- Patients were injured on the operating table.
- When they cut me open,
something went really bad, wrong.
- The first words out of Jeff's mouth was,
"What did he to do me?"
- It was like a crazed maniac procedure.
- Was it an honest mistake?
- I couldn't feel my feet, I couldn't talk,
I wanted to die.
- Or was it a warning that a murderer was on the loose?
- I wanted to lunge at him and shake him.
- And that's when it hit,
my world just turned upside down.
- His deadly weapon was his hands
and his surgical tools.
- This guy's trying to kill people for a living.
I knew he just needed to be stopped.
- As a doctor and certified expert
for the California Medical Board,
I knew first-hand that most medical professionals
will go to any length to help their patients.
But in some cases,
there are those with a deranged mind
and a license to kill.
In 2011, when 55 year-old Texas mom, Kellie Martin
decided to have surgery to treat a minor back injury,
she thought a positive outcome was all but guaranteed.
But on the day of her procedure,
Kellie's family was shocked to discover
how quickly the routine became catastrophic.
- It sounds really cliché and corny to say it,
but people growing up said we were like
the Beaver Cleavers.
- My wife, Kellie, I met her in college.
She caught my interest and apparently I caught hers.
We dated throughout college, got married,
and we basically started a family.
Lauren was born first,
and Caitlin was born few years later.
And as they grew older,
we got involved with their school activities,
sports activities.
We had a-- we had a wonderful time.
- We were so lucky to have two parents
that A, were still married, and that B, loved us so much.
- Our family was very close.
My father being a police officer,
and my mother, you know,
she works in the education field
as a librarian.
- She's very passionate for her daughters
and her family as well.
You know, we did everything together.
She's a very loving woman.
- In November of 2011,
her and my dad were taking Christmas decorations down
from the attic, and she fell down,
and she hurt her back.
- She felt a twinge in her back,
and Kellie got back up.
And she walked around, she worked it off.
But Kellie's pain continued after the fall, kept going on.
And I could tell some days
she could do chores around the house,
and some days she couldn't get in and out of bed.
We had a big trip planned to Antigua,
but she was in pain.
It just kept going on and going on.
And we thought this is never gonna go away,
and we need-- we need to address this some way.
And that's when we went to the family doctor
and told him about what she's been experiencing.
And so, the doctor gave us his card.
And it said, "Doctor Christopher Dunstch."
- When you hear the schools that he went to
and, um, how prestigious it was
to be able to have him as your physician,
you felt really lucky to be able to get in.
- Dr. Duntsch seemed very knowledgeable.
Knew exactly what he was talking about.
He suggested that we get an MRI.
- Dr. Duntsch showed me the MRI.
I saw the source of the pain.
And I knew that it was causing my mom discomfort,
and I didn't want her to have that pain anymore.
- Kellie Martin had torn
a piece of the disc material
from between the vertebrae
and dislocated it into the spinal canal.
And that was compressing on nerves
and producing intense pain.
Dr. Duntsch recommended that she undergo
a procedure to remove it.
A laminectomy is a basic spine procedure.
This is the simplest operation
that neurosurgeons do in the spine.
- The procedure my mom was going to have
was explained to us as a simple procedure.
As simple as possibly even getting a cavity done.
- On the day of the surgery, Kellie, she was concerned.
You could see that on her face a little bit.
And, but, you know, I was there to reassure her.
And then I kissed her, and I told her, "I love you,"
and "I'll see you in an hour."
An hour goes by, I hadn't heard anything,
nobody's come out to me, so I went to the desk.
And I asked her if she could give me an update.
And they just told me that they're still in the OR,
they're still working on her,
and I said, "Okay," and, "Just keep me posted."
More time went on, now I'm kinda worried.
So, I asked her again, "Can you please call?"
And she said,
"It looks like they're about to finish it up,
"and that the doctor will come out
and see you in a few minutes."
Dr. Duntsch came out, took me to this little room,
and said, "The surgery went well..."
but he said that "they may have to keep her overnight.
But we'll see, we don't know."
They may have to take her up to ICU to finish up.
I said, "Okay, do what you gotta do."
- I get a phone call from my father,
and he says, "They're gonna take her to ICU,
"and I think that it would be really great
"if you and Lauren could come
and that she could see you when she wakes up."
- My sister and I walked into the hospital.
My father was sitting in the waiting room.
