True Crime Campfire - Do No Harm: The Story of the Creighton Killer, Pt 1

Episode Date: January 7, 2022

In 2008, a tranquil neighborhood in Omaha, Nebraska was stunned by the vicious double murder of an eleven year old boy—the son of two prominent local doctors—and their much-beloved housekeeper. No one could imagine who was behind the killings, and the case went colder and colder…until the same thing happened again, five years later, and the motive became clear. Join us for a classic whodunnit, the story of a desperate race to uncover the secrets behind these brutal and seemingly senseless murders. Sources:Pathological by Cordes and CooperVarious articles: https://murderpedia.org/male.G/g/garcia-anthony.htmCBS' "48 Hours," https://www.cbsnews.com/news/anthony-garcia-case-was-revenge-motive-behind-omaha-double-murders/NBC's "Dateline," episode "Haunted"Follow us, campers!Patreon (join to get all episodes ad-free, at least a day early, an extra episode a month, and a free sticker!): https://patreon.com/TrueCrimeCampfireFacebook: True Crime CampfireInstagram: https://gramha.net/profile/truecrimecampfire/19093397079Twitter: @TCCampfire https://twitter.com/TCCampfireEmail: [e-mail] a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/true-crime-campfire--4251960/support.

Hello, campers. Grab your marshmallows and gather around the true crime campfire. We're your camp counselors. I'm Katie. And I'm Whitney. And we're here to tell you a true story that is way stranger than fiction. We're roasting murderers and marshmallows around the true crime campfire. In 2008, a tranquil neighborhood in Omaha, Nebraska was stunned by the vicious double murder of an 11th. year old boy, the son of two prominent local doctors, and their much-beloved housekeeper. No one could imagine who was behind the killings, and the case went colder and colder. Until the same thing happened again five years later.

And the motive became clear. Join us for a classic who done it. The story of a desperate race to uncover the secrets behind these brutal and seemingly senseless murders. This is do no harm. The Story of the Craton Killer Content Content warning on this episode just to let you know

the first part of this story involves the murder of a child. So, campers, for this one, we're in Omaha, Nebraska, March 13th, 2008. It was a nice, day, a lot warmer than usual for Nebraska in the winter, and 11-year-old Tom Hunter was enjoying getting to wear shorts and a t-shirt in March. A little after 3 p.m., the school bus dropped

Tom off in his neighborhood, an affluent area called Historic Dundee. Tom was a smart kidd, and he worked hard every day at the science and math-focused magnet school he went to, so after school he liked to just chill out with his chips and his video games. The legend of Zelda was his favorite. It was always mine, too, kiddo. Mine three. As he walked through his front door, he said hi to Shirley, his parents' housekeeper who came by every Thursday to clean and straighten up. Tom's mom was in Hawaii at a conference for doctors, and his dad, also a prominent doctor, would be at work until after dark. Tom grabbed a soda and a bag of chips from the kitchen and headed to his favorite chair to jump on his Xbox and play one of his first-person shooter video games, maybe Halo or Call of Duty. He was engrossed in the game when he heard a knock at the front door.

He could hear Shirley vacuuming out in the hall, so he paused his game. headed for the door. A couple hours later, Dr. William Hunter came home from work. A doctor knows the smell of blood, so he must have realized right away that something was wrong. Even before he came across Shirley Sherman, lying in a pool of blood, a kitchen knife still buried in her neck. He checked her, but almost immediately realized she was dead. Frantic, William ran from room to room looking for Tom.

