Christopher Duntsch
Dallas neurosurgeon serial maiming
CLASSIFICATION: Serial Homicide
LOCATION
Dallas, Texas, U.S.
TIME PERIOD
2010-2017
VICTIMS
33 confirmed
Between 2010 and 2013 in the Dallas–Fort Worth area, neurosurgeon Christopher Duntsch performed dozens of spine operations that left 33 patients injured, 31 maimed and two dead. Hospital peers and later prosecutors documented a pattern of catastrophic surgical errors, alleged intoxication, and deliberate disregard for patient safety; a December 2011 email in which Duntsch wrote about becoming a "cold blooded killer" was introduced as evidence of intent. The Texas Medical Board suspended and then revoked his license in 2013, he was arrested in 2015, convicted in 2017 for the maiming of Mary Efurd and sentenced to life in prison, and appeals were subsequently denied. Key evidence included operative imaging, testimony from multiple salvage surgeons and victims, and Duntsch's own communications revealing state of mind.
Some commentators and testimony focused on systemic failures — credentialing, hospital peer-review and nonreporting to the NPDB — as enabling Duntsch to continue operating. Defense experts and others have argued the case reflects institutional breakdowns rather than only individual malice; prosecutors counter that Duntsch's email and repeated dangerous conduct showed criminal intent.
The Surgeon They Called “Dr. Death”
Between 2011 and 2013, a newly arrived spine surgeon in the Dallas–Fort Worth area left behind one of the most shocking records in American medical history.
Christopher Daniel Duntsch, a neurosurgeon with sterling credentials on paper, operated on at least 38 patients in North Texas. Thirty-three were injured. Thirty-one were maimed. Two died.
Hospitals hesitated to believe a surgeon could be so catastrophically incompetent. Regulatory systems moved slowly. For nearly two years, patients kept going under his knife.
In 2017, long after his license was revoked, Texas prosecutors took an unprecedented step: they put a doctor on trial for what he’d done in the operating room. A jury sentenced him to life in prison.
Early Life and Shift to Medicine
Christopher Duntsch was born April 3, 1971, in Montana and grew up in Memphis, Tennessee. His father, Donald, worked as a physical therapist and Christian missionary; his mother, Susan, was a schoolteacher. The oldest of four children, he attended Evangelical Christian School in Cordova, where he played football.
Football was his first ambition. He went to Millsaps College to play Division III, then transferred to Colorado State University, a Division I school. Former teammates remembered him as someone who trained hard but lacked natural talent. Eventually, he returned to Memphis to attend Memphis State University (now the University of Memphis). By then his football eligibility was exhausted. He pivoted: if he couldn’t make it as an athlete, he would pursue medicine.
He completed his undergraduate degree in 1995.
A Long Training — With Early Red Flags
After college, Duntsch entered an MD–PhD program at the University of Tennessee in Memphis. He earned his medical degree and PhD in 2001–2002 and went on to complete a neurosurgery residency at the University of Tennessee Health Science Center. He finished that training, plus a spine fellowship at the Semmes-Murphey Clinic in Memphis, in 2010.
On paper, this was elite preparation. In practice, there were warning signs.
Neurosurgery residents typically participate in more than 1,000 surgeries. Duntsch took part in fewer than 100, an extraordinarily low number for such a complex specialty. During his fourth year of residency, he was suspected of operating under the influence of cocaine. He was sent to a program for impaired physicians for several months, then allowed back—but his supervisors restricted him from operating without direct supervision.
Friends later recalled him going to work after nights of using drugs. One said he would never have allowed Duntsch to operate on him.
Outside the hospital, he became a regular at Memphis strip clubs. In 2011, he met exotic dancer Wendy Renee Young, who approached him after noticing other dancers were flocking to him once they learned he was a doctor. They quickly moved in together, and she followed him to Texas. The couple had two sons before breaking up just before the second child’s birth in September 2014.