So, I went through the double doors,
and there's a nurses' station.
And I said, "Hi, my name's Lauren Martin,
I'm looking for my mother, Kellie."
And she looked at me,
and her face changed completely.
- She comes around the desk and ushers us
and, like, shifting her body so that we can't see
what's going on behind her.
And moves us into the waiting room,
and that was kind of a moment that I knew
something is not right.
They ask us to go into the small private room.
About 15 minutes after being stuck in that little room,
one of the ER physicians comes in
and says, "We're still working on her.
"There's some blood loss, we're trying to figure out
"where it's coming out of, and we're gonna figure it out,
"and we're gonna keep working on her.
We're not giving up."
- And now we're 21/2 hours, three hours into this thing.
And I had a sick feeling in my gut
that something's wrong.
- My dad is starting to kind of rock back and forth,
um, my stomach is really hurting.
And then what happens is that an ER doctor comes back
and says, "She's in cardiac arrest,
and we're performing CPR."
And, um, at that point,
I-- there was a trash can and I just started throwing up.
I knew even after, like, ten, twelve minutes,
a person on-- you know, having CPR
is not gonna be the same.
You're not getting oxygen to your brain.
I that something was wrong,
and I knew I was losing my mother.
- Coming up...
- Nurses, they're saying, like,
"Randy you won't believe what we just saw
in the operating room."
It didn't have any resemblance to surgery
as we know on the planet Earth.
- I'm realizing that there's a darker side to him.
- I personally felt that
there was a killer on the loose,
and no one could stop him.
- My husband is laying there basically dying.
- We were at the hospital
for my mother's surgery.
We've been here now for hours,
and Dr. Duntsch came out, I would say, at least twice.
And every single time he came out, though,
he said, "We're keeping her stable,
you can go in shortly."
- The surgery Kellie Martin had that day, a laminectomy,
is a safe, outpatient procedure,
because it involves a small incision
to simply remove a piece of dislocated disc material
that was pressing on nerves and causing her pain.
But there was nothing minimal or safe about what transpired.
- There was the anesthesiologist,
the pulmonologist, the ER doctor, and Dr. Duntsch.
All of them came in very somber.
No one was smiling, no positive energy.
- The ICU doctor...
Said, "We did everything we could..."
But they just couldn't save her.
- We lost her.
She didn't make it, we lost her.
- I remember at that moment when they said,
"Kellie is no longer with us,"
I-- my sister lets out this scream
that I will never forget.
And I stand up and I say, "Why?
Why did this happen?"
- And that's when it hit.
It was real.
And...
I just knew that...my world just-- just--
my world just turned upside down, and my loss...
I think that's when my girls lost it too.
- It was such a slow-motion feeling of...
"My mom is gone."
This person, my best friend, the rock of our family,
the center of our universe...
She's gone and I'm never gonna get to talk to her again.
- Doctor Duntsch said nothing during this period of time.
He looked at the floor the entire time,
never gave me or anyone in my family eye contact.
- He just kept looking down.
He got out of there as quick as he could.
- When the doctors left the room,
they asked if we wanted to see my mother,
and we said yes.
I remember putting my hands on her,
and thinking, like,
"Is this the last time I'm going to touch her?"
- I needed something of her for the memory and...
I asked for a pair of scissors
and the nurse gave me a scissors,
and I cut some locks of her hair,
so the girls and I could have it.
We all had to drive home in separate cars.
You know, you're driving home, you're thinking,
"Good God, what now?"
- Christopher Duntsch was born in Montana,
but his family moved to a suburb of Memphis
when he was very young.
He was always arrogant, sort of a salesman,
kinda-- kinda cocky.
He could talk his way out of situations.
Duntsch had his training from a fairly reputable
training program at
the University of Tennessee Memphis.
- He trained with one of the more famous
spine surgeons in the United States.
- He was someone who spent about 15 to 16 years
in school getting his MD and his PhD,
which is a pretty significant undertaking.
So, his resume looked brilliant on paper.
And when he got to Dallas, he finds a market in Dallas
that is very hungry for
minimally invasive spine surgery.
And they're looking for people like Christopher Duntsch.
- Well, I met Christopher Duntsch
in the doctor's lounge
at Baylor Scott & White, Plano.
He explained to me that he was the best
spine surgeon in Dallas.
This is, like, a month into
his coming to Dallas out of training.
