reason why do these people do that. Well, ask yourself this question. If you're so inclined to commit a series of murders,

what profession and what location might you choose? Well, certainly, you want a profession where you have the power of life and death over an individual and we know what professions have that power you know some serial killers have masqueraded themselves as police officers or security guards you know but what

other profession do we know has that power of life and death place of trust yeah right don't you want to work in a profession where people have taken an oath to save lives you know there's that hippocratic oath the nurses have something called the florence nightingale oath it's the same thing these people have dedicated themselves to saving lives and the overwhelming majority of healthcare professionals are the most honest hard-working dedicated compassionate people on the face of the earth that's where I want to hide hey you know what if I'm a killer if I join organized crime or if I join some outlaw motorcycle gang is that hiding target on your back that's not hiding yeah that's the first place we're going to look.

But if I go into a universe of people that are so dedicated and so wonderful as this, even my coworkers aren't going to believe it's me. Right. They're not going to believe it. They're going to say, I've seen that Bruce save lives. I refuse to believe that he's actually intentionally killing people. I've seen that Bruce save lives. I refuse to believe that he's actually intentionally killing people. I've actually seen him save lives. That's the place that you want to be, okay? How about working in a place where the police don't even want to come in?

They don't want to do investigations in hospitals. It's the last place they want to do. You know, what is this HIPAA law, this Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act? I mean, what records can I get? What records can I get? Do I need a subpoena? Do I need a court order? Do I need a judge to sign it? And the science, hey, look, most cops don't become cops because we're good in chemistry and biology okay so we're really dependent we are totally dependent on the staff to tell us what happened on the experts to tell us what happened we don't know the first thing about medical science and we don't even understand the administration the hospital where are all the records, what different departments are they, and the hospital, the hospital is telling us

that there's nothing here, that everything is fine, that they did an internal investigation. They'll hear something like this. Thank you very much, officer, for your concern. You know, here at the hospital, we were just as concerned as you are. So you know what we did? We appointed a board of our very, very best in-house experts, doctors and nurses, all employees of the hospital. And they made a determination that all these patients expired as a direct result of their natural disease processes. Now, sometimes we even did autopsies, and you could look at the death certificates. All the death certificates say myocardial infarction or some sort of heart-related ailment.

And here's our report. Now, if you still want to continue that investigation, knock yourself out. But our internal investigations showed nothing bad happened here. Now, how many police departments who are overworked and understaffed and underpaid are going to want to continue that investigation? Or are they going to want to go on to something that's much easier and much quicker?

Yeah. And that's another reason why medical serial killers get away with so much. Now, look, when we did the Swango case, we spent hundreds of thousands of dollars on lab fees alone. How many police departments could do that? In the federal government well we just write checks you know a billion a trillion it doesn't make a difference local police departments they don't have those resources like that so that also helps these medical serial killers to get away with it one of the things i've been thinking about as you've been going through this over the past 10 minutes or so is ways that you could proactively prevent this and the only thing that's

coming to mind i see a lot of problems with and that is something similar like what they've done with police where they have to wear a body cam. But if you had every medical professional wearing a body cam, every single thing that ever happened, it would totally take away their ability to do their job. No, you can't do that. And it's HIPAA. It's all of it, right? So this is the best you could do. You have to educate staff and law enforcement on these cases. They have to know what the red flags are to spot these people. They have to know how to investigate these cases. They have to feel free to report these cases to the police. They have to be incentivized to report these cases to police, and management has to be held accountable when they don't report these cases to the police. That would be a great

first step. Is it going to stop it? Of course not. It's not going to stop it, but it may limit the number of victims early on, get the police involved, and clean up the situation before it gets worse. Could you imagine if your dad was the victim of one of these serial killers and they had worked in previous hospitals, the previous hospitals had suspected this person but didn't say anything to the current hospital? And that fellow or nurse or woman was allowed to operate or work on your dad? How would you feel? I'd be pissed. Damn right. I'd be really pissed.

Right. And that has got to stop. Yeah. I mean, it's, I think we said this right at the outset, and it's come up a bunch of different times today in small ways, but the, the fear for people is that breach of trust. There's something about when you walk into a hospital, you know, you don't always get the best doctor, but you're like, well, this person's qualified to answer questions. This person's qualified to take care of me. You, if, if you have a loved one, or if you are sitting in a room and sitting in a hospital bed and something bad has happened and you know, now you gotta be on the mend. The trust is that, okay, you're out of the woods, you're on the mend. I is that okay you're out of the woods you're on the mend i'm gonna get out of here and then you know you run into as you've said the sociopath who looks at you with a smile and says everything's gonna be okay and maybe it's the last thing you ever see there's something about that

that is it's almost more all all the serial killer stuff is sinister don't get me wrong but it's almost more sinister that way. And, you know, when people read about serial killers, they read about serial killers who kill prostitutes or people who jog late at night, and they say, I don't do that. We all go to a hospital at some point. We all go to a doctor. So we're all potential victims here. And awareness is really the best defense. Awareness and training is really the best defense that we could have for these cases.

I agree. I mean, look, that's what starts with people got to know what to look for. But we have gotten on too quickly and then off the Lucy Letby case a couple times now. I think there's been a couple details given, but I wanted to go all the way there with the full background of the story. So can you just tell us all what specifically she was doing, and this is the British nurse in hospitals, and how you got involved with that case? Yeah. Lucy Letby is not the first nurse in Great Britain to murder children. There have been other cases, but Lucy Letby has been under investigation by the British police for a number of years. The case began like so many of these other cases with the brave whistleblowers who came forward to the police and told the police what their suspicions were. When these whistleblowers first went to management,

not only did the management poo-poo their concerns, but they actually ordered them to apologize to Lucy Lettby for even raising concerns about her behavior because they were so concerned about the reputation of the institution. Well, how did, so they were basically blowing the whistle on the whistleblowers to Lucy when they had no, did they have a requirement to do that for some reason? I'm not sure I understand what you're saying. So, like, why should Lucy even know that those nurses came forward in confidence to the management?

