True Crime Campfire - Stranger in the Mirror: The Crimes of Theresa Ramirez

Episode Date: May 31, 2024

We tend to think of doctors as leading pretty cushy, privileged lives—lots of money, social status, and respect. But a dark trend has been developing in recent years, and it’s only getting worse. Increasingly, doctors are experiencing violence at the hands of their patients. Sometimes it’s a verbal threat, a push or a shove. Sometimes it’s stalking. And sometimes, it’s murder. This is one of those stories, about a woman whose obsession with physical perfection led her to an unimaginable act. Download the game "June's Journey" on Apple iOS: https://apps.apple.com/us/app/junes-journey-hidden-objects/id1200391796"June's Journey" on Android: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=net.wooga.junes_journey_hidden_object_mystery_game&hl=en&gl=US&pli=1Sources:https://www.forbes.com/sites/dandiamond/2015/03/08/dr-michael-davidson-died-as-he-lived-saving-others/?sh=176e90165e12Oxygen's "Snapped," episode "Theresa Ramirez"Dr. Joni Johnston: https://medium.com/crimebeat/the-ugly-truth-behind-the-murder-of-dr-paul-tavis-e5ad525c88baSFGate: https://www.sfgate.com/news/article/disgruntled-patients-hazardous-to-health-3069418.php MDLinx: https://www.mdlinx.com/exclusive/unsafe-haven-the-rise-of-violence-against-physicians-in-the-workplace/LyJwbDwQgHps1wJ00QYYnFollow 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/TrueCrimeCampfirehttps://www.truecrimecampfirepod.com/Facebook: True Crime CampfireInstagram: https://gramha.net/profile/truecrimecampfire/19093397079Twitter: @TCCampfire https://twitter.com/TCCampfireEmail: [e-mail]! https://true-crime-campfire.myspreadshop.comBecome 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. We tend to think of doctors as leading pretty cushy, privileged lives. Lots of money, social status, and respect. But a dark trend has been developed. in recent years and it's only getting worse. Increasingly, doctors are experiencing violence at the hands of their patients. Sometimes it's a verbal threat, a push, or a shove. Sometimes it's stalking,

and sometimes it's murder. This is Stranger in the Mirror, the crimes of Teresa Ramirez. So, campers, for this one, we're in Petaluma, California, the morning of July 3, 1997. Dr. Michael Tavis and his wife, Deborah, were in a rush to get to work at their plastic surgery clinic. They'd been up late celebrating Deborah's birthday the night before. Now they were hauling ass across town to make the doctor's first appointment of the day. They were going to be a little late, so as Dr. Tavis drove, Deborah tried calling their office manager, Kay Carter, on her cell phone. No answer, which was strange. And this was even stranger.

When they finally pulled into the parking lot, they noticed that Kay's car was there, but their 8.30 appointment was standing by the front door of the clinic looking confused. The door was still locked. Why hadn't Kay unlocked it yet? Deborah and Dr. Tavis unlocked the back door of the clinic. That's the one they usually used in the mornings and went in. Everything seemed normal.

They could smell the coffee in the coffee maker. Dr. Tavis walked out of the back room to go get his day started. Deborah hung back to finish putting on her makeup. A few moments later, Deborah heard voices from the hallway. She strained to hear what they were saying. I've been to 28 surgeons, said a woman's voice. Deborah didn't recognize. The voice was calm and even.

But when Dr. Tavis answered, he sounded almost pleading. I'm sorry, he said. I care. And then, Gunshot. shots. One, two, then several more. Instinctively, Deborah fled out the back door and called 911 on her cell. A call about a shooting was a rare thing in Petaluma at the time, and dispatch sent everybody they had. Nobody knew if the shooter was still in the building, if people were still in danger, if the officers responding might be shot on site, so it was tense. When the employees at the physical therapy clinic next door heard the shots, their first thought was, oh,

tomorrow's 4th of July, must be fireworks, and they didn't think that much of it, until somebody looked out the window and saw a horde of cops approaching the building with their guns drawn. The police knew from Deborah Tavis that her husband was still inside the building, plus the angry-sounding woman and probably office manager Kay Carter as well. She didn't know who else was inside, or exactly what had happened. She was just terrified for her husband. But it would soon become clear. Dr. Michael Tavis lay on his back in the hallway of his clinic, shot once in the chest, and three more times in the back as he tried to get to the front door. He'd fallen right on top of office manager Kay Carter, who had been shot in the head and was barely clinging to life.

