True Crime Campfire - Pygmalion: Dr. Anthony Pignataro

Episode Date: November 12, 2021

In 1997, a 26 year old woman named Sarah Smith went in for a routine breast augmentation procedure. It should have been an easy, outpatient surgery for this healthy young woman, but it didn't turn out that way. Sarah went into cardiac and respiratory arrest on the operating table, slipped into a coma, and died a few days later. Investigators soon discovered that Sarah wasn't the first of cosmetic surgeon Dr. Anthony Pignataro's patients to die after routine surgery. And the more they investigated this flashy, Lamborghini-driving, safari-hunting doctor, the more skeletons they found in his closet--from a long list of butchered patients to an audacious fraud. Pignataro would face justice for Sarah Smith's death, but that wouldn't be the end of his story. There was an even darker chapter still to be written, this time much closer to home. Join us for a twisting tale reminiscent of "Dr. Death," a stark example of what happens when narcissism and recklessness meet greed. Sources:Ann Rule, Last Dance Last ChanceBuffalo News: https://subscribe.buffalonews.com/e/limit-reached-bn?returnURL=https://buffalonews.com/news/pignataro-a-profile-in-deceit-how-the-failed-west-seneca-surgeons-disastrous-professional-life-brought/article_3ec7b800-b1d0-5287-a981-c9790c18380f.htmlWSVN News: https://wsvn.com/news/investigations/disgraced-doctor-who-poisoned-wife-spotted-on-elder-care-website/Oxygen: https://www.oxygen.com/license-to-kill/crime-news/anthony-pignataro-surgeon-resurfacess-florida-new-nameForensic Files Now: https://forensicfilesnow.com/index.php/tag/anthony-pignataro/Oxygen's "License to Kill," episode "Killer Surgeon""Forensic Files," Episode "Bad Medicine"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]: https://shop.spreadshirt.com/true-crime-campfire/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. In Greek mythology, there's a guy called Pygmalion, a sculptor who carved himself a perfect woman out of marble. And while he was working on her, he started falling in love. Just as he was putting the finishing touches on his creation, she came to life. It's kind of a romantic story on one level.

But if you really think about it, it's also kind of creepy. She's his creation. She exists solely to please him. Who wants a relationship like that? A narcissist, that's who. We're about to tell you about a man whose whole life was a metaphor for the Pygmalion story. A man whose massive ego drove him. to create a life that looked like pure perfection,

a spectacular career as a cosmetic surgeon, money to burn, a bright red Lamborghini, a loving wife and girlfriends on the side. But as we've seen so many times before, underneath that shiny veneer there was nothing there. Just a bunch of set pieces made of cardboard, flimsy enough for a strong wind to knock down, and the wind was coming fast.

This is Pygmalion, the story of Dr. Anthony Pignitaro. So, campers, for this one, we're in Buffalo, New York, August 25th, 1997. A call came in to 911 from an anxious-sounding young man. We need an ambulance here. I'm actually at a doctor's office. A patient's dying. The West Seneca Fire Department. went blazing over to the address the caller had given, the office of cosmetic surgeon Dr. Anthony

Pignitaro. When they got there, they couldn't believe what they were seeing. The doctor was leaning over a beautiful young woman on the operating table, and what the hell was that in his hand? It seemed completely impossible, but there it was. A coat hanger. This guy was using a coat hanger to try and open an airway on his patient. Someone said her heart's not beating. In fact, it only took the EMTs a few moments to realize that the woman was in full cardiac and respiratory arrest. Stunned, the paramedics muscled the doctor aside and began CPR to try and resuscitate her. But the doctor didn't want to be muscled aside. He was hysterical, trying to fight his way past the paramedics and take a tube out of her chest and then trying to intubate her, so incompetently

that these experienced EMTs couldn't believe this man was really a doctor. They kept having to push him away. Please, doctor, just let us do our jobs. After a few minutes of CPR and some defibrillation from their portable machine, they finally got her heart beating again. So at that point, they rushed her out of the office and into the ambulance. Dr. Pignitaro followed them, still frantic and yelling at everybody and getting in the way. As they put the woman into the back of the rig, Pignitaro tried to jump in after her. Now, this was unheard of.

Doctors just don't ride along in the back of the ambulance in a situation like this. most doctors have a great deal of respect for paramedics, and when they show up, they let him do what they got to do. They don't try and get in the way. So this was just bonkers behavior. The EMTs tried to call him Pignitaro the hell down and get him to just stay at his office and let them get his patient where she needed to go, but he was adamant. He was going too. So finally, one of them said, look, doctor, I'll drive you, okay? By now, the patient's brain had been deprived of oxygen for nearly 20 minutes.

