How a shocking crime divided
 a small Minnesota town.

By John Rosengren

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Grand Marais is a quiet outpost on Lake Superior’s North Shore, set among boreal forest in the easternmost corner of Minnesota. The town of roughly 1,300 is home to a mix of artists and outdoor enthusiasts, working-class people and professionals, liberals and diehard Trump supporters. In the summer, Grand Marais’s art galleries, shops, and restaurants swell with tourists drawn to what the website Budget Travel once dubbed “America’s Coolest Small Town.” The wait for a table at the Angry Trout Café, which serves locally sourced cuisine in an old fishing shanty, can run to more than an hour. When summer is over, the town retreats into itself again, which suits full-time residents just fine. “Even though we’re a tourism economy, most of us live a life where we just don’t want to be bothered,” said Steve Fernlund, who published the Cook County News Herald in the 1990s and now writes a weekly column for The North Shore Journal. “I’m at the end of a road, and I’ve got 12 acres of land. My closest neighbors are probably about 600 feet away through the woods. So, you know, we appreciate being hermits.”

Content warning: This story contains graphic descriptions of the sexual abuse of children.

Yet privacy only extends so far here. Gossip travels fast while having breakfast at the South of the Border café, or in chance encounters along Wisconsin Street. Everybody knows everybody else’s business—or thinks they do. “Even though there are differences of opinion—we have an eclectic collection of opinions—this is a close-knit community,” said Dennis Waldrop, who manages the Cook County Historical Museum. “Anything that happens here is discussed extensively.”

The residents of Grand Marais have had a lot to discuss in recent years. A suspicious fire that destroyed the historic Lutsen Lodge. The suicide of their neighbor Mark Pavelich, a star on the 1980 U.S. Olympic hockey team that defeated the Soviet Union. Plans for the 40 acres near town owned by convicted sex offender Warren Jeff’s fundamentalist clan. All those events stirred plenty of talk.

But nothing has captivated local conversation quite like what happened between Larry Scully and Levi Axtell in March 2023. A shocking act of violence attracted international attention and split the town over questions of truth and justice. Grand Marais is still trying to piece itself back together.

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Every small town has its cast of offbeat characters. Larry Scully was one of Grand Marais’s. Larry, who was 77 in 2023, dwelled on the fringe of town, where Fifth Street meets Highway 61, and on the fringe of reality. His two-bedroom house, which used to belong to his parents, was crowded with items he’d hoarded over the years. The mess spilled into his front yard, which was cluttered with satellite dishes, a statue of the Virgin Mary, and a wood-frame sign advertising “antler bone art.” The sign was decorated with several of Larry’s scrimshaw carvings, which he hawked at art fairs. In addition to carving, he’d tried his hand at an array of other pursuits: refurbishing broken electronics, selling solar-powered generators that could run home appliances in the event of an emergency, and even fashioning leather lingerie that he peddled to women. Larry had had no stable career to speak of since he arrived in town in the early 1980s.

Larry was a conspiracy theorist. On his Facebook page, he posted videos and articles declaring that the federal government controlled the weather, that Sandy Hook was a hoax, that Timothy McVeigh was a “CIA patsy,” that the totalitarian New World Order was real. Around Grand Marais, Larry was also known to be exceedingly religious. He attended Mass on Saturday evenings at St. John’s Catholic Church, always sitting in the front row, and he believed that the statues there cried actual tears—sometimes of blood. He carried a lock of hair that he said once belonged to Father Mark Hollenhorst, a priest at St. John’s who died in 1993, in a leather pouch around his neck; he claimed that it could effect miraculous cures.

Larry referred to himself as a prophet and would often appear around town dressed in a cloak and sandals and carrying a wooden staff. He once showed up on the courthouse steps for the National Day of Prayer clad all in black, his head covered by a medieval-type chainmail hood, and fell to his knees screaming. Another time he berated a group of gay people who’d gathered in downtown Grand Marais, shouting through a bullhorn that God didn’t approve of them.

Many locals found Larry’s zeal exhausting. “When I’d see him, I’d know I was going to be there for a long time, because he’d go on and on,” said Laura Laky, a Grand Marais resident. “He’d talk about the end-times, the Book of Revelation, Christ coming again.”

Other people were scared of Larry. Rumors that he abused children circulated around Grand Marais for years. People whispered about him watching kids from his parked car. There were claims that he’d videotaped girls’ volleyball games and children at Sven and Ole’s, the local pizzeria. A member of the nearby Chippewa tribe told me that Larry had been banned from the Grand Portage powwow after parents complained about him passing out candy to their children.

Larry once approached a man named Gary Nesgoda at a gas station and asked if he had kids. When Nesgoda said that he did, Larry showed him pictures of a fairy garden he’d built behind his house. There were miniature staircases and doors, and little figurines set amid tree roots. Larry insisted that Nesgoda, who had recently moved to Grand Marais, should bring his kids over to see it. “Everything he was telling me sounded pretty neat,” Nesgoda told me. Then, in the gas station parking lot, someone who’d overheard the conversation stopped Nesgoda. “Do not bring your children over there,” they warned.

This was a common theme. “Larry was the boogeyman,” said Brian Larsen, editor and publisher of the Cook County News Herald, who is a father of four children. “You’d tell your kids to stay the heck away from him.”

In 2014, Larry decided to run for mayor of Grand Marais. In a candidate forum broadcast on WTIP, a community radio station, he ranted about Christianity. “We can’t sit by and let our government stop us from having the Bible in the military, taking out the crucifixes, taking out the Ten Commandments in our federal buildings and establishments,” he said. Then, just before election day, the Cook County News Herald ran a front-page article that seemed to confirm the longstanding speculation about Larry. The piece detailed his criminal conviction for the sexual assault of a six-year-old girl.

“Take whatever treatment is available to you,” the judge said, “because this type of conduct, of course, is just wholly unacceptable.”

Before he became an object of fear and fascination in Grand Marais, Larry was married—twice. For a time he lived with his second wife, Sheila, in Ramsey, about 25 miles outside Minneapolis. On Ash Wednesday in 1979, Sheila went to evening Mass and then to bowl in her weekly league, leaving Larry home alone with their five children: three young boys from his first marriage and six-year-old twins, a boy and a girl, from hers. While the other children slept, according to police and court records, Larry invited his stepdaughter into his bedroom.

The little girl later told a police investigator that he showed her “pictures of naked people,” touched her “potty area” with a vibrator, then stuck his tongue and finger into her vagina. She said it wasn’t the only time he’d touched her, and that he’d warned her not to tell anyone, but she went to her mother anyway. Sheila reported the incident to child welfare services, who notified law enforcement. She told the police investigator that her husband had also recently become violent and suicidal.

The police arrested Larry. In a recorded statement with investigators, he admitted that he’d had sexual contact with his stepdaughter on two Wednesday evenings while his wife was bowling. A psychiatrist determined that he was competent to stand trial, finding no evidence of “any kind of psychiatric disorder.” Rather than face a jury, Larry confessed to second-degree criminal sexual conduct, and the prosecution recommended a sentence of five years. Two court psychologists submitted reports indicating that Larry wasn’t open to receiving treatment. At an October 1979 hearing, the judge urged Larry to reconsider. “Take whatever treatment is available to you,” the judge said, “because this type of conduct, of course, is just wholly unacceptable.”

Larry was incarcerated in Minnesota’s Stillwater prison, and in records from his time there, there’s no mention of him receiving counseling or treatment, though he did join a Bible study. Soon, changes to the state’s sentencing guidelines allowed Larry to seek early release. Since the state did not provide evidence that doing so would “present a danger to the public,” the court approved Larry’s request. He left prison on January 19, 1982, after serving a little more than two years for his crime.

In those days, there was no sex offender registry in Minnesota, or in most states. Larry was at liberty to go where he liked. Sheila had divorced him by then, and his three sons were living with their mother. Larry, who was 36 at the time, hitchhiked to Grand Marais to move in with his parents.

Three decades later, Larry lost the town’s mayoral election, 345 votes to 42. Many locals were surprised that he’d gotten any votes at all, especially after the story broke about his criminal record. “Forty-something people voted for him,” said Amber Waldrop, who lived down the street from Larry. “They knew about this guy. For anybody to even think that someone like that should become mayor of this town is sickening.”

Some of those votes came from Larry’s friends, many of whom shared his belief in conspiracy theories. Perhaps it’s no surprise that they also believed what Larry told them: that the accusations against him were made up, that his ex-wife had encouraged her daughter to lie to the police, that he only took the plea deal to avoid a long prison sentence.

Larry’s friends knew that he tended to hijack conversations and go on at length about topics ranging from the Rapture to homeopathic cures, and that he engaged strangers in ways many people found uncomfortable. But being an oddball, they said, isn’t a crime. Some of his friends thought Larry was on the autism spectrum, which made it hard for him to read social cues and show empathy. “This man has been persecuted all of his life,” said Bob Stangler, a Vietnam veteran who knew Larry for years. “The citizens of the area have labeled him a pervert, and he’s not a pervert at all. He’s a genius with Asperger’s who’s overcaring of people.”

A woman I’ll call Carol, who asked that her real name not be used, said she was so close with Larry that she spoke to him almost daily for 12 years. She knew him to visit sick people, distribute food to the needy, and take care of his ailing mother, who died in 2013. At her memorial service, Larry displayed his mother’s ashes in a cookie jar resembling the Star Wars character R2-D2, saying that it was what she wanted. (His father passed away in 1997.) “As long as I’ve known him, he never hurt anybody,” Carol told me.

She knows that hers is a minority opinion, that for many people in town Larry was foremost a convicted sex offender. “You can never get rid of that label,” she said.

Once they learned about his 1979 conviction, many parents in Grand Marais were more worried than ever that Larry posed a threat to their children. It’s a common enough fear. On the far right, popular conspiracy theories such as QAnon decry a global cabal of child molesters, but even among the general population, concern about the danger posed by pedophiles is widespread. In a Lynn University poll, 75 percent of roughly 200 Florida adults said they believed that sex offenders would reoffend. Yet according to a meta-study conducted by researchers at Public Safety Canada in 2004, one of the most comprehensive available, only 23 percent of people convicted of child sexual abuse were charged or convicted of a similar crime within the next 15 years. (The study’s authors concede that many victims never come forward.) In interviews for this story, researchers noted that recidivism rates have declined even more in recent years.

No one came forward to accuse Larry of more recent abuse after his 1979 conviction. Still, perception alone was enough to put many Grand Marais parents on edge. For one young man, that concern became an obsession.

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If you were passing through Grand Marais a few years back and stopped for gas at the Holiday station on the corner of Broadway and Highway 61, you might have met a stocky cashier with a round, friendly face. While making change, he might have told you one of his homespun puns or signature dad jokes: Why does Paul Bunyan trip in the woods? Because he’s always felling.

That cashier was Levi Axtell. He was raised by his parents, Denise and Treg, in Hovland, a small community located 18 miles from Grand Marais. The Axtells were devout Christians and widely respected in Grand Marais, where they both worked. Denise was a nurse, Treg a physical therapist. The couple had three children: daughters Karlee and Katrina, and Levi, the youngest.

Levi grew up in a picturesque log cabin in a clearing among birch and pine trees. The woods were his playground. He spent hours there as a child, often with his friend and neighbor Cedar Adams. They roasted marshmallows over campfires, tried to catch fish barehanded, and played make-believe, running through the trees as if an attacker were pursuing them.

But Levi couldn’t outrun his demons. There was a history of addiction on Denise’s side of the family, and Levi seemed to have inherited a predisposition to substance abuse. At Cook County High School, he played football, ran track, and drank. Brad Wilson, a carpenter in Grand Marais who was a few years behind him in school, recalled Levi getting caught with liquor bottles in his locker and running from the cops.

Levi’s parents sent him to finish school in Duluth, but he was cited twice within two months for underage drinking. The first time was at Duluth East High School. On the morning of May 29, 2014, when a resource officer tried to restrain him, an inebriated Levi pulled away. The officer wrestled Levi to the ground, but he pushed himself up and army-crawled—with the officer on top of him—down the hallway, until he wore himself out. Levi spent two days in jail and was charged with disorderly conduct and obstructing the legal process with force. “I didn’t know it made the charges worse if you resisted arrest,” he later told Cedar Adams.

Not long after, a law enforcement officer stopped Levi as he walked along the shoulder of Interstate 35. The officer smelled booze on his breath, and Levi admitted that he’d been drinking. The officer cited him and let him go after Levi dumped out a container of alcohol he was carrying.

Three days later, Levi was given a year of probation for his disorderly conduct at Duluth East. (The obstruction charge was dropped.) A judge also ordered him to obtain a chemical-dependency assessment and follow any recommendations. Levi satisfied the terms of his probation, including a stint in treatment.

By 2015, Levi had started dating Anna Ross, who was from Duluth. Their daughter was born on June 17, 2016. Anna had just turned 19; Levi was 20. At first they didn’t live together—Anna stayed in Duluth, while Levi lived with his parents in Hovland. He adored his daughter and beamed when she was in his arms.

Despite the new light in his life, Levi remained burdened at times by darkness. About a year after his daughter’s birth, on the Sunday evening of Memorial Day weekend, Levi got drunk, taped a vacuum hose to the exhaust pipe of his car, ran the other end through the back window, and started the engine. When he texted Anna about what he’d done, she called the sheriff’s department. While she was on the phone with them, Levi called her, and she talked him into turning off the car. Deputies arrived at his home and transported Levi to the hospital. It appears that he received some psychiatric treatment after the incident; a year later he indicated in a court document that he’d been a patient in a mental hospital and had seen a psychiatrist.

Despite his troubles, Levi was by all accounts goofy and lovable. Christina Conroy, a friend who worked with Levi briefly at the Holiday station, described him as “a beautiful soul.” Cedar Adams said, “He’s the best person you’ll ever meet. He’s joyful.” Michael Farnum, another friend, told me, “Levi is very kind and caring. He’d give you the shirt off his back.” His mother, Denise, described Levi as “a sweet, thoughtful boy.” (Levi’s family otherwise declined to talk to me.)

People who knew him casually from encounters at Holiday or Grand Marais’s Whole Foods Co-op, where he also briefly worked, described Levi as personable and a hard worker. Pat Eliasen, the Cook County sheriff and a former assistant coach for the varsity football team at the local high school, coached Levi, who played nose tackle and offensive guard. “You’d tell Levi to do a technique or something and he would just go do it,” Eliasen told me. “You couldn’t find a better football player than that.”

A photo posted on Facebook in 2023 shows Levi with his daughter climbing on his shoulders. According to friends, she was his everything. He was often her primary caregiver while Anna completed a social work degree and later held down two jobs. In the winter, Levi built his daughter snow forts that were so solid he could light a campfire inside. He and his daughter cooked together, drew pictures, and took walks. “She’s his life,” Adams told me.

Levi could not bear the thought of anything bad happening to his little girl. Like any parent, he was on the lookout for any threat to his child. At some point, his attention came to rest squarely on Larry Scully.

Levi and Anna got married in late 2018, but they filed for divorce less than two years later, signing legal paperwork that said “the marriage cannot be saved” due to “an irretrievable breakdown of our marriage relationship.” Levi’s mental health no doubt played at least some role in this.

The following winter, Levi staged a one-man protest urging a boycott of the Whole Foods Co-op, where he’d recently been employed. He’d earned $14 an hour stocking produce and ringing up groceries, but he didn’t think it was enough to provide for his daughter. Her day care alone cost $760 a month. After wrangling with the store’s management over a personal tip jar he propped up at the register, Levi lost his job. Soon after that, he set up a table and chair outside the store’s entrance along with a sign demanding that the co-op pay living wages.

