True Crime Campfire - Mr. Never Was: The Story of Dr. Gerald Barnes

Episode Date: June 17, 2022

No matter how many apples you eat in a day, you’re gonna eventually have to go see the doctor. It’s an unfortunate but necessary part of the human experience to go into that cold little room, put on a gown with no back, try not to gag on the tongue depressor, and hold your breath while they stick a needle in your arm. It’s not fun. And it’s bad enough without having to worry about whether the doctor who’s doing it to you is qualified to be there. We put a lot of faith in our healthcare providers. Sometimes we put our actual lives in their hands. It’s high-stakes stuff. But as stories like “Dr. Death” have taught us, our faith isn’t always well-placed. Join us for one of the most audacious cases of medical malpractice we’ve ever heard of, and forgive us in advance if it haunts your nightmares. Sources:https://caselaw.findlaw.com/us-9th-circuit/1096465.htmlCNBC's "American Greed," Episode "The Impostor"Investigation Discovery's "Who the BLEEP," episode "Bad Medicine"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gerald_BarnbaumNew York Times, Kenneth B. Noble: https://www.nytimes.com/1996/04/17/us/doctor-s-specialty-turns-out-to-be-masquerade.htmlSan Francisco Chronicle, Elizabeth Fernandez: https://www.sfgate.com/crime/article/Bizarre-Medical-Masquerade-Determined-con-man-2950633.phpFollow 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]! https://true-crime-campfire.myspreadshop.com/Become 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. No matter how many apples you eat in a day, you're going to eventually have to go see the doctor. It's an unfortunate but necessary part of the human experience to go into that cold little room, put on a gown with no back, try not to gag on the tongue depressor, and hold your breath while they stick a needle in your arm. It's not fun, and it's bad enough without having to

worry about whether the doctor who's doing it to you is qualified to be there. We put a lot of faith in our health care providers. Sometimes we put our actual lives in their hands. It's high-stakes stuff, But as stories like Dr. Death have taught us, our faith isn't always well placed. Join us for one of the most audacious cases of medical malpractice we've ever heard of. And forgive us in advance if it haunts your nightmares. This is Mr. Never Was, the story of Dr. Gerald Barnes. So, campers, for this one, we're at the upscale Pacific Southwest Medical Group Clinic in Irvine, California, December 27, 1979. A physician's assistant named Rick Delisandro was going over some lab results from the day before

when something caught his eye and hit his inner alarm button full blast. The report on the blood work for a patient named John McKenzie was showing a blood sugar reading of 1200. A normal fasting blood sugar level in a patient that age is under 100. 1,200 is just bananas high, and Alessandro was sick to his stomach when he saw what the doctor who saw this patient the day before had done for him. Despite McKenzie coming in with classic symptoms of adult onset diabetes, extreme thirst, frequent urination, dizziness, weight loss, dry mouth, this Dr. Gerald Barnes had sent him home with a prescription for a vertigo drug. A medication for dizziness. That was it.

No emergency hospitalization, no urgency whatsoever, and apparently no recognition that this dude was very likely in a diabetic crisis. Feeling panicky, Delassandro immediately called McKenzie's home number. No answer. Delessandro tried his emergency contact number. They hadn't heard from him but thought his ex-wife, the mother of his little two-year-old daughter might have. But nope, no luck there either.

A sick feeling in the pit of his stomach, D'Alessandro finally called the local police and sent them to do a welfare check on McKenzie. Officers rushed to his house and when they got no response to their knock, they broke down the door. But it was too late. John McKenzie, a 29-year-old Navy man and beloved father,

was dead on his kitchen floor. He still had the prescription Barnes had given him clutched in his hand. The poor guy had come home from his appointment, lapsed into a diabetic coma, and died right there in his kitchen. His family was devastated. John hadn't even known he was diabetic. Now, his two-year-old daughter didn't have a dad anymore. The worst part of this for physician's assistant Rick Dallessandro was that he and a few other colleagues at the clinic had already been kind of side-eyeing Dr. Gerald Barnes. Despite being a popular favorite with staff and patience for his easygoing, funny personality,

the guy just didn't really seem to know what he was doing a lot of the time. Like, for example, his suturing technique was just weird. He'd close the top layer of skin, but not the layers underneath, so the skin would look all funky and dimpled where it should have been smooth. And he didn't even seem to know the basics of sterilizing a wound. They got a lot of patients with industrial-type injuries at the practice, and Barnes would just barely splash some saline over a wound and then start sowing up, which is just like sending bacteria an engraved invitation to just take up residence and start oozing pus.

