Christopher Duntsch

• 1. Introduction

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  Christopher Duntsch was accused of injuring 33 of the 38 patients he treated as a neurosurgeon in the Dallas-Fort Worth area, all in less than two years. Thirty-one of those patients were maimed. Two died. He became known by the nickname Dr. Death.

  The numbers are shocking, but the stranger fact is that he kept operating. Hospital officials and regulators found it hard to believe that a trained surgeon could be this incompetent, and that disbelief gave him room to keep working.

  Who was the man behind a résumé that looked flawless on paper? What did the doctors beside him see in the operating room? Which safeguards were supposed to stop him, and why did each one give way? And what did it finally take to remove him from medicine for good?

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• 2. Paper Credentials

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  Duntsch's curriculum vitae ran twelve single-spaced pages. It listed fifteen years of training across medical school, residency and fellowship, and on paper it made him look extremely qualified. One line was false. He claimed to have graduated magna cum laude from St. Jude Children's Research Hospital with a doctorate in microbiology, but the hospital did not offer such a program when he supposedly attended.

  The real story behind the document begins in Memphis, Tennessee. Christopher Duntsch was born on the 3rd of April 1971 in Montana, but he spent most of his youth in Memphis. His father, Donald, was a physical therapist and Christian missionary. His mother, Susan, was a schoolteacher. He was the oldest of four children, with brothers Nathan and Matt and a sister, Liz.

  At Evangelical Christian School in Cordova, Tennessee, Duntsch played football. He went on to Millsaps College to play Division III football, then transferred to Division I Colorado State University. Former teammates later said he trained hard but lacked talent. He came home to Memphis State University, now the University of Memphis, hoping to play again, but his eligibility was gone. He chose medicine instead and finished his undergraduate degree there in 1995.

  He next entered an MD-PhD program at the University of Tennessee at Memphis College of Medicine, earning degrees in 2001 and 2002. In 2010 he completed the MD-PhD and neurosurgery residency programs at the University of Tennessee Health Science Center. A spine fellowship at the Semmes-Murphey Clinic in Memphis followed.

  Across his residency and fellowship, Duntsch took part in fewer than 100 surgeries. Neurosurgery residents typically take part in more than 1,000. During his fourth year of residency he was suspected of operating under the influence of cocaine. He spent several months in a program for impaired physicians before being allowed back. His supervisors were worried enough that they would not let him operate without direct supervision. Several friends recalled him going to work after a night of drug use, and one said he would never let Duntsch operate on him.

  In 2011, a Memphis exotic dancer named Wendy Renee Young approached Duntsch at a club after learning he was a doctor. She moved in with him immediately. They had two sons and broke up just before the birth of the second, in September 2014.

  His early career had leaned toward the research side of his degree. His name appeared on several papers and patents, and he joined a number of biotech startups. Even so, he was more than $500,000 in debt when he met Young. Neurosurgery can pay very well, so he turned to it. In 2010 he moved to Dallas, Texas, and persuaded Young, who grew up in the area, to come along.

  Baylor Regional Medical Center at Plano, now Baylor Scott & White Medical Center - Plano, hired him as a minimally invasive spine surgeon. The salary was $600,000 a year plus bonuses.

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• 3. Baylor Plano

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  Randall Kirby, a veteran vascular surgeon at Baylor Plano, formed a poor opinion of Duntsch almost at once. Kirby recalled that the newcomer boasted often about his abilities. In the operating room, Kirby said, "he could not wield a scalpel."

  Kenneth Fennell was the first patient Duntsch operated on at Baylor Plano. Duntsch worked on the wrong part of his back and left him in chronic pain. A second operation meant to relieve that pain left Fennell paralyzed in his legs. After months of rehabilitation he could walk with a cane, but he could not go more than thirty feet or stand for more than a few minutes.