EMS rushed her to the hospital, where doctors and nurses immediately started trying to save her. Kay had survived, for the moment at least, but Dr. Michael Tavis was pronounced dead at the scene. He was clearly the main target of the killer's rage, shot again and again. A much-beloved surgeon, father, and husband was now gone forever. He was only 53 years old. The first thought was an attempted murder suicide, but that quickly went out the window because there was no gun on the scene. There was no sign of forced entry, no sign of robbery, no sign of a struggle,

just blood spatter on the walls and floor around the body. And despite a massive search of the area that included a police helicopter, there was no sign of the shooter. Whoever did this had just swooped in, in the bright morning sun, killed one person and seriously wounded another, and disappeared. It seemed likely that the shooter had come in the back entrance to the clinic, confronted Kay Carter in her office, and shot her once in the face, very brisk and businesslike. Then they waited for the doctor. Beyond that, who knew? But the investigators did get some interesting intel from a woman who worked in the physical therapy office next door. She'd seen a little pickup truck parked backwards in a space at the back of Dr. Tavis office that morning,

and she'd seen the driver, a woman. It had struck her as odd at the time for two reasons. One, there weren't usually many cars back there at that time of day, and the woman seemed kind of intense. And two, she'd seen the same truck in the same spot around lunchtime, week earlier. The same woman was behind the wheel, just sitting and watching people go in and out of the building. The witness first noticed her when she left for her lunch break that day, and when she left work at six in the evening, the woman was still there, still just sitting in her truck,

watching the building. It was weird, kind of creepy. There was something dark about the look in her eyes. When the witness pointed out the exact parking spot the woman had been in, the police realized it was directly in front of the back entrance to Dr. Tavis's clinic. The same door he and Deborah came in through that morning. The witness had gotten a fairly good look at the woman in the truck, brown hair and round face, but not good enough to pick anybody out of a lineup. And then there was what Deborah Tavis had overheard right before the gunshots, a woman saying, I've been to 28 surgeons. And Michael saying, I'm sorry, I care. That sounded like something a disgruntled patient would say. And like most doctors, Dr. Tavis had a few of those over his 22-year career.

He'd been sued by patients in the past. Deborah was shaken to her core, but she wrote out a list of the top five angriest patients her husband had dealt with in recent years. This was a potential gold mine for the detectives, five people to start with. They could check their backgrounds, find out if anybody had a criminal record or history of violence, figure out what their beef was with the doctor. Unlike most spouses of murder victims, Deborah wasn't really a lot of, a suspect in her husband's case, at least not for long. The investigators could tell for minute one

that this woman was beyond devastated by her husband's murder and desperate to do everything she could to help catch his killer. Michael and Deborah Tavis had only been married about a year. It was a second marriage for them both. They'd met in a pottery class. I know. Art was Michael's road not traveled. He loved painting, still lifes. He and Deborah were big time in love. The kind of relationship you tend to in movies. They had their wedding in Paris. Can you imagine that? Just like swept off your feet, married in Paris. Incredible. And for the past year, they'd been running Michael's practice together, very successfully. Dr. Tavis had been practicing since 1975, and he had a stellar reputation. Patients felt like he genuinely cared about them. Other doctors respected him, and he'd built a

very comfy life for himself and his family. Now it was all in ruins. Not only that, but office manager K. Carter was in terrible shape. She was alive, but she had a severe brain injury from the bullet. She would end up in a wheelchair, unable to talk. Her life would bear no resemblance to what it had been before. God, that's horrible. The investigators got right to work on their list of pissed off patients. One by one, they tracked them down and interviewed them, and one by one, they gave their alibis. They all checked out. Well, all but one, that is. The last person on the list, seemed to be incommunicado. Not at home, not at work, not responding to any attempts to reach out. Her name was Teresa Ramirez. And as the only lead the detectives had at this point,

