Pathological

by Henry Cordes

  Not surprisingly, his cascading alcohol abuse finally got him arrested for drunk driving in suburban Chicago on March 12. “I am an alcoholic,” he told the arresting officer. “I drink all day and night.” It wasn’t Garcia’s only form of self-medication. He was also prescribing himself antipsychotic and antidepressant drugs.

  Somewhere in the midst of this personal implosion, it’s clear Garcia became even more deranged, the homicidal thoughts intensifying. Just four days before the DUI, Garcia had gone to Gander Mountain to purchase the gun he used to kill Roger Brumback. Later evidence would also show this was the time he got on the internet to plot against Bewtra.

  Garcia’s odd behavior continued after the May 12 Brumback killings, as he lost a series of other medical jobs amid ever more peculiar circumstances. The strangest of flameouts came in late June. He showed up at an energy company where he was supposed to perform a series of physicals. Instead of going inside, he sat in his car eating and listening to music. He verbally abused a nurse who came out to inquire about his status. When he did come in, he asked one man to perform oral sex on him, challenged another to a fight, and then stomped off.

  But the most telling evidence of how far off the deep end Garcia had plunged would come two weeks later, when the task force arrested Garcia and began searching his home and car.

  As Davis, Herfordt and crime lab technician Amanda Miller arrived at Garcia’s suburban cul-de-sac, they right away noticed the sleek Ferrari parked out front. But as the detectives learned, with Garcia it was all about projecting an image of success. A neighbor told them the seldom-driven Ferrari, as well as a Lotus that Garcia had recently sold, were always parked out in the driveway for everyone to see, even though Garcia’s two-car garage sat completely empty.

  His house was empty, too. “Well, this will be quick,” Herfordt thought as he scanned the barren rooms. There wasn’t much to sift through.

  But he and Davis were immediately attracted to the eight stacks of documents laid out on the marble-tiled dining room table. This scene was familiar to them. For in addition to homicides, the detectives also frequently investigated suicides. It was common for them to see people who took their own lives first organize and arrange their affairs for the benefit of loved ones.

  The detectives moved into the kitchen, where the cupboards were nearly devoid of dishes or food. The fridge was empty, too, save for some condiments and a box of cereal. “That’s when we knew he was crazy,” Herfordt would say later. “Who keeps cereal in the refrigerator?”

  What most interested Herfordt and Davis, though, was a brown plastic garbage bag soaking in the sink. Herfordt went over and opened the bag, finding it filled with still more papers. “You need to stop that,” Davis told him. “Can’t you smell it?”

  Actually, Herfordt couldn’t. A medical condition some years earlier had robbed him of his sense of smell. He didn’t realize that in stirring around the sink, he’d unleashed a powerful, nauseating odor. It appeared some household chemical had been poured over the papers in an amateurish effort to destroy them.

  As in so many other endeavors, Garcia had failed again. While the ink on some papers was running, most were still legible. And in this toxic stew, the detectives would find still more evidence of Garcia’s professional failure, financial struggles, mental decline, desperation and thirst for revenge.

  Included in the paper cache was the detritus of Garcia’s medical career, including lots of documents Herfordt and Davis were already well familiar with: Copies of the bad reviews he’d received from Chhanda Bewtra. The original letter Hunter had handed him when he and Brumback fired him from his Creighton residency. Reviews critical of his performance in medical school. Rejection letters from medical licensing authorities in Indiana and Kentucky.

  Other papers spoke to Garcia’s dire financial straits. There was a copy of a recent letter he’d written to his home lender seeking to stave off foreclosure, the letter saying he had not worked in more than five months. He’d been unable to get another job, he said, due to severe clinical depression, as well as his lack of board certification in a medical specialty.

  There were also lists of ideas Garcia had drawn up on how he could dig out of his financial hole, from dropping his cell phone and selling all his cars to applying for public assistance. One thing Garcia didn’t cut from his budget, though, was beer. It frequently topped Garcia’s handwritten grocery lists.