He found him in the dining room, lying face down. in blood. Far too much blood for there to be any hope of life. Someone had come into this beautiful neighborhood, this tranquil home, and slaughtered two innocent people. William was calm on the phone with 911. In the course of his career as a doctor, he'd seen death many times. It would take a while for the full weight of what he'd just experienced to descend on him. Like many people in this situation, for the moment, he was feeling almost numb. I can't even even imagine what he went through as he realized he had to call his wife Claire at her conference in Hawaii to tell her that their bright little boy, their funny, witty, Harry Potter loving boy

was gone. Nobody should ever have to hear or deliver news like that. And nobody should ever have to see a loved one the way William had just seen his boy. Detective Derek Moyes was working second shift when he got the call to report to the Hunter House. It was an eerie scene. The house was quiet, except for the music from Tom's paused video game. The smell of pennies hung in the air. There was so much blood on the floor that the air actually felt humid, damp. It was clear that both victims had been killed in the same way, vicious, repeated, stabbing. Some of the cuts were deep, but others were shallow,

almost as if the killer had tortured the victims before delivering the final blows. Shirley had been stabbed 18 times, all around her neck and july. jaw, and Tom's wounds were all around there, too, as if the killer had known exactly where the carotid artery and jugular vein were, and aimed right for him. This sparked an ugly little thought for Detective Moyes. This guy doesn't seem like a newbie at this. These two might not be his first. The killer had used two of the hunter's kitchen knives, one seven-inch and one-five, and both victims still had knives protruding from their necks. The investigators soon determined that the knives were the only things that had been disturbed in the house.

The killer didn't seem to have come prepared with his own weapon. Strange. Very strange. Especially since there were no signs of robbery or forced entry, it looked very much like the killer had come here with only one objective in mind, murder. So why would he come so unprepared? It appeared to Detective Moyes that Tom had been killed first, that he answered the door and was immediately attacked. Then the killer had gone after Shirley. Detective Moyes took Dr. William Hunter, still in shock, to the station for questioning. How's your wife?

He asked him first. Crushed, William said. She had a colleague with her, so she wasn't by herself, and they were taking the first plane back. Yeah, can you even just for one second begin to imagine what that plane ride would be like? That's been haunting me all day, just hours to sit there and think about what happened to your son. I can't even imagine. And I don't want to. Poor, poor lady.

I'd need to be sedated. There's, what do you do? Lesser heart. What do you do? I can't imagine. I can't imagine. Word was starting to reach the hunter's other three sons, too, all of whom were grown and out of the house. Two adults, one college student.

Tom had been the baby of the family. As William sat alone in the interview room with detectives, the whole family was making its way home to comfort each other and try to make sense out of the family. of the senseless. William seemed totally baffled as to who would have done this. He said, I've been racking my brain. I mean, we live a peaceful existence, almost ridiculously simple. The investigator's new Dr. Hunter ran the residency program in pathology at Creighton University. Were there any students or staff there who could be holding a grudge against him? He said he'd given bad reviews to a couple former residents, but he couldn't imagine that that could have anything

to do with this. It just seemed impossible. The investigator's initial thought was that the hunters were the most likely target, not Shirley. The murder happened at their house, after all. Shirley just happened to be there. A classic heartbreaking example of

wrong place, wrong time. So they were really interested in the Hunter family, Tom, especially. His friends. Tom had friends in real life, of course, but he was an avid gamer. He had online friends too. This was 2008. Online gaming was picking up steam in a big way, and Tom had been gaming when

the killer showed up. Those games could get heated. Could this have something to do with that? Some hot-headed guy who didn't like losing to an 11-year-old and took his rage further than anyone would ever expect. It seemed kind of far-fetched, but it had to be looked at. Weirder things have happened. Oh, for sure. I mean, I've seen people get really like, insane over video games before. So, yeah. William said he didn't know if Tom had been talking to strangers on the internet, but he told the detectives about a couple of sites he knew Tom liked to visit, Wyville.com, a sort of educational club for neopets, and a kid's site called Club Penguin. Sounded innocent enough, but when they looked into Wyville, they discovered something kind of

disturbing. Some of the people there were a lot older than Tom Hunter. There was a college student pretending to be an 11-year-old, who had chatted with Tom and played Xbox with him. Yeah. And there was a 17-year-old who bragged a lot about being a kind of gangster, getting in fights. You mean someone would go on the internet and tell lies? Of course not. That's preposterous. Eventually, the forensic computer text found that Tom had spoken to over 50 different people online from all over the country.