Well, because it's no secret. You know, it's no secret. In these cases, what happens is that not only does the staff start to talk amongst themselves, say, you know what, this Lucy, we think she's harming people. But sometimes the word actually gets to the patients as well. There was one case in Columbia, Missouri, Richard Williams, and a patient had heard that Richard Williams was suspected of killing other patients. So this patient said, I'm getting the hell out of here. And he leaves the VA,

and the VA police run after him, bring him back to the hospital, and that night he dies unexpectedly. Come on. So what happens is that people continue to work there. The management doesn't even remove them from patient responsibility, and they start getting these nicknames like, if I was introducing my staff, this is Nurse Jones, this is Nurse Smith, this is the Angel of Death. That's how common it is, and that's how the word actually gets around and eventually gets back to the patients. Well, Lucy Letby, she is one to start experimenting with killing these children.

Little newborns, right? Yes, newborns. Killing by putting air, by using drugs. She would experiment to see what works best. And when they would pass, remember, they would go into a code, and you know who would respond to the code? See if this sounds familiar to you. Her boyfriend. You see, her boyfriend would respond to the code. Remember we spoke about Kristen Gilbert? Remember we spoke about how Kristen Gilbert would love to show off when her boyfriend responded to the code. Well, she was having an affair with a doctor, a married doctor. This married doctor would respond to the code as well.

There's so many similarities between Lucy Letbe and Kristen Gilbert that when I called up the prosecutor on Kristen Gilbert and showed him this, he says, my God, they even look alike. You know, this is a terrible, terrible, terrible case. And I said to the National Health System, and I was on British TV, and I said, okay, what's going to change? What are you guys doing to prevent this from happening again? And as we speak, there's actually another case ongoing in England about another nurse who allegedly killed people. I said, what are you changing?

What are you doing? What are you doing to protect your whistleblowers? What are you doing to educate your staff? I haven't gotten an answer yet. I'm still waiting. I'm still waiting for that answer. I haven't gotten that answer yet. Okay?

Terrible. Terrible, terrible. But this has gone on all over the world. There's so many similarities all over the world. The nurse in Germany, Nurse Hogel, all right, who killed over 100 people and traveled from hospital to hospital to hospital. His motivation, see if you could guess, he loved the excitement of a code. He would intentionally put people into a code. And when you look at his evaluation, it's okay, nurse.

Except when it came to codes. It was amazing. That's when he's amazing. Lucy Letby, you know, she would love to interact with the families after the death of their child, you know, to show how compassionate she was. She would go on the computer at the anniversary of their death and sometimes contact the families and say, how sorry I am. Pretty similar stuff, huh? Yeah.

Pretty, pretty similar stuff. The psychological makeup, like the after-the-fact stuff with families, like that dramatic irony of like they don't know that you did it but you're the one calling them supposedly there's like a shoulder to cry on yes and it's all just some power tension and and like with with with lucy and kristin with the actual codes there's some sort of like sexual tension obviously with them having their boyfriend come in i wouldn't even know how this would work because i'm not a psychiatrist or anything but i wonder

if there's if that even carries over in a sadistic way to like these things too you know like like if she gets some sort of weird out of the whole thing like that the entire rush of it including the aftermath is a sexual so oh yeah yeah and how did you get pulled into that again i i believe so well i got pulled in from one of my friends who um is in england and asked me to go on television and comment and make suggestions to the police and um to the national health science while the investigation was ongoing no no not until i wasn't involved with the ongoing investigation okay that was only after the fact got it all right um i was on involved with the ongoing investigation in germany

and a number of them in the united states um including one um that's in my book, Behind the Murder Curtain, about Nurse Richard Williams. Now, that was the one you just talked about where the VA police tracked down the guy. By the way, this is your book right here, Behind the Murder Curtain. Thank you. We'll have the link down in the description available on Amazon. Really good stuff and what I've read so far. But anyway, continue on. Dr. Richard. So Richard Williams, remember I told you that we went to the FBI lab and the FBI lab

on Swango refused to help us? Yeah. And they refused to help us because of the Richard Williams case where they couldn't show a cause of death and that case got really, really ugly. And I'll tell you what happened. Richard Williams worked at the Harry S. Truman Medical Center in Missouri, alleged, underlined, alleged to have murdered about 60 of our nation's heroes at that hospital. So this guy's not in prison today? Oh, no. No, not at all. Not the only medical serial killer to escape justice either, but this is one of mine. You know, there's always that case that sticks in your core.

This is mine. So what happened was before I got involved in this case, the FBI and the VA OIG did this case and they could not determine a cause of death for a number of these veterans. The family sued. They sued the VA and the judge, the judge said in his opinion written nurse Richard Williams did murder these people and the families were entitled to money now keep in mind a civil case is not a criminal case like the OJ thing he had to pay the family exactly the burden of proof is a lot different in the civil case. It's a lot lower.