  As his financial woes grew more desperate, it appears Garcia’s mind increasingly drifted to ways he could make money illegally. He searched on his computer for illicit ways doctors could make cash. The sink papers included information downloaded from the internet on how to commit identity theft. He’d even drawn up a rambling plan on how he could assume the identity of an Indianapolis man who also was named Anthony Garcia:

  “Arrive about 10:30 a.m. when no one is around. Steal pertinent mail from mailbox. Where they shop. Super market, mall, movies ect. (sic) and shop with their stolen credit info/credit cards/ATM cards only at those places. ... Take out loans, credit cards, ect (sic) with their info. ... Follow him to work, ect (sic).”

  Over time, Garcia’s criminal plotting would become ever more incredibly dark and disturbing. Some of his writings alluded to kidnapping families, including references to “tie arms to sides” and “blindfold” and “use duct tape.” Here’s what his most detailed such plan said:

  “Park around corner ... Common shoes ... Band-Aids on tips of fingers (doorbell) ... Fake drivers license ... Take jackhammer and crow bar ... Get their cell phones ... Separate rooms in house. Pawn furniture, jewelry ... Pin # ATM cash ... Plastic ties ... Sizzors (sic) ... Beer.’’

  The Omaha detectives had always figured by the nature of Garcia’s crimes they were dealing with some kind of psychopath. These writings seemed to reflect the thoughts of a man who would not hesitate to kill for his own selfish purposes. The old medical school maxim — first, do no harm — had become completely lost on this doctor.

  But just how truly dangerous Garcia had become would be especially underscored the day after his arrest. That’s when Mois, Warner and Miller ventured back to southern Illinois to go through Garcia’s impounded Mercedes SUV. Among the eye-opening pieces of evidence they’d log:

  A .45-caliber handgun and box of ammo.

  A brand-new sledgehammer and crowbar.

  A box of rubber gloves.

  A road atlas containing hand-written directions to Shreveport, Louisiana, some eight hours directly down the road from where Garcia was stopped.

  A stethoscope.

  And, most chillingly of all, an LSU lab coat.

  Mois’ eyes widened when he spied the coat, with the school’s distinctive logo on the chest. Why would he pull that out of mothballs more than five years after he’d been fired by the school? Along with the gun, maps and burglary tools, there was plenty of evidence Garcia truly was headed to Shreveport to seek more revenge.

  Mois and Warner also found evidence in the car that it was all part of a grander suicide mission. In a blue LSU shoulder bag, the detectives found three manila envelopes that Garcia had addressed to his parents. Those envelopes were stuffed with more important documents out of Garcia’s life, including titles to his cars and information on his life insurance policy. A note with the papers offered only this explanation: “Please hold these documents in case of an emergency. Your son, Anthony Garcia.”

  One personal list of to-dos in the satchel included “Destroy DUI and Justice (medical residences) and Bad info on myself” — a seeming reference to what Davis and Herfordt found soaking in the sink. Two other notes referred to Canada and New Orleans and could be interpreted as a possible suicide plan:

  “Rent boat. ... Have fishing gear (look like a fisherman). ... In right hand: Gun (hidden) ... In left hand Phone, Passport, Driver’s License, Poison (hidden), Knife (knives) (hidden), Cash, Mercedes Keys, Medications.”


  The road atlas with the directions to Shreveport also included directions from Shreveport to New Orleans, along with information on New Orleans businesses that rented deep sea fishing boats. Also, significant to Mois and Warner was what they didn’t find in the car. Luggage. Not even a change of underwear. Garcia clearly wasn’t on vacation.

  As Mois and Warner processed the evidence taken from Garcia’s car, they attempted to piece together his plan. Mois’ best theory: His personal life now circling the drain, Garcia was on his way to Shreveport to kill LSU officials who had fired him five years earlier. The presence of both the lab coat and the burglary tools suggest he could have been targeting them in their homes or even in the halls of the school itself.