Levi sat alone in the bitter cold for days—some locals remember it as weeks. He collected a few donations that he split with other co-op employees, but on the whole his campaign garnered scant sympathy. For a lot of people, it was a sign that something might not be quite right with Levi. “That was an indicator to me that perhaps he was struggling with his mental health,” his friend Christina Conroy told me.

After that, to make ends meet, Levi did odd jobs: clearing snow from roofs, picking weeds, cutting down trees, cleaning apartments, building shelves. By the end of 2022, he and Anna had reconciled enough that they agreed to live together for their daughter’s sake. They shared a split-level home on the edge of Grand Marais, and their property backed up against the woods behind Larry’s house. That meant Levi was now neighbors with the man who, over the previous five years, he’d come to consider his worst nightmare.

According to friends, Levi generally kept his fears about Larry to himself following the outburst at Trinity Lutheran. He didn’t bring up Larry in casual conversation, though it seemed that Larry was on his mind. He once posted a meme on Facebook depicting a person holding a gun, with a caption that read, “Only cure for pedophiles. A bullet.” In a comment below the image, Levi wrote, “People always ask me why I hate pedophiles. They assume I’ve been abused. But really I think being protective is just an Axtell trait.”

His friend Amber Waldrop knew that trait well. She’d met Levi in an outpatient treatment program for addiction, and she found that despite his personal struggles—or maybe because of them—he looked out for other people. Once, they were walking on the lakeshore together and stumbled upon a hornets’ nest. Waldrop thought that she’d been stung and panicked because she was allergic and didn’t have an EpiPen with her. Levi rushed her home in his car. In another instance, when Waldrop was in a dark place, Levi talked her through it. “He has a really big heart,” Waldrop told me.

Many people in Grand Marais knew that Levi had issues and that he could be aggressive when he was drunk. But those close to him didn’t imagine that he would commit brutal violence against another person. On March 8, 2023, Brad Wilson, the carpenter who lived next to Larry Scully, learned that they were wrong.

As the light drained from the sky that afternoon, Wilson was in his garage putting away some tools when he heard a loud crash, like the sound of a car accident. It came from Larry’s driveway. Wilson raced over and saw that Levi had slammed his white Dodge Caravan into Larry’s car. Levi had then jumped out of the van, grabbed a garden shovel from the deck, and barged inside the house. Wilson arrived on the scene in time to hear Larry’s screams.

Wilson stopped short of going inside. He heard the thud of the shovel hitting something, then hitting it again. “Help! Help!” Larry cried out.

Wilson, who had mowed Larry’s lawn the previous summer without pay and generally felt sorry for the man, wanted to intervene, but he feared for his own safety. From his vantage at the front door, he could tell that Levi was in a drunken rage. And Wilson knew from watching Levi play football when they were in high school that although he was only five foot eight and 185 pounds, he was strong. Wilson also feared that Levi might have a gun.

Wilson went around the back of the house to look through an open window. He saw that Levi had trapped Larry in a corner of the kitchen. Hemmed in by stacks of hoarded junk, 77-year-old Larry had nowhere to go. Wilson saw Levi swing the shovel at Larry, who raised his arms as a frail shield against the blows.

Wilson ducked beneath the window and called the sheriff’s department. He then heard a different kind of smash and what was “almost like gurgling.” Wilson said, “It sounded like he was choking on his own blood.” The screaming stopped; Wilson knew that Larry was dead.

Levi bolted out of the house, got into his van, and peeled away. But he wasn’t fleeing. Instead, spattered with his victim’s blood, he drove four blocks to the sheriff’s department, walked inside, and announced that he had just killed Larry Scully. He confessed that he had hit Larry between 15 and 20 times with a shovel, then “finished him off” with a large moose antler.

According to a report from the court-appointed psychologist who evaluated him, Levi considered himself a hero for killing Larry: “[He] believes that others are likely ‘relieved this was taken care of.’”

At Levi’s arraignment, Cook County attorney Molly Hicken successfully argued that bail should be set at $1 million. She told Judge Cuzzo, who was again presiding, “This was a brutal attack without provocation on an elderly man.” People close to Larry thought the attack was provoked—by his brothers Patrick and Jon. “They basically got the whole town against him,” his son Paul told me. “They created the environment where my father could be lynched.”

It was a sentiment that Larry himself had voiced at the hearing three years prior, when Patrick sought a restraining order. “He’s talked to other people and had Levi Axtell say I was trying to groom his daughter,” Larry said. “This shows the vindictiveness of my brother Patrick. He’s trying to establish that I’m a predator.”

According to a report from Mischelle Vietanen, the court-appointed psychologist who evaluated him, Levi considered himself a hero for killing Larry. “[He] believes that others are likely ‘relieved this was taken care of,’ ” Vietanen wrote. She determined that Levi was “impacted by hallucinations, delusions, and paranoia,” and that he was “unable or unwilling to take responsibility for making decisions to interrupt a repeat of impulsive, harmful behaviors.”

Based on Vietanen’s recommendation, Cuzzo found Levi incompetent to stand trial and suspended the criminal charges against him. Should he regain competency, prosecutors could proceed with trying him for second-degree murder.

In a separate and parallel proceeding before a different judge, the Cook County Public Health and Human Services Department pursued a civil commitment of Levi on the grounds—supported by Vietanen’s report—that he was mentally ill and dangerous as well as chemically dependent. At a hearing held via Zoom on June 23, 2023, Levi sat at a table inside the Lake County jail in Two Harbors, 80 miles down Highway 61 from Grand Marais. He wore a black-and-white-striped uniform. He picked at his hands while answering a series of questions, agreeing that he met the criteria for civil commitment. He appeared docile, almost childlike. The judge, David M. Johnson, ordered that Levi be committed, “for an initial period not to exceed 90 days,” to a secure treatment facility.

Levi would remain in the Two Harbors jail for nearly a year, waiting for a bed to open up at a psychiatric facility. When I spoke to him briefly on the phone in late September 2023, he couldn’t discuss the particulars of his case, but he told me a story about a time when he was working at the Holiday gas station and a customer—a man who drove a snowplow for the city—reached across the counter and slapped him in the face. Levi said that he reported the incident to the sheriff’s department, but “they were saying since he didn’t slap me very hard, I shouldn’t have called about it. I was feeling like the cops didn’t care about anything that happened.”

Levi told me that he didn’t know Larry was arrested for trespassing at the gas station, or that the arrest had led to his civil commitment. It seemed as though Levi mostly felt that law enforcement had failed to find a permanent solution—meaning a way to keep Larry away from his daughter and other kids forever.

While he awaited transfer, Levi was able to see visitors, including his daughter. He passed the time drawing pictures that he intended for his daughter and others to color. He sent them to his sister Katrina, dozens every week, and she posted the pictures on Facebook with the invitation, “Please consider mailing him your colored version of his artwork, a letter, photos, and/or a piece of art of your own creation.”

Levi also sent drawings to his friends. One of them went to Amber Waldrop. It depicted a bird’s wings spread wide. “To my dear friend Amber,” Levi wrote. “Remember to … celebrate every victory. To not give up … To leave the past behind … And on your darkest days I hope you learn to dance in the rain.”

When Waldrop showed the drawing to me, she said, “It’s almost like he’s giving himself advice.”

It didn’t take long for a substantial cohort of people in Grand Marais to elevate Levi to the status of folk hero. In their view, what he did was in service of the greater good. Brandy Aldrighetti, a sexual-abuse survivor who lived near Larry, told the Star Tribune, “To me, Levi is like St. George who slayed the dragon—he killed a monster.” Kelsey Valento, a Grand Marais resident and mother, posted an article about the murder on her Facebook page with a comment addressing Levi directly: “I stand by you for removing a horrible nasty pedophile from this community.”

Within days of the crime, his sister Katrina had started a crowdfunding campaign, “to ease the financial burden of the family.” As of this writing, it had raised more than $7,000. When Katrina saw that Amber Lovaasen, Larry’s niece, had posted on Facebook that she and her family had nothing against Levi, she reached out. Soon Lovaasen had designed T-shirts featuring the words, “Our Connection Is Our Strength. Two Families. One Goal. Stop Childhood Sexual Abuse.” She told me that “my family and Levi’s family are coming together pretty much as one family now.”

She does not speak for Larry’s three sons. “I feel sorry for this poor Levi guy,” Paul told me. “He’s obviously got mental issues. I just hope my father gets some justice, that his name is cleared, and he can be seen as the kind, gentle, loving person he was.” Paul and his brothers also hoped to inherit Larry’s house, but a district court judge ruled in March 2024 that a photocopy of their grandmother’s will appointing Larry the sole inheritor of the property was not valid. That placed the home in the possession of Larry’s seven siblings.

His siblings had mixed reactions to Larry’s death. His sister Beth told me that she was worried when she heard the news. “I wanted to make sure that none of my siblings had done anything,” she said. “When I realized that everybody I loved was OK and they all had alibis and it was not them, then I felt relief, kind of lighter and bouncier.” His sister Jane said, “Nobody has the right take anybody else’s life, but when Larry was beating me up and doing things to me as a kid, I wish I would have had access to something to kill him.” Patrick told me that he feels Larry’s death was preventable, if the court system had only listened to him and his siblings. “The sad thing is we tried to warn authorities something like this was going to happen,” he said. “We were afraid some kid’s dad would go over and kill him when they found out about him.”

Within a week of the murder, someone created an online petition asking people to sign “if you agree that Levi Axtell should not be charged with any crimes and immediately be released from jail.” As of mid-May 2024, it had drawn nearly 900 signatures. The petition asks people to “stand by this father, who tried to seek relief via the justice system which failed him.” People who signed the petition noted various reasons for doing so: “I would’ve done exactly what he did if the court system failed me” (Dmitri Birmingham); “Anyone with children understands how this man felt and why he acted” (Joan Folmer); “The world is better off without a child molester!” (Grace Koopman).

Paisley Howard-Larsen, a local mother, told me that she believes Levi did the community a service by killing Larry. “I think this should have been done a long time ago, and I feel bad that it had to be Levi doing it,” she said. “I don’t even see Larry as a human. I think he’s just a monster. It makes me really sad that Levi is going to do any sort of time, whether it’s in a prison or a mental institution. I don’t think that’s right. I think he should have got off free.”

“Even though he actually murdered somebody?” I asked.

“Yeah. I think he did the right thing.”

Others in town, while not condoning murder, nevertheless welcomed the news of Larry’s death. One mother of four young children said, “What Levi did wasn’t justified, but that’s not to say I’m not thankful for it.” Others felt that Levi had been treated unfairly by the state. “Levi tried to go the legal route, he tried to do what he was supposed to do,” his longtime friend Cedar Adams said, citing Levi’s effort to get a protective order against Larry. “They say, ‘Don’t corner a wild animal, because if you do it will attack.’ I feel he felt he was backed into a corner and had no other choice. I feel he’s a victim more than anything.”

Adams’s boyfriend, Nick Swenson, who works at Buck’s Hardware, never met Larry but had heard rumors about him. “You can’t go around killing people,” Swenson told me, “but Levi couldn’t have picked a better person.”

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There’s another side to public opinion, and its defining feature is dismay. The Cook County News Herald published a letter from Jim Boyd, a Grand Marais resident and retired newspaper editor, that argued against vigilante justice. “Scully had not been arrested, charged, jailed, tried, or convicted of any recent crime,” Boyd wrote, referring to the fact that no one had come forward to accuse Larry of abuse since 1979. “You can’t go around killing people just because they are horrible. (The dead would be stacked up like cord wood.)” Similarly, on Facebook threads about the case that mostly lionize Levi and disparage pedophiles, an occasional voice of dissent pops up. For example: “You can’t just murder people because you ‘think’ they might do something” (Penelope Orl). And: “Child molestation is horrible and wrong. Murdering someone by butchery is also wrong” (Don Croker).

For Larry’s friends and sons, much of the discourse about his death is chilling. “He did not deserve to die the way he did,” Carol told me. “I hate the way Levi’s family and Pat and Jon are going after Larry as a monster, and Levi’s a hero.” She conveyed that the main reason she didn’t want her real name used in this story was that she feared repercussions from Larry’s brothers.

She wasn’t the only person to request anonymity. People on both sides of the Levi–Larry divide told me that they were concerned about their reputations. Two sources said the situation is so polarizing that having their names attached to their opinions might hurt their businesses.

On March 7, 2024, Levi was finally moved to the Forensic Mental Health Program, a locked facility in St. Peter, Minnesota. Where his life goes from here, and how the dust of his crime will settle in Grand Marais, is an open question. During my visit to Grand Marais last August, I spent the better part of an hour talking to Amber Waldrop and her father, Dennis, a thoughtful man with a thick gray beard. We met in a building downtown overlooking Lake Superior’s seemingly infinite horizon. When it came to this story, the Waldrops saw no happy ending in sight.

“It’s just a series of people being hurt: Larry’s family, Levi’s ex-wife and daughter, Levi’s parents,” Dennis told me. “There are a lot of victims here. And being in a small town, there’s a conflict going on with what happened and what should’ve happened. It’s a tough line to walk. This is sensational news to the rest of the world, but we’re living it.”

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For years, a mysterious figure preyed on gay men in Atlanta. People on the streets called him the Handcuff Man—but the police knew his real name.

By Hallie Lieberman

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 “Stay away from him.”

In May 1991, Michael Jordan visited Atlanta, Georgia, to revel in the city’s social scene. Jordan, who was 21 and lived in Florida, came on vacation and ended up in a neighborhood called Midtown. If the Deep South had a gay mecca, Midtown was it. The bars there were legendary; among the busiest were the Phoenix, a brick-walled dive, and the Gallus, a sprawling three-floor property transformed from a private home into a piano bar, restaurant, and hustler haunt. Piedmont Park, situated in Midtown’s northeast, was a popular cruising spot, thanks to the privacy offered by its dense vegetation. Cars lined up in droves there, bearing license plates from as far away as California and Michigan. Local residents complained about the traffic, and arborists put up fences to “protect” the trees. A cop once told a reporter that the park was “so busy” with gay men, “you’d think they were having a drive-in movie.”

Note: This story contains graphic descriptions of sexual violence.

But Midtown’s freedoms and pleasures had limits. Sodomy was illegal in Georgia, and cops routinely detained gay men, sometimes by going undercover and posing as hustlers. “One of the television stations would scroll the names of all the people who had been arrested for soliciting sodomy,” recalled Cliff Bostock, a longtime journalist in Atlanta. The HIV/AIDS crisis was approaching its zenith, and testing positive was a near certain death sentence that some Americans, especially in the South, believed gay men deserved. Prominent Atlanta preacher Charles Stanley had made national headlines in 1986 when he declared that the epidemic was a way of “God indicating his displeasure” with homosexuality.

On the evening of May 12, his first day in the city, Jordan was milling around Midtown when he was approached by a man in a white Lincoln Town Car who asked if he wanted to make some money. “What do I have to do?” Jordan replied. The man said he was conducting a study and would pay Jordan $50 to drink vodka. “I’m going to watch as you become more and more inebriated, and I’ll take notes,” the man said. Jordan jumped at the chance to earn some easy cash and agreed to meet the man at the corner of Fifth and Juniper Streets.