By the time they reached the hospital, the young woman, 26-year-old Sarah Smith, had lapsed into a coma. When her husband Dan arrived at Pignitaro's office to pick her up from the supposedly easy, outpatient breast augmentation she'd gone there for, he was met at the door by Debbie Pignatoro, the doctor's wife. As Dan's world dropped out from underneath him, Debbie offered to drive him to the hospital to see the now comatose love of his life, the mother of his two children, Amanda and Nathan. This procedure was supposed to be minimally invasive. No big deal. Dr. Pignitaro had told her all she'd need to recover would be a few days of rest. Now, as Dan walked into her hospital room to find her paper-white and unresponsive and hooked up to machines, he thought back to the family slumber party they'd had in the living room the Friday before. Blankets on the floor, movies, and popcorn. They might never have another one now. The doctors were saying if she didn't come out of this soon, she probably wasn't going to. And Dan just couldn't understand how. Why?

Once they delivered her into the hands of the ER docs, the paramedics had a moment to stop and breathe and think about the bizarre scene they'd just witnessed. Everything about it was way, way wrong. For one thing, the operating room at Dr. Pignitaro's office wasn't remotely equipped to support surgical procedures. There was no crash cart. There was an EKG machine, and she was hooked up to it,

but the screen was just blank. The EMTs had had to use their own EKG to check her heart, and Pignitaro kept yelling at them to, look at my EKG, mine's better. Can't you guys shock her? The only ambabag in the room, a tool they could have used to get Sarah Smith breathing again, was a pediatric one, which explained why Pignataro was trying to use a flippin' coat hanger to open an airway. And they remembered something that now that it had a chance to sink in kind of gave them goosebumps.

The whole time they were working on Sarah, trying to get her heart beating again, Dr. Pignitaro kept screaming, We can't lose this one. This one? Had there been others? Yikes. Later, they learned something even worse. Besides Dr. Pignitaro, the only other people in the operating room,

and we got to put, operating room in air quotes, were his wife, Debbie, a young woman whose health care work experience consisted of a brief stint in a nursing home, and a 17-year-old high school kid who wanted to be a doctor someday. There was no anesthesiologist, no nurse anesthetist, no nurse at all. Un-fucking believable and scary. Wow.

Yeah. They realized this probably wasn't just a case of medical malpractice. This might actually be criminal. They decided to call the police. The next day, Detective Bob Fiscus and Captain Florian Jablonski, best name ever, by the way. My next D&D character will be Florian Jablonsky. Florian Jablonsky. Went to Dr. Pignitaro's office to question him.

Pignitaro seemed upset about what had happened to Sarah, and he said the procedure he performed on her was called the transambulical breast augmentation, tuba for short. It's kind of wild, actually. They take the implant and run it from an incision in your lower belly all the way up to the breast. Once it's in position, they slowly inflate it with saline until, it's the size the patient wants. Now, in 1997, tons of these tuba procedures had been done. It was considered pretty routine surgery. So why had this healthy 26-year-old woman gone

into cardiac arrest in the middle of it? Pignitaro said that at some point in the middle of the tuber procedure, Sarah stopped breathing. He said he gave CPR and gave her an injection of an anti-arhythmic medication that can restart the heart in a cardiac arrest. When she didn't respond to that, he told the 17-year-old to call 911. And that vague little tale was all he was willing to tell. After he set his piece, he stood up, told the detectives he had a patient to see, and walked out. Way to stay off the radar, man. Well, well played, subtle. If the investigators didn't already know something was hugely wrong here. They sure as hell knew it now. At some point, the patient stopped breathing is not a statement that's designed to help get to

the root of the problem. That's a dodge. A few days later, Dan Smith had the worst conversation of his life with Sarah's doctors. There was nothing more they could do. Her brain function was just gone. It was Dan's decision, of course, but it was probably time to let her go. All she wanted was a little self-esteem boost. Pignitaro told her she'd be fine, and now her family had to make the heart-wrenching decision to go on without her. She passed away later that day. Yeah, and this might be the saddest thing I have literally ever heard in my life.

Sarah's husband Dan later said that at Sarah's memorial service, he overheard their little girl Amanda telling one of her friends that moms died when they were 26. and that they'd better be prepared because it would happen to their moms too. Oh, my God, that's so sad. Those poor babies. Oh, she'd take a minute with that. Oh, my lord.