Plus, he seemed to lean on his physician assistant more than your average doctor would. A lot of, okay, Rick, I agree. You can take care of that. It's like, and catch me if you can. Like, do you concur? I concur. Absolutely, yeah. And the guy had a habit of just disappear. appearing to God knows where when he had patients waiting on him. He'd be MIA for like an hour or which drove Rick Dallessandro up the wall because he'd have to scramble to start IVs, take care of wounds, stuff like that. And then Dr. Barnes would come waltzing in with his supremely confident attitude, charm the patient, say, looks good, Rick, I agree, and waltz out again. Annoying and a little

bit suspicious. In fact, D'Alessandro had gone to his superiors at the clinic with some concerns about the doc's weaknesses as a practitioner. But they told him, hey, the guy's great with the patients, he reflects well on this clinic, he's fine. But it seemed obvious to DeLessandro that, as he later told 48 hours, Dr. Barnes hadn't been trained right. Despite all that, the guy was busy, seeing upwards of 40 patients every day, doing physical exams, interpreting labs, reading x-rays, the basic repertoire of a general practitioner.

Now, obviously, not all doctors are created equal. I mean, somebody's graduating at the bottom of these classes, and everybody has different strengths and weaknesses. You know, they say D's get degrees. That's true. It's very but true. You might be shitty at suturing, but a great diagnostician. And Dr. Barnes did have one significant strength. He had an encyclopedic knowledge of prescription drugs, like to an impressive degree.

But despite all that, Barnes had just missed something a first-year memorandum. student would have caught in a heartbeat. Hell, I would have caught it. I would have fucking caught it. That's classic diabetes, absolutely. John McKenzie had presented with a textbook case of diabetes. This wasn't just an honest mistake. This was scary.

Yeah. And then it got quite a bit scarier. A night or two after the police discovered John McKenzie's body, Dallessandro was hanging out at home when his phone rang. The man on the line identified. identified himself as a local attorney. The guy was like, we need to talk, and I need you to keep it absolutely confidential. I can't tell you any more than this, or I'll get disbarred. But you need to look into the background of this Dr. Gerald Barnes you work for. Dallessandro must have been taken

aback, but the lawyer refused to answer any of his questions. He couldn't. But he said it was crucial that Dallessandro look into this doctor's credentials and then tell whichever authorities needed to know. God, this poor dude. Like one minute he's just doing his job, looking at patient's lab reports, and then the next he's in the flipping born identity. Yeah. This is the kind of thing that wouldn't happen these days because like you get a call from an unknown number and you just like go to voicemail. There's no like. Exactly. Like just call her ID. Well, I think the lawyer actually did identify himself. He just said, I can't tell you more than this. Oh yeah. He would have left a message on my phone. But it would never have been out like a moment of like, listen very

carefully. You're like, call me back, please. But Rick Dallessandro is clearly a camper at heart and he decided he was up to the challenge. So the next morning, he woke up extra early so he could slip into work before the owner and the medical director usually got there. He knew what he had to do and he was going to have to risk his job to do it. Probably feeling like he was going to get caught any second, Dallessandro dug into the clinic's confidential employee files.

to see what he could find on Dr. Barnes. Then, with Barnes' file and hand, he called the California State Medical Board in Sacramento. He told them he needed to make sure this doctor was properly licensed and everything, and he faxed them a copy of Barnes' diploma and a copy of his medical license. And then, almost as an afterthought, he also sent a picture of Dr. Barnes. About 15 minutes later, the woman from the state board called back. As Dalla Sondro later told investigation discovery, she was freaking out.

He could hear her voice trembling. That's how shaken up she was. We have a problem, she said. Wait by your fax machine. I'm sending you some stuff. And a few seconds after they hung up, the fax machine came to life. And as page after page came spitting out, D'Alessandro couldn't believe what he was seeing. The address listed for Dr. Barnes was in a town hundreds of miles away from Irvine. What the hell? Barnes isn't commuting 400 miles each way every day. Why is this listed as his current address? And then as the last page came sliding out of the fax machine, Delassandro's

blood froze. There was a picture in the file, a smiling headshot of Dr. Gerald Barnes, and it looked nothing like the man he'd been working with for two and a half years. Dr. Barnes, or whatever his name really was, was a fraud. DeLessandro reported all this to the police right away, of course, and in August 1980, Dr. Barnes was arrested for practicing medicine without a license, and second-degree murder. And you'll love this. They put the habeas grab-us on him at the clinic, and as they were leading him out in handcuffs, he looked at Rick DeLessandro with this kind of wounded puppy expression on his face and said, why didn't you come to me before you did this? Like he was the wounded party. Yeah. It's like you don't even trust me after I lied to you and killed a guy. How could you? Isn't our fraternal bond of doctorhood worth more than one dude's life? Clearly, that was his hot take. In the course of the investigation, the Orange County Police soon uncovered his real identity. His name was Gerald Barnbaum, a former pharmacist from Chicago. See, that's why he knew so much about meds. Five years earlier, he'd gotten himself in a little spot of, of bother, went to trial for Medicaid fraud. He was acquitted, but the State Board of Pharmacy thought

