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You're probably already aware of CAST's new true crime investigative podcast, Lost in Panama. But if you haven't caught up, new evidence and testimony has recently been uncovered in the most recent episodes. It is shining new light on this case. The first four episodes of the series set up the foundation of what is known about this case.
including a deep dive into the suspicious tour guide, the mysterious photos, and the remains. But episode five launches a whole new direction of investigation into this case.
A woman connected to the confirmed homicide of her own son tells us that she knows the same men responsible for her son's death are also responsible for Chris and Lisanne's deaths. Not only that, but she presents to our team a full, detailed story of exactly what happened, how the women were abducted and killed. And somehow, it all adds up. All the pieces start to fit together. All the pieces start to fit together.
or at least start to make more sense. As time begins to run out on the investigation, but with this major breakthrough in hand, the team in Panama must attempt to assemble a compelling enough theory of the case in order to push the Panamanian government to admit that there's more going on here than meets the eye.
We need them to reopen this case so that a much closer look can be taken at all the new evidence coming to light and the families affected can finally find some closure all these years later. Will they do it? Listen to all episodes of Lost in Panama, available now wherever you get your podcasts. This episode contains disturbing content, including conversations about cancer. Listener discretion advised.
I'm not sure if there's anything more symbolic in the field of medicine than the white lab coat. This iconic article of clothing is a sign of authority and professionalism, rigor and respect. Wearing a white coat indicates that you are someone who knows what's going on, someone who can be trusted. And part of that trust comes from the oath of a pharmacist.
I will consider the welfare of humanity and relief of suffering my primary concerns. I will apply my knowledge, experience, and skills to the best of my ability to assure optimal outcomes for my patients. As it turns out, medical professionals haven't always worn white. In fact, up until the late 19th century, they only wore black. Let's face it, at that time, seeking medical help usually meant death wasn't so far off.
And as an added bonus, Black disguised any stains from bloodletting, which was a common practice, and other questionable procedures from centuries past. In the late 1800s, the white lab coat became the face of this new era in medicine, one in which doctors fully embraced the role of science in their practices. And this was a profound shift because, unlike doctors of the time, scientists had the public's trust.
For several hours a day, for over a decade, pharmacist Robert Courtney sat in his white lab coat in a sterile 9x9 room at the Research Medical Tower Pharmacy in Kansas City, Missouri. Alone in that room, he mixed potentially life-saving medications that would be used to treat cancer patients, like Glenda Bailey's mother, Lola.
Her doctor was through research hospital, which is where he was and where she landed. I feel like all of her drugs all the way along probably went through research. Lola Bailey had lymphoma, the most common form of blood cancer. But her family thought her chances of surviving the cancer were good. It had been so minor all along, and she'd maintained well for a good five years or so that we, you know, we were hopeful that it wouldn't
be too quick, I guess is the best way to put it. But Lola wasn't getting better. In fact, she was getting worse. We were kind of blindsided because we expected the immune therapy to work, and instead she got so sick so quickly. And so, yeah, that was kind of a surprise. She was there in the hospital for five months. I went...
To see her all but one day of those five months and walking down the hallway to her room was like walking in a funhouse, you know, where the floor is slanted and you're... I mean, everything is just off kilter. Lola lost her battle with cancer in 2000, just a year before Robert Courtney was arrested on suspicion of tampering with and diluting cancer drugs. Can you just, like, walk me through...
What you remember about finding out about that, you know, where were you? What was that like? Because it seems like that time was fairly chaotic around Kansas City. So, you know, I don't know. What was that like finding that out? I remember getting out of my car and walking through a doorway and I was on the phone. It's just one of those moments you just go into shock.
Like, this is not really happening. And so it's all kind of a blur. Everybody's calling everybody and, have you heard? And can you believe it? And, oh my God, my mother was murdered. I mean, it was just, it was insane. Most people know someone who has battled cancer. A friend, a neighbor, a coworker, a family member.
The fact that cancer is common doesn't make it easy to bear. Even when everything goes right, when you catch it early, when you get all the right treatments, sometimes people still die. But imagine losing a loved one after this long, difficult battle with cancer and then finding out that that loved one wasn't actually given the best chance at survival because they weren't given the right amount of medicine.