So the autopsy soon offered up a definitive cause of death, asphyxia due to improper ventilation. Basically, Sarah's O2 levels got so low that her brain was deprived and her heart couldn't sustain its rhythm. It should have been a totally pre-2. preventable situation. But did it rise to the level of a crime? The investigators had their suspicions, but they needed to do a deep dive. The state board suspended Pignitaro's medical license temporarily, and the detectives went to talk to everybody who was in that operating room the

day of Sarah's procedure. Nothing they found out made them feel any better about Dr. Pignitaro. First of all, the lack of expertise of the few people he had assisting him was just stunning. The young woman, Janie Krause, couldn't think of the word scalpel at one point in the interview. Yeah, it gets worse. She didn't know the names of most of the equipment that they'd used in Sarah's surgery. She'd say stuff like a metal thing, or this thing that looks like a hockey stick. She called the ambabag, the bamboo bag. Just, Jesus, Murphy. So her job had been to administer the medications, and although she did manage to explain which drugs they'd used on Sarah Smith, she didn't know what any of them were for.

She said she thought maybe Versed, which is a sedative, was used for pain control? Zz. Wrong. Thank you for playing. The detectives were shocked at the procedure they used for anesthetizing Sarah, too. Apparently, Pignitaro's M.O. was to hand the patient a handful of pills to sedator, like literally like 12 of them. It was stuff like Valium, you know, sedatives.

And then, when they started getting woozy, Debbie would take him downstairs to the basement surgery center. And Janie Krause would start administering the injections. First, a shot of sodium pentothal. Then the Versid. Then yet another syringe of sodium pentothal. And again, campers, we have no anesthesiologist in the room. No nurse anesthetist. No nurse at all.

Bananas. Talking to the detectives, Janie relayed how Sarah Smith had actually woken up at one point during the surgery, which is literally one of my worst fears in the world to, like, wake up in the middle of surgery. Yeah. She said, ow. And Pignitaro told Janie to give her another dose of sodium pentothal. Now, the detectives didn't know this at the time, but when they spoke with other doctors later on, they realized that this was a metric shit ton of sodium pentothal, like way too much.

And this was on top of the other sedatives that they'd already given her. And just a few seconds after that third injection, Sarah's pulse oxymeter, which is the thing that measures the amount of oxygen in the blood, started beeping. her oxygen level had fallen below 85. Not good. The meds were depressing her breathing. And the shit just kept on hitting the fan. Pignitaro didn't have an adult-sized ambabag, so he barked at the high school kid Tom to go get him a coat hanger. And then, of course, the paramedics had arrived. It was pure chaos, and the investigators realized that this doctor, his staff, and his operating room were all just unbelievably unprepared for this kind of emergency.

young woman hadn't died from some pre-existing medical condition that gave her a bad reaction to the surgery. It was nothing like that. This woman died from outrageous medical malpractice, too much sedating medication, plus a total lack of proper equipment to deal with respiratory or cardiac arrest. And oh, by the way, when they spoke to 17-year-old high school student Tom, the aspiring doctor, he confirmed something that Janie Krause had said, that contrary to what Dr. Pignitaro had told them, it was Debbie Pignitaro who noticed that Sarah wasn't breathing and insisted her husband do something about it. And it actually took her several tries to get him to pay attention and respond. So he just ignored her the first couple of times she said

the patient's not breathing, the patient's not breathing. Tom also said that the EKG wasn't even turned on during the surgery and that Dr. Pignitaro had cornered him in the office the day after trying to coach him on what to say and not say to the cops. Nothing suspicious there, right? I mean, innocent people, they do that all the time. According to crime legend and rule, whose book Last Dance, Last Chance is one of our sources for this case, Anthony's wife Debbie, said he didn't seem bothered at all by Sarah Smith's death.

She, on the other hand, was tormented by it, but Anthony just kind of went about his life like nothing had happened. He seemed to be enjoying the media attention. The case was getting a lot of air time. He'd be like, isn't all this media coverage wild? Oh, my God. Debbie tried to convince herself that he must be holding it in, trying to put on a brave face.

He was her high school sweetheart. She loved the guy, and she'd spent a lot of time over the years trying to explain his bad behavior away. So the investigators started digging, and, oh boy, did they find some dirt. Anthony Pignataro's career was a parade of malpractice. accusations and butchered patients. A few years earlier in 1993, he'd removed a laryngeal tumor

on a 71-year-old woman so they could biopsy it. Like Sarah's tuba procedure, this was a very routine surgery, but Pignitaro's patient died on the operating table anyway. His colleagues were horrified, felt he'd made some serious mistakes that may have contributed to the death. When his privileges at that hospital came up for renewal, they didn't ask him back. In 1994, he did a surgery on a 30-year-old man to try and correct a deviated septum, the cartilage in the middle of your nose. This is a really tricky, delicate area because it's so close to the brain. And lo and behold, according to the Buffalo News, during the surgery, he allegedly nicked this poor guy's brain to the point where fluid was leaking down into the nasal passages. And rather than admitting his mistake, pigna tart.

tried to cover it up. The guy was lucky he didn't develop meningitis and die. And just like the other one, this hospital yanked his privileges and sent him on his way. Later that same year, an elderly patient sued him for botching a facelift and eyelid lift, forcing her to get more surgery to correct the problem. They ended up settling for $75,000. In 96, it happened again. Pignitaro did a tummy tuck on an elderly lady named Sophie Bertrand, and she nearly died.

