Pathological

by Henry Cordes

  Mois was unimpressed. The homicide detective was used to suspects who came at him with a swaggering, in-your-face, fuck-you attitude. What he saw now surprised him. Garcia came off as meek and fragile, hardly a person he could imagine knifing four people to death.

  “Dr. Garcia, we want to spend a little time with you,” Mois said. “I’d like to clarify a couple of things. We’re not here to talk to you about (the) DUI.”

  “We’re here to talk to you about a case we’re conducting in Omaha, Nebraska, and hoping you can help us,” Warner chimed in with an affable, good-cop tone. “If you’re willing to talk to us, we’d be more than grateful about that.”

  “Are you two police officers?” Garcia asked.

  “Yes, we are,” Warner said. “We’re both detectives from Omaha, Nebraska.”

  “OK, ahhhhhhhh,” Garcia said at the mention of the city of his past misdeeds. “I’ll answer your questions — as long as an attorney is present with me.”

  And with those magic words, the interview was over as quickly as it started. The detectives had known going in that Garcia was likely to lawyer up. And any defense lawyer worth beans was going to tell Garcia to keep his mouth shut.

  Still, the detectives’ trip ultimately served another purpose. Mois had some news for Garcia.

  After following the doctor back to the jail booking area, Mois told Garcia he’d be confiscating all of his clothes, wallet and personal items. They would be held in custody as evidence.

  Garcia asked why. Mois dropped the news. “I have a warrant from Douglas County, Nebraska, charging you with four counts of first-degree murder and four counts of use of a weapon to commit a felony.”

  Derek Mois left his first and only meeting with Anthony Garcia finding the doctor’s reaction to those words most telling. Garcia didn’t get defensive. He didn’t look surprised. He didn’t even ask about the nature of the charges against him.

  “Oh, OK,” Garcia responded. And then without prompting, he walked himself back into his jail cell.

  Standing in that Illinois jail at the moment, Mois wasn’t sure Garcia grasped the hard realities that Mois now knew to be true. That Garcia would never spend another minute of his life as a free man. And that after Garcia savagely killed four people in cold blood, the reckoning had begun.

  CHAPTER 19: MISSED OPPORTUNITIES

  Late in the day that Monday, Omaha Police Chief Todd Schmaderer stood in the same room where exactly eight weeks earlier he’d announced formation of the task force. He triumphantly revealed an arrest had been made that morning in the Hunter and Brumback murders. Up on the screen flashed an image of Garcia’s mug shot.

  Speaking to a room packed with reporters and police personnel, the chief said he saw in the suspect “the elements of a serial killer.”

  “We did not feel this individual would stop unless an arrest was made,” Schmaderer said.

  Only an hour earlier, Dr. Bill Hunter had received a call from detective Doug Herout informing him the task force had just arrested one of his former residents for his son’s murder. Up to that point, Hunter had been kept completely in the dark on who was in the task force’s crosshairs. But now Herout told Hunter the name: Anthony Garcia.

  “Oh my God,” Hunter thought to himself upon hearing it. But that was quickly followed by another thought: “That makes sense.”

  Over all these years, Hunter had believed it just wasn’t plausible anyone he’d worked with at Creighton was capable of killing Tom. He’d clung to that belief even after the Brumback killings.

  Now Hunter knew the truth. Despite all he had done to help the young doctor back in 2001, Garcia had invaded Hunter’s home seven years later and murdered his son.

  In the weeks to come, Hunter would frequently question himself: How come I was so dismissive of him in 2008?

  There would be room for other hindsight in the wake of Garcia’s arrest. It had some second-guessing the police investigation, too. Had detectives missed a chance to crack this case sooner? Most importantly, could the Brumbacks’ deaths have been prevented?

  The answer to both questions was yes.

  In the months after Garcia’s trial, an Omaha World-Herald examination of police reports and detectives’ interviews showed that, contrary to the public’s perception of the case, Garcia’s name was indeed mentioned to police — mere days after the 2008 Dundee slayings.