Yes. It's a preponderance of evidence. You just have to have maybe. That means that 51% of the evidence shows that. Yep. So Richard Williams is sticking out there, and man, am I pissed. But I wasn't involved in the case early on. So after Kristen Gilbert, I said to the Inspector the inspector general i said can i take a shot at richard william what year is this uh 2000 something okay uh he said knock yourself out

bruce he was very very supportive very supportive so lucky so this is what i did i gathered up my forensic nurses brought them all to New York City. All right. Got all the medical records. I said, all right, girls, go through it. They were amazing. They said, hey, Bruce, we think these deaths are consistent with succinyl poisoning. Remember we talked about that with Swango, succinyl poisoning? It's the paralytic when they want to put a tube down you oh yes all right wow okay that sounds really good call up the reader's lab hey you have this machine right the high you you know the name i don't but i remember you said it succinylcholine came out of machine time to go to trial now this was a state trial why was this a state trial and not a federal trial because va medical centers come in three different flavors

they come in exclusive federal jurisdiction like the bronx Medical Center is, for an example, they come in concurrent jurisdiction, where either the state or the federal could prosecute, which was the case with Kristen Gilbert. Or they come rarely in what they call proprietorial jurisdiction, which is the state has primary jurisdiction. So in the case of Richard Williams, the state had jurisdiction. So he gets charged and indicted with 13 counts of murdering our nation's hero. Boy, I'm excited. I am so excited.

Then the phone rings. It's the lab. I go, oh, shit. Don't tell me. Remember what happened with Chris and Gilbert? They said we can't prove epinephrine, but have a nice trial. I was afraid to pick up the phone. I pick up the phone. They go, hey, Bruce, I'm sorry. We can't really show it sucks in Alkaline, but have a nice trial.

Now, what was their reasoning behind that? That their lab work was was flawed that they they they had finished some lab testing and they sent it to another organization to verify and the other organization couldn't corroborate their results so it was no good and the local prosecutor at the time declined to proceed with the case like we did with kr Gilbert, even without the science. He said, without the science, I'm not continuing the case. Now, how did you get, let's loop that other case in then, by the way, since you proceeded without the science of actual cause of death on the Kristen Gilbert victims, how did you secure a guilty verdict?

We were able to secure it with experts testifying that the deaths were consistent with epinephrine poisoning. So we said, let's show that these deaths are consistent with succinylcholine poisoning. And the local prosecutor, who's now a judge there, by the way, said, said no i'm not doing it wait for my layman mind what what's the difference there if they say it's consistent with it because they then have to say we don't have proof but it looks like it essentially that's it they'd say it has like all the markers it has everything that's consistent with a poisoning in that effect, but we don't have the actual poison in the tissues to show that. And he refused. I don't know.

Maybe he's right. Maybe he's not. I was very unhappy. But he refused to continue. So all charges were dropped against Richard Williams. So what happened? Richard Williams no longer works for the VA. He goes to a private nursing home. Guess what happens? Richard Williams no longer works for the VA. He goes to a private

nursing home. Guess what happens at the nursing home? They start dying. Yeah, they start dying unexpectedly. Never charged. Never charged. So, anyway, he's free.

He hasn't been convicted, so he's an alleged medical serial killer. But you have no doubt about it. Well, my doubts don't really mean much. Right. I'm always hoping and praying maybe one day he'll have a come-to-Jesus moment and get it off his chest. But he's out there.

He's not in health care anymore. He's not allowed to be in health care anymore. That's good at least. So the FBI and the VA, we both tried very, very hard. But sometimes it just doesn't work out. There's a case in Italy. Danielle Pagliotti. Danielle Pagliotti, a nurse in Italy, allegedly killed about 30 patients.

You know what she used to do? After she murdered the patient, she would take a selfie with herself and the victim as a trophy that's not proof enough christ she was convicted oh she was one on appeal now what was her appeal because they said the science was flawed they went on appeal that they claimed that she used potassium chloride to murder people, but they didn't really have sufficient evidence to show that these people died from potassium chloride. And the case was thrown out. All right.

I'm going to I'm sorry to cut you off. I'm just looking at the screen you're looking at here as well that Alessi's pulling up. We are putting I think we can put these in the corner of the screen because they are blurred with where the patient is. If it's not there, then you're going to have to look at the third camera and squint. There's Danielle. Cutie. She's a real cutie. What?

There's several of these. Oh, yeah, yeah. She's a real cutie. As a matter of fact, she was living with her boyfriend, and when she gets arrested, the cops come to the house, and they say, say okay you're under arrest for murdering you know so many patients and all that and her boyfriend says what and she says oh shut up carlo that's nothing's gonna happen to me and they take her away and she's convicted but on appeal she's out oh my god she's out you know these cases are not easy to make hey look lucy let be

she's going to appeal could be overturned but jurassic could be overturned you know um we hope and pray not but i don't know that much about what science they actually had. You know, I only know what I've read in the newspapers and comments on television. But, yeah, it can be overturned. I certainly hope not. These cases are extraordinarily difficult to make. It's another reason why the police don't really want to get involved with them. Yeah, I had it mixed up. So you were the one you were actually involved with was the German nurse that you've alluded to a few times.

Right, not the Lucy Lethby nurse. So that's an international case. Like how did you get pulled into that? I think I got a call from somebody I know in the German police, a police captain, who read about my cases and talked to me about it. And one thing led to another. And Baden also was consulted. So me and Michael Baden were actually consulted on the case. And the German police did a really excellent job.

