Pathological

by Henry Cordes

  Then in the kitchen sink, more papers in a plastic bag soaking in a strange, nausea-inducing chemical bath. Included were writings in Garcia’s by-now familiar grade-school scrawl, expressing thoughts ranging from the incriminating to the bizarre. Read one of those hand-written missives:

  “Invade (Rich House) —> Torture —> Murder —> Jack. Rich Children. Gun. Invade. Kill. Knife. Garage. Kidnap family. Torture. Kill.”

  As Ryan Davis, looked the paper over, the words seemed the ramblings of a psychopath: Antisocial. Homicidal. Completely lacking of any human empathy.

  “This is something we are definitely going to want to take,” Davis told Herfordt.

  As Davis, Mois, Herfordt and other task force detectives in the days to follow peeled back the layers of Garcia’s life by interviewing those who knew him and sifting through other evidence, they would uncover a stark and revealing picture of the failed doctor and the forces that drove him.

  In sum, Garcia was a man who from the start never had the aptitude nor the desire to be a doctor, a career he felt pressured to pursue by his parents.

  He was a man whose personal and professional lives completely unraveled into bouts of alcoholism, depression and thoughts both suicidal and homicidal.

  A man increasingly detached from reality, his mind moving in ever more erratic, irrational and alarmingly violent ways.

  A man who even after killing four people was still harboring vengeful rage for others he blamed for his problems.

  And a man who when arrested was set for some dramatic act, the final move in an endgame only he understood.

  “It really wasn’t until we got to Terre Haute that we realized how twisted he was, as well as how messed up he was,” Herfordt would later say. “Going into Terre Haute, we still thought he could have been some kind of mastermind gone astray.”

  Behind every killer there’s a life story. Detectives, attorneys and others who probed Garcia’s personal narrative would learn his years-long evolution from aspiring doctor to demented killer started where it all began for him: back home in California.

  There, task force detectives served a search warrant on his parents’ home simultaneous to the Indiana warrant. The Golden State detectives impounded and searched the silver CRV. But they also interviewed Garcia’s family and spoke to neighbors and others who had watched the boy grow up. Getting beyond the medical school records, the detectives began to piece together the entirety of Garcia’s personal back story — a tale of a family’s lofty dreams that bitterly crashed into disappointment and failure.

  Anthony Garcia was born June 9, 1973, in Los Angeles to Frederick Garcia, a postal worker, and his wife, Estella, a nurse. While Frederick had been born in the United States, Estella was a native of Mexico. The family at the time lived in east Los Angeles, the center of LA’s Latino community.

  Both parents worked full-time, so Anthony was raised by his grandparents until about age 3. That’s when the Garcias moved out to suburban Walnut, where a brother, Fernando, and sister, Christina, were born. With a house in a tidy suburb, Fred and Estella were achieving the American dream. And they had even loftier dreams for their children.

  Anthony was always a big kid for his age, needing to lose weight in order to play peewee football. He played in high school, too, by then perhaps with some pharmaceutical assistance. His family suspected he was taking steroids. Anthony eventually gave up the game in high school due to either a back injury or heart condition.

  Even as a kid, Anthony seemed a loner. At no point in his life did it appear he was ever surrounded by an abundance of friends. There never seemed to be any women of note in his life. But socially, he did have a close relationship with his parents and siblings, and he wasn’t one to get into trouble. There is nothing in Anthony Garcia’s early childhood that would have led anyone to believe where he would end up decades later. By almost any account, he was blessed with the benefits of a very normal, loving middle-class upbringing.

  From a young age, though, school often proved a struggle for the boy. By the second grade, he was diagnosed with a reading disability and nearly held back. The middle school years were tough, too. But the boy had some strength in math, taking every class in the subject his high school had to offer. He graduated from Walnut High School in 1991 with mostly B’s.

  Neither his grades nor his IQ, which was average as could be, suggested he was doctor material. But his parents, particularly his father, nonetheless had aspirations for their son. They pushed him to pursue a career in medicine. Not that the boy had any such desire. “Math was my favorite subject from first through twelf (sic) grade,” he would write in a personal journal in about 2003. “I wanted to be a mathematician. My parents would not let me.”

  Garcia also had average grades in college before graduating from California State University-Los Angeles. And his score on the MCAT, the entrance exam for medical school, was low. Not surprisingly Garcia was no hot commodity as he started applying to medical schools around the country.

  But of all the schools he applied to, one did accept him: The University of Utah. A school official later said that given Garcia’s low grades and test scores, it’s likely his ethnicity played a big part in his admission.

  Garcia’s father spoke proudly of Anthony as he went through medical school, at times referring to him as the family’s “brain surgeon.” Frederick Garcia often sported a blue “University of Utah Medicine” sweatshirt as evidence of his son’s budding career.

  In many ways, though, Anthony Garcia from the start was set up for failure. Tests later showed Garcia entered medical school reading at a fifth-grade level, and he was an extremely slow reader. Medical school involves enormous amounts of technical reading from texts and medical journals. Badly lagging peers who usually ranked at the top of their college classes, Garcia likely never had the tools or wherewithal to succeed.