Jordan was already there when the man arrived. The man motioned for Jordan to get into his car, handed him a fifth of vodka, and told him to drink it fast. Jordan downed about half the bottle, at which point the man left the car for a few minutes to get something to mix the alcohol with. When he came back, the man asked Jordan to get hard because he wanted to see him masturbate. Jordan said he was too drunk to get hard quickly. Then he drank more and blacked out.

Early the next morning, a man named David Atkins found someone curled up in the fetal position on the ground of the parking lot behind the Ponce de Leon Hotel, where Atkins worked as a clerk. “At first I thought he was 30 to 35 and very dirty. I nudged him with my foot, told him to wake up,” Atkins told Southern Voice, a gay newspaper in Atlanta. “Then I realized it was blisters all over his body and he was just a kid.”

The person on the ground was Jordan. He was naked, and his genitals had been wrapped in a rubber band and set on fire. Burns extended to his buttocks and legs, and his nose and mouth were filled with blood.

Atkins called 911, and Jordan was rushed in an ambulance to the hospital, where he would remain for a month. When the police were slow to respond to the scene, Atkins reached out to Cathy Woolard, a gay-rights advocate working with Georgia’s chapter of the ACLU. Woolard sprang into action and contacted the police investigator assigned to the case. In her words, she got “nothing but runaround.” Because of the victim’s profile, the police had designated the attack a bias crime. For the same reason, Woolard sensed, they weren’t taking the incident seriously.  

Woolard urged law enforcement to talk to a potential witness: Bill Adamson, a bartender at the Phoenix. Adamson said that Jordan had come into the bar before going to Fifth and Juniper and had described his conversation with the stranger in the Town Car. Adamson issued a warning: “Stay away from him. He’s dangerous.”

Adamson didn’t know the driver’s name, only that people around Midtown called him the Handcuff Man. He was a serial predator who approached gay men, offered to pay them to drink liquor, then beat or burned them and left them for dead. Sometimes he handcuffed his victims to poles—hence his sinister nickname.

There were men who said they’d narrowly escaped the Handcuff Man, and rumors that some of his victims hadn’t survived. But there were also people who thought that he was nothing more than an urban legend. Jordan’s assault would bring the truth to light: Not only did the Handcuff Man exist, but there were people in Atlanta who knew his name, including members of the police force. He hadn’t been caught because, it seemed, no one was trying in earnest to catch him.

That was about to change.

 “I’m going to sue you.”

No one could be certain when the Handcuff Man had staged his first attack. Adamson claimed that he’d been terrorizing Midtown since the late 1960s, that he drove a white Lincoln, was about five foot ten, and had black hair and glasses. A sex worker said that the Handcuff Man had picked him up in Piedmont Park in 1977, asked him to take shots of liquor, then assaulted him. The victim managed to flee with a stab wound to the shoulder, and later saw the man again at the park eyeing other male hustlers. He didn’t report the crime because he was afraid of being outed to loved ones.

In 1984, Susan Faludi, then a twentysomething reporter a few years out from becoming a Pulitzer Prize–winning author, wrote a front-page story about gay hustlers for the Atlanta Journal-Constitution. She asked her sources about the dangers of their lifestyle and learned that “the greatest fear on the street right now is invoked by the specter of ‘The Handcuff Man,’ a man who reportedly picks up hustlers, offers them a pint of vodka spiked with sleeping pills and then handcuffs and beats them.”

The following year, in April 1985, a thin man rolled down his car window on Ponce de Leon Avenue and asked Max Shrader if he wanted to make some money. Shrader, 21, had been hustling since he was 13, turning tricks for out and closeted men alike, including a married Baptist preacher. He knew that what he did was dangerous; someone had pulled a gun on him, and a female sex worker who was his friend had been killed. “They found her head in one dumpster, her arms in another,” Shrader said. “She was a nice person.” Shrader knew about the Handcuff Man, who had attacked another of his friends. But the man in the car on Ponce, as the thoroughfare is commonly known, didn’t come off like a predator. He wore glasses and a pressed shirt; he seemed normal.

The man asked Shrader to drink some alcohol with him, and Shrader obliged. But after a little while he started to feel funny. Had the man slipped him something? Shrader collapsed to the ground. “Don’t hurt me!” he begged, as the man pulled him into his car.

The man drove to a wooded area, parked, and dragged an intoxicated Shrader into a patch of kudzu. He then poured a liquid onto Shrader’s groin and lit a match, illuminating his face in a ghoulish way Shrader would never forget. When the man dropped the match, Shrader caught fire.

Shrader lay in the woods for hours, drifting in and out of consciousness. He cried out for help when he had the energy. Around 9:30 p.m., a man who happened to be a nurse was driving home with his girlfriend when he spotted a naked figure on the side of the road. The nurse stopped, saw Shrader’s condition, and rushed home to call the police and to get some blankets to wrap Shrader in. “I guess God sent him,” Shrader said.

Shrader was taken to Grady Memorial Hospital, the same place Michael Jordan would go six years later. He stayed there six weeks, during which the police came to see him once. They left a business card and said to call if he wanted to talk. He misplaced the card and never heard from the cops again.

Shrader wasn’t surprised. Atlanta cops seemed more interested in harassing and arresting gay men than in protecting them. Sometimes they wrote down the numbers on license plates in Piedmont Park and blackmailed drivers terrified of having their sexual orientation exposed—it could cost them their families, their jobs, possibly their lives. Incidents of gay bashing often went unsolved, if they were investigated at all. Etcetera, a gay and lesbian magazine in Atlanta, reported that between 1984 and 1986, at least 18 gay men died at the hands of unidentified perpetrators. The publication noted with frustration that police had “little understanding” of homophobic crimes. The Atlanta Gay Center began offering sensitivity training for cops, but feedback was mixed. “I think what you told us will be helpful in the longrun and should be expressed more often in police work,” one participant wrote in an evaluation of the training, “but I still think gays are disgusting and a disgrace to our country.” George Napper, Atlanta’s public safety commissioner, refused to make a statement condemning crimes against the gay community because it might be construed as favoritism.

After healing for two years, Shrader went back to hustling, scars and all. He’d grown up poor, and selling sex was one of the only ways he’d ever made money. At least now he knew what the Handcuff Man looked like and could steer clear of him.

J.D. Kirkland suspected that he’d seen the Handcuff Man’s face, too. Kirkland, an Atlanta cop, worked security a few nights a week at the Gallus. According to Don Hunnewell, one of the owners of the Gallus, Kirkland was a combination of Dirty Harry and the sheriff from Gunsmoke—a “kick-ass, cowboy type of tough cop.” In his free time, he trained horses on a large piece of property outside the city and worked on a novel about a time-traveling cop. Kirkland was married with kids; he wasn’t gay, but he was compassionate toward the Gallus’s clientele. “He really cared,” Hunnewell said. “I don’t think he was judgmental at all on what they were doing.” (Kirkland died in 1996.)

Patrons had told Kirkland about the Handcuff Man, including what he looked like, and on November 4, 1983, a man came into the Gallus who matched the description. Kirkland wrote a trespass notice, then snapped a polaroid of the man. The Gallus had a “barred book” filled with photos of people who weren’t allowed on the premises; bartenders were supposed to check it at the start of their shifts so they could eject any banned patrons. Kirkland put the man’s photo in the book.

Before kicking him out for good, Kirkland asked for his name. The man said he was Robert Lee Bennett Jr. “I’m an attorney,” he added, “and I’m going to sue you.”

 “What have you done?”

Robert Lee Bennett Jr. was indeed an attorney, like his father before him. He had been adopted as a baby by Annabelle Maxwell Bennett and Robert Lee Bennett Sr., of Towanda, Pennsylvania, a small town perched on the Susquehanna River. Annabelle was a socialite and the daughter of a wealthy judge; in addition to practicing law, Robert Sr. was the president of a bank.

Robert Sr. was originally from the South but moved to Towanda for his bride. They lived with their son, their only child, in a Victorian mansion nicknamed Nirvana. It had five bedrooms, a white marble fireplace, and a pool house; a Steinway grand piano, Tiffany sterling silver, and plush oriental rugs. The local paper chronicled the family’s every move: vacations to Africa, charity dinners. They were the Kennedys of Towanda.

Ellie Harden Smith, who knew Bennett in high school, said that he was charming, fashionable, and quirky. Most of his friends were girls, and he liked to cross-stitch and garden. He was devoted to his mother. As far as Smith knew, he was never bullied or mocked for his feminine tendencies. Bennett sang in the glee club in high school, was active in the Boy Scouts, and worked at the student newspaper.

After graduating high school in 1965, he moved to Colorado to attend the University of Denver. Smith visited him there, and he took her out to gay bars. “I guess I sort of knew, but that was the first I realized that he was really into that stuff,” she said.

Bennett’s first run-in with the law appears to have happened in 1971, when he was arrested in Virginia for indecent exposure during a homosexual act. At the time, he was pursuing a master’s degree in political science. According to legal documents, he was arrested two years later, this time in Atlanta, for assault with an automobile. A year on, soon after graduating from law school at Emory University, he was arrested again. It happened in Midtown, when he was cruising near the Gallus. Bennett tried to pull a man into his car—a man who happened to be an undercover cop. Bennett was charged with kidnapping a police officer, but he ended up pleading no contest to simple battery and paying a $75 fine.

Once he’d finished his law degree, Bennett moved back to Towanda, where he lived a double life. By day he worked at a law firm and claimed to be looking for a wife; in his free time, he paid poor local boys to take their clothes off and drink or have sex with him. Eventually, he quit the firm and bought a plant and flower business called the Tree Stump.

On April 16, 1976, Bennett met a young man at Leonard’s, a beer garden in Towanda, and suggested that they go to a lake cottage his parents had bought him as a gift. The men had sex in Bennett’s car, then drove to the cottage. According to Francis Panuccio, a police captain quoted in a local newspaper, “something occurred that frightened” the young man, who fled the cottage in Bennett’s car and drove it into an embankment. When police arrived at the scene, they arrested the young man, but Bennett deflected scrutiny thanks to Robert Sr. “Nobody wanted to press charges against him because of the influence of his father,” a retired state police investigator later told the press. “His father was gold.”

Still, Robert Sr. feared that his son would keep getting into more trouble if he remained in Towanda. Two months after the incident at the lake, Bennett moved back to Atlanta. He was 29.

Bennett was hired by a law firm, which is where he met Sandra Powell, 34, a secretary and bookkeeper. She was small and demure, a junior-college graduate who wore her dark hair in bangs. They started dating, and Bennett told Powell that he was impotent. She said it didn’t bother her; they talked about adopting a child. In 1978, on a trip to the lake cottage in Towanda, Bennett proposed and Powell said yes. They were married at Rock Springs Presbyterian Church in Atlanta. Powell wore an ivory gown decorated with pearls and lace, and carried a bouquet of burgundy roses. Bennett wore a tuxedo with a white bow tie. They honeymooned in South America.

His hometown friends were surprised that Bennett got married. Irma Henson, who had known him since his early twenties, said that he likely did it for his parents, especially his mother, with whom he was still close. “He probably gathered from his mother that who he was wasn’t fitting her picture of who he should be,” Henson said.

Shortly after the wedding, Bennett quit the law firm. He worked for a while behind the jewelry counter at Davison’s department store, but mostly he lived off dividends from stocks his father had gifted him. “He would just hang around the house all day, and he would be in his robe when I got home,” Powell later said in court. She was unhappy, but “kept it inside.”

Then one day in the fall of 1982, Powell was getting off the bus she rode home from work when she saw police placing her husband in handcuffs. “What is it?” she asked. “What have you done?”

Over Labor Day weekend, James Lee Johnson, 24, had been found shot to death with a .25-caliber pistol in the middle of the street close to his apartment. His wallet was missing. Police learned that Johnson may have been a sex worker, and that he’d last been seen with a man who looked like Bennett. According to friends, Johnson was in a relationship with a man named Robert whom he’d met at the jewelry store where Bennett once worked. A few weeks before his death, Johnson had expressed fear of this man, telling friends, “Robert’s gonna get me.” When investigators examined the contents of Johnson’s stomach during his autopsy, they found roast beef and potatoes. They searched Bennett’s home and, discovering those items in his refrigerator, arrested him for murder.

Bennett was released on a $25,000 bond and was never tried, because the prosecution’s case was entirely circumstantial. His arrest marked the end of his marriage—Powell soon filed for divorce—but not of his comfortable lifestyle. When he wasn’t in Atlanta, Bennett spent time in Clearwater, Florida, where his mother, widowed in the mid-1980s, kept a home. He vacationed in Nassau, Mexico, and China. He hosted lavish parties, and when he and his mother attended an annual lobster boil at a club in Towanda, an otherwise casual affair, he made sure their table was set with linens, porcelain plates, and a silver candelabra.

Meanwhile, in Midtown, the Handcuff Man’s reputation was mounting. Max Shrader was attacked in the spring of 1985. That August, a man named Charles Gallows was assaulted and robbed. The following June, Anthony Charles Poppilia got in the car of a man who offered to pay him $50 to drink vodka, then pushed Poppilia from the moving vehicle. The stories continued until May 1991, when Michael Jordan turned up maimed behind the Ponce de Leon Hotel. Midtown denizens would later report that, in the hours leading up to Jordan’s assault, the Handcuff Man had approached at least one other man in the area.

“A sadistic Woody Allen lookalike.”

When word of Jordan’s assault reached Richard Greer, he immediately thought of the Handcuff Man. Greer, 32, worked the 5 p.m. to 1 a.m. cop beat at the Journal-Constitution. A few months prior, he’d overheard a Midtown patrol officer casually mention the Handcuff Man to some colleagues. Greer asked around and gleaned that a lot of cops thought the attacker might be “folklore.” Jordan’s assault seemed to be confirmation that he was not.

Greer went to gay bars in Midtown to speak with employees and customers. He heard a rumor that the Handcuff Man had either removed the door handles inside his car or covered them with duct tape to trap his victims. People were upset that authorities seemed to be doing nothing to stop the violence. “The victims were people that most people either wanted to ignore or didn’t know existed,” Greer said.

Greer left his business card with patrons of the Gallus and told them to get in touch if they ever saw the person they believed to be the Handcuff Man. “I started getting calls at one in the morning saying ‘He just drove by’ or ‘He’s on the corner of X street and X street,’ ” Greer said. If he thought the information was reliable, Greer would jump in his car and drive to Midtown, but by the time he arrived, the suspect was always long gone.

Then Greer was given a name: Robert Bennett Jr. But the tip didn’t come from a hustler or a bartender—it came from a cop. Greer was surprised. In his experience, it was unusual for a cop to be so candid. More importantly, if people on the force believed that they knew who the Handcuff Man was, why hadn’t Bennett been investigated and arrested?

Greer spoke with Kirkland, the cop who moonlighted at the Gallus, and Kirkland said that he was never able to do anything about Bennett except ban him from the bar back in 1983, because it was difficult to persuade survivors and witnesses of the Handcuff Man’s attacks to come forward. But if that were true, law enforcement bore at least some responsibility for people’s reluctance: Victims of homophobic crimes in Atlanta feared that if they spoke to the police, they might be blackmailed or arrested, or simply not believed. “The police say if you don’t report the crime, we can’t do anything about it,” Bill Gripp, an activist with the Atlanta Gay Center, told Greer. “We say if we don’t have confidence in them, we won’t report it.”