He doesn't have the gravitas
or the body of work to be able to make that kind of statement.
I thought he was crazy.
But I had no idea that things were gonna get
as bad as they got.
- My name is
Robert J. Henderson.
I'm a physician surgeon.
I-- I specialize in spinal surgery.
I've trained a lot of different surgeons,
but I've only really been called
in to the operating room once
to take over the entire care of a patient.
- Mary Efurd was an active 74 year-old
who went into the hospital
to have two of her vertebrae fused.
It was a routine operation,
easily mastered by most first-year residents.
But on the day of Efurd's surgery,
something went horribly wrong.
- I went in to evaluate the patient.
She had virtually no function of her left hip-flexors
and her quadricep muscles.
She had inability to hold her feet up at the ankles,
and she couldn't wiggle her toes or bring her feet up.
She was in an extraordinary amount of pain
despite medication.
She could not bear weight on her legs.
- Bob Henderson, a fantastic spine surgeon.
He's a Dallas legend.
And Dr. Henderson had to go in and do the salvage surgery.
- Immediately upon opening the patient's prior scar,
I could see a screw penetrating that girl's sack
from the left side at the bottom.
It was just wobbling there.
It was like somebody just threw some Tinkertoys in there
or an Erector Set in there.
I had absolutely zero comprehension
of how a surgeon could think that he had done
the procedure correctly.
- Another spine surgery
in the Dallas area had gone awry.
Was it just a coincidence?
- Dr. Henderson and I, we see each other
in the doctor's lounge.
Doctor Henderson starts describing
a bad interaction he had, the Mary Efurd case,
that Dr. Henderson did all the salvage surgery on.
I didn't know who the surgeon was,
but eventually we found out it was Christopher Duntsch.
And then I explained to him
Dr. Duntsch has had a catastrophic complication
with a patient by the name of Kellie Martin.
And then I was continuing to hear these reports
from the nursing staffs and the medical staffs
of all these hospitals I work at.
I have privileges at over 60 hospitals
in Dallas, Fort Worth.
They're saying, like, "Randy, you won't believe
"what we just saw in the operating room.
What are we gonna do about this?"
- I'm getting angry that this individual
is out there perpetrating his lack of skills
on vulnerable patients who were going to him for help,
and in fact, being assaulted instead.
- Christopher Duntsch had no remorse
about bad results.
He wanted to keep operating despite
catastrophic complication
after catastrophic complication.
I knew he just needed to be stopped.
- The death of Kellie Martin
and the disabling of Mary Efurd
were completely unacceptable and rare outcomes
of very simple procedures.
And both were carried out by the same physician
who was considered the top in his field.
Which is why good and brave doctors, Kirby and Henderson,
were determined to stop Christopher Duntsch
in his tracks and prevent him from hurting anymore patients.
- A lot of trepidation on my part
as to how, if ever, Mrs. Efurd,
she would recover from the damages
that had been perpetrated by Dr. Duntsch.
It was apparent she was gonna have some degree of
permanent paralysis in her-- in her muscles.
It is apparent to me that I'm dealing with
a surgeon who performed
an egregiously terrible surgery.
And I was concerned about whether or not
this is a fully trained surgeon.
- So, I said, "Why don't you just call
"his program director in Memphis
and find out what the problem is."
- I spoke to the chief of the neurosurgery department
at University of Tennessee.
And during one of the latter years
of his training before his chief year,
Dr. Duntsch had been reported by a nurse
for having ingested cocaine and alcohol
and maybe some other drugs
the night before he was presenting
to the hospital for surgery.
And so, they referred him
to the impaired physician program.
After hearing this story,
I'm wondering if maybe his brain
may have been impaired to the point
where he can't remember
how to do these surgical procedures.
He was making catastrophic slipshod attempts
at performing surgeries
and has literally got some grandiose idea
of what he can do without the actual skills
to perform it.
- To the best of my knowledge,
no one here in Dallas ever knew about that.
It started coming together that this is a problem.
He couldn't operate,
he wanted to continue operating,
which was, you know, sociopathic.
- Christopher Duntsch had more than just a big ego.
He had what we call a "God complex."
This is a deadly trait that drove his career
and potentially put every one of his patients
in grave danger.
- We revoked his privileges at Dallas Medical Center,
because I thought he was a real danger to society.
And he never showed up at the facility again.
- I personally thought the problem was solved.