  On March 17, 2008, four days after Tom and Shirlee were killed, Omaha police homicide detectives Eugene Watson and Linda Collins (then known as Linda Yetts) went to Creighton. Their task: Make contact with Angie Alberico, the coordinator for the Creighton University graduate medical education office.

  Alberico had called Omaha police with a tip, wanting to provide the “names of certain medical students that were discharged from the graduate program. … Alberico thought that Omaha police should look into these individuals as possible suspects in regards to the Hunter and Sherman murder investigation,” Watson wrote in a police report.

  The Creighton administrator sat down with Watson and Collins and mentioned five medical residents. Two were Asian men who had been dismissed from the program; one the Russian doctor; another man who was kicked out of the pathology program for substance abuse. One other doctor was listed smack dab in the middle of those names: Anthony Garcia.

  As with the other doctors mentioned, the tip was fairly generic, offering a limited explanation of why Garcia should be examined. Without any detail, the report nodded to allegations that Garcia and another resident had been partners in that May 2001 prank phone call — the final straw that got Garcia kicked out of Creighton.

  “Alberico mentioned (the other prankster) who was in the Pathology Program 10 years ago as a person of interest,” Watson wrote. “Alberico indicated a party by the name of Anthony Garcia who was originally from California and was also in the Pathology Program ... (and that) Dr. Hunter was the program director at the time they were enrolled.”

  That was it. Watson wrote down five sentences of general information on the Russian doctor; five sentences on another Asian doctor; three sentences on the American man; one sentence each on Garcia and his partner in the prank.

  Then came May 11, 2008. Two months after his son’s death, Bill Hunter emailed Collins “asking for advice about an upcoming article in the Omaha World-Herald.” A reporter wanted to run some information past Hunter. Collins advised Hunter “not to talk to the press.”

  But seemingly out of the blue, in the same email, Hunter mentioned to Collins “two individuals” whom he terminated seven years earlier — two people he had not mentioned in any of the interviews he’d given police two months before in the wake of his son’s murder.

  “Those parties were Anthony Garcia ... and (the other person who pulled the prank),” Collins wrote in her report of Hunter’s email. Hunter had even listed those individuals’ birth dates and Social Security numbers.

  “Dr. Hunter stated these two residents were involved in unprofessional conduct and were dismissed,” Collins wrote in her report. “Dr. Hunter stated that ‘we were always professional with one another and I don’t think they bore a grudge toward me.’ ”

  That said, Hunter went on: “The reason that I even mention this incident was that several months ago, Garcia was disciplined by the Louisiana State Licensing Board because he lied on his application for his state license. When asked if he had ever been disciplined or terminated, he had said no.”

  Boom. Unbeknownst to Collins, there it was, in the black type on her computer screen: The name of the killer AND his motive. Provided by the victim’s father.

  However, despite that tip, and the other one two months earlier from Alberico, homicide detectives never zeroed in on Garcia.

  In a 2018 interview, Collins said she remembered spending three or four days looking into Garcia in 2008.

  Collins, who retired in 2012, said she found out tha
t Garcia had lived in Louisiana. She went through a “very stingy” bureaucracy to try to get Garcia’s driver’s license photo, she said. And she sought records of any vehicles he was driving then. The car registered to him when he lived in Louisiana wasn’t a CRV, she said.

  Collins’ recollections don’t square with Omaha police records. Officials say no supplementary reports document any follow up by Collins or any other detective on the two 2008 Garcia tips.

  It’s also not clear why Collins wouldn’t have found the Honda CRV registered to Garcia in 2008, given that Mois five years later received confirmation of it in the records he received from Terre Haute police.

  As for motive, Collins said in the interview that she knew that Hunter had fired Garcia. However, she noted Bill Hunter was dismissive of Garcia — something he has acknowledged. Collins also recalled Hunter mentioning the job recommendation Hunter had made for Garcia even after firing him.