He inspired a lot of contempt at the various hospitals he'd worked at over the years. In a report from a hospital in Philadelphia, a colleague wrote, quote, he would routinely show up late for rounds, claiming he'd done work he had not done, and he had seen ICU patients that he had not seen, fabricate laboratory data, fabricate physical examination data, fabricate information about post-operative patients that he had not seen. This was routine. Holy fuck, right? And of course, it looks like the hospitals did what hospitals.

always seem to do in these situations. Kick him on down the road to the next hospital. Yeah, you know, it'd be nice if one of these places at some point would actually get in touch with the licensing agency and be like, hey, just so you know, this guy sucks. How about we try and make sure he can't operate on people anymore? But that's too much to ask, I guess, as anybody who's listened to that podcast, Dr. Death, knows by now. Because, you know, God forbid we risk him suing us.

Couldn't have that. Our boy Anthony, though, never took an ounce of responsibility for it. He'd grown up the golden boy of his well-to-do family. His surgeon father, Ralph, and his mom, Lena, thought their boy, Tony, woke up every morning and flicked on the sun. He could do no wrong. In Anthony's world, everything was somebody else's fault. The facelift lady? Well, she didn't follow his post-op instruction, so her complications were her own fault.

Little boys who don't play well with others tend to strike out on their own. So by 1997, Pignitaro had opened his own cosmetic surgery practice. He took out ads promising outpatient tummy tucks and breast enhancements at bargain prices. One of those ads caught the attention of a woman named Terry Lamarty. Terry had four kids, and that can take a toll on your belly. Terry hated that no matter how much she exercised, she couldn't get rid of what she perceived as her poochy tummy. And she was always telling her husband Ned how much she wanted to get a tummy tuck. So for her 39th birthday, her hubs surprised her with a gift certificate for a consultation with Dr. Anthony Pignitaro.

Dr. Pignitaro was the kind of doctor who could put you at ease in the first five minutes. He just oozed confidence. You'd leave his office convinced that he was going to fix you right up, having you looking like a billion dollars with minimal recovery time and almost no risk. Plus, despite his stream of botched surgeries and all the bad blood he'd stirred up at various hospitals, he'd become something of a local celebrity over the past couple years. He fancied himself an inventor, a quote, modern-day Galileo he once called himself. Oh, my God. And he owned a bunch of different patents.

The most famous of which was, I swear to God, we're not making this up, the snap-on toupee. Oh, yeah. So this was a toupee that attached to your skull with surgically implanted metal snaps. There's a clip from a talk show, and you can actually see this on YouTube, where he's talking about this thing, and he actually demonstrates how it works using his own toupee. Now, first of all, you can hear the snaps, which gave me the hebes on a level I would not have previously thought possible. And as if that wasn't bad enough, he takes the thing off, and you can see these, like, Frankenstein's monster-like flipping bolts sticking out of his skull. it is gnarly y'all but you know what it got him on the talk show circuit and that's the kind of shit dr tony just ate up with a spoon dude is a master class in narcissism modern day galileo yeah that tracks because galileo was famous for stapling shit to his head right

plus he was flashy he bragged about his inventions and all his money and his skills he worked out obsessively so he He was all built and tan and toupeeed, and he had this big luxuriant Tom Sellecky mustache, which, you know, at the time was the shit. And he drove around town in a bright red Lamborghini. Sometimes he'd use it to pick patients up for surgery, especially the young, attractive female ones. Oh, yeah, he would like show up at your door and be like, all right, hey, hey, candy, you're ready for your boob job? Get in and let's go. Just weird as hell. But, you know, apparently some people got a kick out of it.

you know, I don't really know if I want a surgeon you're getting Yolo vibes off of. Yeah, that's her red flag, definitely. And a lot of his colleagues found him arrogant and exhausting, but he could talk a really convincing game with prospective patience. He knew just what to say. Appearances were everything to Tony, from his and Debbie's big expensive house to his pricey sports car, to his ridiculous toupee, to the taxidermied cheetahs and other wild animals, he hunted on trips to Africa and displayed proudly around the house. So as if we needed another reason to hate this sweaty ball sack, we can now add canned hunting to the list.

Gross. So, anyway, when Terry Lamardi and her husband left Dr. Pignitaro's office after her consultation, they felt great about everything. Pignitaro made it sound like his lunchtime tummy tuck was just the easiest thing in the world. Like a tooth cleaning. Just in and out. A couple days of rest at home and you're on to your news, felt her life.