I could not conceive of any way
that he could get a patient in the door
or operate on another patient
after what had happened at Baylor
and the Dallas Medical Center.
- At this point in time,
the administrator at Dallas Medical Center
brings to my attention an invitation
to meet the newly anointed spine surgeon
at University General Hospital,
Dr. Christopher Duntsch.
- I was shocked he found another hospital to operate at.
Dr. Henderson is livid.
He called the Texas Medical Board,
and I called the owner of the hospital.
And the owner of the hospital said,
"I can't remove him from staff,
" 'cause he hasn't done anything wrong.
"And there's no negative comments about him
"in his letters of recommendation,
"there's no negative comments in his file
"from the National Practitioner Data Bank.
"And so, if I even tried to restrict his privileges,
he'd sue me."
- When a doctor's privileges
are revoked in connection with substandard care
or misconduct, hospitals are required
by law to report it to
the National Practitioner Data Bank.
But the system doesn't always work.
In 2011, a whopping 47% of hospitals
didn't report their restrictions
or revocation of a doctor's clinical privileges.
Without that paper trail,
Duntsch was able to gain privileges at this,
his third hospital.
Leaving yet another patient in danger.
- My name is Jeff Glidewell.
I am 54 years old, and I live in Forney, Texas.
I am a competitive sports junkie.
You name it, golf, bowling, and anything outdoors.
- Jeff and I love to be outdoors doing things.
Our yearly vacations were at the beach.
He would bowl tournaments
and enter fishing tournaments as well.
- August of 2004, I had this motorcycle accident.
Going probably about 30, 35 miles an hour
and got bucked off.
Landed on my head, knocked me unconscious.
- After he had the motor accident,
he wasn't able to do any of those things
that we used to love to do.
A lot of back issues, neck issues,
and had multiple surgeries because of that.
- I tried cortisone shots, epidurals, therapy...
When all else failed,
then there was no way around getting surgery.
I called my insurance company.
That's what led me to Dr. Christopher Duntsch.
All the research I did
on Christopher Duntsch,
I could not find one bad review.
- The Best Docs Network
featuring some of the best physicians
in the Dallas, Fort Worth area
that are helping to change people's lives.
- I drove out to Duntsch's office.
He told me that he was one of the best
minimally invasive spine surgeons
in the state of Texas,
and he believed he could help me.
And I was just excited that someone was gonna fix me.
- We got to the hospital, hooked Jeff up to the IV,
and then it was like a waiting game.
We were waiting for the doctor.
They said they were trying to get in touch with him.
- Two hours had passed, no doctor.
Told them that maybe we need to do this another time,
and we-- we took my IV out.
We're gonna leave the hospital.
- Regarding Dr. Duntsch, I've never really encountered
this level of-- of incompetence.
My immediate fear was that
he was gonna injure somebody else,
and that he may kill somebody else.
And I felt that the only way to stop him completely
was to get his medical license revoked.
- I explained to the Texas Medical Board
what happened at Baylor Plano and at Dallas Medical Center,
but now he's got privileges
at University General Hospital.
How could this happen in our community?
He's been able to jump from two hospitals
in less than a year.
I mean, he can find somewhere else to operate.
I think you need to investigate.
We had a real problem here.
- It can take months,
even years
for state medical boards to properly investigate
malpractice complaints and decide whether or not
to revoke a physician's medical license.
So, despite the quick action
by doctors, Kirby and Henderson,
Dr. Duntsch, a known danger in the operating room,
was still allowed to continue practicing
medicine and hurting his patients.
- Two hours had passed.
I was getting aggravated at this point,
because no one knows where Dr. Duntsch is.
He hasn't called the hospital.
And it was about the time that I took my IV out,
and we're gonna leave the hospital...
And then Duntsch showed up.
He said that he had had a flat tire,
and, um, he showed up in a cab.
And I thought that was strange.
I asked him why he didn't call
and let anybody know where he was at.
He didn't answer me, he just said,
"Have you never had a flat tire?
You know that things happen."
- Jeff is wanting to leave,
but I was like, "No."
I really wanted Jeff to have the surgery,
so that hopefully he could get back to normal.
- So, they put my IV back in, started taking me back...
I basically, um, told my wife I'll see her in a little bit,
and we kissed and that was it.
I wake up from surgery
and I knew something was wrong.
I couldn't feel my-- my feet.
I could not move my left arm.