the case was good enough to yank his license. And that was when Barnbaum decided to reinvent himself as a doctor. Not by, like, going to med school or anything boring like that, just by, you know, saying he was a doctor. And collecting a doctor's salary and treating patients, of course. What's the worst that can happen, right? Of course, that is what John McKenzie's family had just found out. Now, back in the 80s, the penalties for practicing medicine without a license were scarily light. I guess it hadn't occurred to anybody that this might just be a scosh dangerous or whatever. They were too busy doing cocaine and drinking crystal Pepsi. And wearing day glow leg warmers and designing the DeLorean, right?

Yeah. So, yeah, the penalties for being a counterfeit dock were light, but the penalties for second-degree murder, not light. So on the advice of his attorneys, Barnbaum slash Barnes ended up taking a plead of voluntary manslaughter and practicing medicine without a license, and got a three-year prison sentence for his trouble. Not even a little bit long enough, if you ask me. And as we'll see in a little bit, not enough to phase Mr. Barnbaum or make the slightest dent in his obsession with being a fake doctor. A faux physician. A foe-sician, if you will. I will not. Rude. Now, you'd think a horror story like the death of John McKenzie would be the final

chapter in a story like Barn Bombs, but our boy was just getting started. Gerald had always loved acting. He'd done stand-up comedy in theater and college, and by all accounts he was pretty good, especially in comedic roles. But when he couldn't seem to make his acting career take off, he'd gone to pharmacy school instead. And once that hit the skids, he'd apparently decided to get back into acting. He'd chosen Dr. Gerald Barnes as his role of a lifetime, and you were going to pry it out of his cold dead hands. He later told 48 hours, I knew I was better than a lot of them out there.

By them, of course, he means actual doctors, you know, people who went through medical school. He claimed he got plenty of training. He's a quick study, and he practiced surgical techniques on chicken. Piece of cake. Yeah, whatever you say, Walter's shitty. Ah, yes, chickens. The natural step down from people.

Exactly. So, how did Barnbaum come up with this fake identity in the first place? Well, after he lost his pharmacy license back in Chicago, after that little Medicaid fraud debacle, he decided he wanted to get as far away from the windy city as possible. California sounded good. Warm. So Barnbaum got his hands on a California physician's directory and found an orthopedic surgeon in Stockton with a name really similar to his.

Gerald Barnbaum became Dr. Gerald Barnes. Next, he got some custom-printed stationery made that said from the desk of Dr. Gerald Barnes. And using that, he wrote to the California State Medical Board. He needed a copy of his medical license, he told them. He'd just been through a nasty breakup with his wife and she'd burned down his house on him,

destroyed all his records, including the medical license, and now he was trying to apply for jobs and he was going to be shit out of luck until he could get all his records a place. Biches, man, I'm right. Biches. Biches be shopping. and burning down your houses.

Don't you know that was a fun day at the California Medical Board headquarters, like when that letter came in? Who doesn't love a little spicy tea to brighten up the workday? Even if it's just some doctor you don't know. Like, oh my God, Joyce, get over here and look at this. This guy's crazy ex-wife burned down his house. And the thing is, lies like this are a special brand of genius. It's like so specific and weird that people think it has to be true.

Because who would make something like that up? Con artists count on that reaction. And for our boy, Jerry Barnbaum, it paid off. They sent him a fresh copy of Dr. Gerald Barnes' medical license. No questions asked. By the way, this dude did get married like five times over the years. I wish we knew more about that part of the story because, you know, You know there's good stories.

But there's, you know there is. Unfortunately, only one of his exes seems to have spoken publicly about him, and we'll get to her in a little bit. But the juice, the juice has to be real. So now, the fake Dr. Barnes had an official medical license. His next move was to reach out to the University of Wisconsin, where the real life Dr. Barnes went to medical school and run the same bullshit story past them to get a copy of his diploma. And once again, his little house fire scam worked like a charm. In 1977, Dr. Gerald Barnes, air quotes, moved to Orange County, California, and unbeknownst to the real doctor whose identity he'd stolen, used his name and social security number to buy cars, rent apartments, and get jobs at a few different medical practices around town. Destroying the real Dr. Barnes' credit in the process, obviously, but the poor dude didn't know that yet.