she became their primary focus, especially since nobody could find her. They staked out her house for a whole day and night, but nobody went in or out. Had Teresa left town? Had she fled? Then, four days after Dr. Tavis's murder, the investigators got a call from the San Francisco PD. Uh, hey, we think we might have something for you in this murder case. A day or two earlier, they'd been called to the Harbor Court Hotel about an unconscious woman. The woman had checked in on July 3rd at around 5 in the afternoon, and when the housekeepers went in to clean her room, they found her passed out on the floor, totally unresponsive. Paramedics had rushed the woman to the hospital, where doctors quickly realized what was wrong. The lady was diabetic, and she lapsed

into a diabetic coma. She was still in serious condition in the hospital. Okay, so what did all this have to do with the murder of Dr. Michael Tavis? Well, for one thing, the woman had checked into the hotel under a fake name. She'd booked herself in as Teresa Brew, but the ID the cops found in her bag, said Teresa Ramirez. And then there was the creepy assortment of things they found in her hotel room. Five grand in cash, good for somebody who wants to get out of town without,

leaving a paper trail, a train ticket to Van Nuys, two handguns, and scariest of all, a notebook with a handwritten list of names, details about every person on the list, addresses, license plate numbers, family members' names, the specifics of their daily routines. There were 20 names on the list, and one of them was Dr. Michael Tavis. Taken in context with all the other stuff in the room, this looked a hell of a lot like a hit list. Lists like this are like manifestos. There's zero reason to have them and they're creepier when they're handwritten.

Yeah. The Petaluma detectives were floored and they raced over the police station in San Francisco to look at the evidence found in Teresa's hotel room. Teresa herself was still in the hospital and comatose. They were really interested, of course, in the notebook, especially once they realized that the other names on the list were all doctors, just like they were.

murder victim. The first name was Dr. Robert Feist. Dr. Feist was a medical director for the HMO that carried Teresa Ramirez's health insurance, and his job was to evaluate patients' readiness for surgery. Like if you'd had a bunch of cosmetic surgery and were asking for more, Dr. Feese would decide whether that was a good idea. Like, you know that dude that's had like a million dollars worth of surgery to try and look like that singer from BTS, Ollie London or something like that? Oh boy. If you want to go down. Of course you know who it is. Yeah, of course. Yeah. No, if you want to go down that weirdly racist rabbit hole, buckle in because that dude sucks in almost every way it's possible to suck on top of being full bore looting tunes. Like he's racist. He's transphobic. He's like somehow homophobic despite being gay. He's like, it's just he is. Damn. How do you manage that? He is genuinely like one of the worst people on the planet. And like every time he opens his mouth, it's insufferable. Like, it's. genuinely insufferable. I just remember he, like, he claimed that he, like, legally married, like, a picture of

one of the guys from BTS or something. Yeah. No, he got, like a picture of him. He got, he considers himself transracial. That's what, that's his whole schick. Oh, yeah, like Rachel Dolazol. Yeah. Yeah, I identify as Asian.

He thinks he's Korean, yeah. He's, it's genuine, like, genuinely, like, up, he's upsetting. Like, and he talks, like, every luny tune. person with the belief that he is right. You know what I mean? Like he thinks he is 100% correct. And it is like walking through like a fun house of like wild zany mirrors. Holy shit.

Okay. So that's a whole rabbit hole. Yeah. Go down that after you're done with this episode. And then there's like that dude who calls himself the human Kendall and that lady who wants to have the biggest boobs in the world and she just keeps getting them pumped up and pumped up. And you start to kind of get concerned that at some point they're just going to explain. explode and anyway, but I bet all of those people have had a lot of conversations with guys

like Dr. Fis. They're there partly to evaluate you medically and partly to evaluate you psychologically. And a couple of years earlier, Dr. Fice had had what you might call a little run-in with Teresa Ramirez. See, as Dr. Fis later told oxygen, Teresa, quote, had a very unfortunate history of surgeries. She'd had 13 of them, in fact. 13 surgeries. 13 surgeries. for breast implants and various adjustments to breast implants, and she hadn't been happy with any of them. She'd made her displeasure known to her doctors, and in such an unhinged tone that many of them had refused to work with her anymore, convinced she'd never be satisfied. I asked her to come in, Dr. Feast told Oxygen. She came in rather tense, nervous, and sat down abruptly.