  Lee Passmore, a Collin County medical investigator, came away with chronic pain and limited mobility. Duntsch cut a ligament not normally touched in that procedure, misplaced spinal hardware, and put a screw in the wrong spot. He then stripped its threads so it could not be removed. Even without the stripped threads, the screw sat where removing it would have caused Passmore to bleed out. Vascular surgeon Mark Hoyle, who assisted, said Duntsch seemed oblivious to heavy bleeding. Hoyle was so disturbed that he physically restrained him, and later told Duntsch to his face that he was dangerous. He began to question Duntsch's sanity.

  Barry Morguloff, who owned a pool service company, was left with bone fragments in his spinal canal. Duntsch had tried to pull a damaged disc from his back with a grabbing tool. He refused Morguloff pain medication, calling him a "drug seeker." Morguloff eventually lost most function on his left side and needed a wheelchair. Kirby assisted in that surgery and saw Duntsch keep making mistakes even after the correct anatomy was pointed out to him. At a follow-up visit, Morguloff walked out because Duntsch showed clear signs of being inebriated.

  Jerry Summers, a longtime friend of Duntsch, came to Baylor Plano to have two neck vertebrae fused. Duntsch botched the removal of a disk and left his friend a quadriplegic. In a second surgery he packed the space with a large amount of gel foam, which constricted the spinal cord. The anesthesiologist recalled that Summers lost almost 1,200 milliliters of blood. That was more than a fifth of his blood volume and almost twenty-four times the typical loss in a spinal fusion. Nurses and staff expected a revision surgery, but Duntsch refused to do one.

  Summers later claimed that he and Duntsch had used cocaine the night before the operation. He passed a drug test, yet hospital officials were concerned enough to put Duntsch on leave pending a peer review. Duntsch was cleared to operate while the review went on, though officials asked him to stick to minor surgeries. Summers then admitted the cocaine story was untrue. He said he invented it after being upset that Duntsch would not check on him. Summers remained a quadriplegic and died in 2021 of an infection linked to complications from the operation.

  Kellie Martin went in for a routine decompression, the simplest type of spine surgery. Duntsch cut through her spinal cord and severed an artery. A trauma surgeon colleague and the anesthesiologist both warned him, yet he kept operating as she lost a large volume of blood. He refused to admit anything was wrong, which hindered the ICU team's efforts to save her. When Martin woke from anesthesia she was screaming and clawing at her legs, and the team had to put her under again. Duntsch sat in the ICU waiting room writing notes rather than attending his patient, even after she went into hemorrhagic cardiac arrest. Martin bled to death.

  Baylor Plano officials concluded that Duntsch had failed to meet their standards of care and permanently revoked his surgical privileges. The hospital began another peer review, but Duntsch resigned rather than face certain termination. Hospital officials wanted to avoid the cost of a possible wrongful termination suit, along with lawsuits from patients he had harmed. So they agreed with his lawyers that he could resign in exchange for a letter stating there were no issues with him. A firing would have required Baylor Plano to report him to the National Practitioner Data Bank, a database meant to flag problem physicians. A resignation did not.

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• 4. Dallas Medical Center

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  At the Dallas Medical Center in Farmers Branch, Duntsch received only temporary privileges while officials waited to obtain his records from Baylor Plano. Red flags appeared quickly. Nurses wondered whether he was under the influence while on call. One noticed that he wore the same tattered scrubs for three days in a row. He lasted less than a week, until administrators pulled his privileges after the death of a patient named Floella Brown and the maiming of Mary Efurd.

  Brown's vertebral artery was severed during surgery, and Duntsch would not stop despite massive blood loss. He then packed the area with too much of a substance meant to stop bleeding, and Brown suffered a stroke. For a few hours he did not answer the hospital's messages. The next day he scheduled an elective surgery on Efurd instead of caring for Brown. Officials asked him several times to attend to Brown or transfer her out of his care. He proposed a craniotomy to relieve the pressure, but officials refused. He was not qualified for brain surgery, and the hospital lacked the equipment and personnel. Brown lay in a coma for hours and was brain dead by the time he agreed to a transfer.