He wouldn't find out that Barnbaum existed until the death of patient John McKenzie in 79. Oh, my God. And he found out in the worst way. His wife was driving to the store, and she heard a new story about Dr. Gerald Barnes being arrested for second-degree murder. Like, poor woman, I'm surprised she didn't run her car off the road. Oh, my God. That had to be the weirdest experience. Like, when she got home and, like, her husband was just there, like, I know, having a sniffed her a burb.

And he's like, what? why are you crying? This is crazy. Oh, Lord. It probably won't surprise you to hear that our boy had the standard con man charm. I don't think he could have pulled this off if he hadn't. At almost every place he worked, he had people eating out of his hand. Apparently, most people didn't have Rick D'Alessandro's radar for bullshit. In fact, Dr. Paul Frankel told the New York Times, quote, everyone who had contact with him thought he was a remarkable individual and an excellent physician.

He was just the best. Yeah, no, no, he wasn't. He didn't go to med school for fuck's sake. But people who worked with Dr. Barnes later said he was sort of a platonic ideal of the perfect doctor. Beautiful bedside manner, had a shit together, plus he was just a barrel of fun. Oh, yeah, charming. There's that word again. funny, generous with his time and attention, and according to the times, a great storyteller.

Yeah, I bet he was. One of the things he liked to tell stories about was his many volunteer trips to other poorer countries. He'd risked his life to give free medical care to the people who needed it most. Just like Albert Schweitzer. It's a, you know, not at all like that. God, every time Albert Schweitzer gets brought up on the show, like some bullshit's about to happen because, God. Absolutely. Dr. J.C. Smith loved to compare himself to Albert Schweitzer.

Yep. I heard that. There's something extra gross about the fact that this guy went out of his way to get involved in volunteer medicine. Like, obviously, he wasn't doing it out of the goodness of his heart because he has none. So why would he do it to burnish his image as a good guy, TM, a doctor? with a heart of gold to match his 24-karrant bank account? Something to put on the old CV. The kind of story you tell at a cocktail party, and everybody goes,

Aww. Yep. And I bet it didn't hurt as an opening line with the ladies either. It's like, hey, beautiful. Did I ever tell you about that time I was with doctors without borders, and I had to run for my life in a hail of gunfire while using my body as a human shield for a small child with diabetes? No?

Didn't mention that? Well, let me buy you a drink and we'll chat. Ech. And of course, I say, ugh, because again, the man had no medical training. God only knows what kind of havoc he spread in these resource-starved places where he was volunteering. The kind of infections that flared up in the wake of his nasty-ass wound care techniques. It reminds me of that awful Renee Bach, was that her name, that missionary lady who pretended to be a doctor and went over to Uganda to run a quote-unquote medical facility and like a hundred kids died. If you don't know that story, look it up if you can stomach it.

It's horrific and infuriating, and it'll probably make you want to set something on fire. Like, for example, her face. Yeah, hopefully her face. Like, I believe Miles Power on YouTube has done some work about good old Renee and her particular brand of evil. He's one of my favorite debunker YouTubers. He did a whole documentary about the AIDS denialists. He's phenomenal. So check him out if you have time.

And I'll try to find this video and post it. Yeah. and I can only assume her motives and Dr. Barnes here are similar. People with massive egos in no goddamn sense. Okay. Okay. Well, Whitney, if someone does a good deed and no one's around to pat them on the back, did the good deed happen at all?

That's a good point. If you don't get the ass paths, does it even matter? Like, why else would you do good things? Jeez. So, anywho, as we told you, Barnbaum slash Barnes' medical career started a night. and two years later, we have the death of poor John McKenzie, Barnbaum's plea to manslaughter and a three-year prison sentence. Now, three years was bad enough for what, in my opinion, amounted to murder, but Barnbaum didn't even serve that long. He was out in 19 months on good

behavior. And what do you think he did within about 15 seconds of strolling out the prison gates in 1983? Started the whole scam up again, of course. Dr. Gerald Barnes was back, baby. John McKenzie's death doesn't seem to have troubled him the tiniest bit. Remember, he felt like he was a way better doctor than most, and it chapped his ass all to hell that the government had dared to shove its big nose into his business. So, unfortunately, for the clinics he conned and the staggering number of patients he treated on a day-to-day basis, Barnes carried on with the charade. Now, I know some of y'all, my age, y'all's, will remember that kids in the hall sketch about the really bad doctor member Dave Foley? He's like,