And I still speak with them frequently about other cases because they have an ongoing case now involving a doctor. But this case, no, I wasn't actually involved in the investigation at all the lucy lidby case right and so when the when was the this guy niels hogel the german nurse we have him on the screen right now when was he prosecuted it was a couple years back i don't remember the exact date a couple of years back so was this when you were still because you you spent 25 years working as an as investigate investigator for the government and then yeah yeah and then you spent 15 running your own firm and now you just do

consulting exactly so was this when it was somewhere in that universe okay today I don't remember exactly when. How did you say this guy killed his patients again? Hogle? Yeah. Hogle would put them in a code, and I'm trying to remember exactly what he used now, because my mind is, I'm having a senior moment as it's exactly what he used.

But he used some drug, and it would be in there to murder his patients. So he put them in a code. He loved the excitement of the code, and it was a pure case of Munchausen syndrome by proxy. Wild. Now, what about, like, the last few years in America with the health care system? Like, now we're late in 2023,

at least when I've been to doctors' offices and hospitals over the last year or so, it seems a little more normal. But, you know, for a while there, we were in the throes of this pandemic. It was completely unprecedented in many ways in our health care system in the country. And, you know, you had mentioned early on in the conversation that you worked in cases, a ton of cases involving fraud and involving all these different things. But from a perspective of just, I guess, crime in general, wherever you want to take it, did you see like an uptick when the pandemic first struck and hospitals were basically like war zones with anything related to medical murders or fraud? Certainly an uptick in drug diversion cases. What do you mean? I'll explain.

When COVID-19 hit, hospitals, many of them here in Manhattan, were really in a desperate situation. They didn't have the staff. They didn't have the staff. They didn't have the facilities to handle all these people. It was very, very tough. If you remember, they had set up tents in Central Park. The Navy had sent the ship over.

I mean, it was really, really tough. So a lot of hospitals had to resort to traveling nurses and doctors. Nurses that traveled from other states and other areas to come in had a resort to traveling nurses and doctors, all right, nurses that traveled from other states and other areas to come in and fill in the blanks, all right? And there was a big rush to get them in because it's like if you're an infantryman and the man in me is coming over the hill,

you don't have time to do a thorough background investigation on every soldier who's going to sit next to you. You're just happy there's a guy there coming over the hill you don't have time to do a thorough background investigation right every soldier who's going to sit next to you right you're just happy there's a guy there pointing his gun towards the enemy well this was almost a similar situation here so people started coming in to the hospitals from all over the country traveling nurses okay and doctors. The majority of them, excellent. But some of them, because of this rush, had some questionable backgrounds that apparently got overlooked or perhaps just, they just didn't catch it, and they wound up working in hospitals. A number of them wound up working in emergency rooms where they had access to narcotics. Now, when I say drug diversion, I'm talking about diverting drugs from patients and hospitals to either your own personal use or bringing it on the outside. I'll give you an example of what I mean.

Traveling nurse goes to a hospital. She's working in the emergency room. And all of a sudden, she has access to all kinds of narcotics. Well, instead of giving the narcotics to the patients, she replaces narcotics with saline solution, gives the saline solution to the patient, and takes the narcotics herself. This is not so uncommon, particularly during the COVID with the traveling nurses, because a number of them had traveled because their backgrounds weren't so great, and this gave them an opportunity to take drugs.

And when drugs were missing, they would say, oh, you know, I'm new to the hospital here. I don't really understand the system. Maybe I didn't document it right. But meanwhile, the patients aren't getting the narcotics they need. And when you look at their pain score, you know, they have a pain score from 1 to 10, and they say, well, I was a 2, but after I got the narcotics now, you know, I mean, I was a 10, but after I got the narcotics now, I'm a 2. But I'm 10, and the nurse gave me this thing, and I'm still a 10. And that's how they realize that these drugs are being diverted. And a number of – and I had a number of cases, a number of cases involving drug diversion.

And I'll tell you, the biggest case that I had actually involved a pharmacist. A pharmacist who was the chief pharmacist at one of the hospitals here in Manhattan. All right. Big time. Yeah.

He diverted 250,000 pills over, I forgot how many years, maybe five years, something of oxycodone. And this is how he did it. This is how he did it. Okay. He would tell the staff, we have two pharmacies here, staff. We have a main pharmacy and we have a research pharmacy, okay? Well, there's a new protocol, a new study involving oxycodone. So I'm going to have to order a lot of oxycodone. And this oxycodone is going to go to the research facility. Well, I'm going to handle everything. I'll order it.

I'll document it. I'll handle everything myself personally because this is a very unique study. So I'm sitting in my office one day and I get this anonymous letter and it says, dear Bruce, everybody knows me as Bruce. Hey, dear Bruce, something's going on in this hospital with oxycodone. We're ordering a shitload of it and we don't know where the hell it is so i go see the the chief of pharmacy in the hospital and i lay it out for him i say hey look you know i got this anonymous letter i don't really know what it is or anything and they say that we're ordering all this oxycodone but they don't know where it is how about helping me how How about so I could explain

to my boss what happens? Could you help me? All right. No problem, Bruce. You see, there's this study. There's actual, we're doing a study on oxycodone. So I'm ordering all the drugs and I'm monitoring all the drugs. I'm doing all that for the research pharmacy oh great can i go down to research pharmacy and talk to them about it oh you know what the head of the pharmacy it's on vacation but when she comes back you could talk to her well can i actually see this study you know i said my boss he's a tough guy i have to actually show him the stuff because he's not gonna to just take my word for it. So could you get a copy of the study and I'll bring it back to my boss and then everything will be great.