Tom never listed his age and his profile bios, but he did sometimes tell people he was older than he really was. So, in other words, red flags. Detective Moyce knew it was going to take forever to track all these people down, but it had to be done. So he set some of his officers to work on it, and in the meantime, he set out to talk to all the potential witnesses he could find. And right away, he got some promising info from some of the hunter's neighbors. People had seen a heavyset, dark-haired, all-of-complected man around the house around the time of the murders. He'd been wearing a collared shirt and a jacket that didn't fit him very well, and carrying a messenger bag.

The description was good enough for the police to get a sketch out to the media. Some neighbors had seen him in a vehicle, too, a silver Honda CRV, and they had some good info on the car. It only had a rear license plate, and the plate was distinctive. It had a picture of a sunset on it. That wasn't a Nebraska plate, so if that description was accurate, it looked like this was an out-of-state vehicle. Interesting. Unsurprisingly, the media were all over the story from day one with opening lines like crimes like this don't happen in Dundee, which obviously they do.

Stop saying it. It's provably not true. I mean, they happen less maybe, but they still happen and anybody who's ever watched Dateline freaking knows it, so just chill. Stop saying it. Right away, the media hit the possible internet predator angle pretty hard.

The idea that Tom had either attracted or angered some rando online and they tracked him down and killed him, and killed Shirley to eliminate the only witness. The investigators were working that angle, of course, but they also needed to check something else, before they could move forward. A few months earlier, an elderly woman had been murdered in her own home, bludgeoned and stabbed in the neck. Stabbed, just like Tom and Shirley, with knives the killer found in the house. Now, obvious similarities, right?

I mean, we didn't have any bludgeoning here, but the stabbing is there. The murder weapons coming from the house is there, so they had to figure out if there could be a connection. The investigators in the old woman's murder actually did have a suspect, a relative she'd been in a feud with. But the guy had no connection with the Hunter family or with Shirley Sherman. This happens in a lot of murder cases where there's no obvious resolution right away. We look for connections to other cases, and it's obvious why they looked into this one with such similar MOs, but it's an example of why it's so important to avoid tunnel vision and just work the evidence you have. Because as similar as these two cases looked on the surface, it turned out they really had nothing to do with you.

each other. So the detectives had to move on. They'd already questioned Dr. William Hunter about his work at Creighton University Hospital, and he told them he'd definitely pissed off a few residents over the years, but he didn't think any of them were mad enough to do this. Dr. Claire Hunter, Tom's devastated mom and a well-respected cardiologist, couldn't imagine that any of her former colleagues or patients could do this either. But of course, they were both in shock. And as many people do in the face of that kind of staggering grief, they seem to be retreating from the world, just too overwhelmed to try and puzzle out who might have done this to their family. As for Shirley Sherman's family, they were trying hard to get more attention on their case,

hurt and offended that the media's tendency to refer to her as the housekeeper instead of by name. And they wondered, everyone was assuming Tom Hunter was the killer's main target, but what if he wasn't. What if it was Shirley? When he spoke to the police on the day of his sister's murder, Shirley's brother Brad had realized something horrifying. He'd actually been driving in that neighborhood around the time of the killings. It was a thought he had a real hard time pushing out of his head. Shirley was a hell of a lot more than the housekeeper to the people who loved her. She was the center of her family, the one who made sure everybody remembered everybody else's birthday, the one who held it all together.

She'd been poor most for her life, and she'd worked her ass off to provide for her two kids, Kelly and Jeff, now grown up with kids of their own. Shirley had worked multiple jobs for whole adult life and grew fresh veggies in her garden to help feed her kids. Now that she was a grandma, she'd been scaling back. That's one of the heartbreaking things about this case. The hunters were one of the few house cleaning clients she still had. Oh, my God.

And it wasn't long before investigators did hit upon a possible suspect on her side of the case. Shirley lived next door to her grown daughter, Kelly, which means she had a front row seat to the volatile ups and downs of Kelly's relationship. Mostly downs. Dude was married, for one thing, which Shirley hated. She didn't approve of this relationship one little bit, and she made sure Kelly knew it, especially since the guy was abusive and toxic.