I'm a bad doctor. It's one of my favorites. And at one point he says, but I figured, how long can it last? I mean, how far can you coast on charm? Well, pretty far, actually. And as scary as that is,

it's true. As the next decade and a half marched along, our counterfeit doctor went from clinic to clinic, collecting an impressive salary and an equally impressive number of ex-wives, at least one of whom ended up filing a complaint against him for domestic abuse. Guess by the time he got home at the end of the day,

he used up all that charm on his parents, patience. It wasn't a success-only journey, of course. Even really talented con artists are going to get caught sometimes, and Barnbaum was no exception. In 1984, he got nailed for grand theft in writing fake prescriptions and got sentenced to three years and four months in prison. I couldn't find out exactly how much of it he served, but it wasn't the full sentence, because it never is. By 1989, he'd been out long enough to have gotten his dumbass caught again, this time for stealing the identity of a San Francisco pharmacist named Donald. Barnes. He pulled this one off by calling poor Donald up on the phone one morning, claiming

to be from the state board. We need you to verify your social security number and license number, he said, and poor Donald fell for it, as many of us would, especially back then. Apparently, Barnbaum's 84 conviction got into his head a little bit because now that he was out of prison again, he took a little break from his Dr. Gerald Barnes persona and tried getting a job as a pharmacist this time, which he actually knew how to do. He got caught when the pharmacy he applied with called up the real Donald Barnes to talk about the job, and Donald was like, That's not me. Womp, womp. For this, our boy served about five total minutes in prison before getting out on parole.

A couple years later, he went back in for about 10 seconds for violating his parole. But for the next four years after that, he was on top of the world. For one thing, he met wife number five, Lisa. They met at Temple, where they both sang in the choir. Oh, this I love. They always seem to sing in the damn church choir every single time. We're in this case the synagogue choir. It's like you always got to have that mask firmly in place when your entire life is a lie.

Yeah, I think it's a way to, one, you know, get the most goodwill with the least amount of work because you're in a choir. But also people are always complimenting you. Oh, what a lovely voice, even if you have a shit voice. So it serves two narcissistic needs. He introduced himself, of course, as a doctor, gave her a business card, Dr. Gerald Barnes, and as always, he charmed her. The bastard was just so easy to like. He took her to dinner in the theater and the opera, and he told her lots of stories about his volunteer work overseas.

But there were red flags. Lisa noticed he never seemed to have much spending money, even though he had a nice condo and a Cadillac. His story was that he used to have a comfortable savings account, and then his second wife was diagnosed with terminal illness, and he spent it all on her care. Uh-huh. Sounds reasonable, right? But something about Dr. Barnes triggered a tiny little alarm bell in Lisa's brain. She's a smart lady, but she couldn't really articulate what it was that bothered her. And when you can't put a name to something, it kind of tends to make it less real.

And that's definitely true. Yeah. And I want to stop here and give a little bit of, you know, single Katie relationship advice. The best advice my mom ever gave me about dating is that I don't need a reason. That's right. I met this guy on a dating app and I was going to go meet him for coffee and like I couldn't, like Lisa couldn't articulate why I wasn't looking forward to the date. Like it was making me really anxious. Like I wasn't really like, you know, meeting new people is exciting.

but I wasn't excited. And I was like, I don't really want to go, but I feel like I have to. And I was like, why? Don't. Yeah, you don't have to. You don't do anything you don't feel comfortable with. And it was like a light went off in my brain. I was like, oh.

Yeah, that's a huge. That's huge. And it's actually really difficult to do sometimes. But if you can learn that lesson and train yourself to do that early on, you're going to save yourself a world to hurt. Mm-hmm. On top of her inability to really like understand why she didn't like what was going on, Everybody loved the guy.

Her family loved him. Her friends all thought he was the cats, pajamas. That little warning voice in the back of her head just couldn't compete. In 1994, she married him, and it didn't take long for her to realize she'd made a huge mistake. Unlike her new husband, Lisa had never been married before. She really wanted to make it work, but the guy was so arrogant. Lisa told the San Francisco Chronicle that whenever they'd watched the TV show, E.R. together, Gerald would yell out the diagnoses before the TV doctors could. And he'd just be

delighted with himself. Like, that meant he was super doc or some shit. It was annoying. Gross. Which, of course, I do when I watch Law & Order or Criminal Minds. But, like, it's about your attitude. I try not to be smug about it when I'm right. Especially, like, when half the show is spoon-feeding you clues, which ER does, by the way. That's like half the show. It's not house. Yeah, it's not that difficult. Where it's like, it's not lupus. So what could it be? It's the black plague, surprise.

And then there was his total lack of tact when it came to his patients. He was always telling her they're embarrassing medical secrets, like a gossipy old lady. So you're never going to believe who has herpes. Oh, my God. So would be like, are you supposed to be telling me that? like using people's full names because I'm pretty sure you're not. And Gerald would get mad like, hey, who's the doctor here? You? No, I didn't think so.