  Then he planned to drive to New Orleans, rent a boat and shoot himself in a way his body would fall overboard and be lost at sea. That would then allow his parents to collect on the life insurance policy he was mailing them.

  Parts of the theory would be further buttressed later when detectives listened in on a jailhouse phone call between Garcia and his parents. In it, Garcia told them he was headed to Louisiana to kill himself.

  Regardless of what his specific plan was, there seems little doubt Garcia had dramatic plans as he drove his SUV south on Interstate 57. That was additionally supported by another paper Davis and Herfordt found left behind in Garcia’s Terre Haute home.

  The hand-written note featured words drawn from dialogue in “The Grey” — a movie released the previous year in which a group of men trapped in the wild are surrounded by a pack of wolves. In the movie’s most climactic moment, the main character vows that if he’s going to die, he’ll die fighting.

  Garcia’s hand-written words likewise suggested he was now prepared for some kind of dramatic final stand.

  Into the fight we go.

  We live.

  We die.

  We live.

  We die.

  “Whatever his end game was,” Davis would later say, “it looked like he was putting it into motion.”

  CHAPTER 21: THE NERD COP

  Back at his desk in Omaha, Nick Herfordt plugged Anthony Garcia’s iPhone into an electronic contraption not much bigger than a tissue box. Omaha’s self-dubbed Nerd Cop was about to uncover what would prove to be some of the most damning evidence yet in the case detectives continued to build against the homicidal doctor.

  Within three years of the iPhone’s 2007 introduction, smart phone use nationally had exploded. Suddenly, almost every American was, in effect, walking around with a computer in hand — one that held such intimate secrets as who they were communicating with, where they were at any given moment, what websites they were frequenting, even how many steps they were taking in a day.

  By 2013, law enforcement agencies across the country were slowly waking up to how critical digital forensics could be to police work. And few cops anywhere knew the cyber-sleuth’s art like Nick Herfordt. If more criminals realized what digital detectives like Herfordt were capable of gleaning from a cell phone, they would never carry them.

  “It’s not rocket science,” Herfordt liked to say of his craft. “But it is computer science.”

  Herfordt, though, was more than just a computer geek. What helped set his work apart were his investigative skills. He combined a detective’s eye for knowing what type of information was most relevant to a case with the technical knowledge of where on the device to find it.

  The little back box Herfordt plugged Garcia’s phone into was known in the trade as a “universal forensic extraction device,” or UFED — one of numerous electronic toys Herfordt had lying around his desk.

  With the UFED, Herfordt downloaded all the data from Garcia’s phone. He then ran the data through a software program, enabling him to navigate the byzantine numbers, letters and symbols that made up the code. He was looking for clues.

  Herfordt first examined Garcia’s internet search history, hoping he might find incriminating things Garcia had looked up on the web. The detective found only two searches there. Either inadvertently, or most likely in an intentional effort to cover his tracks, Garcia had recently cleared the phone’s search history.

  But simply deleting that history wasn’t enough to foil Herfordt. For him, the browser history really represented just the low-hanging fruit. He had other tricks to help him find what he was seeking.

  What Herfordt knew, and Garcia didn’t, was that whenever a smartphone user closes out of a web browser, the phone internally saves the last page that was viewed in a mode called “suspended state.” That way the next time the browser is reopened, the phone can take the user back to the same place. And, Herfordt knew, all those suspended state entries are stored. Herfordt went poking around in Garcia’s suspended state log, and he quickly found a smoking gun.

  He could see Garcia had gone on to the Whitepages.com phone directory website to search for the address of Roger Brumback. The log entry didn’t have a timestamp, so Herfordt didn’t know exactly when the search occurred. But again, Herfordt had his ways.

  This new information prompted Herfordt to go to Apple with a search warrant to gain access to Garcia’s account. After the court granted it, he went into Garcia’s cloud account and downloaded all the information that was on Garcia’s iPhone the last time it had been backed up.