They'd argue stuff would get thrown around and broken into a million pieces. There'd be yelling and horrible things said. Not good. Worse than that, dude would kick down Kelly's door and punch holes in her walls. Volatile, angry guy. And Shirley was convinced it was going to escalate. I mean, yeah, no shit, I agree. Usually does.

According to Henry Cordes and Todd Cooper's book Pathological, which was one of our main sources for this case, Shirley told Kelly that her boyfriend's violence wasn't going to stop at doors and walls and throwable objects. She told her, you're going to be next. Shirley actually held the deed to Kelly's house, and she tried to use that as a means of keeping this guy away from her daughter. She called the cops about the property damage from his door kicking and wall punching, and she got his car towed. She told Kelly she wasn't allowed to have the guy over anymore, but of course, we all know the dynamics of those kinds of toxic relationships, right? It's not as easy as flipping a switch, and Kelly was too wrapped up in the relationship at that point to stay away. She snuck him over when she thought her mom wasn't looking. That's hard to do when your mom lives right next door, and Shirley almost always found out. And she was pissed.

She grew to despise this guy with the fury of a thousand, thousand sons, and she got maybe a little bit unhinged about it, a couple times. Once, Kelly found her creeping around the house with a hammer in her hand. And when she was like, Mom, what the heck are you doing? Shirley said, I want his blood on this hammer. Yikes. Like, I get it, Mom, but let's try and just relax a little bit. Starting to sound like a character in a Greek tragedy or some shit. That's like the most hardcore way she could have possibly said that. Yeah, Shirley was kind of a badass. I'm not going to lie. Needless to say, things between Shirley and Kelly's married lover were tense. He was not Shirley's biggest fan, and they had some pretty intense confrontations.

Shirley wasn't a big woman, but she wasn't afraid to get right up in this dude's grill. She'd say, go ahead, hit me. Probably hoping he would, so she could have something concrete enough to put him in jail. So into this tranquil atmosphere came the news that Kelly was pregnant with this married guy's baby, and you can imagine how Shirley took the news. She told one of her neighbors, I'm going to get that son of a bitch if it's the last thing I do.

So when Shirley was murdered, some people's thoughts turned in the direction of Kelly's boyfriend. Were Shirley and Tom's deaths fall out from this illicit affair and Shirley's attempts to try and break it up? It was a reasonable question, and the detectives brought the guy in

and questioned him, looked into his alibi for the time of the murders, etc. He was cooperative, gave him everything they asked for, and his alibi checked out. Kelly's boyfriend may have been a cat and a scoundrel, not to mention a total Kyle, but he wasn't their killer. Yeah, not a murderous bastard, but still a bastard. I hope he steps on Legos and wet socks for the rest of his life.

And a few months into the investigation, the detectives had ruled out their entire initial group of suspects. They couldn't find anybody who'd been beefing with 11-year-old Tom on the internet or grooming him either. So that lead was pretty much a bust. And there was a frustrating lack of physical evidence in the case. No fingerprints, no footprints, no nothing. It was a chilling thought that the case might go cold. A killer who could do what this one did, brutalize a woman and child without leaving a trace of evidence,

could be capable of anything. When you've exhausted every lead in a case and you're no further along than you were at the start, you have two choices. Give up or start from the beginning again. Detective Moyes and his crew opted to start again. They had always had an intuitive sense, that Dr. William Hunter was the most likely target. The murder happened at his house,

and his job at Creighton put him in a position of authority. For his students, Dr. Hunter was a crucial step along the way to a successful career as a doctor, with all the money and prestige that brings. His recommendation maybe couldn't totally make or break you, but he had a lot of influence. Detective Moyes felt like this was fertile ground for more investigation. He wanted to dig a lot deeper, So he went to Creighton. He started talking to Williams' colleagues asking if they could think of anybody who might have wanted to hurt the doctor this badly. And as they spoke to Williams' fellow doctors, one name kept popping up again and again. Dr. Michael Belanke, a guy everybody called the Russian.

That's a badass nickname right there. I'm not even Russian, and I kind of want y'all to start calling me the Russian. Because it just sounds cool. I want you to call me the French-Danish German. That's a lot. Okay, I'll, if you insist. Listen, I like being accurate above all things. God, you're such a pedant.