I couldn't talk.
I was in more pain than I ever thought imaginable.
And...my wife,
walked over and-- and, um, she was crying.
My wife told me that they had encountered a tumor
during surgery, and it started bleeding so bad
that they had to abort the surgery.
- It took almost four hours to get it to quit bleeding.
They had it be cauterized, and he did a biopsy.
Um, then proceeded to ask
if Jeff had any cancer that ran in his family,
making me believe, my gosh, my husband has cancer.
So, I was so distraught,
emotional, crying...
- I couldn't talk, nothing's come out of my voice,
so finally, you know, people are bending over,
and I'm able to whisper.
- The first words out of Jeff's mouth was,
"What did he do to me?"
- God.
I just think that something went really bad, wrong
in surgery, and I wanted to die.
I did not wanna live paralyzed.
I didn't wanna think about going through life,
you know, not being able to walk,
with the use of just one arm, not being able to talk.
The next thing I remember is,
um, some other doctors...
Taking a look at me.
They were fussing over infection that I've got.
- Jeff's gown, pillow, sheets
were saturated in fluid.
It looked like somebody had poured a Coke all over him.
It appeared to be pus coming out of the incision.
About ten minutes after all this is going on,
Dr. Duntsch comes in, looks at the incision,
and all that-- and said, "It appears to be normal."
I was furious.
I was screaming and hollering at the doctor,
"This is not normal."
And the nurse was agreeing with me,
shaking her head, "Yes, that's right."
Because my husband is laying there basically dying.
So, at that point, I could--
knew I could not trust this doctor.
He-- he's lying to me for some reason.
- I do remember Dr. Christopher Duntsch
coming into the room...
And he basically just looked me in the eyes
and...told me-- he said,
"You know, we encountered a tumor, did a biopsy..."
And I said, "Well what about this arm?
Why am I-- why can't I feel my arm?"
And he said, "Well, I don't know
what to tell you about that."
And he turned around and walked off,
and that's the last time I saw Duntsch.
We never spoke again.
Yeah.
- It was about 2:00 in the afternoon,
I got a call from the CEO
of University General Hospital.
And said, "Randy, he's done something terrible.
"Dr. Duntsch just had a catastrophic complication
doing a simple anterior cervical fusion procedure."
Which on a scale from one to ten's about a two
in level of difficulty for a neurosurgeon.
"And if someone doesn't get down there
and take care of it, the patient is gonna die."
So, I transferred the patient
to the Methodist Dallas Medical Center,
and then we took him to the operating room.
The incision was in the wrong place.
Dr. Duntsch, he put a hole the size of a silver dollar
in Mr. Glidewell's esophagus.
He'd taken out the recurrent laryngeal nerve
and had cut the vertebral artery--
which is a huge artery-- in half.
And then he shoved a sponge in there
to stop the bleeding from the artery and closed.
It was like a crazed maniac procedure.
There's-- it didn't have any resemblance
to surgery as we know it on the planet Earth.
And at that point in time,
I kinda started thinking to myself:
"This guy is trying to kill people for a living."
And no one is stopping him.
- When I got moved
to a regular room,
that's when...
Dr. Kirby comes in
explaining that, Duntsch tried to kill me.
"You beat him," he said, "You lived.
He tried-- he literally tried to kill you."
I've been told that he has cut a hole in my esophagus.
He had damaged my vocal cords
and done a lot of nerve damage.
The doctor that did the X-ray came back
and told my wife:
"There's not a tumor in his throat,"
he said, "But there is a surgical sponge
retained in his body from the surgery."
- And I'm just blown away by this.
This is-- crazy doctor is trying to kill--
he tried to kill my husband.
I went to the Dallas Police Department,
and it was a female officer,
I explained to her what had happened.
And she said they do not have the resources
to file criminal charges against a doctor.
So, I filed the complaint with the Medical Board,
and Dr. Kirby had also sent one.
- I called the lead investigator
of the Texas Medical Board again.
And I told her, "We've got a problem,
and you're either gonna address it
or I'm gonna call The New York Times
and Rick Perry, the Governor.
So, I got the patients' names, social security numbers,
phone numbers, everything.
And I put together, like, a six-page letter.
It took me about a week to write it,
but a whistle-blower's gotta do
what a whistle-blower's gotta do.
- We found out that his license
had been taken away,
and it was on the front page.