  Mary Efurd's spinal fusion went wrong in many ways at once. Duntsch severed one of her nerve roots while working on the wrong portion of her back. He twisted a screw into another nerve and left screw holes on the opposite side of her spine. He did not remove the disc he was supposed to remove. He left hardware in her muscle tissue so loose that it moved when touched. Colleagues warned him several times that he was doing the surgery wrong and trying to put screws into muscle rather than bone. He kept going, and Efurd was left paralyzed. She remembered waking in "excruciating pain" that she rated "ten-plus" on a scale of one to ten. Several people in the room suspected intoxication, because his pupils were constricted.

  Robert Henderson, a longtime spine surgeon, performed the salvage surgery on Efurd. He would later be called in to repair many of Duntsch's patients. When he saw the imaging, he was so sure legal action would follow that he had the salvage operation recorded. What he found inside Efurd, he said, looked like the work of a child with Tinkertoys or an erector set, not a surgeon. He called the original operation an "assault." Without the repair, he concluded, Efurd would have been bedridden for life.

  The damage was so basic that Henderson wondered whether Duntsch was an impostor. Anyone with a grasp of human anatomy, he thought, would see that the wrong area of her back was being operated on. He sent Duntsch's picture to the University of Tennessee, which confirmed that Duntsch held a degree from the school. Henderson concluded that Duntsch "had to have known how to do it right, and then did the opposite." He then phoned Duntsch's fellowship supervisor and his residency supervisor in Memphis. From them he learned about the incident that had sent Duntsch to the impaired physician program.

  Two catastrophic surgeries at Dallas Medical Center produced no report to the National Practitioner Data Bank. Hospitals at the time were not required to report doctors who held only temporary privileges.

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• 5. The Last Patients

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  South Hampton Community Hospital in Dallas was the next place to grant Duntsch privileges. He also took a job at an outpatient clinic called Legacy Surgery Center in Frisco, now the Frisco Ambulatory Surgery Center. There he damaged the spinal cord of patient Jeff Cheney and left him with no feeling on his right side. Next came Philip Mayfield, whose spinal cord Duntsch drilled into. Mayfield was partially paralyzed from the neck down. After rehabilitation he could walk with a cane, but paralysis remained on his right side and in his left arm, along with shooting pains throughout his body. He died of COVID-19 in February 2021, and his wife said the complications from Duntsch's surgery had made him vulnerable to the virus.

  Marshall "Tex" Muse had degenerated discs removed, and Duntsch left surgical hardware floating between his spine and muscle tissue. Muse woke in considerable pain. Duntsch told him it was normal and prescribed so much Percocet that a pharmacist refused to fill it, fearing Duntsch was trying to kill him. Muse fell into opioid addiction, which cost him his wife and his job. He remembered reading about Kellie Martin's death the day before his surgery. When he called to ask about it, Duntsch cursed him out.

  Jacqueline Troy suffered damage to her vocal cords, her trachea and an artery during her operation. She could barely speak above a whisper, was sedated for weeks, and for a time needed a feeding tube because food was entering her lungs. South Hampton kept Duntsch on anyway when new owners bought it and renamed it University General Hospital.

  Methodist Hospital in Dallas queried the National Practitioner Data Bank when Duntsch applied for privileges there. Soon afterward, he operated on Jeff Glidewell for a routine cervical fusion. Duntsch mistook part of Glidewell's neck muscle for a tumor. He severed a vocal cord, cut a hole in the esophagus and sliced an artery. To stop the bleeding he stuffed a surgical sponge into the throat, then closed the wound with the sponge still inside, ignoring warnings from others in the room. The sponge caused a severe blood-borne infection, and Glidewell became septic. When other doctors found it, Duntsch refused to come back and help remove it.