On May 28, two weeks after Jordan was assaulted, Greer published a front-page story about the Handcuff Man. “Gay prostitutes in fear of sadist,” the headline read. Greer wrote that the Handcuff Man may have attacked up to 100 men during his “reign of terror,” and that gay Atlantans were “angered” that the police were “indifferent” to his crimes. Greer quoted Kirkland, who said that it was possible the Handcuff Man was responsible for several unsolved murders.

Greer characterized the Handcuff Man as “a sadistic Woody Allen lookalike … scrawny and peering with eyeglasses through his car window.” He wrote that Kirkland believed the predator was a “DeKalb County professional.” But Greer didn’t name Bennett. He couldn’t. Doing so would have risked a defamation suit against the newspaper; Bennett hadn’t been arrested or charged with a crime, and he was a wealthy lawyer with his own wealthy lawyer on call. To finger Bennett, Greer needed to keep digging.

Greer began combing through public records and police files. He read documents pertaining to Bennett’s prior arrests. He learned that Bennett had briefly been a suspect in one of Atlanta’s most high-profile crime sprees: From 1979 to 1981, a serial killer murdered 30 people in the city, most of whom were young boys. As pressure mounted to find the perpetrator, the FBI arrived to help. Based on various records, law enforcement came up with a list of 65 suspects. Bennet was among them, perhaps because of his previous arrests. He was also a known fixture in Midtown, and the FBI thought that the killer might be gay. Agents were assigned to surveil “homosexual bars and areas frequented by male prostitutes,” and to pursue the “development of informants with knowledge of child prostitution,” according to a February 1981 memo. Bennett was eliminated as a suspect after three months. (In late 1981, a man named Wayne Williams was arrested in connection with the slayings. He was convicted of two of the murders and is presumed to have committed the others.)

Greer also found the transcripts from Bennett’s contentious divorce proceedings in 1984. Astoundingly, the Handcuff Man was mentioned. Powell’s counsel called three male sex workers to the stand, all of whom testified that they believed Bennett to be the Handcuff Man. Frank Sheridan, a local gay-rights advocate who liaised with the police, testified that he had been “working with the street prostitute community … to build up information on this gentleman regarding his sexual habits and picking up of young men from the street.” Powell herself claimed that her estranged husband was “violent” and a homosexual.

Bennett denied being gay, then admitted that he was. However, he was adamant that he wasn’t the Handcuff Man. Attorney Guy Notte, who represented Bennett, chastised the authorities for not identifying the real threat. “The Handcuff Man is still down there somewhere,” Notte said. “Could you please tell me why this man hasn’t been caught?” The court ended up ordering Bennett to pay Powell a divorce settlement of $40,000.

On May 29 and 30, 1991, Greer published two additional articles about the Handcuff Man. There were still concerns about naming Bennett, so Greer didn’t. By then Jordan had picked a photo of Bennett out of a lineup. Greer reported that Jordan had identified his attacker, but that police hadn’t issued a warrant for the suspect’s arrest. “I’m sure we will call him,” the chief of the sex-crimes unit told Greer.

Greer grew increasingly worried that Bennett might attack another man soon; naming him seemed like a matter of public safety. There was a heated debate in the newsroom about what to do. One editor told Greer that he hoped never to be an uncharged suspect in Atlanta, lest his name show up in the paper. Another editor, Pam Fine, was on Greer’s side. “Heinous crimes were involved,” Fine later said, “and we recognized that police had waited two decades to actively pursue the case.”

On May 31, Greer published an article naming Bennett as the man Jordan identified as the last person he saw before losing consciousness during his attack. The piece indicated that the police still hadn’t spoken to Bennett, much less detained him. “I would certainly love to interview him,” Bobby Ford, a sex-crimes detective, told Greer. The article went on to state: “For 20 years, police officials and members of the gay community say, a man fitting Mr. Bennett’s description has been involved in cases of brutality against young white male prostitutes. The perpetrator of these crimes has come to be known as the Handcuff Man.”

After the article was published, Greer reached Bennett on the phone at his lake cottage in Towanda, and Bennett denied being the Handcuff Man. “No attorney in his right mind is going to make a comment one way or the other on something the police are investigating,” Bennett continued. “You know as well as I do that that is not an indication of guilt or innocence.” In a separate interview, attorney Guy Notte, who was still representing Bennett, said that his client would be flying down to Atlanta the following week “to defend every allegation.”

 “I literally went nuts.”

Atlanta police didn’t immediately issue a warrant for Bennett’s arrest. “There’s just more work that needs to be done to make this thing stick,” Detective Ford told Greer. But the department did send out a dispatch to law enforcement agencies around the country describing the Handcuff Man’s crimes. When the message arrived in Tampa, Bob Holland, a local police detective, recognized similarities with a case his department had been investigating for a few months.

On February 22, 1991, 35-year-old Gary Clapp was standing outside a Salvation Army shelter, waiting for it to open. Clapp, who hung drywall for a living, was broke and struggling to feed his family; he also had a severe alcohol problem. When a white Town Car pulled up and the driver said that he was conducting a survey on how alcohol affected people’s moods, Clapp hopped into the vehicle. In between chugs of vodka from a plastic cup, Clapp asked the man his name, but he wouldn’t answer. Eventually, Clapp passed out.

Around 10:30 p.m. that night, police officer Jimmy Caplinger was driving on the frontage road along the mangrove-lined Courtney Campbell Causeway, which connects Tampa and Clearwater, when he noticed what he thought was a bonfire. He parked, got out, and saw a person engulfed in flames. It was Clapp. Caplinger grabbed an extinguisher from his car and put out the fire, then called for emergency services. When Clapp arrived at the hospital, his blood-alcohol level was “so high they could not get a reading,” according to a police report. He had fourth-degree burns on nearly half his body and was suffering from smoke inhalation.

Holland went to the hospital to conduct an interview. He wrote in his report that Clapp “was able to answer certain questions by either shaking his head or nodding his head.” Holland discerned that someone had deliberately set Clapp on fire.

Clapp’s injuries were so severe that doctors had to amputate his legs. When he regained consciousness after surgery, he began thrashing around. “I kept pulling out all my IVs,” Clapp told the Tampa Tribune. “I literally went nuts and they had to tie me down in the hospital bed.”

Holland spoke to Clapp’s ex-girlfriend, who said that she’d broken up with him because of his alcoholism. She also said that Clapp had previously been in a “homosexual relationship,” but that it “was an isolated incident.” There were only a few possible clues at the scene of the crime, including a Riva vodka bottle and a container of lighter fluid. Nearby were bags containing decapitated chickens and a headless goat. A dead body had recently turned up just 500 feet from where Clapp was found, which made police wonder if the two crimes were connected.

In early March, Holland interviewed Clapp more extensively. Clapp said that the man who’d attacked him drove a Lincoln Town Car made sometime between 1977 and 1984, with a brown leather interior. He worked with a sketch artist to produce a picture of the suspect, who Clapp said was between 40 and 45 years old, stood a little under six feet tall, and weighed 160 to 170 pounds. Clapp also described the man as having dark hair, a mustache, and glasses. The sketch was published in the Tampa Bay Times on April 9.

Two months later, when Holland saw the dispatch about the Handcuff Man, he quickly picked up the phone and called the Atlanta police. They sent him a photo of Bennett, which Holland then showed to Clapp in a lineup. Clapp, who had only recently been released from a hospital burn unit, identified Bennett as his attacker. Holland pointed out that in his photo Bennett was clean-shaven, and that Clapp had said his attacker had a mustache. Clapp said he was certain that the man in the photo was the one who’d set him on fire. “It’s hard to forget someone that’s done you wrong like that,” he told a reporter.

Authorities in Tampa connected more dots. Bennett’s mother’s home in Clearwater, a seventh-floor condo, wasn’t far from the area where Clapp was found. Bennett had been visiting her in February; in fact, a few days after Clapp’s assault, Bennett and his mother embarked on a Caribbean cruise together. Bennett also owned a Town Car, which he’d recently driven up to Towanda.

It was enough to bring him in. On June 5, Tampa police issued a warrant for Bennett’s arrest. They alerted their counterparts in Atlanta, who were expecting Bennett that very afternoon for questioning about the Handcuff Man attacks in Midtown. Just after 3 p.m., he was taken into custody based on the Tampa warrant.

Speaking to reporters, a shaking Bennett proclaimed his innocence. “I am here to tell the Atlanta police and the city of Atlanta I am not the Handcuff Man,” he said. He later complained that he wasn’t served breakfast in jail, and that he had to wait five hours to get a blanket, pillow, and cigarettes.

 “It struck a bell.”

In Midtown, people were relieved that the Handcuff Man may have been caught, but they were also frustrated that Bennett had only been charged with the attack on Clapp, not the crimes in Atlanta. District Attorney Lewis Slaton assured the public that his office was developing a case against Bennett, but also noted that it would be deferring to Tampa authorities. “Since Florida has asked for him, we’re going to let them have him,” Slaton said. “That case is obviously worse.” But worse by what measure, and for whom? “My life will never be the same,” Jordan told Greer at the Journal-Constitution. Jordan was upset at the way police had handled his ordeal. “It wasn’t until it was in the news that they seemed to care,” he said.

Bennett was extradited to Florida on June 11. He pleaded not guilty and was freed on a $200,000 bond. His mother helped him get the money together by putting up her condo as collateral.

By then, other men had started coming forward to accuse Bennett of attacking them. One of the men was Max Shrader. He’d been sitting at home one day in May when his dad called and told him to turn on the news. “There’s another guy who just got burnt the same way,” his dad said. Shrader saw the report about Jordan and called the police to say that he’d suffered a similar attack six years earlier. They asked him to come to the station, where he was shown a lineup of men’s photos. “That’s him,” Shrader said, pointing at Bennett’s face.

On June 21, an Atlanta grand jury indicted Bennett on two counts of aggravated assault and two counts of aggravated battery for the attacks on Jordan and Shrader. Investigators noted that Bennett was suspected of committing similar crimes going back two decades. Bennett again pleaded not guilty and was released on bond—an additional $100,000.

For Dale Sisco and Chip Purcell, who were prosecuting Bennett in Florida, the Atlanta indictment was good news. Their case against Bennett was proving delicate. Clapp had identified his attacker, but because he’d been drunk when he was set on fire, the defense would almost certainly argue that he was an unreliable witness. The defense would also likely argue that evidence found at the scene—the lighter fluid and vodka bottle—wasn’t necessarily connected to the case. Locals called the area where Clapp was found “the redneck Riviera,” because people liked to grill, drink, and party in the mangroves. “There was no videotape of him doing the act,” Sisco said of Bennett. “We had no photographs of him. There were still many circumstantial aspects of the proof that were going to be challenging.” The prosecutors didn’t even have fingerprints connecting Bennett to Clapp’s attack.

So Sisco and Purcell decided to rely on the Williams Rule, a legal precedent in Florida that allows prosecutors to present evidence from other cases or incidents that indicate a pattern of criminal behavior. They identified a handful of recent instances in which men had endured injuries similar to Clapp’s, hoping to find other witnesses willing to testify against Bennett. For instance, there was an unsolved case from 1989 in Detective Holland’s jurisdiction involving a man who was found unconscious outside a gay bar with his genitals burned. But survivors were wary of telling their stories in court. “We talked to several guys who were not excited about coming to Tampa and testifying to what their sexual activities were,” Purcell said.

The Atlanta indictments expanded the pool of potential witnesses. If the Florida case went to trial, Jordan could testify under the Williams Rule. So could Shrader. The same went for a hustler named Shane, who asked to be identified by his first name in this story. Shane was the man in Atlanta who claimed that the Handcuff Man had tried to pick him up in the hours just before Jordan was attacked.

At the time, Shane was in his mid-thirties; he had a wife and a kid he supported with sex work. When a man in a white Lincoln pulled up one day and asked him to drink vodka for $50, Shane was suspicious. He told the driver that if he wanted to drink, they could go to a bar, but the man insisted they imbibe in the car. Shane declined and went about his night. When he heard about the attack on Jordan, “it struck a bell,” he said. Shane got in touch with the police and later identified Bennett in a photo lineup as the man who’d tried to give him vodka. The experience shook him up. “It put a kibosh on me for a while from hustling,” he said.

As Sisco and Purcell built their case, a shocking news story seized headlines: In July 1991, Jeffrey Dahmer was arrested in Milwaukee and confessed to murdering more than a dozen gay men over the course of 13 years. Some journalists made the connection to the Handcuff Man’s crimes. “As in the case of Jeffrey Dahmer,” Mary T. Schmich wrote in the Chicago Tribune on August 3, “Bennett’s arrest has raised questions about the speed and sensitivity with which police handle crimes involving homosexual activity.” Schmich quoted Cathy Woolard, the activist who months before had asked the Atlanta police to take the threat of the Handcuff Man seriously. “A lot of people don’t care that much if gay people get killed,” Woolard said. “It doesn’t seem to matter that much that someone is savagely burning male hustlers, because they’re not the cream of the crop.”

The article ended with an update on Bennett’s whereabouts. “Bennett, who was released on bond, is spending the summer with his 85-year-old mother in Towanda,” Schmich wrote, “where he reportedly indulges a passion for gardening.”

 “You don’t count.”

To work alongside Guy Notte in the Tampa case, Bennett hired a defense attorney based in Florida. Rochelle Reback had spent the previous decade representing all sorts of clients, but none quite like Bennett. “Usually people involved in crimes of violence don’t have a lot of money,” Reback said in an interview for this story. Bennett was different. “We had an investigator. We had a jury-selection expert. We had a lot of resources that a lot of clients can’t afford,” Reback said.

When Reback visited Bennett’s mother in Clearwater, there were photos of Bennett everywhere. Many of them were from his childhood, when his mother had dressed him to the nines. “One was like Little Lord Fauntleroy looking, with his long, curly hair,” Reback said. Between how his mother viewed him and his wealth, it was clear to Reback that Bennett had led a cosseted life. And now he seemed sure that his privilege would protect him. “He really just felt like this was just one more case that was going to go by the wayside and he would suffer no ongoing consequences,” Reback said.

Bennett’s arrogance grated on her. “He was the most unpleasant client I ever had,” Reback said. When they clashed about strategy, Notte stepped in to smooth things over. He had a long history of appeasing Bennett. “Notte wanted to keep Bob happy because Bob was a wealthy client,” Reback said. Together, Notte and Reback tried to find character witnesses willing to testify on Bennett’s behalf, but according to Reback they found none. (Notte did not respond to a request for comment.)

In October 1991, Clapp was interviewed for a front-page story in the St. Petersburg Times. The picture accompanying the article showed him in his government-funded concrete-block apartment, seated in a wheelchair and cradling a black kitten. “There’s times I forget I don’t have legs and I want to get up and go take a walk, you know?” Clapp said. He told the reporter that he couldn’t stop thinking about Bennett. “Truthfully, I’d like to see the same thing happen to him that happened to me,” Clapp said.

When they spoke to the press, Bennett’s legal team tried to use what Reback called the SODDI defense (“some other dude did it”). Notte told a reporter that Clapp’s assault “smacks of the cult [of] Santeria,” because decapitated animals were found near the crime scene. As for the accusations against Bennett in Atlanta, Notte called them “stupid lies.”

Behind the scenes, however, it was becoming clear that Bennett was likely to lose in court. Sisco and Purcell had obtained a five-minute video, shot by the Tampa fire department, that showed Clapp burning in the mangroves; his cries of pain were audible. The prosecution upgraded the attempted murder charge to include use of a deadly weapon, which meant that, if convicted, Bennett could get a life sentence. This wasn’t an outside possibility: The judge assigned to the case was known for tough rulings.