And what if you could point to the one person who was responsible for that? I can't really imagine what that must feel like after already burying your mother and having closure perhaps with that and then that being brought up a year later. What was that like with your family? A lot of anger. A lot of anger. Anger and disbelief. Because it just rips your heart out again. The fact that a human could be so...
so awful is just beyond belief. From Cast Media, this is The Opportunist, a podcast about regular people who turn sinister simply by embracing opportunity. This is season two, episode two of four. I'm Hannah Smith. Daryl Ashley was a sales rep for oncology medications in Kansas City from 1986 to 2018 when he retired.
And in 1996, he started working at Eli Lilly, the company that manufactures Gemsar. He remembers the very first time he met Robert Courtney. I went as a brand new rep, introduced myself, and then I asked, where should I call you? I said, do you go by Bob? Do you go by Rob? Do you go, how should I call you? Where should I call you? He goes, in a dead face, serious, very cold tone.
It's Robert. Daryl didn't have to go introduce himself to Robert Courtney because he never worked directly with the pharmacy. The oncologists were his clients, but he's just the kind of guy who would go out of his way to say hi to someone. Daryl Ashley admits he never liked Robert Courtney. My job as an oncology representative is to take the data, all the information about my drugs, my products,
including updated clinical trials and things like that, and give that information to the physician to help him or her make the best choices for their patients. Chemotherapy drugs are always advancing. GEMSAR was approved for use by the FDA in 1996, and it was kind of a big deal, this new chemotherapy drug that had gentle side effects. Let's say GEMSAR is
Some person might get it and then might have really bad reactions and lose their hair and another patient might get it and not and just have a different reaction. Is that typical? Patients, yeah, they would respond differently. It was rare in particular to Gemsar because it had the nickname of gentle cytobine. And in the beginning of it,
physicians were reluctant to use it because it was so gentle on the patients. They were wondering if it was working. They were saying, "Where are the toxicities in this?"
As a note, the brand name of the drug is Gemsar, but the name of the medication is Gemcitabine, thus the nickname Gentlecitabine. Fast forward to the year 2000. Daryl Ashley was visiting one of his oncologist clients, Dr. Verda Hunter, when a nurse commented on how much Gemsar they were using.
Typically, sales reps like Daryl, they get a credit, which is like a commission for the sales. So the nurse, when she said that, she was implying that Daryl Ashley must be getting a lot of credit because of how much gems are the office was buying. I said, I don't know how much gems are you using because you're getting it from Robert Courtney. And he buys from a non-reporting wholesaler. So then she goes, so you're not getting any credit for it? I said, no.
which was okay. She goes, "Oh, that's not right. So how can we fix that?" According to Darrell, Dr. Hunter's office then requested a utilization report from Robert Courtney's pharmacy. This report included all of the Gemsar that Dr. Hunter's office had bought. Then Darrell turned around and gave that utilization report to his company, Eli Lilly, so that he could get the credit for the sales.
Here's where things get tricky, and some of the stories don't align. In 2003, during a deposition, Dr. Hunter told a different story of what happened next. We'll get into that later, but for now, just know this is Daryl Ashley's account of what happened. Jim's arcane in two vial sizes. It came in a 200 milligram vial and a one gram vial. And when I got the credit,
It was all for one grand vials. It's like, no, this isn't right. They're not that big. This office is not that big. At first, Daryl thought there was a mistake. But then he noticed the price. Robert Courtney was selling Gemzar to Dr. Hunter for less money than it was being sold at Eli Lilly. He asked the nurse about this. She goes, no, that's the price. That's everything. It's like, I couldn't find any reason
I was trying to think of rational reasons. Because you're like, he would be losing money on this. He would lose $300, $200 to $300 per patient if he charged that. So I'm thinking, okay, well, maybe he's buying, you know, getting on a fire sale.
In 2001, drug wholesalers didn't have to report their sales. The Drug Supply Chain Security Act changed that, so now it is a requirement, but that wasn't signed into law until 2013. So back in 2001, the wholesaler that Robert Courtney purchased his drugs from was one of those non-reporting wholesalers. This means that the data on how much Gemsar he was purchasing wasn't available information.
And then during our conversations, you know, they would joke that they could always tell when Robert Courtney mixed the bags because they were not always as full. You know, bags vary. You know, the amount of fluid you put in the bags can vary.
Daryl then thought back to conversations that he had with Dr. Hunter's office about the lack of side effects patients were experiencing. Especially in a patient getting its second or third line, their treatment. Cisplatin is like taking EpiCac. They should be throwing their socks up. But that was the era of new antiemetics and all of this. So I said, and so nobody was getting sick. And it's like, nobody's getting sick?