  “I read so slow I spend virtually all my time reading material over and over again,” he wrote at one point as he sought special education accommodations from his medical school. “So much time is spent reading that I have no time to socialize, sometimes no time to wash clothes or dishes.”

  At Utah, he failed his biochemistry, physiology and human genetics classes and was forced to repeat them. He was put on academic probation. His mother later reported that whenever she visited him there, he always seemed tired, stressed out and depressed by his academic struggles.

  Indeed, it was early during medical school that Garcia for the first time was treated for clinical depression. As another sign of his stresses, a citation for public intoxication suggests med school may also have been where he began drinking excessively. A psychologist later hired by his attorneys suggested one could see as far back as medical school the cascading personal problems that over time would combine to spawn a killer.

  In Utah, Garcia also began to exhibit some of the personality traits that would dog him later in life. His teachers cited poor interactions with patients and staff. He was so rough with one patient during a OBGYN exam that he brought her to tears.

  But somehow through the testing accommodations — and that extra fifth year — Garcia squeaked through to get his medical degree. He narrowly passed his national certification tests, too, sometimes after retaking them. He was now Dr. Anthony J. Garcia, M.D. And despite all his documented struggles, he even managed to gain acceptance into that family practice residency in New York.

  In the summer of 1999, Garcia and his father loaded up an old van and drove straight through to that first residency at Bassett. One could only imagine how proud Fred Garcia felt as he left his son in Albany that day.

  But Bassett, of course, became the first of three failed residencies over the next four years. As Garcia sought certification in a medical specialty — critical to getting his career off the ground — Garcia again appeared to be over his head academically. The blow-up with the radiologist that got him fired i
n New York came after he was frustrated about being interrupted while studying flashcards he’d made to help him muddle through.

  After New York, Garcia landed back at home in California, seeming to his family exhausted, frustrated and not the same person they knew. But in July of 2000 came the second chance at Creighton. While there was clear evidence of stressors during his time in Omaha, it wasn’t until Garcia’s third residency in Chicago that Garcia appeared to reach a true breaking point, both mentally and emotionally.

  In January of 2003, he showed up at an emergency room in Chicago complaining of migraine headaches and major depression. The previous day at work, he said, he couldn’t stop yelling. He’d reached the point where he sat in his apartment all day crying, screaming, drinking and feeling hopeless, despite prescribing himself antidepressants, an anti-anxiety drug and a drug to dull his alcohol cravings. He also had fallen into a dark place, confiding to doctors he’d been having homicidal thoughts about his co-workers and thoughts of killing himself.

  “I can’t make the negative thoughts stop,” he told his doctors. “It’s like the thoughts aren’t my own.” For the protection of himself and others, he was hospitalized in Chicago for 10 days.

  He was hospitalized again two months later with more suicidal thoughts. Now he was actually making plans to kill himself, expressing to doctors that he had thoughts of overdosing on his medications or stepping in front of a bus. As evidence of the seriousness of his condition, he was administered six rounds of electric shock therapy. Such treatments are often a last resort for treating chronic depression, after counseling and antidepressant drugs have proven ineffective.

  By the end of 2003, Garcia had walked away from his Chicago residency rather than undergo an evaluation to see if he was fit to continue. He again landed in failure back home in California and holed up for the next three-plus years in his parents’ home. The medical bills for his depression ultimately forced him into California bankruptcy court. He applied for and was granted disability income. Neighbors rarely saw him. His mom told them her son was “on vacation.”

  Thoughts of suicide persisted. One day, Garcia climbed behind the wheel of a car parked in the family garage and, with the garage door closed, turned on the ignition.

  Minutes later, his brother came home to find Garcia passed out or asleep behind the wheel. He quickly stirred his brother and opened the garage door, foiling the apparent suicide attempt. Garcia denied that had been his intent, but his brother went upstairs to find Garcia’s important documents organized for his family.

  A note he scrawled in a notebook around that time also suggested the homicidal thoughts he’d expressed years earlier had not gone away. “100 years from now it will not matter. So kill them but do it right,” he wrote.

  As Garcia struggled with what to do with his life, he continued to apply for medical licenses — at least five states over time would turn him down, including his native California. But his parents told him it would be OK if he pursued another career.

  He took some automotive technology classes. He tried to get on as a Los Angeles police officer. He applied to some law schools, though in at least one case he did so in an odd fashion, whiting out the word “medical” on one of his applications and changing it to “law.” He explained in one law school application that he was no longer suffering from the migraines that had caused him to leave medicine.

  “My health will not prevent me from completing law school,” he wrote. “I discovered my flaw and it is not going to happen again. My goal as a law student is to fit in and get along with my teachers and classmates.”

  But Garcia apparently did not completely give up on medicine. And perhaps his struggles with depression sparked an interest in psychiatry. It’s not clear how, but in the spring of 2007, he was accepted into the psychiatric residency at LSU.

  Given all his struggles to find himself in recent years, the LSU residency must have come like a bolt out of the blue, offering Garcia and his family new hope. And for a time, it seems Garcia may have actually turned a corner. The reviews in his fourth residency weren’t sterling, but they sounded nothing like those at his previous stops. One LSU faculty reviewer described him as “kind, well-mannered and intelligent.” Another even remarked that he had “a nice personality.”