Bennett’s lawyers persuaded him to take a deal. On February 13, 1992, he appeared in court in Florida to plead guilty; he planned to do the same in Atlanta several days later. At least three of his victims—Clapp, Jordan, and Shrader—were in the courtroom. Shrader wanted to lunge at Bennett as soon as he laid eyes on him. “But I knew if I hit him right there,” Shrader said, “I’d get hell.”

Bennett, who stood with his arms crossed, was sentenced to 17 years in prison followed by 13 years of probation. Under Florida law, he would be eligible for parole in five years. Clapp considered the sentence too light. “I don’t think he’ll ever feel sorry for anything he’s done,” he told the court. “He’s a sick puppy.”

Bennett’s attorneys requested that he be allowed some time to make arrangements for his aging mother’s care. He was told to turn himself in on March 9. “I trust you as a man and as a lawyer,” the judge told Bennett. The prosecution was stunned by the three-week reprieve. “This is clearly one of the most heinous crimes I’ve ever prosecuted,” Purcell told the St. Petersburg Times.

Frustration mounted further when it was announced that Bennett might get a deal that would allow him to serve his sentences in the Florida and Georgia cases concurrently rather than back-to-back. The Journal-Constitution argued in an editorial that this would effectively mean “no prison time” for the crimes he’d committed in Atlanta. “The full force of the legal system should be used to show that such acts will not be tolerated and to prevent them from happening again,” the editorial said. Had Bennett’s victims “been women or straight men … it is hard to believe the Florida sentence and the Fulton plea bargain would even be discussed.” (Atlanta is the seat of Fulton County.)

Gay-rights advocates agreed with the paper. Larry Pellegrini of the ACLU called the deal “horrendous.” Jeff Graham of Atlanta’s chapter of ACT UP told a reporter, “I think that clearly you’ve got a prejudiced judicial system in Atlanta.”

On February 24, Bennett appeared in an Atlanta courtroom for sentencing. It was packed, with cameras everywhere. Shrader was nervous, and when he got nervous he smiled; a lawyer told him to stop smiling.

The plaintiffs’ counsel argued against the plea deal. Jordan’s attorney said that her client “wants this man to serve life.” Shrader’s lawyer said that “this child of affluence has developed into a sadistic sociopath” for whom “the concurrent sentence is not adequate.”

When the judge asked if Bennett wished to say anything, he said no.

“Did you, in fact, pick up those two fellows?” the judge then inquired, referring to Jordan and Shrader.

“I’m pleading guilty to the charge, your honor, on the advice of my counsel,” Bennett said.

“I asked you, did you pick up those two fellows?”

Notte interjected. “Your honor, he would rather not answer that question.”

“I want to hear from him. You don’t want to say so, say you don’t want to say so,” the judge said.

“Yes,” Bennett responded.

Ultimately, the judge ruled in favor of the plea deal. In addition to the concurrent prison sentences, Bennett was banned from Fulton County for life, instructed to see a psychiatrist, and ordered to pay restitution of more than $100,000 to his victims. When asked where the money would come from, Notte said that Bennett would use his mother’s trust fund.

Gay activists who had come to see the sentencing shouted “shame” repeatedly at the judge. In an article for Southern Voice, reporter K.C. Wildmoon wrote that the court sent “a message to the lesbian and gay community, to the hustler community, that these things will happen. It says ‘you don’t count.’ ”

“A danger to society.”

There are lingering questions in the story of the Handcuff Man. Chief among them is how many victims there actually were, and whether any of them died from the attacks. But no further indictments were ever brought against Bennett. “What upsets me the most is how many Max Shraders there are that maybe nobody even knows about,” said Don Hunnewell, the Gallus’s owner. “Maybe nobody even knows they died.” (The Gallus closed in 1993.)

Greer, who now lives in Virginia, wonders what lessons were learned from the whole affair—by the police, the media, and the wider Atlanta community. “The Handcuff Man was the perpetrator, but in a sense we’re all accomplices. I’m certain a dead hustler on the south side today would be all but ignored, while a crime against a wealthy family in Buckhead would get a lot of ink and cameras,” he said, referring to one of Atlanta’s poshest neighborhoods.

Then there’s the question of why Bennett committed his crimes, what motive he had. Was it a combination of rage and self-loathing? Shrader thinks so. “He was gay and he hated that,” Shrader said. “Then he decided that he’d get rid of [who he considered] the lowest of the gays, the slime on the totem pole, which were gay hustlers, and unfortunately I just happened to be in his path.” For her part, Reback said that she gleaned from her conversations with Notte that Bennett was “deeply repressed” and couldn’t “function sexually in any way.” (After his convictions, Bennett filed a court motion claiming that Reback had provided ineffective counsel; it was dismissed.)

An old friend of Bennett’s in Towanda, quoted in the local paper, placed some of the blame for Bennett’s crimes on the people who’d helped him evade the consequences of his actions as a young man. “He should have had some help earlier in his life when he got into some of the minor scraps in Pennsylvania,” the friend said. “If some of that was not covered up, he might have gotten some sort of help.”

The Handcuff Man himself never offered any insight. Two days after the contentious Atlanta hearing, the judge in Florida revoked the bond he’d released Bennett on so that he could sort out his mother’s care. After his sentencing, Bennett had been seen cruising a red convertible through an area of Tampa known to be popular with gay hustlers. The judge called him “a danger to society.”

Once in prison, Bennett was placed in solitary confinement at his own request. Eventually, he was moved to the general population because, as Notte told a reporter, he was “going buggy” in isolation. His mother died in 1993. Bennett would receive a $1.5 million inheritance upon his release from prison.

But that never happened: On April 1, 1998, just one year before he was supposed to get out, Bennett had a stroke and died behind bars. “He got the life sentence that he probably deserved,” Reback said.

The bulk of Bennett’s estate went to Towanda’s historical society and to the Boy Scouts. He left $25,000 to the son of his friend Ellie Harden Smith and $15,000 to the local country club, with the condition “that this bequest be acknowledged and established as a memorial to my grandfather, the Honorable William Maxwell, my mother, Annabelle Maxwell Bennett, and myself, Robert Lee Bennett, Jr.” He also requested the erection of a memorial to himself and his mother as a condition of a gift to the county library. There was no mention of honoring his father.

As for his personal effects, namely his clothing and photographs, he issued an unusual directive: Bennett said he wanted them burned.

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An ob-gyn in Virginia performed unnecessary surgeries on patients for decades. When his victims learned the truth, they fought back.

By Rae Nudson

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1.

Debra* had hoped that her medical nightmares were over. In 2009, she was diagnosed with breast cancer that had spread to her lymph nodes. The disease was estrogen positive, which meant that it was feeding on her reproductive hormones. After six months of chemotherapy and a double mastectomy, the cancer was declared in remission. To keep it that way, doctors put Debra on tamoxifen, a hormonal drug used as a prophylactic against certain types of breast cancer. She expected to be on it for about five years.

*Asterisks denote pseudonyms.

Debra has a wide smile, dimples, and thin, arched eyebrows. She likes high heels and she likes to talk. She used to work as a hairstylist, a job well suited to someone who falls easily into conversation with strangers. She is also a mom to two boys, and always wanted more kids. Patients on tamoxifen are advised against becoming pregnant; Debra, who was in her early forties when she started taking the drug, planned to conceive once she’d completed treatment.

Then, about halfway through her tamoxifen regimen, Debra got a letter in the mail with bad news: The results of her latest pap smear were abnormal. She had undergone the procedure, which involves scraping cells from the cervix, during a routine visit to a Veterans Affairs medical center near her home in Portsmouth, Virginia. (Debra was in the Air Force from 1988 to 1992.) An abnormal pap can indicate the presence of cancerous or precancerous cells; follow-up testing is usually recommended.

Debra knew that even with the tamoxifen, there was a risk that her cancer might come back, possibly in a part of her body other than her breasts; oncologists call this a distant recurrence. So she took the pap results seriously. When the VA referred her to two ob-gyns, Debra reached out to both. One had a monthslong waiting list, but the other had immediate availability. His name was Javaid Perwaiz. 

Dr. Perwaiz’s main practice was in a small redbrick building near a strip mall in the city of Chesapeake. The parking lot had 14 spaces, including one for handicapped drivers, and cars came and went in quick succession. Perwaiz had a reputation for working fast: An established patient could expect to arrive for an appointment and be back in their car in under 15 minutes. The waiting room was small, with a vaulted ceiling, a bank of windows, and walls painted a soothing mauve. Many of Perwaiz’s patients were Black women on Medicaid. Debra fit that profile.

When she met Perwaiz in July 2012, Debra felt confident about him as a doctor. He was in his early sixties and short, with a thick, well-groomed white mustache, bushy eyebrows, and a comb-over. During appointments he wore a white coat. He was matter-of-fact but not cold. He remembered details about his patients’ personal lives and asked about their loved ones.

According to Debra, after performing some tests, Perwaiz told her that she had precancerous cells on her cervix that would likely develop into cancer. He said that there was no drug she could take to stop that from happening. Given her history of breast cancer, he recommended a hysterectomy.

Debra was shocked and scared. She didn’t want to lose her ability to have more children. But she also wanted to live to see her sons grow up. After subsequent appointments with Perwaiz, during which she underwent additional tests, she agreed to have surgery, but said that she didn’t want her abdomen cut open. The doctor who performed the C-section during the birth of her first son had used a “beautiful subcutaneous suture” to close up the incision, resulting in a faint scar. “You couldn’t even tell that I’d ever had a surgery,” Debra told me. She wanted to keep her stomach the way it was. According to Debra, Perwaiz assured her that he could perform the surgery through her vagina; no abdominal incision would be required.

Debra trusted what Perwaiz told her. From their conversations, her understanding was that he would remove only her ovaries, because decreasing the estrogen in her body might diminish the risk of her cancer recurring. In fact, a hysterectomy by medical definition involves the removal of the uterus. But Debra didn’t know this going into surgery, because, she said, Perwaiz never explained it to her.  

On the morning of December 29, Debra arrived at Chesapeake Regional Medical Center and filled out the required paperwork for her procedure. One of the nurses was someone she knew from church, a friendly face. Then Debra was prepped for the operating room and given the sedative propofol. Hospital staff were wheeling her on a gurney down a hallway when she saw Perwaiz.

“What time do I need to tell my friend to come back and pick me up?” Debra asked him.

“That’s not the surgery you signed for,” she remembered Perwaiz replying.

She wasn’t sure what that meant. The propofol was making her sleepy. Then everything went dark.

When Debra woke up in a recovery room, she knew something was wrong. Groggily, she moved her hands to her stomach. She found tape covering an incision. Debra didn’t understand. She began to cry.

She was discharged the next day, and only then did it fully sink in: Perwaiz had performed an invasive surgery, slicing into her abdomen. Within a few days, Debra felt persistent, agonizing pains in her lower belly. The area also became swollen and tender. Debra was alone most of the time—her elder son had already moved out, and the younger one was in school during the day. She had trouble getting out of bed.

Debra called Perwaiz’s office for a prescription to help with the pain. When the medicine didn’t work, she called again. According to Debra, she spoke with Perwaiz directly. “Women all over the world go through this,” he told her. “You are just going to have to get used to the pain.” She was so out of it that she let the comment go. “I didn’t have the wherewithal to chew his head off,” she told me.  

One day a friend called to check on her and was alarmed to hear Debra cursing and not making sense. The friend drove to Debra’s house, and when nobody came to the door, she persuaded the landlord to open it. Inside, Debra was lying down; her skin was turning blue, and her stomach was so distended that she looked nine months pregnant. Her friend called 911, and an ambulance rushed Debra back to Chesapeake Regional.

Debra wondered if she was dying. In her head, she could hear a hymn her grandmother used to sing: 

I know it was the blood,

I know it was the blood,

I know it was the blood for me;

One day when I was lost

He died upon the cross,

I know it was the blood for me.

At the hospital, Debra learned that Perwaiz had removed more than her ovaries: Her uterus, cervix, and fallopian tubes were gone too. A diagnostic scan showed that a large amount of fluid had built up in her abdomen, and labs indicated that she had severe acute renal failure. There was also a perforation in her bladder—one of six, she later learned, made during her surgery. She was in sepsis.

Debra remained in the hospital for several days. She slipped in and out of consciousness. At one point she thought she saw Perwaiz at the foot of her bed. He looked nervous to her; his hands were clasped. “He might have been praying, ‘Please live,’ ” Debra said.

Debra knew about the history of coerced sterilization in America, of doctors persuading women of color to undergo unnecessary hysterectomies or performing the surgeries against their will. She couldn’t help but see her case in that context.

She did live. She had to wear a catheter for several weeks, but she got better. The long recovery gave Debra time to think on what she wanted to do about the man who had hurt her. “I’m gonna get this motherfucker—that’s how I was feeling in my head,” she said. “You don’t want to mess with me. I got teeth. I spit sulfuric acid.”

She requested her medical records and was stunned to find discrepancies with what Perwaiz had said to her during appointments. Most glaringly, she didn’t see any mention of precancerous cells on her cervix; the tests Perwaiz performed on her had come back normal. “If I was normal,” Debra said, “why did I have a surgery?”

There were other inconsistencies. One form from an appointment described Debra complaining of back and pelvic pain, which she told me she never did. Another document dated the day before her surgery stated that she “insisted on having those ovaries removed through the abdominal wall incision and not vaginally,” and that the “consent obtained after entirely counseling the patient [was] for abdominal hysterectomy.” In fact, she had requested the opposite surgical approach, and she recalled no such conversation with Perwaiz; the only time she’d spoken with him in the lead-up to her procedure was in passing in the hospital hallway.

Debra was sure she had a malpractice case. She went to several lawyers, but none of them would take her on as a client. “So many men—man after man saying, ‘You had a decent amount of care, and that’s all you’re afforded,’ ” she said. Frustrated, she came up with a new plan: “I said, ‘Alright, I’m going to learn how to sue this bastard myself.’ ” (Perwaiz declined to comment for this story.)

Debra enrolled in a paralegal program at Tidewater Community College. She learned how to research case law, how to write briefs, and how to file a suit. She didn’t have an Internet connection at home, so she used a law library at a nearby university to access everything she needed. She meticulously highlighted key phrases in her medical records and made notes in graceful cursive. When requesting materials for her case from health care providers, she signed emails “respectfully,” but she was not sorry to bother anyone. She followed up. She was tenacious. To get anything done, she knew that she had to rely on herself. “I was now acutely aware that people can’t be trusted,” she said.

As it is in much of the U.S., the statute of limitations for malpractice in the state of Virginia is two years from the date of occurrence. Debra filed her suit on December 23, 2014, six days shy of the cutoff. She asked for $1.5 million in punitive damages and to be compensated for loss of enjoyment of life, loss of the ability to reproduce, and diminished sexual intimacy, as well as lost wages and medical expenses.

Someone told her to file the suit in state court, but Debra declined. She knew about the history of coerced sterilization in America, of doctors persuading women of color to undergo unnecessary hysterectomies or performing the surgeries against their will. She couldn’t help but see her case in that context. She believed that the suit belonged in federal court because Perwaiz had violated her most fundamental rights.