Physicians saying that this other doctor
was basically a serial killer.
And then to turn the page and to see your mom's face...
Was gut-wrenching.
- Now we're starting really to think,
Kellie's surgery, the loss of Kellie,
wasn't just an accident.
And I realized...
Yeah, this guy, quite possibly, is doing this on purpose.
- Revoking Duntsch's license was the one thing
that should have stopped him from practicing medicine.
But in reality, it only limited him.
He could still apply for a license outside of Texas.
Which is why Dr. Kirby knew something much more radical
needed to be done.
- I thought it was important that we not stop
at the Texas Medical Board level.
I thought it was extremely important
that he was investigated by the authorities,
because I thought that what he was doing was criminal.
And so, I called the District Attorney
in Dallas.
- This is not the type of case
that is normally prosecuted.
It's not what we normally handle.
So, when we initially started we didn't know
whether a crime had occurred
or if these were just malpractice cases
that they were trying to bring into the criminal realm.
And so, what we really had to focus on
was figuring out what had happened to the patients
and did it amount to any criminal act?
We started by just going and talking to the patients
and hearing their stories.
And we sent out over 800 subpoenas,
and talked to over 100 witnesses trying to figure out
exactly what was going on.
We kept hearing about more patients,
and so many of the patients' stories
are heart-wrenching.
They're crying in front of us.
From there we started going and talking to
the surgeons who later reviewed the cases.
- I was appalled...
After I saw the Kellie Martin case.
Kellie Martin died because of an injury
to a blood vessel-- a large blood vessel
that lies in front of the spinal column.
Dr. Duntsch undoubtedly had gone through that
and torn a hole in the vein, she bled to death.
It became very clear in reviewing those cases
that what Dr. Duntsch did was so egregious
that society needs to be assured that
he will never be able to do anything like this again.
- A pattern is emerging that he is hurting
most of the patients that he touches.
And two of those people had died.
Based on all of these events put together,
we believe that he intentionally
and knowingly committed this crime.
And that's what helped make our decision
that this was absolutely criminal,
and he had to be stopped.
We knew that we had to take the case.
- When we were told that they would take it on,
I was beyond grateful.
Someone else was fighting for my family.
I personally felt that
there was a killer on the loose,
why hasn't this person been stopped?
- During this period of time,
Dr. Duntsch gets arrested
for nothing to do with medical reasons.
He actually gets arrested for shoplifting.
- He stole about $400 of sunglasses
and pants and things.
And he was thrown in jail, posted bail.
- He had moved back to Colorado
and was living with his parents.
But he would come to Texas periodically
to visit his children.
It was on one of those occasions
that we issued the indictments through the grand jury
and arrested him.
- The day Dr. Duntsch was finally arrested,
Jeff and I were probably the happiest
we'd been in a long time to know that this doctor
was hopefully gonna pay for what he had done to Jeff.
- After we arrested him at his hotel room,
they brought him back to the police department
to be interviewed.
- Christopher Duntsch gets charged with
one count of injury to an elderly person,
which was Mary Efurd.
She was left partially paralyzed.
- We also filed five indictments
for aggravated assault with a deadly weapon.
These included four other patients,
and his deadly weapon was his hands
and his surgical tools.
- Our ultimate goal, when we prosecuted this case,
was to get a large enough sentence
so that he could never practice medicine again.
- As we were strategizing for the trial,
we really zeroed in on Mary Efurd's case,
because it would give us the biggest punishment range,
injury to an elderly person.
If the jury found that he intentionally
and knowingly committed this act against Mary Efurd,
then they would be able to sentence him anywhere between
probation up to a life sentence.
We also asked the judge to allow us
to put in other patients.
Part of our theory was that Christopher Duntsch
knew before he went into Mary Efurd's surgery
that he was going to hurt her,
because he knew that he had hurt
all of these other patients before.
- The challenge in a prosecution like this
is that you're not going to have the surgeon
admitting that he intended to hurt somebody.
And it's not like he, you know,
had there a bunch of witnesses who watched him walk into
a bank and pull a gun and shoot somebody.
- We looked at cases over the years
that have prosecuted medical crimes
to see if this was something that had been done.
We could not find a single case like this one
where we were going to be inferring knowledge and intent.
- I can't explain to you the worries that I had,
the sleepless nights, the doubts on whether we could
convince a jury that what he did was criminal.