  Herfordt sifted through this backup data. To his delight, he saw it included all of Garcia’s recent search history, before he’d deleted it. And it took him no time to find Garcia’s search for Brumback’s address. He had made it on Mother’s Day, at precisely 2:57 p.m.

  The day was obviously significant. And the time fit snugly into the Brumback murder timeline, coming right after Garcia’s wing restaurant purchase and within an hour of when detectives believed the Brumbacks were killed.

  Then came the biggest bonus of all: the data included the GPS coordinates for the exact location of Garcia’s phone when he made the search for Brumback’s address. The pinpoint put him in the parking lot outside Wingstop. In effect, Herfordt had just uncovered digital DNA showing Garcia plotting Brumback’s murder right there in Omaha that day.

  With this information, detectives now had a far more complete picture of what happened in Omaha on Mother’s Day. After Garcia’s failed break-in at Bewtra’s, he essentially drove to the restaurant, ordered up some food, then got on his iPhone to track down Brumback as his next Creighton victim. It also helped prove Brumback was really just a fallback for Garcia. As he drove the hundreds of miles from Terre Haute to Omaha, the intended target was Bewtra.

  That revelation, too, seemed to fit a pattern. Similarly, Mois and the other Garcia detectives would speculate that five years earlier, Tom and Shirlee also almost surely weren’t Garcia’s intended targets. Garcia had gone to the Hunter home either with the intention of confronting Bill Hunter at the door, much as he had Brumback, or to break in and lie in wait for Hunter, as seemed to be his plan with Bewtra. And then for whatever twisted reason — perhaps to cover up the fact he had been to the Hunter home — Garcia instead murdered an innocent boy and house cleaner.

  With this finding, Herfordt wasn’t yet done working his cyber magic. Looking at the search history on a laptop taken from Garcia’s home, Herfordt confirmed that Garcia had been plotting his attack on Bewtra for months.

  On Jan. 10, during Garcia’s strange binge of drunken emergency room visits and four months before his trip to Omaha, Garcia had typed out a search for “home residence bewtra Omaha Nebraska.” There were no such searches for Brumback, again underscoring Bewtra as his original target.

  Around that same time, Herfordt found dozens of other searches that piqued his interest. Among them: “how to break into a house,” “best crimes to make money,” “breaking into a window,” “credit card skimmer for sale,” “how is identity theft accomplished,” “ordering a fake driver’s license,” “how to make a pipe bomb,” and “easy ways for physicians to ma
ke illegal money.” All again spoke to the desperate financial straits that were driving Garcia to the edge.

  Herfordt finally turned his attention to one other Garcia device, a Samsung tablet computer that Mois and Warner found in Garcia’s car. Herfordt examined the tablet last because he didn’t have much hope for it. In his experience, most people use tablets for little more than playing video games or watching movies.

  But as detectives were increasingly finding, Garcia was not like most people. Herfordt soon discovered Garcia had actually done much of the final plotting for his Mother’s Day massacre on the tablet.

  Two days before Mother’s Day, Garcia was up at 3:40 a.m. searching for driving directions to Omaha. Four hours later, Garcia had searched Whitepages.com for Bewtra’s address and then mapped out directions to her home. Amid those searches, Herfordt also found evidence that Bewtra may not have been the only target on Garcia’s radar at that time.

  Just before looking up Bewtra’s address that morning, Garcia conducted multiple searches for the home and work addresses of a pathologist who gave him bad reviews during his failed Chicago residency. As with Bewtra, Garcia had even mapped out the route to her office.

  This was particularly significant for another reason: Detectives knew from Garcia’s credit card and phone records that he had not traveled directly from Terre Haute to Omaha before Mother’s Day, but had actually spent time in Chicago on the way there.

  Herfordt had to wonder: Was this Chicago doctor even alive?

  Herfordt reached out to her and found that, thankfully, she was still in one piece. It seems that if Garcia did indeed have plans to kill her in Chicago that day, that plan, too, had somehow fallen through.