Pathological

by Henry Cordes

In his job as residency director, Hunter routinely handled hundreds of such verification requests each year, coming from medical boards, other medical schools, hospitals and other health care employers. Given Garcia’s problems at Creighton, though, verifications in his case were less-than-routine. Procedure called for Hunter to run them first by the school’s legal department.

  Some verification requests merely ask for dates of training. Others ask specific questions about program completion and performance. The request in this case called for some level of detail. Hunter told Louisiana the resident had been fired before completing his first year of training.

  For the licensing board, Hunter’s response was particularly notable because it didn’t square with Garcia’s license application. In that document, Garcia had suggested he did finish a full year at Creighton. In addition, Garcia had falsely answered “no” on part of the application that asked whether he’d ever been the subject of a disciplinary action.

  Citing the falsehoods and omissions, the state medical board in February of 2008 notified LSU officials of its intention to deny Garcia a license. Garcia could still continue his training at LSU under his temporary license, but LSU officials realized the doctor had likely lied on his original application to them, too.

  Days later, Hunter’s LSU counterpart gave him a call. Hunter verified that Garcia had indeed been fired by Creighton in 2001, also during that interview terming him a “weak resident.”

  On Feb. 26, 2008, LSU officials summoned Garcia into the office. They then dismissed him, citing his Creighton omissions.

  Garcia argued he’d been wronged by Creighton’s “racist” program. He would have sued Creighton if he’d had the money, he said that day. LSU officials told him he could appeal his termination. He demurred. “I’ll move on,” he said. He was escorted off the premises.

  But this time, as events in Omaha would soon prove, he did not go quietly.

  Indeed, as Mois, Herfordt and Davis worked at their desks in Omaha piecing together Garcia’s life story, the details of Garcia’s LSU firing proved a major revelation. When Herfordt received the package of records from LSU, he saw the firing date and quickly realized its significance: Feb. 26 was just 16 days before the murders of Tom Hunter and Shirlee Sherman.

  Now it all made sense. It wasn’t as if Garcia had stewed for seven years over his Creighton firing before acting on it. There had been a much more immediate trigger for the killings.

  Herfordt would later say it was never confirmed in his subsequent interviews with LSU officials that they had specifically told Garcia when they dismissed him about their phone conversation with Hunter. But regardless, it would have been clear to Garcia that his Creighton firing was the reason he was being terminated. For the detectives, this was a huge development, creating a rock solid, proximate motive for the Dundee slayings.

  At that point, the detectives followed Garcia’s paper trail from LSU back to Chicago, where he soon after moved. It wasn’t clear to the detectives, but it seemed likely he returned to Illinois because it was the only state to grant Garcia a medical license. Though obtained for his Chicago residency seven years earlier, it was still valid.

  Back in the Windy City, the detectives could see from Garcia’s email records that by 2009 he’d been able to land work with a couple of medical clinics, including one that sent doctors on house calls to elderly Medicare patients. It wasn’t lucrative work for a doctor, but it was a paycheck.

  Then by 2010, Garcia landed another job with a contractor that was providing health care for inmates at the federal prison in Terre Haute. The prison in that Indiana city where Garcia soon after relocated is best known for the special confinement unit in which federal prisoners who’ve been sentenced to death are held. Oklahoma City bomber Timothy McVeigh was executed within the prison’s walls in 2001.

  As he had at LSU, Garcia practiced in Indiana on a temporary license. But then when Garcia subsequently sought a permanent license from the state of Indiana, his past came back to haunt him again.

  The Indiana medical licensing board in 2012 contacted Creighton to verify Garcia’s training. This time, Roger Brumback gave the response, having permanently taken over the department’s verification duties from Hunter in the wake of his son’s 2008 murder.

  Brumback told Indiana about Garcia’s firing. “Garcia was involved in an incident that the program felt was unprofessional behavior toward a fellow resident,” Brumback wrote to the medical board in September 2012. Based at least in part on this information, the Indiana licensing board denied Garcia a license in December 2012.