She fidgeted and her eyes darted all over the room. Dr. Feast told her he needed her to consult with a psychiatrist before he could approve any further surgeries. I'm concerned that you keep having such poor results, he told her. He wanted to make sure she was a good candidate for future procedures. Teresa didn't like that answer. And before the doctor could fully process the awful place where his life choices up to now had just led him, she stood up, ripped open her blouse, and said, here, I'll show you why I need more surgery, and just busted out the twins.

Right there in the office. Yikes. You know, anger-based flashing is just not something we see that often. You know? Like, I feel like aggressive flashing is not something we see. It's usually a little more jovial, you know, Marty Grah. Like a little joke between husband and wife. I've only ever seen anger-based flashing from Judy Greer's character and Arrested Development.

And even then, it was more like aggressive seduction. remember she goes like and this is the last time you'll see these again yeah exactly yeah yeah it's a it's an odd choice um yeah so dr feats bless his heart had to call security to escort her and the girls out of the building weirdest day ever and weirdest patient ever according to the doctor and he'd been practicing for 30 plus years a little did dr feasts know that two years later his house would be the first one Teresa visited on the day she murdered Dr. Michael Tavis. Luckily for him, he wasn't home at the time. If he had been, this story might have gone very differently.

This was a strange place for Teresa's life to land. The main thing you could have said about her for most of her life is that she was a private person, maybe a little bit of a lone wolf. Like, she'd been an orthopedic nurse for years, but her colleagues at the hospital never felt like they got to know her, like, at all. which is weird for a health care setting. I mean, I've worked with nurses, and in my experience, they tend to be real collegial. You know, they talk.

They have inside jokes. They bond either that or they're, like, fighting to the death. But, like, they're not just, you know, cash about it. It's one or the other. Right. But Teresa's fellow nurses barely knew anything about her life outside the hospital. She was that private. She never confided in anybody or went out for drinks with the other nurses and doctors after a shift.

She was apparently tight with her family, though, and she had a little Cocker Spaniel doggy. Teresa grew up in the 50s and 60s in San Francisco. She was the oldest daughter of three siblings, and they looked up to her. She was physically tiny, but she was assertive, never afraid to speak up if she had a strong opinion about something. And she was independent, too, which wasn't necessarily an easy quality for a woman born in the 50s. In the late 60s, Teresa went to nursing school.

She got a job at the Kaiser Hospital in Santa Rosa and stayed there for years. in the orthopedic unit. According to people who knew her in nursing school and beyond, Teresa never shared any hot tea about her private life. She never mentioned a boyfriend. She never talked about her family. She didn't talk about her hobbies. She was pretty much a closed book.

She was cordial, but not what you'd call friendly. There was a wall there. One former colleague told Oxygen, I worked there down the hall from her for 10 years, and I really didn't know a whole lot about her. There was one thing her coworkers managed to suss out, though, just through the rumor mill, I guess. Teresa's dad was a firefighter, and at one point he'd set her up with a fellow fireman,

and they had a relationship. Teresa was smitten with a guy, but it didn't work out. They broke up after a while, and she was totally devastated. After that, she never got involved with a man again. That was it. And then in 1988, Teresa's life took a sharp turn. She was diagnosed with breast cancer. Luckily for her, they caught it early, but this isn't really a time in your life that's going to

you feel lucky, regardless of the outcome. Teresa was a nurse, and she'd had relatives die from breast cancer. She'd seen what it could do to people's lives, and I'm sure she was scared shitless, because I know I would be. And she made a big decision. She wanted to get rid of the cancer, but she also wanted to go the extra mile and make sure it could never come back. So she opted for a double mastectomy, removal of both breasts.

A nightmare scenario for a lot of us, but also, also a way to take back some control over a scary situation. I can totally understand why she did it. And like a lot of people who have this surgery, Teresa wanted to have reconstructive surgery done once she'd recovered. Breast implants. That is how she met Dr. Michael Tavis. And at first, their doctor-patient relationship seemed to be good.