Excuse me, Lisa. Where did you go to medical school? Oh, wait, I didn't go either. Sorry about that. Just the arrogance of the suit. And this is creepy. After she married Barnbaum, she thought his name was Barnes. Lisa started having migraine headaches a lot. sometimes he'd give her pills

later she found out he was writing prescriptions in her name and picking them up the drugstore she had no idea what he was using them for selling them taking them himself putting them in her morning coffee now I should be clear Lisa did not actually insinuate that in any of the sources I saw

but I noticed she told the Chronicle that it wasn't just the migraines she started feeling like crap pretty much the day she married him and then after she left him she felt fine Now, that could just be the release of all that stress, but I'm just saying, I would not put it past this creepy little crime bag. I feel so bad for Lisa. She seems like a really nice, intelligent person, and you can tell this really shook her to her foundations.

Like, she said to The Chronicle, people wonder why I didn't know he wasn't a doctor. How could I know? Absolutely, how could she know? It just amazes me when people are such huge assholes as to say stuff like that. Like, the man was working as a doctor. He was making Dr. Money. He went to continuing ed classes about medical stuff. He had medical textbooks all over the place.

The man performed minor surgeries on people, which remember, he said was a piece of cake because he practiced on chickens, which I hope to God were already dead at the time. He's like, no, no, no, it's fine, it's fine. I've clocked hundreds of hours in the operating room. You're in very good hands. He doesn't mention that by the operating room, he means the game operation he had as a kid.

Remember operation? Let me just grab this. Ah, shit. You remember that game, right? I still have trauma from that thing. That noise. It makes my eyelid twitch just to think about it. You know, human patients should really go when you make a mistake on us, too.

It would probably be a lot fewer, like, sponges left inside people's abdominal cavities if we did. But, of course, the doctors also might be a little bit jumpier, too. So it's probably six to the half dozen, but it's just thought. I think doctors could afford to be a little jumpier. They've been too comfy for too long, those white-jacketed bastards in their ivory towers. Damn straight. Get on it, science. So Lisa and Gerald hadn't been married long before he started a new job in L.A.

This was his cushiest one yet, and by far the dumbest move he'd ever made. Because the job he took was head physician with Executive Health Group, a health care provider that offered occupational medical exams to big companies, and to law enforcement agencies, including the FBI. What could go wrong, right? They even bragged about Dr. Barnes' extensive experience in their promotional brochure. Meanwhile, he must have been eating up the fact that he was putting one over on all these well-trained agents who were coming to him for prostate exams, breast exams, and pap smears.

Yeah, let that sink in. It's by far the creepiest part of this whole thing. And Barnes loved it. As he'd later tell 48 hours, quote, I'm proud I pulled that off, especially on the FBI who I have contempt for. In the nine months he was there, he examined hundreds of patients, including almost 100 FBI agents. His say-so determined whether these people were fit for duty, and he had no idea what the hell he was doing, so surprise, surprise, he fucked up a lot. Later, investigators would uncover a whole slew of mistakes, failing to diagnose a case of prostate cancer. terrifying, missing a serious heart condition by misreading an EKG.

All kinds of incorrect blood work and meds people didn't need, just yikes. And multiple agents had their jobs disrupted because of him, got put on inactive duty or whatever, all on the word of this numb nuts who was just having a ball, practicing medicine as some kind of bizarre performance art. Fortunately for everybody, it all came to a screeching halt when Barnbaum and his wife went to a wealthy doctor's holiday party, and ran smack into Rick Dallessandro, the physician assistant who'd caught him in the first place in 1979. Dallessandro took one look at Barnbaum with his hello, my name is Dr. Gerald Barnes, name tag, and knew his old nemesis was at it again. Of course, Barnbaum tried to play it off, hey, Rick, how you doing?

But Dallessandro was not in the mood today. He said, not great, Gerald, because I see you're pulling this same stuff again. And on Monday, he went to executive health groups administrators and told them what was going on. and it's a scary testament to Barnbaum's charisma that at first they didn't believe it. The administrator pulled out all Dr. Barnes's official documentation, like, see, he's totally legit. And just about that time, Dr. Barnes himself walked in. He looked at his boss and said, look, this is all just a big misunderstanding. This guy and I, we had some problems years and years ago.

He's probably still mad at me. I'm just going to go gather some information for you, and it'll clear this whole thing right. up. And then he turned on his heel and left and didn't come back for the rest of the day. Just gathering proof. Be right back. And can we take a moment and appreciate how unshakable Rick Talessandro is? Because I love this frigging guy. I know. Because here's the thing is, you know that Jerry was absolutely relying on like social pressure. to keep, to make him keep his mouth shut. Delisander's like, no, actually, fuck you.