It's true. Belenki was a former Creighton student who'd dropped out of the pathology program in a huff. He had the kind of problems a lot of students have when they're not cut out for medicine. for the particular specialty they're trying to pursue or whatever. But Balanky was louder about it than most. In fact, he was so pissed off, he threatened to sue Dr. Hunter. This made everybody a little nervous because, according to Creighton Docs, rumor had it that Balanky might have ties to the Russian mob.

Shit. So glad we're talking about him on our podcasts. Not a group of folks you really want to fuck with. I, for one, highly respect the Russian mob. We do not want to fuck with the Russian mob. Nothing but respect, guys. Yep. Okay.

So now Detective Moyes had a fresh lead. He tracked down the Russian and asked him where he was on the day of the murder. Belanke said he was in Pittsburgh working at a lab. I signed into my email from the lab, he said. You can check. Now, ostensibly, he said all this with like a ominous Russian accent. A cool Russian accent. Again, I'm not going to offend the rushed mob here.

Can't do it. And lo and behold, he was on the schedule at the lab in Pittsburgh that day. There was a little wrinkle, though. Although he was scheduled to work and his computer showed a login to his email on the relevant day, nobody remembered seeing him there. So as alibis go, it wasn't perfect, but it was enough to suggest to Detective Moyes that Polanky probably wasn't their guy. Another promising lead busted.

As the months went by with no arrest, Shirley's loved ones were getting so frustrated that they hired a private investigator and set up a $50,000 reward for information. None of it brought up anything useful. And I think it's important to discuss that when you talk about family setting up a $50,000 reward, that money is coming from the family. Like a lot of times they raise that money, but that's stuff they scraped together and put up to solve this crime. Meanwhile, the investigators tried a different tack. They called the FBI, specifically the behavioral analysis unit, the criminal profilers. The professionals. The FBI felt that the killer might be a serial killer, one who moved around from place to place,

and they thought the cops probably wouldn't catch him until he killed again. It's the kind of thing you don't want to be right about, but they would be. Every lead exhausted, the double murder case went cold. Detective Moyes knew how frustrated and angry the families were. He was too, and he tried to keep in touch with them. He thought about the case a lot. Five years passed, and then a day that changed everything. It was May 14, 2013.

A couple of guys from an Omaha Piano Delivery Company arrived at their next pickup. And when they got to the front door, they noticed something. odd. The security door was slightly open, and what looked like the magazine of a handgun was stuck between the security door and the main door of the house, and nobody was answering their knock. The workers called the cops who walked in on a nightmare. When Detective Moyes got to the scene, the back of his neck prickled. This felt like the worst case of deja vu ever. Two victims, an older man and woman, each lying in a huge pool of blood. dead for a day, maybe two.

There had clearly been a struggle. There was blood smeared all over the walls, and the woman had defensive wounds all over her hands and arms. She also had a horrifying slash wound on the side of her neck, and two kitchen knives lay on the floor by her body. The man had been shot multiple times and stabbed in the neck. The responding officers quickly determined that the victim's names were Roger and Mary Brumback. It seemed clear that Roger had struggled with the killer at the door as he was

shot several times. Somehow, Roger had managed to force the magazine of the gun to release and fall to the floor, leaving the killer with a dud gun. But Roger had been shot several times by then, most likely fell to the ground. The killer had chased Mary down then, hitting her again and again with the gun, dazing her and knocking her down. This gave him time to go in search of another weapon, and when he found two knives in a drawer, he'd gone back to finish what he started, viciously stabbing both Mary and Roger. It was obvious they'd both fought hard for their lives and each other's. Nothing seemed to have been stolen.

A few drawers had been rifled through, but it seemed likely this was just the killer searching for knives, and there were no footprints or fingerprints at the scene. To Detective Moyes, it all seemed way too familiar. The only differences were the gun and the fact that both victims had put up a fight. And when Moyes found out who the victims were, He knew his instinct was right. Roger Brumbach was Dr. Brumbach, Dr. William Hunter's supervisor at Creighton University.