  There would be no indication that Garcia specifically knew that Brumback had played a direct role in his Indiana license denial. But Mois later said it’s believed he did receive some degree of information on why the license was denied, and his Creighton failure again clearly played a significant role. Within five months of the license denial, Brumback was dead.

  For Team Garcia, the additional medical records uncovered in recent weeks had been a goldmine. It seemed they’d revealed concrete motive for both of the doctor’s deadly house calls in Omaha: a pathological drive for revenge against the pathology doctors at Creighton who he blamed for his failures.

  Buried in the all the medical records was one other tidbit that, while not particularly significant to the case the detectives were building, was at least of morbid interest.

  During her hold-nothing-back review of Garcia’s work in the lab and classroom in late 2000, Chhanda Bewtra had actually given Garcia high marks in one area. She noted he showed skill in cutting the tissue samples that pathologists analyze in the lab.

  In other words, he was good with a knife.

  CHAPTER 15: THE BIG BREAK

  Traveling with an FBI agent, detective Scott Warner checked in at Omaha’s airport on June 14. He was set to fly off to Washington state for what was still seen as one of the most critical moments of the Omaha task force investigation — an interview with the Russian.

  Almost from the moment the Brumbacks’ bodies were discovered, Warner had been preparing for this interview. Despite five years of serious vetting since the 2008 Dundee murders, the former Creighton pathology resident was still seen at the start as the best suspect the task force had. The plan was for Warner to fly west and surprise the Russian at the cabin in the woods of northern Washington where he now lived, just miles from the Canadian border.

  Just before Warner and the agent boarded their plane, Warner got on the phone with Mois. While the two longtime homicide partners had pursued their separate tracks during the task force investigation, they stayed in regular contact. Mois had kept Warner in the loop on what he was learning about Garcia, counting on Warner’s advice during those “what’s next?” and “what am I missing?” moments. Now Mois razzed his friend about flying cross country on the taxpayers’ dime.

  “You’re out there chasing ghosts, and I’m here finding the real guy,” Mois teased.

  Mois by now was indeed convinced his team was on to the right guy. Each new discovery about Garcia was only fueling Mois’ fire all the more. He had barely taken a day off since the moment he picked up that Garcia binder. But there was still so much work to do.

  Clearly Mois, Herfordt and Davis were finding Garcia had truckloads of motive to kill Hunter and Brumback. But the detectives needed to now establish that Garcia was actually in Omaha at the time of the killings. And that was proving frustrating and elusive.

  The rise of the digital age has given investigators a couple of critical tools to prove where a person was at any given time in the past: cell phone calls and credit card transactions. Almost everyone carries a cell phone and makes purchases with plastic. Find out where and when a person uses them and you can pinpoint just where they were at a given date and time.

  The detectives had quickly determined that the cell phone number that showed up in some of Garcia’s Creighton files was still an active
one. Davis wrote up a search warrant for those phone records. At the same time, Mois went after Garcia’s credit cards.

  A run of Garcia’s name through a credit rating agency showed he in recent years had almost too many credit cards to count. Mois was soon up to his neck in search warrants, having to seek records from 20 different banks.

  Mois could see this was going to take some time. In fact, the effort dragged on for weeks. But finally at 9:15 a.m. on June 25 — nearly a month into their focus on Garcia — an email landed in Mois’ inbox.

  It was from AT&T, a file containing the call log for Garcia’s cell phone.

  Mois downloaded the records to a computer disc and handed it to Herfordt, who was most familiar with such records. Herfordt sat down at his computer. With Mois standing over his shoulder, and Davis right behind him, they started sifting through the data.

  The records didn’t go back far enough in time to cover the Dundee killings. But Herfordt soon found that on Mother’s Day 2013, there was a single phone call on Garcia’s log: an incoming call at 5:18 p.m. that went unanswered, going to voicemail. The detectives saw the time of the call could well fit into their working timeline for the Brumback killings, coming less than two hours after the gunshots heard by the neighbors.