In his notes on her very first visit, Dr. Tavis described Teresa as delightful, which fun fact, my mom's surgeon has described her as delightful as well. like her she had a hand surgery and they called her like a delightful age female i was like that's true shout out to my mom see that's a goal i never even knew i had but now i definitely want all of my doctors to describe me as delightful and notes how do i find out if they did you can get a copy your notes online i'm gonna they better you better call me delightful

that's how you get it by threatening them 1989, Dr. Tavis did her implants, and initially he wrote in his nose that the surgery was a complete success, and Teresa was ecstatic with her results. But then, as can happen with breast implants, some painful scar tissue ended up forming, and she had to have it taken out. Hi, I'm Darren Marler, host of the Weird Darkness podcast. I want to talk about the most important tool in my podcast belt. Spreaker is the all-in-one platform that makes it easy to record, host, and distribute your show everywhere from Apple Podcasts to Spotify.

But the real game changer for me was Spreeker's monetization. Spreaker offers dynamic ad insertion. That means you can automatically insert ads into your episodes. No editing required. And with Spreker's programmatic ads, they'll bring the ads to you, and you get paid for every download. This turned my podcasting hobby into a full-time career. Spreaker also has a premium subscription model where your most dedicated listeners can pay for bonus content or early access, adding another revenue stream to what you're already doing.

And the best part, Spreaker grows with you. Whether you're just starting out or running a full-blown podcast network, Spreker's powerful tools scale effortlessly as your show grows. So if you're ready to podcast like a pro and get paid while doing it, check out spreeker.com. That's S-P-R-E-K-E-R dot com. So far, this is nothing too unusual, but this was just the beginning. Just one week after her scar removal surgery, Theresa went back to Dr. Tavis saying her implants were uneven. Dr. Tavis performed another correction. Now, we should pause here and say, I don't know if she really needed this correction or not.

As you're about to see, Teresa was impossible to please and more than willing to bend the truth into a pretzel to get what she wanted out of her doctors. Yeah, and I mean, I'm not a plastic surgeon, okay, and I've never had any work done like that myself, so I could be wrong about this, but can you even tell after a week? Like, I would think you'd have to wait longer than that for the swelling to go down and stuff like that. It just seems like she was way jumping the gun to me. Yeah, but doctors do sometimes get pressured into doing surgeries. They don't think are necessary because patients will threaten to sue or confess. plane to the medical board or whatever, it happens. And what do they say about like health care professionals being the worst patients? And for the record, a quick Google search told me that it can

take up to six months for breast augmentation to actually heal and like equalize. Like it might look uneven. They might look high. It just takes time. Like I think for like nose, nose surgeries, like rhinoplasties, it takes like four months for the swelling to even go down. They say like do not freak out. It seems like she never gave it time. It seems like she never gave it time. She never gave it time. She just would immediately be like, I don't like it. Fix it. Yeah.

And it's a major surgery. You are cutting out bone or you're inserting foreign objects. Like it's like it's not like a, oh, outpatient surgery. So maybe she had some bad luck with the first couple of surgeries and it set off the chain reaction of chaos that would follow. Or maybe she was already coming unglued by this point, already beginning to obsess over problems that weren't really there. It didn't take long for Teresa to become notorious among the doctors in her area, the plastic surgeons especially, a problem child who would always find fault with her results no matter how well the surgery went. Like we said earlier, Teresa would end up having 13 surgeries on her breasts over the next few years, which is just, wow. And she was unhappy with every single one of them.