Oh, yeah, Bruce, come back in a week. Come back in a week. I come back with the chief pharmacist for the whole system. She's sitting next to me. Like the whole city? No, the whole hospital system. sitting next to me like the whole city no the whole hospital system they had like a number of hospitals so the just a wonderful wonderful lady i said okay mr pharmacist um i'm ready to look at the study oh you know what bruce we couldn't

we it's it's buried deep somewhere the dog ate it you know we couldn't really we couldn't really find the study but i tell you i'll come back in like three days i promise you i'll have it fine i'm not going anywhere i'll be back in three days come back in three days but the chief pharmacist finally the guy guy says, his name was Anthony D'Alessandro. Hey. And Anthony says, you know, Bruce, there really was no study. I actually took the drugs myself. $250,000.

He says, yeah, I have this habit. I actually took these drugs myself. I said, oh, Anthony, I have this habit. I actually took these drugs myself. I said, oh, Anthony, I feel so bad. I feel so bad for you. Tell me exactly how you did this. And he says how he altered the paperwork, and nobody in the research pharmacy even heard of a study or knew anything about the study.

He laid the whole thing out for me, but claims that he took it himself i said oh my god i said you know what anthony we have to get you drug tested right now because i think you need help maybe our doctors can help you so he goes and he gets drug tested he's negative he doesn't have any oxycodone in his system. Oh, my man was a dealer. Oh. Yeah. So that's when I met the special narcotics prosecutor for the city of New York. Her name is Bridget Brennan. And she had a chief of the drug diversion unit who handles just these kind of cases. Okay. unit who handles just these kind of cases okay and i i laid the case out for him and he said um wow wow so i went in the grand jury testified of course he he got arrested you know fired and

arrested and um and you know what he actually faced the death penalty under the drug kingpin statue because there were so many narcotics involved in this drug diversion. Yeah, we'll put a picture of him in the corner of the screen. Anthony Dell. Oh, let me tell you something. Tony Dell. So when I went there, he was a big weightlifting guy, huge, huge weightlifting guy. And I actually thought the guy was going to open up the window and jump out when I confronted him with this. And the chief pharmacist who's with me, she's like sliding back in the chair. Oh, my God, he's going to jump. What's going to happen?

Well, he didn't jump. didn't jump well he only got five years though well so how did he only get five years he's out now yeah because he had to cooperate and say where all these drugs actually went what was he doing with them he lived in staten island no that's a bad start and there were fellas with as shall we say short fingers and fat necks that he actually uh sold it to and and cooperated with the police with that so now if you're the president of the hospital system you call me up and you're gonna say hey br, that's great. You did a great job and all that.

How do we know this isn't going on in other hospitals? How are we going to change the system to make sure that this doesn't happen again? And that's the kind of phone call you want to get. That's what separates an inspector general from like an FBI. Because an FBI goes in, they lock up the bad guy and they leave. That's only half of our job. Half of our job is to lock up the bad guy. The other half is to correct the system

to make sure something like this doesn't happen again. And we went on, we, myself, and and pharmacists we went on like a whirlwind tour of all the hospital pharmacy systems and nursing stations to let them know what happened and come out with systems that would prevent this from happening again that's the way these things are supposed to get handled it's not just enough to arrest Lucy Letby. Hey, great job, guys. What are you going to change? You're not going to change anything? You're not going to do anything different? Well, then don't come call me up and tell me to comment on the next one, because it's your fault that there's a next one, that you didn't change anything. You didn't change the

system. You must change the system. And when you change the system you must change the system and when you change the system this has not happened again at this volume to my knowledge this case was so big that the prosecutor actually got a newspaper article from new zealand talking about this case because how many times does a pharmacist divert that many drugs? That's a – I mean I'm not doing a little math on street money there. Oh, millions. Yeah, he's having a day. It was millions of dollars.

Millions of dollars. And the 500-pound elephant in the room with a case like this is the underlying drug, the oxycodone i mean obviously that's been an enormous story over the past five years with the sacklers and what what they've done i mean to me they are you've heard a ton of people say this and i think it's 100 correct they're the biggest cartel that we've had in in recent history in the united states they They effectively cheated the system in every way. There's been all kinds of documentaries, all kinds of TV shows made on this. There's an amazing book written on it as well, I think called Empire of Pain by Patrick Radden Keefe

that is tremendous. I highly recommend that. But, you know, it seems like these guys were caught. They weren't prosecuted criminally. There was a giant civil settlement that, again, we may have said this on the podcast or it could have been right before. But again, it's being relitigated now. But as of now, it's basically just they're going to pay their net worth and interest every year and for 10 years and be done with it and a lot of people at home say you know what's what's the difference now in big pharma and then and in the ability and what i don't

want to do is say that like big pharma doesn't do anything that helps people yes there are a lot of drugs out there that help a lot of people you know there's there's good and bad with this stuff the good is really good the bad is really bad but like how you know did you have any cases around you know uh outside of one like this that that were centered on investigating you know oxycodone abuse or stuff like that in in hospitals well just a number of uh yeah a a number of employees who would divert, we go back to that term, diversion, who would divert oxycodone for their own personal use or to bring it home to family members

who for some reason the doctor wouldn't write them scripts anymore. So a father would go to his daughter and say, hey, look, you work in the hospital. The doctor won't give me any more of this oxycodone I needed. Can you get me some? And sometimes they would. And they would get caught. And they would get fired. And there was always a big debate in the hospitals, by the way. Always had this big debate. When a nurse or a doctor diverts drugs, should they be criminally prosecuted?