A judge disagreed. In January 2015, Debra was asked to provide a valid reason why hers should be a federal case, and not one decided by a lower court. She responded with documentation explaining her position, but that May her case was dismissed for lack of jurisdiction. She appealed the decision, until one day she missed a filing deadline. According to Debra, she hadn’t received paperwork she needed to complete until the day before it was due, and there was no way she could get it to the court on time.

Just like that, her legal campaign to hold Perwaiz accountable was finished. But there were more patients like Debra, more women Perwaiz had injured. There were numerous dots waiting to be connected—someone just had to come along and do it.

2.

Javaid Perwaiz was born in a village in Pakistan that had no electricity or running water. He went to college, then medical school, graduating in 1973. He moved to the United States the following year, alone and knowing very little English. He worked as a surgical assistant at a hospital while he applied to be a medical resident. After completing his residency, he took a job at a private practice in the Portsmouth area, sharing an office with two other physicians. He struck out on his own in 1982.

If his online reviews were any indication, over the next thirty-plus years Perwaiz amassed a devoted following of patients. “Dr. Perwaiz is amazing. I had an issue that previous Dr’s kept putting off and he scheduled surgery for it immediately,” one review read. “He listens, he’s very understanding, and I’d never go anywhere else.” Some reviewers stated that Perwaiz had delivered both them and their children. “I love you and my family does as well,” another wrote. Perwaiz, that reviewer continued, will “go down in history as the best.”

All of Perwaiz’s staff were women, and they were fond of him, too. It helped that his practice did very well: He saw a lot of patients, many of whom underwent surgery, and money rolled in. Perwaiz took his staff to nice restaurants. He wrote their names in red ink on their birthdays in his appointment book so he wouldn’t forget to buy them gifts, often expensive flower arrangements. He sometimes paid for employees’ vacations or bought them chic accessories. The staff joked that after insurance clerk Diane Coleman became visibly upset about something that happened in the office, she could expect a new purse from Perwaiz in the next few days.

If Perwaiz had a deputy in the office, it was Margo Stone, who graduated from nursing school in 1985 and started working for Perwaiz a few years later. For a time, Stone and Perwaiz were romantically involved, and Perwaiz became close with Stone’s two sons. The romance didn’t last, but Perwaiz remained an important part of the lives of Stone and her boys. They celebrated holidays and birthdays together. Perwaiz had the license plate for one of his cars customized to bear the boys’ initials. One of the sons recorded the outgoing message on Perwaiz’s phone. “You have reached Henry and John’s papa,” he said.

Perwaiz regularly gave Stone gifts, including several watches worth about $2,000 apiece. The pair also shared an American Express card, and Perwaiz helped pay for Stone’s sons’ education. Over the years that they worked together, the gifts, tuition, and other financial assistance Perwaiz gave Stone added up to several hundred thousand dollars. (Stone declined an interview request.)

In addition to seeing patients in her capacity as a nurse, Stone took on administrative duties at Perwaiz’s practice, including maintaining the payroll and keeping medical supplies stocked. The staff treated her as a go-between, someone they could talk to if they wanted something changed at the office. Perwaiz respected Stone’s opinion; he listened whenever she made suggestions.

It was Stone the staff turned to about Perwaiz’s approach to sanitizing medical devices. One of the procedures he often performed on patients was a hysteroscopy, which involves inserting a long, thin tube with a light at the end through the vagina and cervix to examine the uterus. Hysteroscopies are used to diagnose and, when necessary, remove polyps, fibroids, and other growths that cause gynecological issues, including abdominal pain and vaginal bleeding. Per office protocol, the scopes Perwaiz used in these procedures were supposed to be sterilized between uses, a process that took 12 to 15 minutes. But Perwaiz sometimes didn’t want to wait that long. According to Lisa Strong, a medical assistant, on busy days Perwaiz told her to just rinse the scopes between appointments.

The staff approached Stone about the matter, and she took it to Perwaiz. He agreed to abide by the rules. Above the sink where the scopes were cleaned, an employee placed a yellow sticky note with “soak for 12 minutes” written on it in large bubble letters.

Time was of the essence because Perwaiz performed a lot of hysteroscopies—so many, in fact, that he became the subject of an insurance inquiry. In July 2012, a week prior to Debra’s first appointment with Perwaiz, an employee at Optima Health raised an internal alert: The insurance company had recently received two suspicious requests from Perwaiz’s office for approval of hysteroscopies. In one instance, the patient had undergone the same procedure three weeks prior, yet nothing in Perwaiz’s clinical notes acknowledged it or indicated a change in the patient’s status that would necessitate another so soon. In the second instance, Optima denied the request because the patient’s medical records showed no justification for the procedure: There wasn’t documentation of heavy bleeding, for instance, or of the failure of more conservative treatments to resolve the patient’s issues. The same day Perwaiz received Optima’s reply, he asked the insurer to reconsider, and he provided a note that mirrored its concerns exactly. He said that the patient was bleeding all the time, and that neither oral contraceptives nor anti-inflammatory pain relievers were helping.

Optima, which has since changed its name to Sentara Health Plans, opened an investigation into possible “overutilization,” the insurance industry’s term for medically inappropriate care. Over the next several months, the company compiled some troubling data on Perwaiz’s practice. Nearly 11 percent of Perwaiz’s patients received a diagnostic hysteroscopy (an examination), and 12 percent underwent a surgical hysteroscopy (the removal of tissue), while other ob-gyns in Virginia who took Optima plans performed those procedures on just 1 percent of their patients. While 44 percent of Perwaiz’s patients who had a diagnostic hysteroscopy went on to have a surgical one, among his peers this happened so infrequently that the figure wasn’t statistically significant. Optima also reviewed the medical records of 20 of Perwaiz’s patients, chosen at random, and found that half contained discrepancies between Perwaiz’s notes and observations about procedures, and the pathology reports that came back from outside labs.

According to the National Health Care Anti-Fraud Association, “Performing medically unnecessary services solely for the purpose of generating insurance payments” is one of the most common types of medical scams. Another is “falsifying a patient’s diagnosis and medical record to justify tests, surgeries, or other procedures.” But was Perwaiz committing fraud, or was he just a bad doctor—sloppy perhaps, and overzealous too?

Greg Merti, a medical director with Optima, visited Perwaiz’s practice in May 2013 to speak with him about the investigation’s findings. The pair met in Perwaiz’s private office. Hanging on the wall were photos of Stone’s sons. Perwaiz had a massive wooden desk with a file tray and lamp. Notably absent was a PC—Perwaiz refused to use one, preferring to keep patients’ files in paper form. His staff were tasked with anything that required a computer, including filing insurance claims, updating hospital records, and renewing Perwaiz’s credentials with the state.

The two men spoke for just under an hour. Merti told Perwaiz that he was an outlier in terms of the number of hysteroscopies he performed. Perwaiz defended his decision-making, but he also expressed an interest in improving patient care and being transparent with Optima. When Merti suggested implementation of an “improvement plan,” Perwaiz was receptive. Merti later stated under oath that he took Perwaiz “at his word.” Whether or not the topic was broached, an improvement plan likely would have saved Optima money, since Perwaiz billed the company every time he performed a procedure on a patient covered by one of its plans.

Two years later, in 2015, Optima ran numbers on the costs and performance of its in-network providers. The results showed that Perwaiz was still an outlier: He was in the 97th percentile of doctors doing hysteroscopies, hysterectomies, and transvaginal ultrasounds, meaning that only 3 percent of providers in Optima’s network performed those procedures more often than he did. Merti spoke with Perwaiz again and told him that if he wished to change his approach to patient care, he could reach out for assistance. According to Merti, Perwaiz never did.

In a statement, Dale Gauding, a spokesperson for Sentara Health Plans, said the company “followed best practices” in its communications with Perwaiz. “There are strict criteria for peer review interventions,” Gauding said, “and utilization issues are not reportable to the state Board of Medicine.”

Perwaiz performed hysteroscopies at his private practice, but more complex procedures required using facilities at a hospital or surgery center. On Saturdays, Perwaiz had surgical privileges at Chesapeake Regional, meaning that his background and credentials had been screened and he was approved to operate at the hospital. It was a standard arrangement: Chesapeake Regional made money by billing a patient’s insurer for costs associated with Perwaiz’s use of its facilities.

One of the nurses Perwaiz worked with at Chesapeake Regional was Lisa Atkinson. At first, Atkinson had a good impression of Perwaiz, finding him pleasant and professional. She also saw that he worked much faster than other surgeons. His hysterectomies took between 20 and 30 minutes, while other providers required at least an hour. He packed his schedule too; no ob-gyn came close to performing as many surgeries at Chesapeake Regional. According to data compiled by the hospital, in 2017 Perwaiz performed 220 surgeries there. The next-highest number for an ob-gyn operating at the facility was 150.

By then, Atkinson’s opinion of Perwaiz had shifted. It started with a concerning encounter she had with him in 2014. One of Perwaiz’s patients came in for what was described on the day’s surgery schedule as the removal of her uterus, cervix, fallopian tubes, and ovaries. This conflicted with the patient’s consent form, on which she had agreed to have only her uterus and cervix taken out. “We are not doing the ovaries?” Atkinson asked the woman directly. “Nope,” she replied. Atkinson assumed that there was an error on the surgery schedule, the kind of thing that’s usually cleared up before an operation begins.

After the patient was under anesthesia, Perwaiz completed his pre-op paperwork, then the surgical team assembled for what’s known as a time-out: Before an incision is made, everyone in the operating room discusses the specifics of the procedure, whether the patient has any allergies or known health risks, and other crucial matters. It was during the time-out, when Atkinson was looking at the paperwork Perwaiz had just finalized, that she noticed a change on the patient’s consent form. Since she’d last seen it, the words “bilateral salpingo-oophorectomy”—the medical terminology for the removal of the ovaries and fallopian tubes—had been added in small, swooping letters in the right margin. The handwriting was Perwaiz’s.

When Atkinson asked about the addition, Perwaiz readily admitted to making it. Legally, Atkinson knew she needed either the patient or a designated proxy to sign off on the change to the form before surgery began, so she went to the waiting room to speak with the patient’s husband. According to Atkinson, the husband assumed that ovary removal was part of a hysterectomy. Atkinson explained that it was not. “Well, if it has to be done,” the man replied. He deferred to his wife’s doctor and signed the form.

After the surgery, hoping to gain more clarity about what had happened, Atkinson spoke with two pre-op nurses who had worked with the patient. They told her that the patient had been adamant that she wasn’t having her ovaries removed—not casual about it, like when Atkinson spoke with her, but definitive. The next day, Atkinson sent an email to her supervisor. “I feel as though we performed an assault on the patient if she truly did not want to have her ovaries removed. This just really bothers me,” Atkinson wrote. “I suppose we are covered by having her husband sign the consent, but it should have never come to that.”

Atkinson never learned what if anything the hospital did with the information she provided, or what happened with the patient. All she knew was that Perwaiz kept operating at Chesapeake Regional, which meant that she kept working with him. (The hospital declined to comment for this story.)

Other nurses raised red flags about Perwaiz. On alternating Fridays, he operated at a facility called Bon Secours Surgery Center at Harbour View. Some doctors who use Harbour View have an ownership share in the business, and Perwaiz was among them; his photo was mounted on an interior wall. Nurse Jean Kennedy found Perwaiz’s routine chaotic. He’d regularly perform between ten and fourteen surgeries per day, while other surgeons at Harbour View typically did two or three. Patients tended to arrive at the same time, early in the morning, as if they’d all been scheduled simultaneously, and it was left to the nurses to figure out how to slot the procedures. Perwaiz was known to work in two or three rooms at a time, shuttling from one anesthetized patient to another, and to begin filling out post-op charts before surgery.  

The staff called these operating days “Perwaiz-a-thons.” The pace worried Kennedy. “To me, it was an open[ing] for risk of mistakes, errors,” she later stated under oath. Kennedy and other Harbour View employees spoke to their supervisors about their concerns, and around 2009 there was a staff meeting where nurses reported that they didn’t like how fast they were asked to work when Perwaiz was on the schedule. They also said that some of his patients didn’t seem to know what kind of surgery they were having.

Perwaiz wasn’t at the meeting, but the administrator of Harbour View was. So was his boss, the regional coordinator for United Surgical Partners International, which owned the facility. Afterward, according to hospital staff, the Perwaiz-a-thons continued. Staff were told to fill out incident reports when something happened that seemed like cause for concern.

In a statement, a spokesperson for Harbour View said the facility was “unaware that Perwaiz was performing medically unnecessary procedures on his patients,” and noted that “his medical license, as granted by the state of Virginia and subject to review by the Medical Board of Virginia, was unrestricted and in good standing” for the duration of his time working at the surgery center.

Jen wanted to start seeing a gynecologist, but as anyone who’s ever been to one knows, the initial appointment can be especially stressful. You have to take off your clothes and open your body and your life to a stranger.

Perwaiz wasn’t just performing surgeries on a lot of patients—in some cases, he was performing a lot of surgeries on a single patient. Carol White, a nurse at Harbour View, saw this pattern plainly. Before the surgery center switched to computerized charts, staff added a sticker to a patient’s file when they came in for a procedure. White found it odd that there were long rows of stickers in the records of some of Perwaiz’s younger patients, who were statistically less likely to require multiple gynecological surgeries.

One of the patients who had multiple surgeries with Perwaiz was Jen*, who moved from New York City to Virginia in 2006. She wanted to start seeing a gynecologist, but as anyone who’s ever been to one knows, the initial appointment can be especially stressful. You have to take off your clothes and open your body and your life to a stranger. Topics of discussion are immediately intimate: Do you want to have children? How many sexual partners do you have? Have you ever had a sexually transmitted infection?

Jen felt like she’d be in good hands when a coworker recommended Perwaiz. The coworker had been a patient of his for years; he had delivered her kids. Jen made an appointment.

Jen was glad to see a diverse group of patients when she arrived at the office: old and young, pregnant and not, white and also Black like her. She liked Perwaiz right away. “He was super cool, very easy to like,” she told me. Over time she noticed that he had expensive taste in cars. She’d see his Mercedes in the parking lot, or his Jaguar.

Her first surgical procedure with Perwaiz took place about a year after she became his patient. After doing an exam, he told her she had HPV and recommended removing abnormal tissue he’d identified. He set up an outpatient appointment for her.

A few years later, in 2012, Jen told Perwaiz that she was experiencing abdominal discomfort, and after she had an ultrasound, he told her that she had a fibroid. He put her on birth control, a common treatment for the symptoms of fibroids, which include pain and bleeding. When that didn’t help, Perwaiz suggested that she might have endometriosis, a condition where tissue similar to the kind lining the uterus grows elsewhere in the body. Endometriosis can cause intense pain as well as infertility, and sometimes the only way to diagnose it definitively is via a surgical procedure known as a laparoscopy: A doctor makes a small incision in the abdomen, then inserts a scope to look for evidence of the disease.

According to a recent study in the journal Obstetrics and Gynecology, it can take patients as long as 11 years to finally be diagnosed with endometriosis. In part, researchers found, this is because of the normalization of gynecological pain: Patients and health care providers alike often see this kind of discomfort as a fact to be tolerated, not a condition to treat. Moreover, some doctors lack sufficient knowledge of endometriosis to help patients who suffer from it. Yet here was Perwaiz taking what Jen said seriously and offering to help her. She agreed to have the laparoscopy.

Not long after scheduling the procedure, Jen had an appointment at her general practitioner’s office. She told the medical assistant that she was having a laparoscopy soon. The assistant asked who her doctor was. After Jen gave Perwaiz’s name, the assistant said something she found strange: “Everybody I know who goes to him has to get that same surgery.”