We'll highlight just a few here. she started to hit some resistance after the first half dozen surgeries or so first from her insurance company no surprise there she wanted to have yet another surgery to even the girls out and her hmo said no teresa did not take this well she stormed into dr tavis's office i'll puncture them she said then they'll have to pay girl yikes like she was just going to take a pencil and just pop them herself long after this, Teresa got into a fender bender. A guy in a pickup truck rear-ended her, and oh, she claimed the accident had popped one of her silicone implants. Dude's insurance ended up paying her $100 grand in damages and Teresa used the money to get another surgery. This time from a different doctor, a rock star plastic surgeon named Dr. William Shaw. Shaw was the chief of plastic surgery at UCLA, so no slouch. He was nationally renowned about as good a surgeon as you could dream of. And lo and behold, when he got Teresa on the operating table, he discovered that

her implants were fine and dandy. There had been no puncture. But, you know, he already had her on the table. He did the procedure anyway, replacing the silicone implants with Teresa's own belly fat. So now she's got a totally new set of breasts, a different kind this time, from a second eminently talented surgeon. And she still wasn't happy. In fact, Teresa seemed to to be unhappier with every procedure. Dr. Shaw, trying his best to satisfy her, did several corrections, but nothing. Nothing could quiet the noise in Teresa's mind. They still weren't right. They looked horrible, deformed, totally botched. During one visit, she screamed at Dr. Tavis in front of a waiting room full of patients, called him a butcher. Ugh, that ain't going to be good for

business. At one point, Teresa became so unhinged and was pestering Dr. Tavis so much, and that he thought about taking out a restraining order against her. But, just like Glenn Close's character in fatal attraction, Teresa wasn't going to be ignored. She was so convinced she'd been butchered that she sued Dr. Tavis. But the suit was thrown out for lack of evidence, and Teresa simmered with rage. One of her colleagues at the hospital later told Oxygen

that she was shocked to find out that Teresa had 13 cosmetic surgeries on her breasts. She wasn't the type to dress sexy or style herself up a lot. She just didn't seem like the kind of person who would be this obsessed with her boobs, but what her colleague didn't know was that Teresa was most likely suffering from a potentially life-wrecking condition called body dysmorphic disorder. Most of us have some kind of looks related insecurity, right? Like, I don't like my nose.

I wish I were a few inches taller. I wish I could wave a magic wand and make certain parts of me look like they did when I was 20. but if you have body dysmorphia you're not just sensitive about a few things your body flaws or perceived flaws become a delusional obsession i saw a woman like this on dr phil once okay she literally looked like a human Barbie she was so beautiful and yet she couldn't bring herself to leave the house because she thought she was like bridge troll level hideous it's completely baffling when you see it and at first glance i was like oh cry me a river lady seriously because it just seemed like vanity and like she was lying or something. I don't know.

But as I watched it and watched her, I came to realize this is a real mental illness and it's actually really sad for the people with severe cases. Where most of us look in the mirror and think, yeah, I wish I had clearer skin or I wish I still look 25. People with body dysmorphia look in the mirror and see nothing but these massive glaring flaws. And it can become totally life-ruining. In Teresa Ramirez's case, it became the singular focus of her life, and her rage against the surgeons she believed it ruined her body got folded in as an integral part of the obsession. As we've seen many times before on this show, obsession plus rage can be a deadly equation.

Teresa continued trying to persuade doctors into operating on her. She had that insane meeting with Dr. Fees that we told you about earlier, where she flashed the poor guy when he told her she needed to see a psychiatrist. psychiatrist. Dr. Tavis was actually the only doctor in town who had been willing to work with her time after time because he was a good guy and he wanted his patients to be happy. Talk about no good deed goes unpunished, right? Seriously. Teresa was just marinating in her own righteous anger. And then about a year after her lawsuit got dismissed, something happened that snapped the final fragile thread holding her together. She'd been feeling run down so she went to see her general practitioner, and after some blood work, she was diagnosed with type 2 diabetes.

Her sister Patricia later said, quote, as soon as she found out, something in her mind clicked off. One of her coworkers later said that Teresa had always had anger issues, and she could be passive-aggressive when she didn't get what she wanted. Now she moved past passive-aggression. In her mind, it was aggressive aggression time, and she had a whole list of people in mind. It must have taken her weeks or months to assemble all the information. about their personal lives and daily routines. Home addresses and license plates numbers, she logged it all in her notebook in meticulous handwriting. On the morning of July 3rd, her first stop was the home of Dr. Fees. If he hadn't been out of town, he'd have been the first to die.