  Collins said detectives in 2008 didn’t comb through Garcia’s Creighton personnel file, which would have revealed — as it would for Mois years later — other evidence of Garcia’s grudge. Collins said they didn’t do a deep dive in part because Hunter didn’t think Garcia was the killer.

  “You have to listen to the gut feelings of someone like Bill Hunter,” Collins said.

  The retired detective said she often prayed for guidance in her homicide investigations. “I feel God kind of directs you which way you should go,” said Collins, a devout churchgoer. “I always felt I was a good investigator. I was very tenacious. I didn’t want to give up until I knew we were at a dead end. … “And I really thought we had come to a dead end with Garcia.”

  In a 2018 interview, Omaha Police Chief Todd Schmaderer, who was not in charge of the department in 2008, said he understood in talking to others that Garcia’s name came up “one time” back then but “he was not on the investigative radar.”

  A reporter showed Schmaderer the two police documents in which a Creighton administrator and even Hunter named Garcia shortly after the 2008 murders.

  “The question really centers on, should he have been a focus or at least looked into?” Schmaderer asked. “My answer is yes. This was a very egregious crime. I would have liked to have seen that looked into.”

  It’s not clear whether Garcia’s name made it to the case’s “lead sheet” — which sums up leads in the investigation and serves as a guide that police sergeants use to direct the investigation.

  A review of investigative documents showed that Omaha police looked fairly deeply into a number of other suggested Creighton pathology suspects — including some seemingly less promising than Garcia. Collins spent six entire pages on the Russian doctor, one of the prime suspects. She also spent four pages on an African-American doctor; two pages on an American Indian doctor; and one page on an Asian doctor.

  And her report suggests she and other detectives ventured far and wide as they chased the 148 various tips that had come in during the first two months after the killings. For example, Collins was assigned to interview a woman who had nothing more than a “premonition” in “a dream” that a 50-something guy had committed the murders. The woman mentioned a specific name of a man who lived in Minnesota. “The caller stated these thoughts are based on her nightmare and that she has no other knowledge of the case,” Collins wrote.

  Collins devoted 18 lines to explaining how she looked into the man in the nightmare. She devoted just six lines to Garcia, merely summing up the tips given to police.

  The tips about Garcia fell into a mountain of reports that the cold case unit inherited in 2009. In time, the cold case unit would become knee deep in 2,300 pages of police reports. Garcia’s name appeared on just five of those pages.

  “It was a needle in haystack by then,” Schmaderer said.

  Ken Kanger, the head of the cold-case unit from March 2008 to June 2010 who went on to become the department’s deputy chief, said his unit would have received all of the Garcia reports. But none of the detectives from the unit would recall seeing the brief mentions of Garcia in those reports or ever hearing his name.

  Kanger said the initial investigation had so many tentacles — from Shirlee’s daughter’s boyfriend to the adults who played video games with Tom to the Creighton connections of both Bill and Claire to the FBI’s speculation it was a serial drifter. They even spent hours on the phone with famed California criminologist Dr. Henry Lee, who meticulously went over the crime scene with them. Detectives followed all sorts of leads, Kanger said.

  “We’re talking about hundreds and hundreds,” he said. “Obviously, afterwards, you always want to sit back and try to learn. You think, should we have spent all of this time on Tom’s computer (interactions)? Should we have put more emphasis and resources on the hospital? There’s going to be successes you learn from and there are going to be things you wish you would have done a little more.

  “If we had got that right record and that right file that showed (Garcia’s) vehicle, then you’re right … it probably leads to a successful conclusion. But, I mean, I don’t second-guess the effort. There was a lot of work done. It was, unfortunately, a unique set of circumstances that we hope we never see again.”

  At the time of Garcia’s arrest, Sherman’s family was among those critical of the investigation. They had long believed Omaha police weren’t looking deep enough into possible Creighton connections, one of the reasons they hired their own private detective. “We’re relieved they got the guy, but we’re pretty upset, though, that two more people had to die before they solved the case,” Brad Waite, Shirlee’s brother, told a reporter after Garcia’s arrest. “That’s tragic.”