From Biotech Dreams to Spine Surgery
For much of his training, Duntsch focused on the research side of his MD–PhD. His name appeared on papers and patents, and he joined several biotech startups. But by the time he met Young, he was more than $500,000 in debt.
Neurosurgery offered a way out. In 2010 he relocated to Dallas, Texas, bringing Young with him to her home region. He arrived in North Texas with a striking résumé: 15 years of postgraduate training and a 12-page, single-spaced curriculum vitae.
He embellished it further. He falsely claimed to have graduated magna cum laude from St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital with a doctorate in microbiology, a program the hospital did not offer at the time he claimed to attend.
Despite this, Baylor Regional Medical Center at Plano (now Baylor Scott & White Medical Center – Plano) hired him as a minimally invasive spine surgeon with a salary of $600,000 a year plus bonuses.
It didn’t take long for his colleagues to worry.
Baylor Plano: The First Wave of Catastrophic Surgeries
Veteran vascular surgeon Randall Kirby remembered that the new spine surgeon boasted constantly about his skills. But in the operating room, Kirby was stunned. As he later put it, Duntsch “could not wield a scalpel.”
Soon, patients began emerging from surgery permanently injured.
Kenneth Fennell
Fennell was the first patient Duntsch operated on at Baylor Plano. Duntsch operated on the wrong part of Fennell’s back, leaving him in chronic pain. A second surgery—again by Duntsch to fix the problem—left Fennell paralyzed in his legs.
Months of rehabilitation allowed him to walk with a cane, but he could no longer walk more than about thirty feet or stand for more than a few minutes.
Lee Passmore
Passmore, a Collin County medical investigator, underwent spinal surgery that turned into a nightmare. During the operation, Duntsch:
- Cut a ligament that should not have been touched in that procedure
- Misplaced hardware in Passmore’s spine
- Incorrectly positioned a screw used to secure that hardware
- Stripped the screw’s threads so it could not be safely removed
Even if the stripped screw could have come out, it was lying in a position that could have caused Passmore to bleed out if tampered with.
Vascular surgeon Mark Hoyle, assisting that day, recalled significant blood loss that Duntsch seemed to ignore. At one point, Hoyle became so alarmed he physically restrained Duntsch. He later told him to his face that he was dangerous and began to question his sanity.
Barry Morguloff
Morguloff, a pool service company owner, came in for back surgery. In trying to remove a damaged disc, Duntsch pulled at it with a grabbing tool, leaving bone fragments in the spinal canal.
Morguloff woke to excruciating pain. Duntsch initially refused to prescribe pain medication, dismissing him as a “drug seeker.” Morguloff eventually lost most function on his left side and required a wheelchair.
Kirby, who assisted the surgery, recalled that even after colleagues pointed out correct anatomical landmarks, Duntsch kept making the same mistakes. At a follow-up visit, Morguloff said he walked out after perceiving that Duntsch appeared inebriated.
Jerry Summers
Summers, a longtime friend of Duntsch, underwent a neck fusion at Baylor Plano. During the procedure, Duntsch botched the removal of a disc and left Summers a quadriplegic.
He then performed a second surgery and packed the area with an excessive amount of gel foam, compressing the spinal cord. An anesthesiologist later reported Summers lost almost 1,200 milliliters of blood—over a fifth of his total blood volume, and nearly 24 times more than typical for a spinal fusion.
Staff expected a revision surgery to correct the damage. Duntsch refused. Summers would remain a quadriplegic until his death in 2021 from an infection related to complications from the surgery.
Summers later said he and Duntsch had used cocaine the night before the operation, a claim that prompted Baylor Plano to place Duntsch on leave pending peer review. Although a drug test came back clean, hospital officials restricted him to minor surgeries while they investigated. Summers later recanted the drug-use claim, saying he’d made it up out of anger when Duntsch did not check on him.