That could have been a moment of clarity for Teresa. Standing on Dr. Fees's doorstep in the bright morning sun, she could have stopped, realized she was about to do something she could never take back. She could have turned around and gone home. But that's not what she did. Instead, she moved to number two on the hit list, Dr. Michael Tavis, and we know what happened there. And remember how we told you they found a ticket to Van Nuys in Teresa's hotel room? Well, that train station in Van Nuys was about 10 minutes from the home of Dr. William Shaw, another one of the names on Teresa's hit list.

She was headed there next. If she hadn't gone back to her hotel room and lapsed into a diabetic coma, Dr. Shaw might have been down too. And who knows how many others. There were 20 names on her list, and I think she'd have kept killing until she'd worked her way through all of them. Yep. This woman was out for vengeance, out for blood. She used hollow point bullets, by the way, designed for maximum damage. Oh, God. Ballistics texts confirm that a revolver they found in Teresa's hotel room was the same gun that had killed Dr. Tavis and horribly wounded Kay Carter. And luckily, for the investigators, Teresa had woken up from her coma just in time for them to interview her.

So on July 9th, investigators went to the hospital to meet her. Teresa stared at the lead detective as he introduced himself and explained why he was there. But when he started asking questions, she turned her head away and refused to say a word. She pretended she couldn't talk because of her condition, the police chief later told oxygen, but she was fine. She just didn't want to talk about it. Pissed off that she only got two of the people on the hit list, most likely. But the detectives didn't need her to talk.

They put her under arrest right there in her hospital bed for first-degree murder and attempted murder. Hospital habeas Gravis. At Teresa's trial, some chilling evidence came out, giving everybody a better idea of what had happened the day of the shootings at Dr. Tavis' office. The office manager Kay Carter had come into work that morning, just like she did every day.

She put on a pot of coffee and started getting ready to start her day. And then Teresa appeared in the doorway and just shot her in cold blood. No hesitation. Then as Kay lay bleeding for 30 minutes, Teresa hid in one of the offices until she heard Dr. Tavis and his wife come in. Now, just imagine being Dr. Tavis in that moment.

You're walking down the hall and suddenly here's the patient you almost had to get a restraining order on, stepping out from a doorway and opening fire on you. Teresa chased Dr. Tavis down the hall, shooting him once in the side and twice in the back because he tried to run to safety. And then she left him to die.

Fortunately, she didn't encounter his wife on the way out. Teresa's defense was that she had shot these people, but she wasn't in her right mind at the time because of her body dysmorphia. And there's definitely something to the body dysmorphia. I mean, her lawyer later said that while they were preparing for trial, he could hardly ever get her to talk about the actual details of the case. All she wanted to talk about was her, quote-unquote,

horribly disfigured breasts. and how these evil doctors had ruined her life. The obsession was still going strong, but an insanity defense is a tough cell. You might very well have body dysmorphia, and it might very well suck, but it doesn't mean you get to murder somebody and leave somebody else disabled for life.

These crimes were very premeditated, methodically so. And the jury just did not buy what Teresa's lawyers were selling. They found her guilty on the first-degree murder and the attempted murder, and sentenced her to two life sentences without the possibility of parole, consecutive. Meaning, she ain't going anywhere. She's leaving prison in a pine box.

Teresa's reaction to her verdict was totally stone-faced. She didn't say a word, just sat and stared. She wasn't insane, her co-worker said later, she was just evil. You know, I do have sympathy for Teresa. She went through a horribly traumatic experience. Breast cancer, losing both her breasts. I mean, that has the potential to mess anybody up emotionally and mentally. But my sympathy ends the minute she picked up that gun.

She destroyed people's lives and she wanted to destroy a lot more. Kay Carter, by the way, died in 2012 from complications related to the shooting. She left behind four children. And those kids had already lost their father years before. So now they'd lost both their parents. It's just horrific. And Michael Tavis' family lost him. His new wife, his children,

and the patients who relied on him, they didn't have him anymore. There's no excuse for that. But the scary thing is, this case isn't actually that unusual, not as much as you'd hope. Violence against health care providers has been rising for a while now.