No. Yeah. With 100 milligrams of cisplatin, no one's getting sick. It's like, no. It's easy to look back now and think, wouldn't those half-filled bags and the lack of side effects be this clear indicator that something was wrong? But...
The anti-emetic drugs, which ease the side effects of chemotherapy, were also advancing and becoming pretty effective. So I guess that could have explained the lack of side effects. But these red flags, plus the fact that the sales numbers weren't adding up, made Daryl suspicious. Then I said, okay, now let's start playing the what-if game. And play the what-if game. What if...
Instead of looking for a rational reason for all these things happening, what if everything that people are saying is true? Lack of toxicities, the bags being inconsistent, the price that they're saying that he's selling it to them for. It's only speculation, but he may be deluding. Not until that moment did even the thought of delusion come to mind. In April of 2001, two things happened.
First, Daryl found out that earlier that year, the non-reporting wholesaler had been purchased by a bigger company that did report their sales. So for the first time, data was available about Gemsar sales in the area. The second thing that happened was Daryl took a medical leave from work.
His daughter was diagnosed with a kidney disease. She needed an eight-hour procedure done. It was during those eight hours that Daryl started crunching the numbers. I took all of my data and sat there and went through his... Because we didn't really get invoices, but we got the printouts from the company on sales that just had the zip code. So then I said, you know, there's just something wrong here.
There's something wrong. Daryl could definitively see that Robert Courtney was not purchasing as much Gemzar as he was selling to Dr. Hunter's office. Daryl came back from his medical leave on May 15, 2001, that very same day he went to Dr. Hunter's office.
the day of the sales luncheon. Dr. Hunter later testified that Daryl made a casual comment to one of her nurses in the hallway after the sales luncheon that tipped her off to the discrepancy in Gemsar sales. But Daryl claims that he had been looking into this for months, and when he finally had the paperwork to back up his suspicions, he went directly to Dr. Hunter's office with the intention of revealing what he had found.
Dr. Hunter wasn't available that day, but he told one of the nurses that he suspected that Robert Courtney was diluting chemotherapy drugs. What was the nurse's response? Shock, again. I walked out of their office, and I will never forget, Hannah, that I was like, what did I just do? Because it was all speculation. What did I just do? Because if I'm wrong...
I just accused an innocent man of doing something terrible. If I'm right, what about those poor patients? It was horrible. It was horrible. Dr. Hunter later claimed she received no further communication from Daryl or Eli Lilly. She said she requested help from Eli Lilly to test the drugs, but never got a reply.
Daryl claimed that Eli Lilly told Dr. Hunter they did not have the facilities to test the drugs. But he says he personally reached out to Dr. Hunter's office about six times to see if he could help in any way. We were not able to reach Dr. Hunter for this podcast. I've been told that she is no longer speaking to the press.
What we do know is that after Dr. Hunter was tipped off about the dilution, she found a company that would test a sample of Taxol for her. And in June of 2001, she got the test results back. The sample came back with less than a third of the prescribed dose. She then notified the FBI.
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I started out my professional career as a pharmacist. I graduated from Mercer University with my doctor of pharmacy in 1991, and I practiced in several different areas of pharmacy. This is Melissa Osborne, former FBI agent in Kansas City who worked the white-collar crime cases. Prior to joining the FBI, she was a pharmacist for six years. We met her in episode one. I practiced in pharmacies.
actually a lot of pharmacies that were very similar to the pharmacy and pharmacist in the case that we will be discussing. I also worked in a psychiatric facility, I worked in clinic pharmacies, I worked in compounding pharmacies, which that is what Robert Courtney did.
According to the FDA, drug compounding is the process of combining, mixing, or altering ingredients to create a medication tailored to the needs of an individual patient. Compounding includes the combining of two or more drugs. And it plays a really important role in medicine. Like, let's say someone needs to take an antibiotic, but they're allergic to an ingredient in most commercially manufactured antibiotics.
A compounding pharmacy will create an antibiotic specifically for that person's needs. I happened to work in a pharmacy that did compounding in Missouri after this happened, from like 2007 to 2012. And we were very cautious of what we did. We kept even, like, if you had to measure something out, we actually kept the printout that would actually show the weight of it.