  Several days passed before Kirby was brought in to repair the damage. What he found when he reopened Glidewell, he said, was the work of a "crazed maniac." He told Glidewell it was clear that Duntsch had tried to kill him. To Kirby it looked as though Duntsch had tried to decapitate his patient, and he said such a botched surgery "has not happened in the United States of America" before. Glidewell was left with a single vocal cord, permanent esophageal damage and partial paralysis on his left side. He has undergone more than fifty corrective procedures, and at one point he could eat only small bites of food. He proved to be Duntsch's last patient, and University General pushed Duntsch out soon after. Glidewell's case would give Kirby the final piece of evidence for a formal complaint.

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• 6. A Board's Disbelief

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  "A clear and present danger to the citizens of Texas" was how Kirby described Duntsch in his detailed complaint to the Texas Medical Board. In the same letter he called him a "sociopath." Under heavy lobbying from Kirby and Henderson, the board suspended Duntsch's license on the 26th of June 2013.

  The delay had a cause. The lead investigator later revealed that she wanted the license suspended while her ten-month probe was underway, but board attorneys would not agree. Board chairman Irwin Zeitzler said many members found it hard to believe a trained surgeon could be as incompetent as Duntsch seemed. According to him, it took until June 2013 to establish the "pattern of patient injury" needed to justify a suspension. Zeitzler also argued that complications are more common in neurosurgery than most laymen realize.

  Martin Lazar, a veteran neurosurgeon consulted by the board, saw it differently. He was scathing about Duntsch's work and was especially angry that Duntsch had missed the signs that Kellie Martin was bleeding out. "You can't not know that and be a neurosurgeon," he said. The board revoked the license on the 6th of December 2013.

  Duntsch moved to Denver, Colorado, where his life spiraled downward. He declared bankruptcy after listing more than $1 million in debts. He was arrested in Denver for driving under the influence. During a visit to Dallas to see his children, he was taken for a psychiatric evaluation, and he was also arrested there for shoplifting.

  In March 2014, three former patients, Mary Efurd, Kenneth Fennel and Lee Passmore, filed separate federal lawsuits against Baylor Plano. They alleged the hospital had let Duntsch operate while knowing he was dangerous. Texas Attorney General Greg Abbott, later the state's governor, moved to intervene on the hospital's side. He cited a 2003 Texas statute that capped civil damages for medical malpractice at $250,000 and removed the term "gross negligence" from the legal definition of malice. The suits also alleged that Baylor Plano earned an average net profit of $65,000 on each spinal surgery Duntsch performed.

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• 7. Road to Trial

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  Henderson and Kirby feared that Duntsch could move to another state and still, in theory, obtain a medical license. Convinced he was a clear and present danger, they urged the Dallas County district attorney's office to bring criminal charges. The inquiry went nowhere until 2015, when the statute of limitations on possible charges was close to running out. One obstacle was proving that his actions were willful and intentional as Texas law defines those terms. Prosecutors interviewed dozens of patients and survivors and concluded that his conduct was criminal. Only prison, they decided, would keep him from practicing medicine again.

  A December 2011 email became a key piece of evidence. In it Duntsch boasted that he was ready "to leave the love and kindness and goodness and patience that I mix with everything else that I am and become a cold blooded killer." Assistant District Attorney Michelle Shughart led the prosecution. She later recalled that Henderson, Kirby and Lazar each contacted her, demanding to testify against Duntsch. Doctors, she said, almost never testify against each other.

  Shughart and other members of the trial team described the case in an article for The Texas Prosecutor, the journal of the Texas District and County Attorneys Association. Their own superiors were skeptical at first. Eventually those superiors found themselves in "overwhelming disbelief" that a surgeon could do what Duntsch was accused of doing. The "scary pattern" in his actions became clear to others in the office. The district attorney agreed that prison was the only way to stop Duntsch and approved taking the case to a grand jury.