Based on the laparoscopy, Perwaiz diagnosed Jen with endometriosis. From then on, it felt to Jen like every time she saw Perwaiz, he told her she needed another procedure. She got fibroids and cysts removed. She began to feel anxious whenever she had an appointment, to the point that she sometimes had to take a Xanax to calm down. “I was just afraid that he was going to tell me I needed surgery again,” she said.

In 2018, when Perwaiz told her that she had another cyst, Jen said she didn’t want it removed. She was done with surgeries. She asked what would happen if she didn’t have the procedure. Perwaiz told her that he could monitor the cyst to see if it grew. Jen hadn’t realized that this was an option; she couldn’t recall Perwaiz informing her about it during previous appointments.

About a year later, she had an ultrasound at Perwaiz’s office. Afterward he told her that the cyst was gone. Jen was glad, but later she wondered: If a cyst could resolve on its own, had Perwaiz really needed to remove all the others?

In mid-2019, a patient came into the waiting room and began yelling that all Perwaiz wanted to do was cut people open. The woman was put in an empty exam room, and Perwaiz told staff that she just wanted more pain medication, that she was an addict.

The medical technician who performed the ultrasound on Jen was Courtney Ciccone. But Ciccone was more than Perwaiz’s employee: She was also his patient. In fact, Perwaiz treated several of his staff. He also treated some of their family members. Lisa Strong, the medical assistant Perwaiz once instructed to rinse scopes instead of sterilizing them, recommended that her mother start seeing him.

Strong would later testify that she did this in spite of growing unease about her boss. She was often in the room when Perwaiz saw patients, and she noticed that he sometimes put a detail in a chart that didn’t correspond with what had happened in an appointment: He’d write that a patient’s menstrual cycles lasted longer than they reported, for instance, or list a lower blood pressure reading than what Strong had measured. Still, she thought Perwaiz was a good doctor. “I felt that he would take good care of my mother, which he did,” she said under oath. “And with me being there to, I’ll just use the word oversee things, not that I even really had to with her, I felt comfortable.”

In 2016, Strong’s adult son died. She took time off work to grieve, and her mindset about Perwaiz changed. She felt guilty for sensing that things weren’t right at the practice and not acting, and she decided that she had to quit. It was a difficult choice; she needed the job. But she finally gave notice in the summer of 2018.

Before she left, Strong spoke regularly with Diane Coleman regarding her concerns about Perwaiz. Coleman, who handled insurance claims for the practice, had some of her own. From her desk, she sometimes heard patients in the hallway make comments about having to get yet another surgery. She knew that most of the patients who had repeat surgeries were on Medicaid. In mid-2019, a patient came into the waiting room and began yelling that all Perwaiz wanted to do was cut people open. The woman was put in an empty exam room, and Perwaiz told staff that she just wanted more pain medication, that she was an addict.

Coleman later stated under oath that Chesapeake Regional at one point asked Perwaiz to start scheduling and billing abdominal hysterectomies as inpatient procedures, since they usually required an overnight stay post-op. Perwaiz didn’t want to do this, because insurance companies took longer to authorize inpatient procedures; calling them outpatient made for less hassle. According to Coleman, Perwaiz said that if Chesapeake Regional didn’t like his approach, he’d take his surgeries elsewhere.

The sheer number of procedures Perwaiz performed meant that Coleman sometimes worked seven days a week doing data entry and filing insurance paperwork. On weekends, when Perwaiz was done with his surgeries, he’d typically text Coleman to let her know, so she could use her work laptop to enter post-op information into the hospital’s computer system. Doctors usually did this themselves, but Perwaiz had Coleman do it because of his aversion to computers. Among other things, he would tell her when he’d altered a surgical plan in some way, since it affected the bill sent to the patient’s insurance provider. Coleman noticed that Perwaiz’s changes almost always involved adding components or complexity to surgeries. A vaginal hysterectomy became an abdominal one; ovaries were taken out along with a uterus. In general, the more complicated a surgery, the larger the insurance reimbursement.

Coleman took issue with the way Perwaiz worked, and she thought that he didn’t always give her the respect she deserved. She was feeling particularly stressed and underappreciated in September 2019, when an FBI agent knocked on her door. The bureau wanted to talk to her about her boss. Coleman immediately said that Perwaiz was an asshole.

By then federal agents already knew that at least one other person felt the same way: Debra.

3.

The FBI declined to comment for this story, and the bureau has never revealed exactly why it started investigating Perwaiz. All it has said is that, in 2018, an anonymous tip came in from someone at Harbour View—a nurse, perhaps, or another staff member suspicious about the Perwaiz-a-thons at the surgery center.

As the FBI began to dig into Perwaiz’s past, it found a complaint Debra had filed with Virginia’s medical board as part of her quest to hold Perwaiz responsible for performing surgery on her that she didn’t want. In February 2019, Debra got home from work and found a business card on her front door from an FBI agent, along with a note requesting that she get in touch. Debra didn’t know what the feds wanted with her, but she figured it must be serious. She called right away and made an appointment to visit the bureau’s Norfolk office.

When she arrived, Debra found a district attorney and two investigators waiting for her; all three were women. When they told her they wanted to speak with her about Perwaiz, Debra broke down. One of the women handed her a tissue and told her to take her time. “They patted me on the back, they comforted me, and then they gave me hope,” Debra said.

It had been several years since her surgery, years when she’d felt utterly alone and furious that Perwaiz was getting away with malpractice. “I thought nobody was listening to me. I felt like the system had failed me,” Debra said. “But these three women picked up the ball and they ran with it. They made me feel like I was a part of it.” She told them her story and agreed to cooperate going forward.

By the time the FBI got to Diane Coleman’s door several months later, investigators were looking for current patient records. They wanted to prove that Perwaiz was still doing the kind of thing Debra claimed he’d done to her. At first, Coleman was hesitant to cooperate, but at the end of her conversation with the agent who visited her, she walked to her car and grabbed some documents; she was often so busy that she had to bring work home with her.

Coleman shared the documents with the agent. It felt like the right thing to do. Over the next several weeks, she provided investigators with additional materials, including at least one document Perwaiz had planned to destroy.

Perwaiz kept a bin under his desk, and whatever he put in it was supposed to be shredded by an employee once a week. The document Coleman came across was a standard patient-intake form; it had been filled out, but there was an X drawn across it. Coleman checked the patient’s file and found another copy of the form. She later testified that Perwaiz had “rewritten” the form, filling it in with “different” information: The version he wanted shredded indicated that the patient had no gynecological complaints, while the one on file described them reporting pelvic pain and pressure, persistent cramps, and irregular periods. Any of those symptoms might justify gynecological surgery. Coleman shared both versions of the intake form with the FBI.

Coleman also told agents about Layla*, a patient who in the past few months had experienced some serious health issues. Intermittent but severe uterine bleeding had landed Layla in the ICU, where she required transfusions. After her hospital stay she followed up with Perwaiz, who had been her ob-gyn since 2014. Based on a physical exam and an ultrasound in February 2019, Perwaiz told Layla that she had fibroids that needed to be removed, because they were large and might be cancerous. (The vast majority of fibroids are benign.) Perwaiz performed a procedure known as dilation and curettage to scrape the fibroids from Layla’s uterine wall.  

Layla went back to Perwaiz that September. She wasn’t having her period, which meant that she might not be ovulating, and she wanted to have a baby. Layla underwent an ultrasound on September 26, after which Perwaiz told her that she had a small fibroid he wanted to remove before it got any larger. (Fibroids can disrupt a person’s menstrual cycle.) Layla agreed to have the procedure the following month. 

But while reviewing Layla’s file, Coleman noticed that, in fact, her most recent ultrasound didn’t show any fibroids at all. Perwaiz had scheduled Layla for a procedure to remove a growth there was no evidence she even had. In the plainest of terms, he seemed to be lying. Coleman provided the FBI with a copy of the surgical plan for Layla’s procedure, along with the conflicting ultrasound results.

On October 10, investigators visited Layla at her home. They said that they had reason to believe Perwaiz was performing unnecessary procedures on patients, including her. They talked about what was in her medical file, the information that didn’t match up. In addition to the normal ultrasound results, Perwaiz had noted in her file that she was experiencing heavy, painful periods, when in fact she wasn’t menstruating at all.

The investigators asked Layla to call Perwaiz to talk about her upcoming surgery, to see what he said. The FBI would record the conversation. Layla was on hold with a receptionist for a few minutes before Perwaiz picked up the phone. “I have some quick questions for you,” Layla said.

She told him that her boyfriend wanted to know more about the surgery she was scheduled for. Could Perwaiz explain the procedure? Perwaiz told her that it was for fibroid removal. Layla then asked how long she’d need to be off work, since she was starting a new job. He told her one week. She asked why the recovery was longer this time than it had been for her last surgery.

“Because we’re making a bikini incision,” Perwaiz said, referring to a type of surgical cut in the abdomen.

“You didn’t cut me in that area last time, so why are you cutting me in that area this time?” Layla asked.

“Because we are removing the tumor. These are big tumors, you cannot remove them through [a] belly-button incision.”

Perwaiz was describing multiple large fibroids, not a single small one, contradicting what he previously told Layla about why she needed surgery. She had caught him in a lie.

“Are there any other options as far as the surgery?” Layla asked. “That sounds kind of scary.”

“Then don’t do it,” Perwaiz said. “We’ll cancel it and hopefully you get pregnant. How about that?”

Layla agreed, they said their goodbyes, and she hung up the phone.

On Monday, October 28, two special agents from the Department of Health and Human Services and the Virginia Medicaid Fraud Control Unit arrived unannounced at Perwaiz’s practice. The agents, Tamika Williams and Paul Hastings, were shown to Perwaiz’s private office, where they introduced themselves and showed him their credentials. They said that they had a complaint they needed to resolve, which required asking Perwaiz some questions.

They started off with a basic one: How many patients did he see in his practice? “Thousands,” Perwaiz replied. “I’ve been in practice for 39 years. One hundred patients a week, 400 maybe a month, maybe 5,000 a year.” The agents asked some more general questions about Perwaiz’s office and the types of procedures he did there, including hysteroscopies. Perwaiz described the procedure and answered questions about the equipment he used. Then he excused himself to see a patient.

When he got back to the office, Perwaiz abruptly ended the interview. “If there’s any complaint, I absolutely want that addressed,” he said. “But I don’t think I should answer these questions anymore. I have already probably answered too many.”

The next day, the FBI raided his office. Agents took medical devices and the contents of trash cans. They snapped photos. And they seized medical records, loads of them. They took more than 3,400 files from shelves in the front office and from a storage space in the attic. The material filled 80 bankers boxes.

After the raid, authorities assumed that because he was under investigation, Perwaiz would voluntarily stop seeing patients. But he didn’t. One of the women still in his care was Tessa*.

Tessa is an exuberant person—she likes to sing and is quick to laugh. She was once in an abusive marriage but got out with her three children. She went back to school and remarried, and soon she wanted to have a child with her new husband. Tessa was in her forties then, but other women in her family had had kids later in their reproductive years, so she thought she could, too. Then her general practitioner identified what might be a tumor in her uterus and referred her to Perwaiz.

At her first appointment, according to Tessa, Perwaiz looked at an ultrasound from her GP’s office and confirmed that she had a tumor. He told Tessa that if she didn’t have a hysterectomy soon, she would get cancer. She asked if there were other options, since she wanted to have another baby. Perwaiz said no.

Tessa’s mother, grandmother, grandfather, and uncle had all died within two years of each other. Her father had just survived his second bout with cancer. She was overwhelmed by the stress of all the illness and loss around her, and she worried about her kids being left without a family if something happened to her. She agreed to have a hysterectomy but decided to keep her ovaries. Her surgery was scheduled for October 19.

Tessa had complications from the operation almost immediately. She called Perwaiz’s office to let him know that she was going to need more than a three-day prescription for pain medication. She could tolerate a lot—she had delivered three kids, after all—but this was too much. Perwaiz told her to take two Tylenol.

Tessa didn’t get mad, just like she hadn’t when she was still in the hospital and Perwaiz told her, “Good luck having more babies.” However intended, it seemed like a cruel thing to say to someone who’d just had her uterus removed. But Tessa didn’t want to come off as a stereotypical angry Black woman, so she kept her mouth shut.

On October 26, Tessa’s postoperative pain got so severe that she went to the emergency room. When she explained her situation, staff members remarked that she’d seen “the weekend doctor.” Tessa didn’t know what that meant, so someone explained that they were talking about Perwaiz, “because he does so many surgeries over the weekend.”

Tessa went home the next day, but the pain didn’t go away. She also felt faint and short of breath. Her husband took her to the general practitioner who’d referred her to Perwaiz, and the doctor expressed surprise that Tessa had undergone major surgery so soon after Perwaiz first saw her.

The GP did an ultrasound, then sent Tessa back to the ER, where she had a CT scan. After reviewing the imaging, her doctor told Tessa that her ovaries were gone. Perwaiz had removed them, forcing her into early menopause. 

A few days later, in early November, Tessa was at home in bed recovering from the ordeal when Perwaiz’s face appeared on the local news. She screamed. Her husband, who was cooking dinner, ran into the room.

“What’s wrong?” he asked.

“This motherfucker is on TV!” Tessa said.

Perwaiz had been arrested. He was charged with just two counts: health care fraud and making false statements relating to health care matters. The prosecutor’s office expected that there would be more charges, but it decided to proceed with the first two to compel Perwaiz to cease practicing.

4.

One by one, Perwaiz’s patients learned of his arrest. Jen looked at a news site on her work computer and saw his face on her screen. Another patient got a text about Perwaiz from her cousin and thought, That’s weird—that’s my doctor’s name. It took a second for it to click: He was her doctor. Brittni DuPuy-German was one of the last patients Perwaiz ever saw; she had an appointment with him on November 7, the day before his arrest, and he’d scheduled her for surgery. She found out that he was behind bars when a friend texted her a news article.

Debra hadn’t told anyone she was talking to the FBI, but her loved ones knew about her effort to sue Perwaiz. When they heard about his arrest, they celebrated with her. Got him! they said. Debra agreed to be a witness at Perwaiz’s trial: She was ready to do everything she could to make sure he never saw another patient.

Within weeks of Perwaiz’s arrest, the FBI was contacted by hundreds of people he’d treated. Some were sure they’d had surgeries they didn’t need. Others were just now realizing that might be the case. Many didn’t know what to think, but were scared. “This man may have very well taken any ability I had to bear children of my own forever,” one email stated. Another read, “I have recently learned that I’m missing a fallopian tube and an ovary.” The flood of contacts became so great that the government set up a hotline for potential victims.

The following June, the prosecutor’s office filed a new indictment against Perwaiz, expanding its case against him. It listed 26 counts of health care fraud and 32 counts of making false statements relating to health care matters. There were also three counts of aggravated identity theft: Perwaiz was accused of using patients’ names and Medicaid information to try to obtain insurance money.

The details in the indictment were shocking. The government accused Perwaiz of “routinely” lying to patients and falsifying medical records in order to perform unnecessary surgeries. He told numerous patients that they had cancer when they didn’t, scaring them into hysterectomies insurers reimbursed him for. He told other patients, including Layla, that they had fibroids or cysts that would become cancerous if entire organs weren’t removed immediately, when in fact the accepted standard of care for those conditions called for far more conservative treatments, such as monitoring or medication, before surgery. One woman who began seeing Perwaiz after she had an abnormal pap smear in 2012 told investigators that she underwent no fewer than seven procedures, including a diagnostic hysteroscopy and a laparoscopy, in just nine months. Later she had a hysterectomy. Perwaiz told the patient’s insurer that the reason for the hysterectomy was uterine prolapse, a condition the patient was never diagnosed with.