Since these drugs are mixed on-site at compounding pharmacies and because they're tailor-made to an individual's needs, they're difficult to regulate. Melissa says that record-keeping is really one of the only ways to keep track of what a compounding pharmacy is doing. Melissa kept detailed records of everything her pharmacy compounded. One of the things I find so fascinating and truly amazing is that
you had this background in a doctor of pharmacy and that you happened to be stationed in Kansas City and that, you know, you were kind of like the perfect person to work on this case. My main role was thinking like a pharmacist. It wasn't my FBI hat on. It was my pharmacist hat. You know, hey, when you mix these things, they don't stay good forever. Hey, pharmacists do make mistakes.
Hey, we need to make sure we get the best information we possibly can. But there's one link between Melissa's story and the Courtney case that I find particularly interesting. I was my roommate's pharmacist when she was going through cancer treatments. Were you preparing your roommate's chemotherapy drugs? I would merely order all of the chemotherapy medications. I did not mix them.
But I would go with her to her visit at her oncologist. And her oncologist had a nurse who was actually certified to mix them. So that nurse would actually take the vials in and prepare the IVs
that morning before she received them. I did not compound or do the admixtures of the chemotherapy. I was actually her pharmacist and I helped to take care of her for about a year. And after she passed away, I really did feel like I was in a rut. And sometimes when you have those things happen, you kind of need to leave and do something different. You kind of need to make a change.
It's in this time, when Melissa was looking for a change, that a friend introduced her to an FBI agent, and he encouraged Melissa to apply to the FBI. Healthcare fraud was a priority for the FBI at the time, and they needed more agents with a background in healthcare. I've always been very curious about things and very interested in investigations and the law and following the law, even as a pharmacist. You know, it was very important to me to...
Melissa started the application process in the winter of 1996, and the next summer, she got a call from the FBI.
They're like, hey, we want to offer you a spot in this next class that's coming up in two weeks. Would you like to do it? And you need to let me know by tomorrow. And I'm like, oh, wow. OK. So she took the leap, completed the basic field training course and was assigned to the white collar crime squad in Kansas City.
Melissa's experience makes me think about how vast the psychological impact of cancer really is. She changed careers because of the effect that it had on her life. And yet, a few years later, it would all be brought back up again when she worked the Robert Courtney case. As one of the only FBI special agents with a doctor of pharmacy, she was assigned full-time to the case.
This is Supervisory Special Agent Judy Lewis-Arnold. She was in charge of the Robert Courtney investigation. None of us, you know, had any background, you know, in the pharmaceutical industry. And just the language itself, you know, created quite a challenge for most of us. So to have Melissa on board, you know, who could actually interpret, you know, what was happening,
you know, being said and the various reports and, you know, the different drugs and, you know, walk us through that was, you know, extremely instrumental to us. I really think she brought a lot to the table and we relied on her a great deal.
She worked alongside Melissa and lead investigator David Parker on what would become the largest federal investigation in Kansas City's history. Even though she didn't have a lot of investigative experience because she was a first office agent in Kansas City, being paired with a senior agent, you know, it was a great, you know, he had the investigative ability, she had the pharmaceutical background, and it was, I think, amazing.
Honestly, by the grace of God, that she ended up in Kansas City to help us on that. So it was a good mix, and we were a great team. It was June of 2001 when Dr. Verda Hunter tipped off the FBI about the IV bag of Taxol from the Research Medical Tower Pharmacy that contained only one-third of the prescribed dose. On July 27th, Melissa, along with the other agents, went to meet Dr. Hunter.
And we were told we were going to meet with this doctor, and we're all in the waiting room waiting to go back. And actually some of the agents from the FDA also came. And it was like their main supervisor and a couple of agents. It was a cast of characters. Obviously there were a number of civil attorneys. There were people from the U.S. Attorney's Office. There were people from the FDA. There was FBI.
I think all there with one goal, and that is to determine that this wasn't happening. I will never forget that moment because we're all there and then the door opens and Stephen Hill, who's the former U.S. attorney for the Western District of Missouri, came in and there was a man and a woman. And she was introduced to us as Dr. Verda Hunter. That was the first time we heard her name. And I'll never forget how she looked. I mean, you know, she was so pale. And you could see that...