  Next to that call in the log were two multi-digit numbers. Herfordt knew they represented latitude and longitude lines, their intersection point being the location of the cell phone tower that had routed the call to Garcia’s phone. It was, in effect, a digital fingerprint that Garcia’s iPhone had left behind that day.

  Herfordt noted the coordinates: 41.49047 latitude, -95.0527 longitude. And then he anxiously typed the numbers into Google maps.

  The detectives peered at the screen with breathless anticipation as Herfordt hit send. This was a real moment of truth. It was time to get beyond gut feelings and hunches. If the right result came up, they’d have irrefutable evidence that Garcia had been in Omaha that day. Conversely, if the map showed he was at home in Terre Haute, they’d be depressingly back to square one.

  On the screen, a map came up. At first, they weren’t familiar with any landmarks that popped up. Herfordt zoomed out for a wider view and found the cell tower was in ... remote, mountainous northern China, near the Mongolian border. What?!

  Oh no, wait, Herfordt said. He right away realized that in his haste, he’d dropped the negative sign before the longitude number, sending the detectives to the wrong hemisphere of the globe. Herfordt corrected it, hit send again, and they all again peered intently into the screen.

  Bingo.

  On the new map that came up, the detectives immediately saw names and places they recognized. There was Interstate 80, the buzzing freeway linking Omaha to both coasts. There were several familiar towns, little ones just miles across the Missouri River in neighboring Iowa.

  The cell phone tower that had routed that call to Garcia’s phone May 12 was located along I-80 near Atlantic, Iowa, just an hour east of Omaha.

  “That’s it,” Davis said excitedly. “We got him.” The detective team high-fived and bro-hugged in celebration, jubilant in the moment. “When western Iowa popped up on the screen,” Herfordt would later say, “it was like getting injected with 1.21 gigawatts of adrenaline.”

  For Mois, this was the breakthrough he’d been chasing for more than five years. Not only did Garcia have clear motive to kill the Brumbacks, but these phone records also showed he had the opportunity to do so. And given his physical description, the car he was driving in 2008 and the timing of the LSU firing, he was the strongest suspect Omaha police had ever identified in the 2008 Dundee homicides.

  In 29 days, Garcia had gone from being just a name on a binder to now being the prime suspect in the deaths of Roger and Mary Brumback, Tom Hunter and Shirlee Sherman. There was now no doubt. They had their man, even if at the moment they likely couldn’t prove that in a court of law.

  “At that point, he had moved from a person of interest to a suspect,” Mois later recalled. “I remember thinking, ‘This is good. But we still have a long ways to go.’ ”

  CHAPTER 16: ‘DO WE HAVE ENOUGH?’

  Behind the covered-over windows of the sixth-floor task force operations room, the air buzzed as Team Garcia assembled with task force commanders, Omaha Police Chief Todd Schmaderer and Brenda Beadle, the chief deputy in the Douglas County Attorney’s Office.

  It was now July 12, six weeks after Mois, Herfordt and Davis had started on the trail of Anthony Garcia, and three weeks since they got the cell tower hit. It was time for prosecutors to decide whether there was enough evidence to seek a warrant for Garcia’s arrest. And it was up to Mois, Herfordt and Davis to make the sale.

  This wasn’t just an academic exercise. If the task force was going to arrest Garcia, its leaders wanted to be sure they had enough evidence to prove his guilt in court. At the same time, they all felt the clock was ticking. There remained very real concern that Garcia could at any time strike again. As they pondered what to do, lives could very well be hanging in the balance.

  Mois, Davis and Herfordt had prepared a PowerPoint presentation detailing the evidence they’d gathered, ready to walk through it all. Included in those slides were some noteworthy new developments — information that in Mois’ mind had really solidified the case for arresting Garcia.

  Significantly, the detectives could now tie Garcia to the very model of gun that killed Roger Brumback. And they also knew much more about Garcia’s whereabouts on that deadly Mother’s Day in Omaha, able to place him in close proximity to the Brumback home just before the killings.