If they diverted drugs for their own personal use, should we just treat them? Should we put them in therapy? Should we make them better and not prosecute them? Or should they be prosecuted for stealing? All right? this is my personal belief if they diverted drugs that was intentionally prescribed for another patient and they took those drugs themselves and gave that patient some sort of placebo, yeah, I think they should

definitely be criminally prosecuted. That I'd agree with. If they took some drugs out of the cabinet and used it themselves and never been in trouble before, I'm a little bit more open to something else. I think I agree with you. Yeah. You know, because I always look at the victim as if it was my mother, my father, my daughter, somebody. How would I feel?

Did you know anyone who was near the Sackler case? Because obviously a lot of the government got involved. Were there any officers you're aware of with that? No. Because what really bothers me about that is're aware of with that? No. Because it's what really bothers me about that is the backroom dealing that went on. I mean, you have like phone calls going from Rudy Giuliani, who was representing the Sacklers to, you know, Congressman X or White House Attorney Y. And suddenly, you know, the person who's prosecuting the case, who's just a

prosecutor on the totem pole is then told what to do and everything goes away. And I think it makes people, righteously so, completely think the system is fucked because, you know, despite the work of guys like you and the cases you do and the good work that happens, you see at the highest level an extremely addictive drug like this that is essentially heroin let's call it what it is it essentially is heroin being legally put into people's mouths that then get addicted to them and someone makes a huge profit on it and then they pay the government so they can have influence to make sure the profit keeps flowing i mean it, it just, it's very hard not to be extremely negative or even just like very down on the system. Yeah, it is. And because the negatives are always highlighted, and as you pointed out before, the positives are rarely ever highlighted. So we only get bombarded with all the negatives,

and it's very easy for us to not be happy with the situation as the way it is. But as I always point out, for a whole career of investigating bad doctors and nurses, I had a wonderful opportunity to meet so many outstanding doctors and nurses and technicians that really helped me. And without them, I wouldn't be having this conversation because I would have never made any of these cases. You know, I'm just very dependent on them. And most of them were just really wonderful. What about at the government? Because you were there for a long time.

We all know some of the stereotypes with bureaucracy and things move slow and sometimes people are just looking for the job in the private sector. But it sounds like you had a lot of good people on your team and you speak of it in a way, don't let me put words in your mouth, but you speak of it in a way like you had a really positive experience with the work I did. I would say I was very fortunate to have very supportive bosses on Washington, D.C., that the inspector general and his staff were very supportive of all the work we were doing. You have to remember, no inspector general up to this point had ever successfully investigated a homicide because that was not perceived to be our mission. Our mission was perceived to be our mission. Our mission was perceived to be fraud, waste, and abuse. Well, abuse is what I hung my hat on. And initially, the FBI didn't even want to work with us. They said, you guys are the fraud guys. You guys shouldn't be involved in this. They were very, very uncooperative in a number of our cases. And Kristen Gilbert, they didn't even want to join the case. We did the case with the Massachusetts State Police,

who were excellent, by the way, excellent. They didn't want to join in. They didn't even want to join in. And, you know, the supervisor sets the tone. I worked with a number of FBI agents. A number of them were outstanding, I would say. One of the best agents I ever worked with ever was an FBI agent. But I've run into some really arrogant, obnoxious FBI supervisors.

And I think we saw this particularly when the FBI had to testify remember in Congress the FBI which one you know with Peter Strzok remember yes remember how arrogant and obnoxious he came on well that's what I had a face I had a face some arrogant and obnoxious FBI supervisors who really gave me a lot of agita on a number of these cases. Now, I also ran into some excellent ones because I say the supervisor sets the tone. Some FBI supervisors will set this tone. We want you to work with everybody. It's a team effort. We'll work with the other agencies. Great.

Then there's another group of FBI supervisors that say, we are better than they are. They're inferior. We don't have to share anything with them. We don't have to do anything with them. We don't even need them.

If you get the right supervisor, it could be a marriage made in heaven. You get the wrong supervisor, it could be a marriage made in heaven. You get the wrong supervisor, it could be a marriage made in hell. Unfortunately, I ran into a couple of marriages made in hell, and they're in the book. And I talk about that. Certainly can't paint the whole agency with a broad brush because there's some truly outstanding fantastic fbi agents but i ran into a couple of arrogant supervisors like you saw in the hearings that just um just refused to cooperate

refused to work with us hell they wouldn't even do the lab work on the swango case that's an example well good for you guys for going to go make those cases yourselves and doing a kick-ass job. I said, to hell with them. You know? I mean, it's a shame because all the agencies should be working together. When all the agencies work together, the bad guys are in a lot of trouble. They're in a lot of trouble. But when there's agency infighting, who benefits from that?

The bad guys are the ones who actually benefit from it. And when you left the government and went into private investigations, you're doing all investigations around hospitals and things that go wrong there. So I would imagine you're dealing with clients who are taking the steps you wanted all these other managers to take, which is that they are looking into these things and they are trying to determine if there's a case to be made. And I guess the second question there would be, was it a part of your job to go make those cases and then turn it over to law enforcement, or were you more like even serving the whole way through? You know what? I was never, ever inhibited by management from turning it over to law enforcement.

They never said don't. They never said don't. They never said don't. It's not true in every hospital because I've had people know people who work in other hospitals where they had a different attitude. But in the hospital that I worked in, they were very concerned about fraud. They were very concerned about all these issues and they wanted to do the right thing. and it was really a pleasure to work for them it really was a pleasure to work for them um but it's not that way in every hospital or every institution columbia did you read in the paper recently about the obgyn in columbia definitely didn't tell me about it dr hayden or hadden i I believe, H-A-D-D-E-N.