She was devastated by whatever information she was going to give us. In that meeting, Dr. Hunter told Melissa and Judy and all the other agents in the room the whole story of the sales rep Daryl Ashley tipping off a nurse about the discrepancy in Gemsar sales and the diluted Taxol IV bag. Supervisory Special Agent Judy Lewis-Arnold couldn't say enough nice things about Dr. Hunter and how helpful she was to the investigation. So Dr. Hunter...
tried to determine on her own, you know, whether this was indeed happening. And you could see that in her face, in her demeanor, in her speech. She was devastated by the whole situation. But, boy, she stood tall.
We often hear stories about botched investigations, you know, police overlooking obvious clues at a crime scene or investigators making procedural errors that jeopardize cases in court. This is not one of those stories. The investigation into Robert Courtney was conducted intelligently and incredibly swiftly.
There's a lot of factors at play with that, but personally, I think a big part of the success was because of Melissa Osborne. Her background in pharmacy and knowledge of chemotherapy drugs gave important context to the situation. Coming out of that initial meeting with Dr. Hunter, she wasn't convinced that one diluted Taxol sample or the sales discrepancy were good enough evidence of wrongdoing.
Just because a drug rep said they're not selling as much, that doesn't necessarily mean anything. Because I knew, coming from an independent pharmacy background back in those days, that lots of purchases were not recorded in any sort of database anywhere. She also knew that that drug sample wouldn't hold up as evidence in court. You know, the one that came back from the lab showing only 30% of the prescribed dose.
A defense attorney could poke a hole right through that credibility just by pointing out that the sample had been sitting around for a while before it was tested. Remember, these chemotherapy drugs start to degrade in potency as soon as they are mixed into a saline solution. They've got a shelf life.
These would have been mixed in June and our meetings in July. So once again, it is information and it tells you one thing, but to me, it wasn't definitive information. It wasn't what we like to call in law enforcement or prosecutions like a smoking gun information and evidence. Melissa insisted they needed to acquire newly mixed drugs from the Research Medical Tower Pharmacy
And they needed to test them within 24 hours. This was the only way to prove that these chemotherapy IVs were being diluted. Let's set up what we would call a sting operation and do some covert purchases. If we did this, we would have real-time information. We would have evidence that we can control from start to finish to look at.
Dr. Hunter stopped using Robert Courtney as soon as she suspected that he was diluting medication. She ordered the chemo medication from a different source and had a nurse train to mix them in-house.
But she agreed to work with the FBI on the sting operation. So she called Robert Courtney and she told him that the nurse who was mixing her chemotherapy medications was pregnant and could no longer safely handle the drugs. Would he temporarily start mixing for her again? And he jumped all over it. Absolutely, he'll do it. Absolutely. So at this point, you know, there's the potential of crime. So at this point, an investigation is open.
And I think that a lot of us still believe that this was just a mistake and an error. There's absolutely no way a pharmacist would do this to a patient, even for greed. Now that an investigation was officially opened, Melissa Osborne and Judy Lewis-Arnold met with prosecutor Gene Porter from the U.S. Attorney's Office.
Gene Porter said that from his 11 years' experience prosecuting white-collar crime cases, he had learned that with healthcare fraud, there is often a non-criminal explanation, a.k.a. people make mistakes all the time. And he assumed this case wouldn't be any different. I was so certain in my own mind that it was not going to turn into a criminal case that I'd left on vacation thinking that when I got back,
They would have determined that this was all a mistake, this all had a good faith, logical, rational, non-criminal explanation, and that it would be over. That wasn't the case. The initial meeting with Dr. Hunter and the FBI happened on July 27th. The FBI's first covert operation, or sting operation, happened on August 7th.
I'm pointing out the dates because of just how quickly this investigation took place. In August of 2001, things moved very quickly. Everyone involved felt that if the worst were true, if Courtney were intentionally diluting these medications, then every moment that he continued to operate, human lives were at stake. We thought we might have to, you know, create some sort of fake investigation
insurance card or information. But after talking with her, he did not bill the insurance for these. He billed her for them. So he would make the chemotherapy and instead of sending it to the insurance, he would actually bill the whole amount to Dr. Verda Hunter. Then she would turn around and bill the cost of that medication along with the infusion costs to the insurance. So that made it really easy for us.
It's August 7th, 2001. The FBI creates fake patients and places orders for four chemotherapy drugs: Gemsar, Taxol, Paraplatin, and Platinol. A few hours later, Robert Courtney walks into the office of Dr. Verda Hunter, carrying four chemotherapy IVs that have just been mixed. He hands them to a nurse behind the counter, just like he always does.