  That Garcia was able to strike again later didn’t sit well with Schmaderer, either. The chief said it was heart-wrenching to think the Brumbacks could still be alive.

  “We’re human,” the chief said. “Of course we wish it wouldn’t have culminated in two more murders. It becomes personal to us in a lot of ways. And that drives us forward in every investigation that we have.”

  It would take the Brumback murders to bring Garcia into the fore. The day the Brumbacks’ bodies were discovered, Hunter mentioned during an interview with detectives the incident in which Garcia was fired. He knew that both he and Brumback had played a critical role in the firing.

  But at the time, some 12 years after Garcia had left Creighton, Hunter could no longer remember Garcia’s last name, only recalling that he was Hispanic. It would not be until the task force began its dive into the Creighton personnel records — and Mois picked up Garcia’s file — that Garcia’s name would enter the investigation.

  When Bill Hunter in 2018 was shown his 2008 email in which he mentioned Garcia, he took off his glasses and covered his eyes. He struggled to recall the time, and what prompted his email.

  By May 2008, Hunter said, he had sunk into a “fog” of depression — and had given up hope that police would solve his son’s murder. Police seemed to have no promising leads.

  He may have come up with Garcia’s name in response to continued police prodding for anyone or anything that might lead them to Tom’s killer. If police had followed up on his email, he said, he likely still would have been dismissive of Garcia as a likely suspect.

  “I had a hard time thinking it could be anyone at Creighton,” Hunter said. “(Garcia) bore no grudge to me, or so I thought. We hadn’t heard anything from him after he left. I just would not have been suspicious of him.

  “I couldn’t fathom who would do this to me or my family. I mean, I didn’t have any enemies, I didn’t think.”

  Hunter would later acknowledge it’s possible his kindly nature and tendency to see the good in people left him with a huge blind spot when it came to Garcia. The fact that he now knew he had mentioned Garcia doesn’t assuage any angst, he said, because it doesn’t bring back the Brumbacks.

  In the end, Hunter said, detectives faced a monu
mental task in trying to solve the killings. While in hindsight they could be faulted for not looking harder at Creighton suspects, and not pulling all the files, they had less reason to suspect a Creighton link in 2008. It wasn’t until Brumback was killed that the Creighton pathology connection became obvious.

  Hunter said he suspects investigating a crime is much like trying to diagnose a health problem.

  In medicine, symptoms can be confusing and conflicting. Theories for what’s wrong can be offered up, therapies can be tried, and still fail to offer a cure. Then a new symptom emerges or a lab test comes back, and suddenly the picture is crystal clear. Everyone slaps their foreheads and says it was so obvious. How could we have been so dumb? Why didn’t we see this sooner? There’s even a colloquialism for it in the medical world: retrospectoscope.

  “I think that’s what happened here,” Hunter said. “Unfortunately, it took two additional deaths to make the connection.”

  CHAPTER 20: STRANGE WAYS

  Though Anthony Garcia was locked behind bars, the Indiana State Police SWAT team still went in force to kick down the door of his Terre Haute home. They didn’t know what dangers could still lurk inside. So in they charged, weapons drawn. In the end, what the tactical officers and Omaha detectives who trailed behind found on the inside was more bizarre than threatening.

  While the attractive split-level house with the black Ferrari convertible pretentiously parked in the drive suggested a successful doctor resided there, the home’s interior told a very different story.

  Sparse furnishings, some rooms completely empty.

  No bed, just a blue air mattress set on the floor.

  Empty beer cans and trash as the primary decorative motif.

  Amid the emptiness and disarray, a table with piles of papers set out at perfect 90-degree angles. They included Garcia’s Utah medical degree, his Illinois medical license and the deed to the house he was about to lose to foreclosure — documents that spoke to a man putting his affairs in order.