Well, Dr. Hadden sexually molested, I'd say about 250 patients. Oh, this is Columbia, New York, Columbia University. Yes, Columbia University. Okay, there he is. So this is like Larry Nassar type stuff? Oh, yeah, but let me tell you something. A number of the patients went to the hospital to complain, and their complaints were dismissed by the hospital management. The hospital management fought the police on every turn. All they did was defend this guy um if you remember andrew yang his wife andrew yang the presidential candidate his wife was one of the victims of this

guy oh yeah oh yeah he made a deal with the district attorney's office where he would plead guilty and get no jail time but thank god and this is an example how federal prosecutors um could do things when they want to do things they found that he actually enticed patients interstate to come to his office where he sexually abused them so there's a federal crime because of the interstate nature of the crime. And he got 20 years in jail. And the hospital has paid out millions and millions of dollars. Has anyone in the hospital been criminally prosecuted in the management? No. Has anyone been removed? I'm not aware of that. All right.

Has anyone, has it cost anyone, has anyone had to reach into their own wallet to pay any of these victims? Well, no, of course not. So the incentive is to protect the institution at all costs. But these women were very brave and they didn't give up. They didn't give up. They didn't give up. And there he is. About 250 victims.

All right. Wow. There he is. You know, there is just... I remember I've told this story before on the podcast, so apologies if people have heard it before. But I remember in college when I was in Management 101, they gave us, like one of the first days in the class they gave us like these you know the main kind of stereotypical

business terms it was like efficiency effectiveness and there was another one and it said group think and i was like they must have invented this word this isn't a real word it kind of it looked like a stupid word to me but then i you know i i read what it was and i looked it up i'm like oh shit it's in the dictionary and the older i get the more i see how it is the full explanation of almost anything that goes wrong in society not necessarily like the first initial act but everything that happens afterwards and you get these systems and we've talked about them ad nauseum today where it becomes either A, we need to make this not our problem because it's going to cost us X, Y, and Z, whatever, jobs, money, profile, whatever. Or B, people just straight up cover things up because they don't want to be a part of it for the same reason and i always wonder you know what it would be like to be in

that role to be the president of a hospital and as one example and get you know a couple patients come in and say my ob OBGYN molested me. Here's how he did it. And you know this guy. You go to lunch with him twice a week, right? You've been to his house for Christmas parties. You play golf with him once a month on Saturday mornings, and you have the same caddy every time.

And what would – I try to put myself in those shoes, and I'm like, would I have the bias of that and assume he could never do this? Or would I investigate it? And I'd like to think that if a couple people came forward, like we're going to do the right thing and investigate it. But people – when you see people scurry off the ship like a rat at the end, that's what really gets me. At some point, there has to be enough that you do the right thing. That's right. And something about that group thing holds people back. And I just wonder if these people are actually bad, or they just they did a bad thing,

like passively. It's a it's a fascinating thing. And I don't know the people in these cases, you just kind of wonder it. But there, I'm sure that's you've seen that in almost every case you've ever worked yes i have seen it and i'm not saying initially these people are bad but they've done some really bad things right and a lot of people commit crimes aren't really bad people until they commit that one particular crime. And it's a crime of convenience. And for them, they had every opportunity to do the right thing. But they're so concerned about their own position, their own reputation, the reputation of the hospital, that they figured they could just keep prolonging this, and then eventually it'll go away. Right.

This guy may be the most prolific sexual predator in hospital history. Worse than Nassar? Well, I don't know. Should somebody be held accountable for it in management? Probably, if it's as bad as you're saying. Nassar was, I mean, because this case I'm not familiar with, Nassar was just, that was horrific. Yeah, there are a lot of them. Awful, awful.

But one other thing I haven't asked you about today that I've been wondering about a little bit, just you've told some stories that involve it, but your interrogation tactics. I'm always interested in that. For people who worked in law enforcement, there's different ways they do it. It seems like you, and correct me if I'm wrong here, it seems like you were a guy who took the empathetic, I'm your friend route to get people comfortable, to open up. If that's not true, though what what was your style there you know i i would say that i would say first of all it's very important to get people talking about anything just to start talking so to get people talking i would always go into great detail about their life their education

you know where they live how they came to work at the hospital, all of that. And yeah, and I would try to show empathy because I think empathy is an important quality for an investigator to have, quite frankly. Now, some people, there are some guys who take a different approach and they're very successful. They're really very successful with sort of that good cop, bad cop kind of thing, and I've seen success in that. But I think if I try to be a tough guy, people just laugh at me. He's not a tough guy. So that's not going to work for me because I'm not really a tough guy, physically tough guy.

But I like to get people talking and talking, and then after a while they start to say, you know, this guy isn't so bad. Maybe he'll understand why I had to do that. You know, he'll be empathetic towards me. He'll understand I could talk to this guy. And I've been pretty successful with that. You know, that's kind of worked well for me. Other investigators have different techniques. But my technique is just to let them talk, keep talking, and then gradually kind of circle around and then, boom, get to the point. And say, look, I understand why you had to do this.

I understand, you know, your dad needed the drugs. You know, you're certainly not a bad person. I don't know what I would do if it was my dad. I understand that's why you had to take it, right? Something like that. And they would say, yeah, yeah, yeah. You know, and I really didn't want to do it, but my dad, I felt so bad for my dad. So I just kind of took the drugs, you know, and then I would always get them to write it out. And a lot of times people, there would actually be a sense of relief from them, right? Because it's almost like a session with your psychiatrist, all right? So it would actually be a sense of relief.