He was head of the pathology department at the hospital. They worked closely together. It couldn't be a coincidence, could it? The cold case murders of Shirley Sherman and Little Tom Hunter had just blazed back into life, and Detective Moyes jumped right into the investigation, finding out everything he could about these two new victims. The last time Roger and Mary had communicated with anybody was on the Sunday before the murders, Mother's Day.

Their grown daughter had facetimed them. Later, she'd remember that conversation on the show 48 hours. At one point, her parents had laughed so hard they were practically in tears, and she'd taken a screen grab to remember the moment. That was the last picture ever taken of either of them. Oh, God. I know it hurts, doesn't it? That really got me, too. Nobody could understand it.

Who could possibly want these people dead? They were lovely. Both brilliant, generous, kind people who had tons of money but lived modestly. And they were madly in love with each other. Mary edited all Roger's manuscripts for him. She had a degree in pharmacology so she understood the science. And she was an attorney, so she had the writing skills. They were close with their families.

In fact, they were getting ready to move back east to be near them, which is why they'd hired the piano movers. Now they'd never get the chance. It just seemed horribly unfair. One of Detective Moy's first thoughts was Dr. Michael Belenke, the disgruntled resident who tried to sue Dr. Hunter, the one everybody thought might have some kind of shadowy tie to the Russian mob. His alibi for the first case was Soso, and the guy gave off some weird vibes. Moise wanted to talk to him again, but before he could make a move to contact him, Balanky called him. Do you need to speak to me again? Well, yeah, actually, we do.

It was an odd conversation. Belinky's reaction to the murders of the Brumbacks was basically, I'm glad he's dead, which, you know, just not the kind of thing you hear every day, and also not the smartest comment to make when you're the prime suspect and the guy's murder me, dude. But you do you, I guess. Way to keep it together, man. He denied saying that later, by the way, but Detective Moyes swears he did. Belinky denied having anything to do with the Brumbach's murders, said he was living in the Pacific Northwest now, and there was no way he could have gotten to Omaha. and back in time, which Moise quickly determined was probably true. Probably. It wasn't impossible, but it was unlikely. Doesn't that sound familiar?

So frustrating. So back to square one, yet again. And then four days after the murders of Roger and Mary Brumbach, another Creighton University professor called the police. Her name was Dr. Chandra Butra. She'd heard about the murders, of course, and I have had heard. her worried about something that happened the previous Sunday. The same Mother's Day when the Brumbachs had their final FaceTime call with their daughter. Dr. Butcher and her husband had been out to lunch with a few friends that afternoon when at 2.19 p.m. something had set off their burglar alarm. They rushed back

to their house, which was only a couple minutes drive away, and found, well, not much. Somebody had clearly tampered with the front door, trying to break in, but they must have run off when the alarm started blaring. Now, this would be enough to make your stomach lurch the best of times, but here's the thing. Dr. Chandra Butra just happened to work in the pathology department at Creighton University Hospital. Same as Dr. William Hunter and Dr. Brumbach. So... Oh, my God. Yeah. So an attempted break-in would have been a little scary anyway, but when you find out

that two of your colleagues were stabbed and shot to death on the same day, it's a lot of enough to bring you to your knees. And as she was telling the police the story, Dr. Boutra realized that she and her husband would have been home at that time, if not for one little change in their plans. One of their friends they met for lunch that day had been running late. He used a walker to get around, and it slowed him down. Dr. Boutra's husband had teased him about it at lunch. Now they realized it had probably saved their lives. Oh, God, I kiss me goosebumps. It's always wild to me to think about that kind of stuff. Like, you could have made a thousand little decisions over the years that saved your life, and you'll never know about it.

There's no way to know. Or you could make some little tiny change in your routine and end up getting hit by a bus. You just never know. But it's enough to make you want to just sit in a room and stare at the wall all day if you let yourself think about it too much. So let's not. Sorry I brought it up. Yeah, but as you're staring at the wall, a plane could fall from the sky into your house, a laudony Darko, killing you instantly. Okay, I said I shouldn't have brought it up. God.