Terry couldn't wait. On the day of her procedure, her husband dropped her off in the morning. And Pignitaro was like, go, run errands, do whatever. You can pick her up in a few hours. They got Terry changed into a gown, and soon a young woman in scrubs came in and handed her a little paper cup full of pills. Pre-op meds, she said. Terry swallowed him.

Before long, she started to feel sleepy and a little bit woozy. and soon the young woman was back, taking her by the arm and leading her down two flights of stairs to the surgery center. Through the haze of meds, Terry thought it looked more like a basement to her, like somebody's random basement. There were no bright lights, no trays of gleaming sterilized instruments. Something felt really wrong about this, but she was already drifting off, too doped up to form coherent sentences like, I want to call this off.

All she could do was moan. All she could feel through the drugs was absolute terror. The next thing she knew, Terry was waking up in the waiting room. The clock said 5 p.m. Pignitaro had told her she'd be done by one. Somehow she was fully clothed again, and in the worst pain she'd ever felt in her life. She was doubled over in her chair, confused and disoriented, when she saw her husband come through the door. When he saw her, he went white as a sheet.

By the time her husband got her home, blood was literally sheeding down her legs and onto the floor, so much that her daughter had to get a mop to clean it up. When he lifted her bandage to see what was going on underneath, Terry was horrified. She had over a dozen big metal staples across her belly. But there was also big gaping holes, big enough to stick your finger in. The incision wasn't even almost closed. By the next morning, Terry's belly was so distended and swollen that she looked pregnant. and she was an epic, science fiction alien about to burst out of her body levels of pain.

So her husband bundled her into the car and rushed her to the ER, and it's a damn good thing he did, because the doctor is there quickly determined that Pignitaro had nicked Terry's intestine during the procedure, and she was rapidly going septic. Her belly was literally rotting. There was a hole in her abdomen about four inches wide and half an inch deep. Absolutely fucking horrifying. Oh, my lord. Terry was in the hospital for about a week, getting IV antibiotics and pain medication that barely took the edge off.

For the first day or two, she really thought she was going to die. And then, one night, she woke up in the wee hours to the overhead lights in her room blazing on. Dr. Pignitaro was standing at the foot of her hospital bed, her chart in his hand, and a look of fury on his face. You don't belong in a hospital. He screamed at her. You need to just get up and go back. back home. Terry was terrified. This man is insane, she thought. She wanted if he was going to kill her. Yeah. Fortunately, a moment later, a couple of nurses burst into the room. Dr. Pigtotaro, you do not have privileges here, they said. You have to leave now. God bless nurses, man.

They do not take shit from anybody. I was just about to say. Don't fuck with nurses, man. Pignitar stood glaring at them for a moment and then turned on his heel and stormed out. After that, the hospital put a couple of security guards right outside Terry's room so she'd feel safe. She was lucky she survived. It was just two weeks later that Sarah Smith walked into Pignitaro's office for her breast enhancement surgery. Terry's doctor called her at home to tell her about Sarah's death. She felt like she dodged a bullet.

The more the investigators dug into Pignitaro's career, history and operating procedures, the worse it got. During a search of his office, they found a whole bunch of framed diplomas on the wall. Pretty standard decor for a doctor's office, for sure. But when they called the universities that supposedly gave him these various degrees and certifications, guess what? They were all totally legit? No, no, no, no. They were fake, one after another. And on top of that, our boy Tony had forged his board certification. as an ear, nose, and throat doc. He was performing surgical procedures.

He had no business performing, all while Rakin in the cash. Wow. Just the balls on this asshole. Just amazing. The stickhead had about as much business performing surgery as I do. God grant us the confidence of a mediocre man, right? It seems obvious to me that his parents did at least some of this to him by treating him like the sun shone out of his ass since the day he was.

born. If you want to know more about that, read Anne Rule's book because they get all into his like childhood history and everything. His parents always treated him like he was physically incapable of doing anything unperfect. And people who knew him well said they always felt like Anthony had this really intense drive to compete with his dad, like be a better surgeon, be richer, more successful, more respected. But he just couldn't cut it. His grades weren't good enough for him to get into an accredited medical school, so he ended up going to an unaccredited school in Puerto Rico instead. And we haven't gotten into his relationship with his wife yet, but we're gonna. There are complicated dynamics there, obviously, and he was most definitely emotionally abusive

and manipulative, but Debbie fell into line with the Anthony as a Golden God program pretty early on when they started dating in high school, and she stayed in line for years and years afterward, always backing him up and making excuses for him and just generally treating him like fucking Baron von Fancy Pants, Lord High ruler of Fancelvania. But we'll get into that more in a bit. So, anywho, the Erie County DA felt like they were building a pretty solid case against Pignitaro in the death of Sarah Smith. The question was what to charge him with? To charge him with murder, you had to show that he intended the victim to die, and that didn't really seem to fit here.