I'm going to ruin your life. So good. So now executive health was on the alert. And when they found out about it, so was the state medical board. And in the spring of 1996, they sent an investigator to the clinic where Barnbaum was working. The investigator later told the Chronicle, he showed me big drawers full of medical samples. It was like he was trying to convince me. doctor, look at all, look at all these props that I have. Would a, would a fake doctor have

these? He also told the guy he had terminal prostate cancer and said all these false allegations had been so stressful that he was thinking of taking his own life. Oh, Lord. And then Campers, he faked a heart attack. Right there in front of the state investigator. Very unconvincingly, too. I mean, they called him a doctor, a real one. But he was fine. I guess his acting skills didn't go that far. Man, I would love to have been a fly on the wall for that. Oh, my God.

It was only when he was arrested for this latest fraud that his wife, Lisa, found out he wasn't really a doctor. And that his name wasn't really Gerald Barnes. Oh, God. She didn't even know the man's real name. I can't even imagine what that must have been like. Lisa immediately got the marriage in old, good for her, and worked with the investigators to help build an ironclad case against him. And y'all, my girl was pissed.

She stopped calling her ex by his name. He doesn't deserve a name, she told The Chronicle. His life was a fraud. He is a sociopath. He has no soul, no compassion, no. remorse, he felt he had the right to be a doctor. Now, as you can imagine, these FBI folks, Barnbaum had such contempt for, didn't take what he'd done lightly, where before he'd always skated by with short sentences, this time it

wasn't going to happen. He had picked the wrong group to mess with. He had fucked around and promptly found out. This time, he was prosecuted in federal court, which should be. if you're familiar with the feds, they don't fuck around. They don't try cases they're not going to win. And Jerry ended up taking a plea deal.

And Jerry ended up taking a plea to unlawful dispensing of controlled substances, fraudulent use of controlled substance registration, and mail fraud. Big stuff. And his sentence at the time was 12 and a half years. And, you know,

I guess this was the wake-up call he needed because Barnbong really applied himself in prison, took classes, got some therapy, and finally realized what he was doing was wrong. Oh, great. I'm just kidding. He took a bunch of medical correspondence courses in there and acted like such a model inmate that the prison guards came to trust him. Yeah. Just take a moment to Sycampers because, who, you're about to have rage aneurysms. then he found out there was this heating and air conditioning course he could take at another prison, you know, valuable job training for when he got out.

And he asked to be transferred to the place where they offered it. He knew that Taft, the prison where he was housed, was minimum security. And when they trusted you, they sometimes let you transfer yourself to another facility. By taking you to the bus station. handing you a ticket and telling you, okay, they're expecting you in two days. They called it unescorted furlough. I shit, do not. Jesus, Jones, that is unbelievable.

So that's what they did. They handed this repeat con artist a bus ticket and told him to go turn himself in at the other prison in two days. And I know this is going to shock you campers, so sit down if you need to, but he didn't do that. Yeah, this wasn't the freewheeling. 60s or 70s, right? This is in the year 2000 this man a known con artist

was allowed to just fucking leave jail. I cannot deal with this, y'all. Was the warden Ned Flanders? Just let him go! He'll show up eventually. It's Jerry. Because he's proven himself to be

such a trustworthy guy in the past, right? Boy, so instead, he used his bus ticket to escape, and within days, he was Dr. Gerald Barnes again, practicing medicine at a North Hollywood clinic. This man typecast himself. He really did. He also bought himself a new car and about $600 worth of new clothes with credit cards he opened

in the real Dr. Barnes' name, so yet another assault on this poor dude's credit rating. Now, he might have gotten away with this if he'd had the sense God gave a tapeworm and used a different name, or even set up shop somewhere other than Southern California, which is where he'd been running this scam for the past two decades. But bless his heart, he just couldn't give up on Dr. Barnes, his role of a lifetime. So it didn't take long for the cops to find him, like literally less than a month. But when they nabbed him, he was right there in his white coat, prescription pad in his pockets, desoscope on, the whole nine yards. He saw him taking out the handcuffs, and he said, oh, wow, you guys are good. No.