Kellie Martin
Martin arrived for what should have been a routine decompression—the simplest type of spine surgery. Instead, Duntsch cut through her spinal cord and severed an artery.
Her blood loss was massive and obvious. A trauma surgeon and the anesthesiologist warned him, but he pushed ahead, refusing to acknowledge he was in the middle of a catastrophe.
In the ICU, Martin awoke from anesthesia screaming and clawing at her legs, forcing the team to re-sedate her. Duntsch stayed in the waiting room, writing notes instead of helping treat his patient, even after she went into hemorrhagic cardiac arrest. She bled to death.
How He Walked Away From Baylor Plano
Baylor Plano concluded that Duntsch had failed to meet standards of care and permanently revoked his surgical privileges. They opened another peer review and prepared to act—but he resigned before they could formally fire him.
That decision mattered.
If the hospital had terminated him for cause, it would have been required to report him to the National Practitioner Data Bank (NPDB), a federal clearinghouse that tracks problem physicians. Instead, to avoid the risk and cost of litigation—and potential exposure to lawsuits over the patients he had already harmed—Baylor Plano agreed that he could resign in exchange for a letter stating there were no issues with him.
Armed with that benign separation, he went looking for work elsewhere in the Dallas area.
Dallas Medical Center: Two Patients in a Week
Duntsch next secured temporary privileges at Dallas Medical Center in Farmers Branch while administrators waited for his records from Baylor. Almost immediately, staff noticed problems: he wore the same dirty scrubs to work for three days, and nurses wondered if he was under the influence.
Within a week, two surgeries ended in disaster: one patient dead, another paralyzed.
Floella Brown
During Brown’s operation, Duntsch severed her vertebral artery. Faced with massive bleeding, he refused to abort the surgery, stuffing the area with too much hemostatic material. Brown suffered a stroke.
When the hospital tried to reach him afterward, he did not respond for several hours. The next day, instead of focusing on Brown, he chose to proceed with an elective case on another patient, Mary Efurd. Administrators repeatedly asked him to tend to Brown or transfer her care. He refused and suggested a craniotomy to relieve brain pressure—despite having no qualification in brain surgery and despite the hospital lacking the equipment and staff for such an operation.
Brown remained in a coma for hours. By the time Duntsch finally agreed to transfer her, she was brain dead.
Mary Efurd
During Efurd’s spinal fusion, Duntsch:
- Operated on the wrong part of her back
- Severed one of her nerve roots
- Twisted a screw into another nerve
- Drilled screw holes on the wrong side of her spine
- Failed to remove the disc he was supposed to take out
- Left hardware so loose in her muscle tissue that it moved when touched
Colleagues in the operating room repeatedly warned him he was placing screws into muscle, not bone. He pressed on. Efurd awoke paralyzed, later describing her pain as “ten-plus” on a ten-point scale. Several in the OR suspected he was intoxicated; they recalled constricted pupils and erratic behavior.
Longtime spine surgeon Robert Henderson was called in to perform salvage surgery. Anticipating lawsuits, he had the procedure recorded. What he found inside Efurd’s back reminded him not of surgery but of a child’s Tinkertoy or erector set project. He later described it as an “assault” on her spine and believed she would have been bedridden for life without his intervention.
Henderson could not believe a trained neurosurgeon had done such work. He briefly wondered if Duntsch was an impostor. He sent a photo to the University of Tennessee to confirm his credentials. The university verified that the man in the picture was indeed their graduate.
That revelation disturbed Henderson even more. If Duntsch was legitimately trained, Henderson concluded, “he had to have known how to do it right, and then did the opposite.”
He called Duntsch’s former supervisors in Memphis and learned about the earlier drug-related concerns and impaired-physician program.
Despite the disasters involving Brown and Efurd, Dallas Medical Center did not report him to the NPDB. At that time, hospitals were not required to report doctors who had only temporary privileges.