So the other options were manslaughter or a criminally negligent homicide. both of which charged that Sarah died as a result of his reckless behavior. The DA convened a grand jury to unravel all this, and Terry Lamarty, the patient whose hospital room Pignitaro had stormed into it two in the morning, made sure to be there. One afternoon during a break in the proceedings, Terry was standing out in the hallway with the prosecutor when Pignataro caught sight of her. He came running down the hall towards her, big grin on his face,

and campers this man tried to hug her. He said, oh my God, Terry, you look so great. I sure did an amazing job on your tummy tuck. Nobody could believe what they were hearing. This man was delusional. She almost died because of him. Unfortunately for Terry, the courthouse security guards saw this whole bizarre display and grabbed him by the collar and escorted him the fuck away from this poor woman

that he'd almost killed with his patented cocktail of incompetence, ego, and greed. And in January of 98, the grand jury indicted Anthony Pignitaro on multiple counts. manslaughter in the second degree criminally negligent homicide, assault in the second degree, reckless endangerment in the second degree, and falsifying business records. Golden Boy was starting to look a little

bit tarnished. If he got convicted of the manslaughter charge, he could go to prison for up to 15 years. Finally, after his long career of butchered patients and weird inventions, there was going to be hell to pay. Oh my God. See what I did there?

To pay, the snaps. Come on. Give it to me. You must be stopped. Look, I am the queen of wordplay and you love it, so shut up. Fine, you're right. So, I'm a punstress. Just, you know, deal with that.

So they put the gravus on old Tony P with that whole slew of charges, and as you can imagine, this put some of the fear of God into him. Enough that he was able to wrestle down his massive ego and let his attorney work out a plea. deal, which is surprising in a way because Pignitaro was indignant about the whole thing. During the grand jury investigation, he developed a whole Pepe Silvio-like conspiracy theory about what was really going on. It was complicated, as conspiracy theories always seem to be, but the main gist was that the Erie County DA's office was in cahoots with the police to frame him for Sarah Smith's death. Because, you know, reasons. The whole thing was absurd, but the funniest part was when he decided that the famous medical examiner, Dr. Michael Bodden, was in on the plot,

which is hilarious because Bodden wasn't even involved in the case. It's just like, huh? Nice try. Nice try, my man. The DA's main concern at this point was making sure that Pignitaro couldn't do any more damage, so they agreed to let him plead his case down from second-degree manslaughter to criminally negligent homicide. More importantly, he agreed to surrender his medical license. In August of 1998, the judge sentenced him to six months in prison, seemed pathetically inadequate to a lot of his victims, but at least his medical career was over.

He also got a $5,000 fine and 250 hours of community service, which sounds super piddly, but y'all, I bet he hated that community service, don't you? So that makes you feel a little bit better, but only a little bit. So Tony served his six months and then he got out. Now that he couldn't practice medicine anymore, he had a hard time finding any kind of work at all. His parole agreement said he couldn't leave New York, so that limited his job hunting too. Plus several former patients, including Terry Lamarty, sued him for malpractice, and that's always pricey. So his mommy was supporting him and the family. On top of that, people still seemed a little worked up about that.

little kerfuffle that landed him in jail in the first place. That's how he looked at it anyway. Yeah, he's like, so a patient died. It was like a year ago. Get over it already. He's like, you can make more people. It's fine. God. The people of Buffalo, though, not so over it, apparently. Anthony got death threats and some civic-minded Mary prankster painted killer in huge red letters on the side of his and Debbie's house, which is both delightful on one level and really sad on the other, because it must have been hard for Debbie and her two kids. Yeah. It wasn't their fault.

No, of course not. The whole thing was hard on Debbie. She loved Anthony, like she had since high school, but the stress was taking a toll on the marriage. Eventually, it got to be too much, and they separated. But as Jerry Seinfeld once told us, the first person. breakup never takes. And a couple months later, they were back together. And shortly after

that, Debbie started to feel sick. She was having a whole host of weird symptoms. Nausea, pain in her abdomen, legs and feet. And strangest of all, numbness and tingling in her arms and legs. She felt so weak sometimes that she could hardly walk.

Her doctors were baffled. For a while, they thought maybe it was pancreatitis, but no. then they considered Gian Barre syndrome, an autoimmune disorder that causes your body to attack your own nervous system. But that didn't exactly fit either. And I know you're going to be shocked to hear this campers, but Anthony was a fucking nightmare throughout the whole thing. He bullied her doctors insisting that he knew exactly what was wrong. It had to be her gallbladder.