You're just an idiot. Which he actually seemed to realize later on 48 hours, he was like, I didn't do it right that time. Yeah, I think maybe using the same name in the same area with the same dude's information, maybe wasn't the way to get away with your little one-man play, Jerry. Yeah. Also, does it count as an acting gig when you're the only one that knows that's what it is? Like, what? So they hauled his lion ass back to prison where he received another 30 months

added on to his sentence for the escape. He told 48 hours he didn't feel bad about what he did. He was as good a doctor as any of them. But he pinkiespore he'd never do it again if they let him out. Fortunately, he never got the chance. Barnbaum died in prison in 2018. He never apologized to any of his five ex-wives, any of his kids, terrifying that's due to kids,

or any of the patients he violated over the years. And those patients were pissed. So pissed, in fact, that some of them joined forces in a class action lawsuit against executive health group, the clinic where Barnbaum treated the FBI agents. Their complaint claimed not only medical malpractice, but also battery and sexual battery. For the patients who went to him for gyno exams and prostate screenings, that suit was settled for millions in 1999, and I hope everybody got a little bit of closure from that, but honestly, it would be really hard to shake that feeling of violation. And I think it would be really hard

to ever trust a doctor again. Now, we could talk all day about Barnbaum's motives for doing this. According to a prison psychiatrist, he did it because he was depressed and insecure and lacked maturity. Well, duh. Like, I think that's pretty obvious and probably why most of these people do it, regardless of the harm it does. I forgot to mention, by the way, that in addition to all the other terrifying mistakes he made, at one point in his career, Barnbaum worked at a blood clinic, screened about 100,000 donors while he was there. And the people who received that blood had no idea whether it was safe. No clue. There's no way to tell

how many units of blood he might have rubber stamped that shouldn't have been. And that is terrifying. And the thing is, Barnbaum is by no means unique. There have been so many other cases. We couldn't possibly list them all here. There's Dr. Love, a dude who started impersonating a doctor when he was still in his teens. His real name is Malachi Love Robinson. He's 24 now and still at it. His most recent arrest for fraud and grand theft was just last year. You know, when you find work that you love, you'll never work a day in your life. In 2010, a dude named Daniel Ray Stewart posed as a visiting resident in the ER of the Cape Fear Valley Medical Center in North Carolina. Cape Fear, indeed.

And when they caught him, by the way, they realized it wasn't his first time. In 1999, a guy named Adam Litwin faked his way into a surgical residency at UCLA Med Center for six months, guided surgeries on people. Yikes. That's horrifying. And although some of these fakers have creepier reasons, like fake gynecologist Raphael DiPaolo, who was basically just a sexual predator, and Nick Delaney in Australia, who claimed he posed as a doctor to make friends and hit on a hot security. guard at the hospital, most of them seem to be motivated by two things. A desire to swank around,

collect admiration, and just plain old greed. But, of course, they'll tell you they did it to help other people. Barnbaum seemed totally convinced that his motives were altruistic. There's a really scary guy we might actually do an episode about

sometime. His name is Rick Van Thiel. And he is a piece of work. This guy, who a Vegas judge, once called more dangerous than a serial killer, operated out of a filthy, disorganized trailer and often treated patients buck naked. I swear to God this is true.

Yeah, a conspiracy theorist who called himself a sovereign citizen, I roll, I roll, I roll. Ricky Boy seemed to view himself in his gross, naked quackery as some kind of death blow to government tyranny. Yeah, okay, fight that good fight, you fucking weirdo. Fight it with your dick out, I guess. Dicks out for freedom. He quote-unquote treated all kinds of things, but possibly the worst thing he did was to claim he could cure HIV and AIDS by using ozone therapy,

an alternative treatment that supposedly increased the amount of oxygen in your blood and cleans viruses and bacteria out of it. Shockingly, this did not work. And at least one patient died as a result. It's a terrible story. And Van Thiel, who died in 2017, was a truly scary dude who apparently thought of himself as some kind of freedom fighter. Fighting for his freedom to be a dumb, selfish bastard. So the problem persists.

Even though the penalties have gotten a lot harsher since the 90s, and many states have created special task forces to investigate and shut down faux docs. But even now, as the real Dr. Gerald Barnes told 48 hours, it's just too darn easy. My file wasn't flagged soon enough. How is the consumer protected? Isn't it frightening that a patient could go to a doctor's office and not be sure if the doctor really is one? Yeah. Now that you mention it, it really, really is.

And as cases like Dr. Christopher Dunch, aka Dr. Des, have taught us hospitals have a long way to go to fix the good old boyism. them that lets stuff like this flourish. They've got to start turning a more critical eye on themselves and fight that impulse to just cover up their mistakes or else we're in for more of the same. And the next time you check yourself in for surgery, you'll need to sleep with one eye open. So that was a wild one, right, campers?

You know, we'll have another one for 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 today, we have a special birthday shout-out to do. Jocelyn Galvin, you beautiful creature, your girlfriend Roney, asked us to wish you the happiest of slightly belated birthdays. We hope you had a great one. And as always, we also want to send a grateful shout out to a few of our lovely patrons. Thank you so much to Katie, Gina, Emma, Bridget, Amber, Corey, Haley, Magley Puff, awesome, and Cassandra.

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