What he doesn't know is that on the other side of the wall behind the nurse, there's an FBI and an FDA agent. As soon as Robert Courtney turns and walks out of the office, the nurse will open that door and hand over the IV bags to the federal agents. They immediately left the building, went to the airport, and flew to the FDA office in Cincinnati for us to test and have results within 24 hours. The very next day,
August 8th, 2001. We got the results from that first covert purchase. The highest percentage in any of those bags was 28% of what it should have been. The lowest was basically 0%, hardly even a trace of medicine. So basically, if that had been a real person and that bag would have been taken to an infusion room and hooked up to a patient with cancer, all they were getting was saline.
That's it. This is obvious, but I'm going to say it anyway. Saline does not kill cancer cells. The IV bags prepared by the Research Medical Tower Pharmacy did not have enough chemotherapy medication to effectively fight against cancer cells. Up until this point, Melissa Osborne was still operating under the assumption, or maybe the hope, that this was all a big mistake. But once she saw the test results from the sting operation...
She knew that wasn't the case. That, I will tell you, was my OMG moment. I felt sick because at this point in time, we knew there was evidence of a horrible crime. And, you know, all of the, you know, doubts that I had, they all went away because this, this, no, this did not happen by accident.
When prosecutor Gene Porter got back from vacation, he was quickly brought up to speed on the Robert Courtney case. The sting operation, the search warrant, the plan to raid Research Medical Tower Pharmacy. They ramped me up fairly quickly with all the developments, and I was bowled over. It was like, OK, we have a tiger by the tail here. Let's get busy.
If this were a movie, this would be the part where you would see a stunned and horrified look of realization on Gene Porter's face that the worst possible outcome of this investigation was coming to fruition. A pharmacy was knowingly dispensing diluted chemo drugs.
It was all hands on deck. At that point, there's just no way to overstate the way in which all of us realized the impact that
dilution conduct would have on patients. Everything else, quite frankly, that several of us were working on just faded into the background. And this was all we were consumed by for quite a long period of time after that. The FBI decided to do one more covert purchase just to make sure they had enough evidence to build an airtight case.
On August 12th, they made six additional covert orders to Courtney's pharmacy through Dr. Hunter's office. The next day, August 13th, they raided the Research Medical Tower pharmacy. Part of the search warrant execution is gathering the records that are authorized to be seized by the warrant. Another part of the execution of the warrant is
is to attempt an interview of the target or the subject of the investigation. David Parker from the FBI and Stephen Holt from the FDA approached the Research Medical Tower Pharmacy. They identified themselves to Robert Courtney as federal agents and told him they wanted to ask him some questions. They asked if he would come outside with them and sit in the car and talk. Robert Courtney agreed.
The agents noted that he seemed agreeable and calm. David Parker and Stephen Holt told Robert Courtney that they were investigating a pharmacist who they believed was diluting medications and asked Courtney if he knew anything about that. Courtney said he did not. They asked him, is it important when compounding medication to use the right amount of drugs that the doctor specified? And Courtney replied, yes, it's important.
And one of the critical, maybe the most critical question that Dave Parker and Steve Holt asked Courtney was, who prepared the drugs that were delivered to Dr. Hunter today? And he said, I did.
The covert purchases from the day before were still being tested. But now the FBI knew, for sure, that Robert Courtney was the one who prepared those drugs. If those IV bags came back diluted, then they would know Robert Courtney was responsible. But it was at the end of the interview when Dave Parker and Steve Holt
you know, point blank told Mr. Courtney that he was the pharmacist whose conduct they were in fact concerned about and looking into. And he said, I'm done talking to you. I want to talk to my lawyer. It wasn't long after that, that a lawyer representing him did in fact arrive on the scene also. I'm stuck on this one detail.
The FBI caught Robert Courtney by surprise. I asked Jean Porter, Judy Lewis Arnold, and Melissa Osborne about this. They all said, from their perspectives, Robert Courtney was surprised, shocked even, that the FBI was after him. He did not suspect it. Even when they identified themselves as federal agents at the beginning of the raid...
Even when they said they were investigating a pharmacist. Even when they asked him probing questions about dilution. This makes me wonder, did Robert Courtney believe that he would never be caught? Was he so comfortable that he wasn't even looking over his shoulder? He didn't know. He didn't realize that you had a confession. Not a clue. Not a clue.