Perwaiz was also accused of inducing labor before 39 weeks so patients would give birth on days he was already scheduled to perform surgeries, thus ensuring that he, and not some other doctor on call at the hospital, received the insurance payments associated with the deliveries. Of the more than 80 births Perwaiz billed Medicaid and Tricare, another insurer, for in 2019, at least 33 involved patients induced before 39 weeks with no medical indication that they needed it. (Early induction is not recommended unless the health of a fetus or the person carrying it is at risk.) According to the indictment, to avoid dealing with questions from insurers, Perwaiz sometimes falsified a patient’s estimated due date so it appeared they were past 39 weeks when he induced them.

Many of the patients listed in the indictment described suffering “serious bodily injury” as a result of what Perwaiz did. But there were also allegations of crimes involving no bodies at all. The indictment stated that, between 2010 and 2019, Perwaiz billed insurers for more than $2.3 million in procedures and surgeries, including “hysteroscopies and colposcopies, that he did not actually perform.” In other words, there were procedures he’d simply made up.

The more money Perwaiz made, the more the hospitals where he performed surgeries benefited. According to trial testimony, from 2010 to 2019 Chesapeake Regional made $18.4 million from Perwaiz’s use of its facilities, while Harbour View made $3.1 million.

Perwaiz’s trial began in October 2020, and lasted four and a half weeks. Former employees, coworkers, and patients took the stand to testify about what they’d seen and experienced at Perwaiz’s practice or while under his care. A nurse described complications suffered by babies Perwaiz delivered via unnecessary early induction. Women described the trauma of realizing that they’d had organs removed without their consent or surgeries based on false diagnoses. One former patient said that she was so scared when Perwaiz told her she would likely get cancer if she didn’t have surgery that she left his office and immediately bought life insurance.

During Debra’s testimony, the prosecution shared documents related to her surgery, including her consent form, where someone had scribbled “possible abdominal hysterectomy.” Debra didn’t remember seeing those words on the form when she signed it. Perwaiz’s progress notes on the procedure also contradicted what he and Debra had talked about in her appointments. “Patient wants to have ovaries removed through abdominal incision,” Perwaiz wrote. “Risks/benefits, including need and risks of hormones, explained at length. All her questions answered.” Meanwhile, the post-op report stated that after Perwaiz closed her up, he was alerted to blood in Debra’s urine, but he decided it wasn’t enough to worry about and sent her to recovery.

“I did not tell you to cut my guts,” Debra said on the stand. “That wasn’t what was agreed upon.”

Some of Perwaiz’s staff who were also his patients described seeing procedures they hadn’t consented to described in their own medical files. Additionally, employees testified that they were instructed to write details of patients’ medical histories and complaints on Post-it notes during appointments, leaving Perwaiz to transcribe them himself into the patients’ files later.

Margo Stone, the longtime nurse in Perwaiz’s office who was also his ex-girlfriend, agreed to testify against him in exchange for immunity; she had never reported the financial support he gave her to the IRS. Many former patients and staff learned at the trial that Perwaiz himself had a history of tax problems. In April 1996, he was convicted of filing false returns after he claimed the value of personal items, including a Ferrari and a Mercedes, as business expenses. He was put on probation and in-home confinement, and his medical license was briefly revoked. Two decades later, he lied on a form required by an insurance provider: When asked if he’d ever been convicted of a felony, Perwaiz indicated that he hadn’t—he characterized what happened in 1996 as merely “tax issues.”

Perwaiz told the same insurance provider that he’d never had his clinical privileges revoked by a medical facility, but investigators discovered that this also wasn’t true. In October 1983, Perwaiz lost his staff membership and surgical privileges at Maryview Hospital in Portsmouth after administrators found that he’d performed unnecessary procedures. That December, the CEO of Maryview, J. Bland Burkhardt, wrote a signed letter to his counterpart at Chesapeake General Hospital, Donald Buckley, alerting him that Maryview had cut ties with Perwaiz and explaining why. Chesapeake General would later be renamed Chesapeake Regional. (Buckley retired from the hospital in 2005 and now teaches at Eastern Virginia Medical School. He declined to be interviewed for this story.)

On June 22, 1984, the Virginia Board of Medicine sent an official notification to Perwaiz that he was being investigated regarding his time at Maryview. The letter detailed 11 instances in 1982 when he had performed a hysterectomy despite there being no medical indication that the patient needed the procedure. The same went for a diagnostic laparoscopy Perwaiz performed on a 17-year-old girl. The letter also noted that he’d had a sexual relationship with one of his patients, which Virginia law defines as unprofessional conduct that might be grounds for discipline.

Members of the medical board met on July 27 to determine Perwaiz’s professional fate. Based on evidence from the investigation, they had four options: They could exonerate him, reprimand or censure him, place him on probation, or recommend a formal hearing, where the question of revoking his medical license would be considered. The board chose to censure Perwaiz for poor record-keeping and for lack of professional judgment. The censures became part of his permanent record, and he continued treating patients and performing surgeries at hospitals where he had privileges.

In the ensuing years, there were at least four complaints about Perwaiz filed with the Virginia Department of Health Professions. One of them was submitted by Debra and had led the FBI to her door. At Perwaiz’s trial, the prosecution revealed a complaint from 2010 filed by a woman who felt Perwaiz had coerced her into inducing birth. WAVY, an NBC affiliate in Virginia, found another complaint about Perwaiz, this one filed by a woman named Linda Jackson on August 15, 2013, after a series of surgeries and complications. She believed that Perwaiz had harmed her and that Chesapeake Regional was covering for his mistakes. “Please help me!” Jackson wrote in her complaint. “I don’t know what to do!” In all three cases, the Virginia Board of Medicine did not pursue disciplinary proceedings. (The board declined to comment for this story, citing a Virginia law prohibiting it from doing so.)

The other known complaint, also found by WAVY, predated the others by at least two decades. On June 4, 1991, Susan Pullem wrote a letter asking the medical board to investigate Perwaiz. He had operated on her six times between April 1987 and July 1988, then performed a partial hysterectomy in October 1988. The following February, Pullem went to a new gynecologist, who told her that the hysterectomy had probably been unnecessary; had Pullem been his patient, he would have treated her symptoms with medication. The new doctor also told her that the lining of her vagina was “paper thin” because of the numerous procedures she’d had in such a brief span of time.

When bills arrived from Perwaiz’s office, Pullem refused to pay them. “The way I figure it, you owe me!” she wrote in an October 1990 letter to Perwaiz. “I am sure all of my surgeries bought you at least one or two more of the Mercedes that you are so fond of.”

Perwaiz sued Pullem for payment. In a letter submitted to the court, Pullem described what had happened to her and said that she’d spoken with dozens of other women who’d had similar experiences with Perwaiz. One woman told Pullem that Perwaiz had cut her bladder while performing a hysterectomy. “He didn’t even notice it and completed the surgery,” Pullem wrote. “This same woman was recently hospitalized again with complications from that surgery.” The situation sounded remarkably similar to what Debra endured beginning in 2012.  

“I hope that the courts will look at all of the evidence presented and come to the same conclusion that I have. Dr. Perwaiz is a disgrace to his profession and has taken advantage of trusting women for too long,” Pullem’s letter to the court continued. “Between the monies paid him by myself and the insurance companies, I feel he has been paid very well indeed for ruining my life.”

The court sided with Perwaiz. Pullem later filed her complaint with the state medical board. She said she never got a reply.

As Pullem professed, Perwaiz’s patients made him rich, a fact all the more disturbing because so many of them were Medicaid recipients, which by definition meant that they earned very little money. In the years immediately leading up to his arrest, Perwaiz made about $1 million annually. (Per the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the average estimated salary of an ob-gyn in the United States in 2020 was about $239,000.) And the more money Perwaiz made, the more the hospitals where he performed surgeries benefited. According to trial testimony, from 2010 to 2019 Chesapeake Regional made $18.4 million from Perwaiz’s use of its facilities, while Harbour View made $3.1 million.

Throughout the trial, Perwaiz maintained that he was a good doctor who did right by his patients. In testimony, he said that the surgeries he performed were justified, even if his approach to paperwork left something to be desired. He said that he saw the number of patients he did because he didn’t want to turn people away, especially those who might not have reliable access to transportation. “I had a standing policy and instruction to my scheduling people that if a patient calls, new or an established patient, bring her in the day she wants to come in. And if it [was] that day, we made it happen,” he said. “It was never a[n] ‘I’m too busy’ kind of office.” Perwaiz attributed his rate of surgeries to his “patient mix,” as he put it. “Seventy-five or probably more close to 80 percent of my patients are Medicare/Medicaid patients,” he testified. “They’re [at] higher risk when they are pregnant, and they have more gynecological issues because they don’t do preventative things, and so forth.”

But the evidence against Perwaiz was overwhelming. On November 9, 2020, a year and one day after he was arrested, a jury found him guilty on 52 counts. He was sentenced to 59 years in prison and ordered to pay restitution of more than $18.5 million to the insurance companies he defrauded.

His former patients got nothing. Legally speaking they weren’t victims in the case—only the insurance companies were. In the eyes of the court, Perwaiz’s victims were witnesses, testifying about the wrongs done to insurers through the harm done to their bodies.

At the sentencing hearing, Tessa gave a statement addressing this fact. “Women have been fighting all of our lives to matter … just to be smacked in the face, a reality that we aren’t as important,” she said. Tessa described how she and other patients hurt by Perwaiz needed help: medical care, mental health support, financial compensation. But many of them couldn’t file a lawsuit even if they wanted to, because of Virginia’s statute of limitations on medical malpractice suits. “The fact that we have yet to find assistance,” she said, “is a clear statement that we still don’t matter.”

Perwaiz’s most recent patients were able to file suit, and more than a dozen did. Tessa was among them, and she eventually settled with Perwaiz out of court. When Brittni DuPuy-German filed her own suit, she named the Chesapeake Hospital Authority, the governing body of Chesapeake Regional, as a defendant alongside Perwaiz. DuPuy-German alleged that the hospital administration had been negligent in failing to properly evaluate his credentials and in granting him surgical privileges. Attorneys for the hospital argued that it wasn’t liable for Perwaiz’s actions.

In April 2021, a judge sided with DuPuy-German, but in the appeals process the hospital invoked sovereign immunity, a legal concept derived from English common law that prevents public entities from being sued. The Chesapeake Hospital Authority was established by the state legislature, and its members are appointed by the Chesapeake city council. In February 2022, a judge ruled in the authority’s favor and dismissed it from the lawsuit.

There is longstanding precedent in Virginia for the court’s decision. The legal logic is that public bodies must be able to perform their essential functions without fear of lawsuits. But according to critics of sovereign immunity, this can leave victims of institutional wrongdoing without recourse. “At Safeway, if there is a salad bar, and somebody slips and falls because an employee didn’t pick up the salad off the floor, then Safeway is vicariously liable for the actions of the employee—that’s a very typical arrangement,” said Anya Bidwell of the Institute for Justice, a public-interest law firm in Virginia. “But when it comes to government entities, they are somehow special, they are exempt from this…. What ends up happening is a culture of unaccountability.”    

DuPuy-German said that she feels Chesapeake Regional is “hiding behind sovereign immunity.” (She settled separately with Perwaiz.) “They pretty much got away with this,” she told me, “even though in my opinion they were just as negligent as him, because they were notified by multiple different people in their own facility, and they didn’t do anything about it.”

More than a half dozen suits are still working their way through the legal system, including one filed by Layla, who’d let the FBI record her phone call with Perwaiz. (She declined to be interviewed for this story on advice of her attorney.) But most of Perwaiz’s victims, of which there are likely hundreds, have been left without a clear path to restitution. The FBI designated a victim coordinator to connect former patients with mental health services and to communicate information about the investigation and trial to people requesting it. The bureau told potential victims that, as a first step in addressing any harm done to them, they could request their medical files from Perwaiz’s office.

Jen, who underwent multiple surgeries with Perwaiz, drove to his office to get her file. She recognized the female employee who was handing out documents to the former patients coming in the door. Jen also requested her records from Chesapeake Regional. She took everything to a new gynecologist, who didn’t see any evidence to validate the endometriosis diagnosis Perwaiz had given her. It was hard to hear, even harder to sit with. “I realized there really wasn’t going to be much I could do about it,” Jen said. When she sees a doctor now, Jen’s anxiety still spikes, but she also feels like she has a better understanding of what good care looks like.

Others haven’t been so lucky. Former patients who spoke at Perwaiz’s sentencing hearing or were interviewed for this story said they’ve struggled to find doctors to support them. When one woman told a new gynecologist what Perwaiz had done to her—a hysterectomy based on a false cancer diagnosis—the doctor said she should see it as a good thing, because it was a permanent form of birth control. “I let her finish her exam, I cried, and I left,” the woman said. Other former patients, including Tessa, said that they’d encountered health care providers who seemed to be on Perwaiz’s side. Tessa was in the middle of an exam when her new ob-gyn said that they’d heard Perwaiz was an awesome doctor.

“If an insurance company dies, nobody gets hurt,” Debra said. “But if I die, my sons grow up without a mom.”

After Perwaiz’s arrest, Tessa slipped into depression. She had panic attacks; she felt paranoid. She also experienced the effects of the early menopause—mood swings, specifically—brought on by a surgery she hadn’t consented to. “I have been battling through the stages of grief as if I lost someone, because I have. I’ve lost myself,” she said in her witness statement. “I’m not the woman I was before, and it’s a daily challenge trying to find myself again.”

When the trial ended, Tessa sent email messages to local politicians requesting support for Perwaiz’s victims. She asked that hospitals be held responsible when people are hurt in their facilities. She asked that laws be changed to protect women like her.

She never heard back.

Jen has talked to her therapist about Perwaiz, and she sees what he did as an all too common betrayal. “It’s somebody that you trusted. Somebody that you’re taught to trust your entire life. Somebody that you put your life in their hands,” Jen said. “As a woman, and on top of that as a Black woman, it’s always this way, you know? We have to face so many barriers.”

Other former patients I spoke with felt similarly, and some believed that Perwaiz specifically targeted poor Black women. In their comments were the echoes of history: of the Tuskegee experiments, when the U.S. Public Health Service left Black people to suffer and die from syphilis so doctors could study the effects of the disease; of Henrietta Lacks, whose cervical-cancer cells were taken without her permission for biomedical studies; of the enslaved Black women whom J. Marion Sims performed experimental surgeries on—surgeries that would earn him the moniker “the father of gynecology.”

These echoes pushed Debra to fight to be heard, even when it seemed like no one cared to listen. She still mourns the children she can never have because of what Perwaiz did. And while she’s glad she finally got to tell her story in court, she’s angry that the legal system’s priority wasn’t to help Perwaiz’s victims. “If an insurance company dies, nobody gets hurt,” she said. “But if I die, my sons grow up without a mom.”

Debra, who now lives in Mississippi, has more she wants to say and do. She’s channeling some of that momentum into a new career: She recently took a job at the Department of Justice, as a program specialist focused on initiatives to de-escalate police violence. “In my little life,” Debra said, “I want to be in a position where I can bring some kind of equity to people’s lives, to help them.”

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