  The new breakthroughs had started with Garcia’s cell phone records, the same ones detectives had used to prove he was in neighboring Iowa on Mother’s Day. The day after the discovery of the tell-tale Iowa call, Herfordt continued to work the records. He next wanted to see exactly who Garcia had been talking to on his phone, which might reveal more incriminating evidence. Going down the call log, Herfordt looked up each phone number for both incoming and outgoing calls in a reverse phone directory.

  Herfordt first learned that the unanswered call placing Garcia across the river in Iowa had actually come from his parents in California, perhaps intended to be a Mother’s Day conversation between mother and son. Among the other calls Herfordt discovered was one Garcia had placed to an outdoor outfitting store in Terre Haute called Gander Mountain.

  Herfordt had never heard of Gander Mountain. While it was the largest chain of outdoor specialty stores in the country, it had no outlets within 250 miles of Omaha. Mois, though, an avid hunter and wilderness backpacker, was familiar with Gander Mountain. And he knew something else: Gander Mountain sold guns.

  The detectives now wondered whether Garcia could have bought a gun from Gander Mountain. And they were looking for one gun model in particular. Thanks to the Omaha police department’s resident gun guru, they already knew the exact make of gun that killed Roger Brumback.

  Right after finishing the crime scene investigation at the Brumback home weeks before, Mois had gone to meet with Dan Bredow of the Omaha Police Department crime lab. Mois dropped on Bredow’s desk all the gun parts collected from the floor of Brumback’s home: the small broken-off, U-shaped piece of the frame, the rod and spring and the ammunition clip. He also presented Bredow the shell casing found in the doorway and a bullet slug found on the kitchen floor. “Can you tell me what kind of gun these came from?” Mois asked.

  Mois knew from experience that if you ever wanted to know anything about a gun — and wanted to take that information to the bank — you go talk to Dan Bredow. The Omaha crime lab technician possessed an encyclopedic knowledge of firearms, from their history, manufacture, function and capabilities, right down to the damage they do when fired into human flesh and bone.

  As usual, Bredow did not disappoint. He examined the parts, the rifling on the slug and the contact marks on the casing. And the very next day,
he got back to Mois. This isn’t official because I haven’t finished my report yet, Bredow told Mois in an email. “But you’re looking for an SD9.”

  Mois was quite familiar with the gun Bredow referred to: a Smith & Wesson SD9VE semi-automatic pistol. It was a 9-millimeter handgun with a distinctive two-tone finish, featuring a stainless steel slide, a textured grip and 16- to 17-round clip. Find someone with an SD9, Mois now knew, and you have a person with the means to kill Roger Brumback.

  So weeks after that finding, Team Garcia was now seeing Gander Mountain in these phone records. They decided to play a hunch. Ryan Davis asked the Indiana state police to serve a search warrant at the store for records of any gun purchases by Garcia.

  The next day, June 28, the results came back, and it was another bull’s-eye shot. On March 8, 2013 — two months before the Brumback killings — Anthony Garcia went to Gander Mountain and bought an SD9.

  This was another huge finding. With the SD9, it seemed the detectives had potentially locked down means, motive and opportunity for Garcia to commit the Brumback murders.

  With all that Mois and the task force now had in hand, some command officers were getting antsy, feeling it was time to swoop in. Chief Schmaderer himself had been closely following the case, coming down to the detective bureau himself one day to see Mois.

  Days earlier, Schmaderer had been deflated when he’d been informed Warner had come back from his interview with the Russian unconvinced he was the killer. The prime suspect was now off the list. What do we have to go on now? That’s when Schmaderer then was first briefed on what Mois, Herfordt and Davis had been up to. Sitting in Davis’ chair right next to Mois, the chief then asked for a horse’s mouth update on this new suspect.

  Schmaderer remained concerned that Garcia could kill again. In fact, the detectives had other records showing Garcia had bought another gun recently, likely a replacement for his broken SD9. It suggested he might have more deadly plans. As soon as the detectives were ready, Schmaderer wanted Garcia taken off the street.