  In July 2015, about a year and a half after his license was revoked, Duntsch was arrested in Dallas. He faced six felony counts of aggravated assault with a deadly weapon, five counts of aggravated assault causing serious bodily injury and one count of injury to an elderly person. The indictments came four months before the statute of limitations would have expired.

  The injury-to-an-elderly-person charge concerned Efurd, and prosecutors gave it top priority. It carried the widest sentencing range, with up to life in prison if he was convicted. They also thought it would be easy to prove, since Duntsch had been told repeatedly that the hardware was misplaced and fluoroscopy images from her surgery showed it. Because they wanted a sentence long enough to end his medical career for good, they chose to try Efurd's case first. Duntsch sat in the Dallas County jail for almost two years before trial. By then he was almost penniless, and the court appointed a lawyer to defend him.

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• 8. Verdict and Legacy

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  Thirteen days of trial turned on one question: did Duntsch maim Efurd on purpose? Shughart argued that he should have known he was likely to hurt others unless he changed his approach. His failure to learn from earlier mistakes, she said, showed the harm to Efurd was intentional. By the trial team's estimate, his patients together lost 23 liters of blood, more than ten times what they would have lost under a correct operation. Prosecutors also faulted his supervisors at the University of Tennessee for signing off on his credentials despite knowing about his drug abuse, and faulted his employers for failing to report him. They argued that the salary of a neurosurgeon, which could solve his money troubles, motivated him to keep operating.

  Over his lawyers' objections, prosecutors called Passmore, Morguloff and Summers as witnesses. They also put the families of Martin and Brown on the stand. The aim was to show that Duntsch knew he was "reasonably certain" to maim Efurd and should never have taken her into surgery. The defense blamed poor training and weak oversight by the hospitals. According to his lawyers, Duntsch did not grasp how badly he had performed until he heard the prosecution's experts describe his blunders to the jury. Shughart countered that the 2011 email, written after his first surgeries went wrong, proved he understood his actions were intentional.

  The jury needed only four hours to convict him of maiming Efurd. In the punishment phase, as Texas calls its penalty stage, prosecutors called 10 more patients maimed after Efurd. They argued that Duntsch had "sentenced his patients to a life of pain (or death)," and that he "deserved the same lifelong sentence." On the 20th of February 2017, the jury took an hour to sentence him to life in prison. On the 10th of December 2018, the Texas Court of Appeals affirmed the conviction in a 2-1 decision. On the 8th of May 2019, the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals declined to review it. The four hospitals that employed Duntsch still have civil cases against him.

  Duntsch is held at the O. B. Ellis Unit outside Huntsville. Even with credit for his time in the Dallas County jail, he is not eligible for parole until July 2045, when he will be 74 years old.

  Wondery Media launched a podcast called Dr. Death, and its first season of ten episodes focused on Duntsch. An eight-episode television mini-series based on the podcast began streaming on Peacock on the 15th of July 2021. Joshua Jackson played Duntsch, Alec Baldwin played Henderson, Christian Slater played Kirby and AnnaSophia Robb played Shughart. A follow-up docuseries, Dr. Death: The Undoctored Story, arrived on Peacock on the 29th of July 2021, with interviews with patients and colleagues as well as Henderson, Kirby and Shughart. Oxygen's License to Kill made Duntsch the subject of its 2019 premiere. A 2021 episode of American Greed, "The Real Dr. Death," covered his crimes, and a 2024 episode of Murder by Medic did the same.

  The conviction has been called precedent-setting, since it is believed to be the first time in the United States that a physician was convicted on criminal charges for actions taken in the course of medical work. The Dallas County district attorney's office called it "a historic case with respect to prosecuting a doctor who had done wrong during surgery." Carlos Bagley, the director of neurosurgery at UT Southwestern, testified for the defense that "the only way this happens is that the entire system fails the patients." A neurosurgery expert on the defense team added a warning: "The conditions which created Dr. Duntsch still exist, thereby making it possible for another to come along."

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