They needed to take it out. He hammered at him relentlessly trying to talk him into the surgery. Fortunately for Debbie, though, her doctors were made of strong stuff. and they refused, said, look, Debbie's so weak right now that the surgery might kill her. You should know that, Dr. Pignitaro. Oh, he knew it all right. I'm sure he did. Yeah. The illness was frustratingly come and go.

Debbie would be sick for a while, then she'd start to get better and feel almost normal for a little while, but inevitably, just when she thought she was coming out of the tunnel, she'd get sick again. And every time the symptoms were worse. And then the whole thing got even scarier. Their little girl Lauren started having the same symptoms as her mom. Not nearly as severe, but eerily similar to what Debbie was feeling. And Debbie was getting worse. In addition to the numbness and tingling, nausea, and pain, now she was having memory loss.

She was disoriented. And her legs were so weak she could no longer walk at all. She had to get a wheelchair. It finally got so scary that they admitted her to the hospital. One of the doctors decided he wanted to look at some of Debbie's bone marrow under a microscope, and that was what finally unlocked the answer. Debbie Pignitaro had been poisoned. Someone had given her an enormous amount of arsenic over a period of months.

The hospital put Debbie under 24-hour protection to make sure nobody could continue poisoning her, and they called in the police. Tested on a range of stuff from the Pignato's house didn't turn up any arsenic, and both Anthony and their son Ralph were clear. But little Lauren showed signs of the poison, too. Not nearly as much as her mom, but it was there. The doctors wondered if Debbie could have been taken the poison herself to take her own life, but she denied it vehemently.

She'd never leave her two kids. And of course, the police had a different suspicion for pretty much day one, because they knew who they were dealing with. Dude had just gotten out of jail for the negligent homicide of a patient, and, you know, they knew Debbie had been poisoned repeatedly, most likely in her own home. There was only one other adult in that house, and that was Anthony Pignitaro. They quickly learned that Anthony had a life insurance policy on Debbie. Now, it wasn't a huge one, only $50,000, but our guy was really struggling financially, and they'd certainly

seen people killed for a lot less. Debbie Pignitaro had been Anthony's loyal partner since they were in high school, and she adored him. But the more they spoke to the people, people closest to Debbie, the more they realized that the feeling might not be mutual. He'd abused her emotionally and verbally for their entire relationship. She was stupid. She was boring. She was fat. He harped on about her weight constantly, but he wouldn't let her change her cooking, still expected her to make all his favorite stuff. And then there were the mistresses. First one was an exotic dancer whose boob-yed worked on. He met the second one at the gym. Debbie finally got suspicious about the second one when she found a

letter Anthony had written to her while he was in jail. Suspicious enough that she started calling the woman and asking her questions about her relationship with her husband. Woman just lied to her though, just denied there was anything going on and gaslight, gaslight. Meanwhile, Anthony was sending the mistress sappy cards telling her how much she meant to him and talking to her about running off together to Florida or Mexico where he wanted to start an anti-aging clinic. Despite all of this, though, at first, Debbie couldn't wrap her head around the possibility that her husband was poisoning her. He had his fault, sure, but he could never hurt her, and surely he could never hurt Lauren. Even after Debbie came home from the hospital, she was still desperately sick, paralyzed and in a wheelchair.

Anthony put on quite a show, acting like the platonic ideal of the concerned husband, making sure she didn't start suspecting him, no doubt. But one afternoon, as Anthony sat next to Debbie's bedside holding her hand, Debbie's cousin Dennis stormed into the room and ordered Anthony out. to everybody's surprise he actually left and when debby was like what the hell dennis said debby listen there's something you need to know anthony wrote to his mistress while you were in the ICU while you were laying there dying he wrote to this girl and the card had said if you knew how much i missed you you'd be right here with me fucking gross how dennis had got a hold of this card i don't know but it was the last piece of the puzzle for Debbie, the validation she needed for those sneaking feelings she'd been having about this other woman. Debbie decided that was it. She didn't want Anthony

around her anymore, not for one more day. And he must have realized she was serious, because after that day he stopped coming around. That may have been the first domino to fall, the first thing that helped open Debbie's mind to what had really been going on. The second one was a woman named Sharon Simon, a victim's advocate from the Erie County Police Department. Over the next few months, as Debbie slowly began to regain some feeling and movement in her limbs with daily physical therapy, Sharon got to know her. Debbie was a little reserved at first, but eventually the two women got close. Sharon was a great listener, and before long, she was offering Debbie exactly the kind of support she needed to understand that the man she married was not the person she thought he was. She was even more sure of that when she found out from a mutual friend that Anthony was showing,