More Patients, More Damage
After leaving Dallas Medical Center, Duntsch obtained privileges at South Hampton Community Hospital in Dallas and began working at Legacy Surgery Center in Frisco (now Frisco Ambulatory Surgery Center).
There, the trail of injured patients continued.
Jeff Cheney: Left with spinal cord damage and loss of feeling on the right side of his body.
Philip Mayfield: His spinal cord was drilled, leaving him partially paralyzed from the neck down. After rehab, he managed to walk with a cane but suffered paralysis on his right side and in his left arm, along with constant shooting pains. Mayfield later died of COVID-19 in February 2021; his wife attributed his vulnerability to the complications of his injuries.
Marshall “Tex” Muse: Hardware was left floating between his spine and muscle tissue. When he woke up in severe pain, Duntsch told him this was normal and prescribed so much Percocet that a pharmacist refused to fill it, fearing a potential overdose. Muse slid into opioid addiction that cost him his job and marriage. He recalled calling Duntsch before surgery after reading about Kellie Martin’s death; Duntsch allegedly cursed him out for asking.
Jacqueline Troy: During surgery, Duntsch damaged her vocal cords, trachea, and an artery. Troy was left barely able to speak above a whisper, required weeks of sedation, and had to be fed through a tube because food was entering her lungs.
Despite these outcomes, when South Hampton was sold and renamed University General Hospital, the new owners kept him on staff.
His final known patient would be another turning point.
The Glidewell Case: The Last Operation
When Duntsch applied for privileges at Methodist Hospital in Dallas, the hospital checked the NPDB. Meanwhile, he operated on patient Jeff Glidewell at University General.
Glidewell was scheduled for a routine cervical fusion. During the operation, Duntsch:
- Mistook part of Glidewell’s neck muscle for a tumor and cut into it
- Severed a vocal cord
- Punctured his esophagus
- Cut an artery
To stem the bleeding, he stuffed a surgical sponge into the wound—then closed Glidewell up with the sponge still inside, despite warnings from others in the operating room.
The sponge triggered a severe infection. Glidewell became septic. When other physicians discovered the problem, they asked Duntsch to return to help; he refused.
Randall Kirby was brought in to repair the damage days later. He later described what he found as the work of a “crazed maniac,” saying it looked as if someone had tried to decapitate Glidewell. In his view, the botched surgery was unlike anything that “has not happened in the United States of America” before.
Glidewell survived but was left with:
- Only one functioning vocal cord
- Permanent esophageal damage
- Partial paralysis on his left side
He required more than fifty procedures to address the damage and, at one point, could only eat in tiny bites.
After Glidewell, University General pushed Duntsch out. He would never operate again.
The Texas Medical Board Acts
Kirby, horrified by what he’d seen, wrote a detailed complaint to the Texas Medical Board, calling Duntsch a “sociopath” and a “clear and present danger to the citizens of Texas.” He and Henderson lobbied the board relentlessly.
The board opened an investigation. According to its lead investigator, she wanted his license suspended immediately. Attorneys for the board hesitated. Many could not fathom that a neurosurgeon could be as inept as the reports suggested.
Board chair Irwin Zeitzler later said it took until June 26, 2013, for investigators to establish a clear “pattern of patient injury” sufficient to justify suspension. He noted that complications can be more common in neurosurgery than laypeople realize.
But the neurosurgeon the board consulted, Dr. Martin Lazar, was bluntly critical. He was especially outraged that Duntsch ignored clear signs that Kellie Martin was bleeding out. “You can’t not know [that] and be a neurosurgeon,” Lazar said.
On June 26, 2013, the board suspended Duntsch’s license. On December 6, 2013, it revoked it outright.
Collapse and Civil Suits
After losing his license, Duntsch moved to Denver, Colorado. His life unraveled. He declared bankruptcy with debts exceeding $1 million. He was arrested for driving under the influence in Denver, taken for psychiatric evaluation in Dallas on a trip to see his children, and later arrested in Dallas for shoplifting.