So I actually have a story about this. I'm going to take us off road for a second. I was taking my boyfriend to work. He worked nights at like a gas station. And I was in college. And he, I was driving him to work. And I decided on a whim to take like a scenic route home. Because I was like, oh, you know, just dropped my boyfriend off. Like feeling like we, you know, hanging out, feeling good. And as I passed the street I would have taken, like a, I'm not kidding, a flaming car wreck. Holy shit. Yeah. I was like, oh, that could have been me.

Jesus Christ. Oh, my God. Yeah, it freaked me out. Freak me out. That's what I'm saying. Anyway, back to the story. Detective Moyes took the Butre's story seriously right away. No way in hell was this a coincidence.

Their killer had killed Roger and Mary Brumbach and tried to kill the Butras on the very same day. God only knew who was going to be next. It was time to catch this asshole now. So the Omaha police chief put together a task force and invited the FBI in to assist. At this point, it was crystal clear. They were dealing with somebody holding a serious grudge

against the pathology department at Creighton. So they dug into the personnel files going all the way back to 2001. Now, they'd already looked at these files back during the Hunter Sherman investigation, but they didn't go quite so far back. And right away, one of the files stood out. Why? Because where most of the residence files were in little folders, this file from 2001 was in a full-ass three-ring binder. Like, oh boy, you know you've got a live one when their personnel file is 50 freaking pages long. Yeah, I don't want to criticize the investigators, but I feel like they really should have started with the giant

three-ring binder that was presumably glowing bright green, like a task item in a video game. Yeah. Well, we can just assume it was at the bottom of the pile or something, right? So, whose vile was it? Well, it belonged to a guy named Dr. Anthony Joseph Garcia. He'd done a residency in the pathology program at Creighton until he'd been terminated for, quote, inappropriate conduct toward another resident. Ooh. And campers, guess which professors were involved in the termination? Dr. Hunter, Dr. Brumbach, and Dr. Butra.

Boom. I can just imagine the rush of adrenaline Detective Moy's got as he read all that, can't you? Like, that was a lead. So who was Anthony Garcia? He grew up in Southern California. where his dad was a postal worker and his mom was a nurse. They worked a lot, so he was mostly brought up by his grandparents. Anthony had a few problems in school.

He was diagnosed with a learning disability in the second grade. He still managed to stay with his classmates and move on from one grade to the next, but it was a close call sometimes, and he didn't have a lot of friends or romantic relationships. But learning disability or no, he was really good at math, and he really liked it. He wanted to be a mathematician, in fact. but his dad wanted him to be a doctor. And according to a journal, Anthony kept years later,

his parents, quote, wouldn't let him pursue his dream. Now, the dynamics of a thing like this are complicated. Now, obviously, your parents cannot force you to become a doctor. They really can't. Whatever they're telling you, they really can't. But they can put a lot of psychological pressure on you. And if you're a guy like Anthony, who didn't really have friends growing up and kind of substituted his parents and siblings instead, so that they were sort of the only social group he had, that can be powerful. However, it is worth noting that Garcia's parents have publicly said that they never pressured him to become a doctor, that they just wanted him to do what made him happy. So who the hell knows? He could be lying through his teeth about that. So Garcia went to college at California State in L.A., graduated with so-so grades, just kind of average, and did pretty crappy on the MCAT, which is the standardized test you take to get into medical school.

Tests showed he had pretty significant problems with reading, which is bad news for a prospective med student, because you have to do a lot of reading. But crappy MCAT score or no, he managed to get accepted to one medical school at the University of Utah. Once there, he put in a request for some academic accommodations, writing, quote, I read so slow I spend virtually all my time reading material over and over again. So much time has spent reading that I have no time to socialize, sometimes no time to wash clothes or dishes. Dude. Go be a mathematician. It's what you want to do. It's what you're good at. Follow your dream, man. But for whatever reason, he was just determined to become a doctor. It was rough going. He had to repeat biochemistry, physiology, and human genetics and ended up on academic probation. He started showing signs of depression and antisocial behavior. He got written up repeatedly for the shitty way he treated patients and peers. Once he got so rough with a patient during a gynecological. exam that she started crying. Yikes.