  But it all once again came crashing down for Garcia in February of 2008 when the Louisiana medical board uncovered his undisclosed Creighton firing. This time, his reaction to failure was different, as evidenced by his 730-mile drive to Omaha to kill Tom Hunter and Shirlee Sherman.

  Why this latest failure turned a doctor who had previously never committed known acts of violence into a remorseless killer would remain murky even years later. Records from the time show in the weeks leading up to the Dundee killings he had been self-prescribing and injecting steroids, excessive amounts of which have been linked to anger, agitation, aggressiveness and violent behavior.

  The best evidence of his dark mental state at the time of the March 2008 killings would come from a trip he took to see a California psychiatrist two months later. Back at home again with his parents after the murders, the 34-year-old Garcia once again slid deep into depression. He saw a psychiatrist in Glendale in May 2008, confiding he was having thoughts of hurting others.

  “Never done that, it’s just thoughts,” he lied, according to the doctor’s notes of the conversation. During the exam, Garcia reported feeling helpless, hopeless, worthless, angry, sad and withdrawn. While he did not admit to abusing alcohol, another doctor noticed hand tremors consistent with severe alcohol abuse.

  But the Dundee killings had also not been an impulsive act. In the garage of the Garcia home in California, detectives found a duffel bag containing stacks of Garcia’s old financial papers, dating to his life in Louisiana. These records would give detectives their first evidence of Garcia’s calculated planning for the murders.

  Detectives saw in the records that Garcia pretty much lived off his credit cards. He’d eat out three times a day, and sometimes visit a liquor store twice in a day. Curiously though, there were no charges made on March 13, the day of the Dundee murders. The records also showed that on March 12, Garcia had withdrawn $300 from his Shreveport bank — certainly enough cash to get him by for a couple of days on the road. Unlike with the Brumback killings five years later, Garcia back then was careful to avoid telltale credit card purchases during his trip to Omaha. It was more evidence that the Garcia of 2013 was in a completely different state of mind.

  It was also noteworthy to detectives that before leaving Shreveport to head for Omaha in 2008, Garcia made an unusual $7 purchase at an auto parts store — a smoke-colored license plate cover. Such covers are illegal in many states. The reason: they make a license plate harder to read.

  The credit card records showed Garcia was back in Shreveport within two days of the Dundee killings. A couple days after that, Garcia went out to buy more auto accessories, this time a new set of floor mats for the CRV. The detectives could think of some plausible scenarios why someone would need new floor mats after knifing two people to death.

  Once back in California with his parents in the wake of the murders, Garcia would remain there for nearly a year. But then he somehow again found work in the profession he was so clearly not cut out for. By March 2009, the deficient doctor had returned to Chicago, where over the next year he was able to land a couple of odd medical jobs.

  The work didn’t involve anything particularly heroic, mostly performing minor health screenings. His employers would say he did decent work, though he was also described as a loner, with a wooden and odd personality.

  The federal prison job in 2010 seemed to represent another step up for Garcia, enough so that he for the first time was able to buy his own house in Terre Haute. He also seemed at the time to try to get his personal life in order, seeking treatment in 2011 for alcoholism.

  But by July 2012, he’d washed out of th
e prison job, too. Among the myriad conflicts which ultimately forced his resignation: he didn’t like the fact he was supervised by a nurse; he came to work with alcohol on his breath; he left another boss some harassing phone messages.

  Months later, during a weeks-long span in late 2012 and early 2013, Garcia got a double blow to his ego and future career prospects: he was denied an Indiana medical license and then fired from another contract medical job after showing up at a worksite drunk.

  It was at that point Garcia seemed to become completely unhinged.

  On a wild Jan. 5, three days after he was fired from his job, he showed up in a local emergency room with a blood-alcohol level triple the legal limit, saying he was suicidal. Five hours after being discharged, he walked in again even drunker than before. Before he could be treated, he pulled out his IVs and walked away. An hour later, he landed at another hospital.

  “There is a part of me that wants to go home to the closet in my bedroom, get the gun out of the safe, load it and shoot myself,” he said, according to his hospital records. Other than a month of sobriety, he said he’d been boozing consistently since 2004.

  The three hospital visits that day marked the start of a series of interactions with law enforcement and medical personnel over the next several weeks in which Garcia displayed increasingly odd behavior.

  A week later on Jan. 12, a Terre Haute fire and rescue team had to break down Garcia’s door after he called 911. They found him on the floor surrounded by empty beer cans, a gun close at hand. They took the gun for his own protection and delivered him to a hospital. Three days later in a follow-up appointment with his doctor, he showed up drunk.

  On Jan. 25, Garcia called 911 so drunk the operator advised him to call back when he sobered up. Five days later, he was in a car accident. Rather than waiting for police to arrive, he handed his entire wallet over to the other driver and left. The day after that he was back in the hospital, saying he just drank 20 beers. Three weeks after that, he asked a neighbor to call 911 because he’d lost his keys. When the responders told him he needed to sober up, he sat on the sidewalk outside his home and threw his coat over his head.