In March 2014, three of his former patients—Mary Efurd, Kenneth Fennell, and Lee Passmore—filed separate federal lawsuits against Baylor Plano. They alleged the hospital had allowed him to operate despite knowing he was dangerous.
The lawsuits claimed Baylor Plano made an average net profit of $65,000 on each of his spinal surgeries. Then–Texas Attorney General Greg Abbott intervened to defend the hospital, citing a 2003 statute that capped medical malpractice damages at $250,000 and removed “gross negligence” from the definition of legal malice.
Civil cases against the four hospitals that employed him remained ongoing even after his criminal conviction.
Building a Criminal Case
Henderson and Kirby weren’t satisfied with a revoked license. They feared Duntsch could move to another state and eventually obtain a new medical credential. They pushed the Dallas County district attorney’s office to bring criminal charges.
For years, nothing moved. Prosecutors struggled with a key legal question: could they prove his actions were not just negligent, but willful and intentional as required under Texas law?
As the statute of limitations loomed in 2015, the DA’s office intensified its review. They interviewed dozens of patients and family members. Gradually, prosecutors concluded that what happened in his operating rooms wasn’t just malpractice—it was criminal.
A key piece of evidence surfaced: a December 2011 email from Duntsch, in which he wrote that he was “... ready to leave the love and kindness and goodness and patience that I mix with everything else that I am and become a cold blooded [sic] killer.”
Assistant District Attorney Michelle Shughart, who led the prosecution, later said that Henderson, Kirby, and Lazar all pressed her to testify against Duntsch—an unusual move in a profession where doctors rarely testify against colleagues.
Inside the DA’s office, early skepticism gave way to what trial team members later described as “overwhelming disbelief” as they mapped out a “scary pattern” of similar injuries. Ultimately, the DA authorized them to present the case to a grand jury.
Arrest, Trial, and a Historic Conviction
In July 2015, about a year and a half after his license was revoked, Dallas police arrested Duntsch. He was charged with:
- Six counts of aggravated assault with a deadly weapon
- Five counts of aggravated assault causing serious bodily injury
- One count of injury to an elderly person
The indictments came just four months before the statute of limitations would have expired.
Prosecutors focused on the charge involving the elderly patient, 74-year-old Mary Efurd. Under Texas law, “injury to an elderly person” carried the broadest sentencing range, up to life in prison. It was also, in their view, the clearest case to prove: multiple colleagues had warned him mid-surgery that he was placing hardware incorrectly, and fluoroscopy images documented the errors.
Their goal was explicit: secure a sentence that would guarantee he could never practice medicine again.
Held in the Dallas County jail for nearly two years, Duntsch by then was nearly broke. The court appointed a lawyer to represent him.
At trial in 2017, Shughart argued that:
- By the time he operated on Efurd, he knew his methods were harming patients.
- His repeated refusal to change made future injury “reasonably certain,” meeting the legal standard for intent.
- Across his cases, patients lost a combined 23 liters of blood—more than ten times what would be expected if he had operated properly.
The prosecution also criticized the University of Tennessee for signing off on his training despite his drug history, and faulted hospitals for failing to report him. They suggested that his financial desperation and the high pay of neurosurgery motivated him to keep operating regardless of the risk.
Over defense objections, prosecutors called multiple prior patients and family members, including those connected to the deaths of Kellie Martin and Floella Brown, to show a consistent pattern of catastrophic outcomes. They argued this proved that when he took Efurd into surgery, he knew he was likely to maim her.
The defense countered that he was a badly trained, poorly supervised surgeon—a product of systemic failures, not a criminal. An expert neurosurgeon for the defense would later say, “The conditions which created Dr. Duntsch still exist, thereby making it possible for another to come along.”
Shughart pointed again to the 2011 email about becoming a “cold blooded killer,” sent after his early surgeries had already gone wrong. To her, it undermined any claim that he was oblivious to the harm he was causing.