Did he no else just clinch? That gave me the Wiggins. Yeah, I know. I'm like crossing my legs right now. After five years of study, he barely made it through, having to retake his certification tests several times before finally earning the title of Dr. Garcia. He'd worked his way through med school and should have been set for life, but as datelines, Josh Mankowitz puts it, his life began. to be lit in large measure by the bridges he burned along the way. Oh, well said, Spankowitz.

That's my affectionate little nickname for Josh. Hi, Josh, big fan. You're such a fucking weirdo. I'm sorry, dateline is very important to me. It is. I know that. And it's why I love you. Spankowitz. In 2000, at 27, Garcia moved to Omaha to begin his residency in pathology at Creighton,

another one of those decisions that altered the course of so many lives. Everything started out okay for him in Omaha. His supervisor initially described him as a diligent, hardworking resident, who was doing a good job transitioning from clinician to pathologist. He did well in his hematology rotation. But then things started to hit the skids. Garcia had a bad attitude. During meetings with faculty, he'd start making weird noises like an annoying 12-year-old.

Once, when Dr. Butra asked him to join her in the conference room, he said, I don't feel like it. I'll do what I want. You don't want it. I'm not going to. So there. It's a grown-ass man. I don't want a doctor that shares catchphrases with South Park Carrier. characters. Pack up the stethoscope, Eric Cartman. That's exactly. Oh, I should have said it in a Cartman voice. Anyway, I'm not going to here. Skiy guys, I'm going home. That's a terrible Cartman. I'm rusty. I know. It's been a while since I've had any reason to quote South Park.

It didn't take the Creighton faculty long to notice that Anthony was pretty much shit at doctoring. He didn't have the knowledge he should have, and he didn't even seem interested in the subject matter, his attitude was pretty much just meh, which if you've had any kind of conversation with a doctor, you know that is not the case. They will talk your fucking ear off about stuff you do not understand. Yeah. Doctors are huge nerds for doctoring, which is, you know, that's a good thing. That's what you want. This guy was so clearly somewhere he absolutely didn't belong. And no shade on him for not being good at it in terms of academics. I I wouldn't get a semester in, okay?

So I'm not judging him for that. No. But he was just so clearly, like, he didn't want to do it. And it's just, it's sad. Right. And I think that's what, where we can criticize him is like, I wouldn't be a good fucking doctor, but I'm also not a doctor. So look at that.

But realize that and realize that you've got patients' lives in your hands and go be a flipping mathematician, man, which is what you're good at. And he's a full grown adult. Like, it's not some like 16-year-old. Like, he's been out of, yeah, he's been out of the house for a decade. Dr. Hunter, looking into Garcia's med school history, started wondering how in the hell this guy had ever gotten into their program in the first place. It had taken Garcia five years to graduate. He failed step one of his board exams three times.

This, in addition to the evaluations he was getting from the rotation, was not a good sign for Dr. Garcia. Most of his colleagues and supervisors avoided giving him evaluations, though, because they knew that anything they put in writing would go on his permanent record. Doctors are notoriously hesitant to torpedo other doctors' careers, even when somebody really, really deserves it. But there was one doctor who didn't have any such qualms, Dr. Chandra Boutra. Good for her. Mm-hmm. She wrote, Dr. Garcia showed a marked lack of initiative and interest. He took no responsibility for his

cases. His knowledge is very poor. When specifically asked to read up on certain topics and report back, he never did. Creeply, though, she did give him high marks on one thing. While he lacked a basic understanding of medicine, Garcia was excellent at anything that involved cutting. As Cordes and Cooper put it in pathological, he was good with a knife. We're going to break it there for part one campers. This is a big story and we've got a lot more to tell you next week. But for now, lock your doors, light your lights, and stay safe until we get together again around the true crime campfire. And we want to send a grateful shout out to a few of our lovely patrons. Thank you so much to Katie, James, Lisa, Ella, Amy, Kara,

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