Because what Dave and Steve had told him was that they were investigating a pharmacist without identifying who it was. So he thought, you know, he didn't have any reason to believe that the pharmacist they were investigating was him.
So there was Gene Porter, standing by in case anyone needed any legal guidance at any time. And this came in really handy when Robert Courtney got wise to the fact that he was the one being investigated and called his lawyer. I wanted to be there to be able to speak with that lawyer and, quite frankly, keep the lawyer busy talking to me.
So the lawyer didn't get in the middle of the agents doing what they were wanting to do and needing to do to gather the records that were authorized to be seized by the search warrant. There was now enough evidence to connect Robert Courtney to the diluted drugs. He admitted to preparing the IV bags the day before for Dr. Hunter. And as soon as the test results came back, which they did hours later,
They would show that Robert Courtney prepared six chemotherapy IVs that all contained less than 50% of the prescribed medication. Gene Porter was convinced they could convict Robert Courtney, but convict him of what? Mislabeling IV bags?
He wanted an official confession from Robert Courtney. I said, if you want to bring him in and get Mirandized and make a fully admissible confession, yes, we'll do that. And I said, and here's the deal. If he doesn't do that, then the first thing I'm going to tell the judge at the time of sentencing is that your client had an opportunity to mitigate the harm caused by his conduct.
And he said no. And so, two days later, Robert Courtney would drive himself to the FBI headquarters in Kansas City. He would admit to diluting the drugs for 34 patients. But was it just those 34 patients, or were there more? This is Melissa Osborne again. We're at the tip of the iceberg. We just have a teeny bit of information. You don't amass $19 million by doing nothing.
Robert Courtney's pharmacy supplied chemotherapy drugs to oncologists all over Kansas City. For patients currently receiving chemotherapy, their treatment was suddenly compromised, and their doctors scrambled to figure out a path forward. The FBI raid on the Research Medical Tower pharmacy revealed...
that Robert Courtney didn't keep any records of the dilution. But I think he just kind of picked and choose. If he had one vial, he'd divide it. If he just happened to have two, maybe he'd do that. Because it was kind of willy-nilly. He didn't say he always divided it a certain way. He never kept record what he actually gave anybody. Meanwhile, word was spreading in Kansas City. People were beginning to panic.
The FBI set up a temporary voicemail line that evening for people to call in with their concerns or worries. So initially we set up a voicemail to get us through the night. That thing was filled by the next morning. We got calls from all over the country. It started a panic on everybody thinking about anybody getting medicine from anywhere.
My mother calls me from Virginia to tell me she saw me on TV. She goes, what's going on? Well, I can't really say what's going on, but, you know, you know, keep watching. Suddenly, the FBI had this major public health crisis on their hands. And the only person who knew the answers to what had been diluted was Robert Courtney.
Next time on The Opportunist. Anybody who becomes a career criminal or becomes a serial murderer or becomes a pharmacist who's diluting drugs, they don't do that overnight.
And it's the small steps. The morning that Courtney left his house to go to the FBI office, he gave his wife a satchel and told her, there's $168,000 in here in cash. Take this and give it to my dad.
You know, here he's telling us little by little that he's gone back more and more. So how many patients did he really affect? So he kind of would like make pharmacy jokes to me, like talking like pharmacy lingo to me and like trying to bond with me. And I had to bring that out in him. It made me feel sick to my stomach. I waited, Bob.
The opportunist is produced by Kate Mays, Amanda Elliott, and me, Hannah Smith. It is written by Amanda Elliott and me. Pesha Eaton is our researcher. Colin Thompson is our music supervisor and music editor. Austin Olivia Kendrick is our audio editor. The show is mixed and mastered by Matt Sewell.
John Savack and Colin Thompson are our executive producers. Our podcast art for season two is by Arvin Lee. The ending credit song is I Waited by the Chapel Door by Andrea Litke and Irvin Litke. Our main theme song is by Chalate. Special thanks to James Kirkpatrick Davis, Ashley Mattingly, and Kristen Thurmond. The Opportunist is a cast original podcast. I Waited
in despair I stepped within the chapel door and found you the rising sun broke through the dawn and swept away the time and mingled with our tears and laughter sealed your lips with mine
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The rising sun broke through the dawn and swept away the time.
And mingled with our tears and laughter, sealed your lips with mine.