And you can actually see after they were over, people used to thank me after they confessed everything and my boss used to say bruce they're thanking you as they're walking out he couldn't believe it he couldn't believe it my boys how come they're thanking you i said because i treated them with respect and i treated you and I understood. Now, is everything they gave me in the statement 100% accurate? Maybe not. Maybe they tainted it a little bit to protect themselves. That's okay. Didn't really make a difference to me.

Really didn't make a difference. The fact is that they would admit to the crime and they'd actually feel better when it was over. When I had this nurse one of the last cases i had a nurse that diverted drugs one of these traveling nurses during covid she started talking she started telling me about drugs she diverted in other hospitals before she even came to new york this was an opportunity for her to get it all all out and she when it was over she felt like a sense of calm she said felt a sense of relief was she an addict in this one she claimed to be

um i i think she did actually test positive i remember yeah yeah but she said well you know bruce when i was in uh i think madison i don't remember madison wisconsin i did the same thing you know and i almost got caught there but then i moved on to another hospital and this is how i did it there and this is how i did it here and she wrote the whole thing out for me and then there was a sense of like calm there's like a sense of quiet and usually i'm doing this not by myself, but usually I have like maybe a nurse with me or a pharmacist with me. And they're all sitting there like,

I can't believe this woman's saying this. I can't believe this. They don't say a word. They're like shocked. And then after they walked out, they said, Hey, Bruce, how did you get them to say? How did you get them to admit all of this? I said, they really wanted to.

They really wanted to. I just kind of opened up the door a little bit for them to walk through, made it a little easier opening. But they actually wanted to confess, most of them. They just really wanted to get it out. It's almost like a cry for help. And. You know, and that's very, very rewarding when it happens. Now, that's not true of my medical serial killers. You know, first of all,

they very rarely even talk unless they'll lawyer it up. And then, finally, at the end, after they plead guilty,

then they might talk, but they hold back. I mean, Swangle never admitted the full extent of people that he killed. We think it's about 60. Who the hell knows? He doesn't even know.

That's our best estimate. Niles Hogle, he says 100. It could be 300. Lucy Letby. Who knows? You know, you never even get the full number of people. You almost, like I say, you go for the best cases you could get. And each number is still a person.

But I got a call a month ago from a family on Swango, and they said, Bruce, you missed one. Yeah. I probably did. I'm not denying it. And that's the thing. It's justice.

Each one of those numbers is a person with a family, with a story, with the trauma of that. It's not just four counts or five. I felt really bad. But the woman was very nice. It was her father.

And she's very nice. And she understood. I said, well, what exactly would you like now? And she said, I'd like the VA to admit that my father was murdered. I don't think they'll ever do that. I don't think they'll ever do that. But I said, I understand. I understand.

So could he have been murdered by Swango? Sure. Absolutely. But brutal. Yeah. Well, have you, I would imagine, with your serial killer cases, this is nearly, if not impossible, but with cases in general, perhaps with the exception of people who were diverting because they were addicts, you know, with some of the serious criminal cases you worked, when you left the room, when you finished the interrogation, you know, that zone is off. Did you ever feel empathy for some of them? Yeah.

Empathy for how they got into that position? Oh, sure. Look, we're all human. I mean, I don't know. I don't know what would happen if my father was crying and crying for drugs, and I worked in a hospital, and would I be so tempted to? I hope not. But I don't know I'm only human if I saw my father crying in pain and I could help him I don't know I'm gonna be honest

with you I certainly hope not I hope that I wouldn't violate the law and do that but if somebody did it for that reason. I could understand. I certainly wouldn't take the drugs out of the mouth of another patient. That I wouldn't do. That's different. But if there are a whole bunch of pills in a drawer and I just kind of take them out, you know. And some of these people get pretty clever on how they do this. You know, hospitals, they have this thing. They have this cabinet.

This cabinet called the Pyxis machine. It looks like, remember the old Pez dispenser? Yeah, yeah, yeah. So it looks like a machine full of Pez dispensers, and you put in a code, and the drug comes out, and then it has a certain amount of drugs. And so you put it in, and you're saying, you know, patient Bruce needs this oxycodone. So I go in the system, and Dr. Jones had ordered it. So I take it out and I'm supposed to deliver it to the patient. Well, what happens if Dr. Jones is not available and the patient's really suffering? Well, as a nurse, I could go into that Pixis machine and I could withdraw that drug, and then there should be a doctor's note later on saying that, yeah, you know, that patient really needed it.

I wasn't around, so the nurse did the right thing by withdrawing it. But many times we would find that it was withdrawn and there were no doctor's orders, and that was certainly a red flag. People got very, very clever how they could open up files and pour out the drug and put in saline and put the cap back and make it look like it was never actually entered or they would withdraw it with a syringe. They got very clever on how they could do it. But eventually they get caught. I swear, some criminals, man man if they put that towards like curing cancer we have it we'd have a cure god damn but bruce this has been awesome man going through all these stories there's so many and a lot of it's dark but you know you you also put a lot of these people away and and thank you for doing that i mean that's just like we said throughout the day

it's the ultimate preacher trust especially with some of the major major league serial killer cases you worked, you know, to to see people that are capable of this that could be operated right under your nose that you're that you're supposed to go to for help. So thanks for doing that. And thank you for coming on to do the show. It's my pleasure. I thoroughly enjoyed it. Thank you very much for having me. Of course, of course. Always good having someone from Long Island. But we got your book once again, Behind the Murder Curtain. The link will be in the description below, so everyone go check that out. It's really good stuff. Thank you for being here. And everybody else, you know what it is. Give it a thought. Get back to me. Peace. Hey guys, thank you for checking out this episode.

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