up to the kids' school events and working on them, trying to coach them on what to say to the cops if they came around asking questions. Oh, my God. Yeah, he seemed to be rehearsing his cover stories with the kids. One day, he told him that somebody in Sarah Smith's family was poisoning their mom. Another day, it was there across the street neighbor. Why? Who the hell knew? Yet another time, the shadowy poisoner was his mistress's jealous ex-boyfriend. That one made even less than sense. I mean, if his girlfriend's ex was mad at him, wouldn't he poison him? Debbie didn't have anything to do with it. It was ridiculous. The man was clearly aware that he was being investigated, and it was clearly making him jumpy. One of the tests they'd done on Debbie was a hair test

to figure out when the poisoning had started. And it had begun around May, according to the test. When they told Debbie that, she remembered something very interesting. Right around the middle of that month, Anthony had made her some homemade soup. And right after she ate it, she got violently sick. She remembered it, vividly. And with that realization, the final domino fell for Debbie. She gave the investigator's permission to search the house. The detectives were convinced that Anthony was the one who'd poisoned Debbie.

What they needed was to figure out how and where he got the arsenic. And once they searched the property, they had a feeling they'd cracked it. Anthony'd been using this stuff called tarot, an ant killer, the active ingredient of which which was arsenic. Little Lauren told them she'd seen her dad putting little tins of it around the house to kill the ants. And it didn't take long to find credit card receipts from a store nearby that sold the stuff. It wasn't proof, but it was a step closer. When they finally brought Tony in for an interview and asked him if he'd poison Debbie, he just kind of dropped his head and said, well, I can see why you'd think that. Everything about his tone, facial expression,

and body language is just screamed guilty to these experienced detectives, but they still didn't couldn't have enough to arrest him. And then the DA's office got a call from a guy who'd been in prison with Anthony and had some information he wanted to share. Ah, the old jailhouse snitch campers, love him or hate him, sometimes they're just what the doctor ordered. Snitchie poo and Anthony had been good buds in the joint. Dude confirmed that the doc had talked about his mistress and about the life insurance policy

he had on Devi. He talked a fair amount about how much he wanted to. to get rid of Debbie. He didn't say he wanted to kill her, but that was the distinct impression that snitchie pants got. And then one day, Anthony had just come right out and asked him, do you know how to poison somebody? Now we're getting warmer, right? And not long after they spoke to this guy, much to their shock, as though the entire universe had just decided that it was sick of Anthony Pignitaro shit and wanted to help make sure he went down, the investigators heard from yet another informant.

This guy was a former patient of Pignitaro's hair implants, and he had one hell of a story to tell. Dr. Pignitaro had thought of him as a sort of tough guy. He had that kind of reputation. One time, the doc had complained to him, professional as always, about some patients who owed him money. And the informant had half jokingly said he could take care of that for him if he wanted, you know, intimidate the patients into paying up. not long after that he now told the police the doctor had asked him to kill his wife for him now this was sensational info and the interesting thing about this campers was when it happened months before sarah smith died before pignitaro even went to prison apparently debby's poisoning

had been a long time in the making the former patient had declined the offer he wasn't the type to want to hurt a woman. But once he saw a news report about Debbie's poisoning, he realized what must be going on. Felt like he had to come forward. And now, at long last, the DA had enough. They charged Pignitaro with attempted murder and first degree assault and hauled his ass back to jail. Once his defense got a look at the DA's case, they called up and asked for yet another game of Let's Make a Deal. And in November of 2000, Tony P. stood up in open court and pled guilty to the attempted assault of his wife. A few months later, he was sentenced to 15 years in prison, the maximum sentence allowed. Yay! Now, despite pleading guilty, he didn't interview from prison

for a local news station soon after, Sands Tupé, by the way, and denied everything, saying, there have been a boatload of very vituperous allegations levied against me, and I have not had a chance to tell my side of the story. Just like before, with Sarah Smith, It was all just a conspiracy. Everybody ganging up to frame poor old Anthony. Shut the fuck up, Anthony. Shut the fuck up, Anthony. So, a final scary little P.S. to this story, because we know you love him.

Pignitaro served every minute of that 15-year sentence, which is excellent. And in 2013, unfortunately, he got out. By now, Debbie had divorced him, of course, and was doing a lot better health-wise, but it made her and the kids anxious to have him out and about. And a few years later, it came to the attention of the authorities that he'd moved down to Florida, changed his name to Anthony Hote, and was now advertising himself as a qualified elder care provider.

Now, this isn't technically illegal. He's not saying he's a doctor, but would you want this chode taking care of your me, ma'am, and papaw? Because I sure shit wouldn't. So we're going to put his picture up on our social media campers And we suggest you keep an eye out If you have elderly relatives who need care Because this guy is dangerous

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 we want to send a grateful shout out To a few of our lovely patrons Thank you so much to Shannon, Becca, Heather, Ashley, Katie, Karen, and Kirsten.

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