I'm sure some of y'all remember the case of Dr. David Cornbley, the Chicago dermatologist whose patient murdered him. We covered that one a few months ago, and that's just one of many. In 2015, a man named Stephen Picherry shot and killed Dr. Michael Davidson at Brigham and Women's Hospital in Boston. Picherry was convinced that a medication Dr. Davidson had prescribed

his mom had contributed to her death, something there's no evidence for. And his mom had a heart condition and the doctor was trying to treat it and it didn't work and she died. But Picheri obsessed over it and finally ended up murdering the doctor. Dr. Davidson's last words were, run, run, he showed. shooting as he tried to warn other people in the hospital. Dr. Davidson was a much-loved doc. His patients called him Dr. McDreamy, and he was the kind of doctor who would sit with you as long as you needed and answer every one of your questions.

Reassure you it was going to be okay. The Bureau of Labor Statistics reports that in the five years from 2018 to 2023, health care workers made up almost 75% of all non-fatal workplace injuries and illnesses due to violence. Jesus. The American College of Emergency Physicians recently found that violence against ER staff has gone up 24% in the past four years. In one survey, yeah, in one survey, three quarters of all emergency room docs reported getting at least one threat of violence from a patient in the previous year. And 30% of those had actually been assaulted.

Some inside the ER and some outside of it, which means a patient attacked them at home or somewhere else. else. That's just terrifying. And almost 4% of those doctors had been stalked by a patient. Oh, Lord. The organization MD Links did a survey recently, too, and check out this quote from the doctor who conducted it, Dr. Shamard Charles. I have three rules for early career medical professionals. Be on time. Be prepared and know your patients. But recently, I've had to add a fourth. Never wear your stethoscope around your neck. He goes on to say that his med students, usually assume he's joking, but he's not. He made that rule because a patient once tried to strangle one of his fellow doctors

with her stethoscope. Fortunately, she made out of her alive, but she had to take personal leave to get some counseling and trying to process what happened. And a year later, she quit medicine altogether. How awful is that? God. Nurses are victims on a regular basis, too. Some sources say that psychiatry, emergency medicine, and plastic surgeons tend to be

victimized most often. And you can kind of understand why. With emergency medicine, you've got providers who are dealing with the general public during the worst moments of their lives. Weight times can make people angry, especially if they're in pain or sick. It can be the perfect storm. With psychiatric providers, obviously you've got some patients who aren't mentally stable. And with plastic surgeons, well, people can be intense about their looks. And if they feel like they didn't get the results they were after, shit can get dark.

There's a Russian case that's very similar to Teresa Ramirez, a former soldier named Yuriurie. Lebedev didn't like his nose or his ears, and he'd had several plastic surgeries to try and get them looking the way he wanted, but nothing satisfied Yuri. Eventually, he came up against the same obstacle Teresa did, a doctor named Alexander Remizov, who told him no more and advised him to see a psychiatrist. And in September of 2015, Yuri snuck into the Russian Railways Hospital in St. Petersburg with a machine gun hidden inside a sweater. He walked straight to Dr. Remizov's office and shot him dead. Then he took his own life. Dr. Remazov died the next morning.

Yeah, this is definitely not just a problem in the U.S. Italy did a really comprehensive study a few years ago and found that it's a major problem there, too. Their health care providers are like 17 times more likely to experience work-related violence than the average Italian citizen. And China has had trouble attracting medical students because people are so worried about violence against doctors. So evidently, it happens a lot over there.

Damn. A lot of medical professionals here are calling for better protections at state and federal levels. Better security, better protocols. Like schools, hospitals all over the country are now doing active shooter training. That's scary. And it's a complicated problem, and we don't tend to be great at solving those. And even after all this discussion, Teresa Ramirez is still a mystery to me. Such a deeply private person, so quiet on the outside with such a wild storm, inside. But as tangled up as her psychology might have been, for me it comes down to total self-involvement in the end. I wish she'd been able to get out of her own head, instead of just fallen deeper into the abyss of her own obsession. And I'm thankful she didn't make it any further down her hit list. A whole lot of people dodged a literal bullet that day. 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 as always, we want to send a grateful shout out to a few of our lovely patrons.

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