It was so important, because he wanted to go
operate on and assault more people.
The only way to stop him was to put him in jail,
because he was not going to stop himself.
- The first time that I was in the courtroom,
I was violently shaking.
- My husband had to physically put his hands on my shoulders,
and say, "Caitlin, you have to take a deep breath."
You have to just sit there ten feet away
from the man who took your mother from you.
I wanted to lunge at him.
I wanted to lunge at him and I wanted to put
my hands around him and shake him and tell him,
"How could you take my mother from me?"
- Duntsch sat motionless,
he stared forward nearly the entire time.
- He looks terrible.
He's put on, like, 30, 40 pounds.
He's almost unrecognizable,
and he's got a surly look on his face.
- I go down to
the Dallas County Courthouse to testify.
I basically had an opportunity to tell
what happened the day of Kellie's surgery,
and then how the loss of Kellie
has impacted, me and our family.
- So I walk into the courtroom and I'm sworn in,
I start getting kind of emotional,
because I'm still going down and getting
my esophagus dilated 'cause it filled in with scar tissue.
- Sitting in that room and hearing the stories
of the other people that he had hurt,
I realized at that point in time
this is so much bigger-- so much bigger than just us.
- I spent quite a bit of time discussing my circumstances
with Mrs. Efurd, and interpreting
some of the video that I had taken
of the surgical procedure.
So, this is not providing
any stability at all.
There's bone fragments just laying
over the exposed dura here on the left side.
And I was able to point out to the jury
where the defects were,
where the errors were in the surgery,
where things were mal-positioned,
where the nerve had been amputated,
where the holes were in the bone.
I get off the stand and I said-- I said to myself,
"Well, did I do enough? Did I say enough?
Did I explain it well enough?"
- Despite overwhelming evidence
of the harm done by Christopher Duntsch,
the crux of the case against him depended on proving
that he intentionally and knowingly
committed these offenses.
To do that, prosecutors would have to
pull off the impossible.
- We needed a glimpse into his mind.
I would say the most important piece of evidence
that we really worked hard to get was the email.
- The District Attorney presented to the jury an email
that Duntsch had written in which he said,
"I am ready to be what I've always been,
a cold blooded killer."
- Saying that he had godlike hands,
but he was also the anti-Christ,
and he was freeing these people from their body.
And it really showed that
he was intentionally doing this.
- This was an email that he had written
to one of his physician assistants.
He's basically admitting that
he was hurting these patients on purpose.
I hope that would convince a jury
that he was guilty.
- I was at work and, um,
I was-- I was literally gripping my phone at my desk.
My palms were sweating so hard.
I knew it was gonna happen within that hour.
And my dad calls me...
And he tells me,
"It's guilty, it's guilty."
"We the Jury having found the defendant,
"Christopher Daniel Duntsch,
"guilty of injury to an elderly individual,
"unanimously assess his punishment
"confinement of Texas Department of Criminal Justice
for life."
- I'm literally jumping up and down at my desk,
so happy that this actually happened.
- I remember that day, finally hearing...
That he had been sentenced to life.
And just thinking...
It finally happened.
This man,
who ripped my mother from my life...
Is finally going away.
There was this huge sense of relief.
Finally feeling validated
for all of the pain and the frustration
that we had been having.
- It took the jury about an hour to decide.
Life in prison for a doctor convicted
of maiming and killing his patients.
- When I heard the final verdict
against Dr. Dunstch,
I was happy but sad, because as a husband,
I don't have my wife and my life partner
with me anymore.
You know, we were about to plan--
when we retire, to do things.
That's gone. But you have to, you know--
I try to remain strong for my girls
and, you know, just keep the head up high.
- Thinking about what all he had done to Jeff
and all these other patients,
I hope he rots in prison.
- I truly believe today and I did then
that this was a serial killer
and a serial maimer.
I mean, I just did what was right.
- He'll no longer be able to
go out and wreak havoc in the community.
The Dallas County D.A.'s office
put away a killer with a God complex
for the rest of his life.
- Between May 2011 and June 2013,
Christopher Dunstch operated on 38 patients.
Of those patients,
31 were seriously injured.
Two were, in fact, killed.
Thanks to ethical physicians
like doctors Henderson and Kirby,
as well as a highly skilled D.A.'s office,
justice was served
and a cold-blooded killer is behind bars.
For more on License to Kill, go to Oxygen.com.