After a 13-day trial, the jury deliberated just four hours before finding him guilty of injury to an elderly person for maiming Mary Efurd.
During the punishment phase, prosecutors called 10 more patients injured after Efurd’s surgery. They argued that he had effectively “sentenced his patients to a life of pain (or death)” and deserved “the same lifelong sentence.”
On February 20, 2017, the jury took only about an hour to sentence him to life in prison.
In December 2018, a Texas Court of Appeals upheld the conviction in a 2–1 decision. In May 2019, the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals refused to hear his further appeal.
Imprisonment and Legacy
Christopher Duntsch, Texas Department of Criminal Justice #02139003, is incarcerated at the O. B. Ellis Unit outside Huntsville. With credit for time served in county jail, he will not be eligible for parole until July 2045, when he will be 74 years old.
His conviction has been described as a precedent-setting case, widely believed to be the first time in U.S. history that a physician was convicted on criminal charges for acts committed during surgery. The Dallas County district attorney’s office called it “a historic case with respect to prosecuting a doctor who had done wrong during surgery.”
At trial, UT Southwestern neurosurgery director Carlos Bagley, testifying for the defense, remarked that “the only way this happens is that the entire system fails the patients,” underscoring how hospital oversight, training programs, and reporting mechanisms all faltered as patient after patient was harmed.
The story has since spread widely through podcasts and television, including the Wondery podcast “Dr. Death,” the Peacock drama and docuseries of the same name, and episodes of Oxygen’s “License to Kill,” CNBC’s “American Greed,” and the series “Murder by Medic.”
Beyond the media coverage, the case remains a stark example of what can happen when a dangerous surgeon slips through the gaps of a professional system built on trust—and how long it can take for that system, and the law, to stop him.
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Birth
Christopher Daniel Duntsch was born in Montana.
MD–PhD completed
Duntsch completed his MD–PhD program at the University of Tennessee (degrees earned 2001 and 2002).
Residency/fellowship completed and moved to Dallas
Duntsch completed neurosurgery residency and a spine fellowship, then moved to Dallas to begin practicing as a spine surgeon.
License suspended
Under pressure from fellow surgeons, the Texas Medical Board suspended Duntsch's medical license while investigating a pattern of patient injuries.
License revoked
The Texas Medical Board revoked Duntsch's medical license after finding a pattern of catastrophic surgical outcomes.
Arrested and indicted
Duntsch was arrested in Dallas and indicted on multiple felony counts including aggravated assault and injury to an elderly person; indictments came as statutes of limitation neared expiration.
Convicted and sentenced
A Dallas jury convicted Duntsch for the maiming of Mary Efurd and sentenced him to life in prison.
Appeal affirmed
The Texas Court of Appeals affirmed Duntsch's conviction by a 2–1 decision.
Final review denied
The Texas Court of Criminal Appeals refused Duntsch's petition for discretionary review, leaving the conviction in place.
Earliest parole eligibility
With credit for time served, Duntsch's earliest possible parole date is July 20, 2045.
Between 2010 and 2013 in the Dallas–Fort Worth area, neurosurgeon Christopher Duntsch performed dozens of spine operations that left 33 patients injured, 31 maimed and two dead. Hospital peers and later prosecutors documented a pattern of catastrophic surgical errors, alleged intoxication, and deliberate disregard for patient safety; a December 2011 email in which Duntsch wrote about becoming a "cold blooded killer" was introduced as evidence of intent. The Texas Medical Board suspended and then revoked his license in 2013, he was arrested in 2015, convicted in 2017 for the maiming of Mary Efurd and sentenced to life in prison, and appeals were subsequently denied. Key evidence included operative imaging, testimony from multiple salvage surgeons and victims, and Duntsch's own communications revealing state of mind.
Some commentators and testimony focused on systemic failures — credentialing, hospital peer-review and nonreporting to the NPDB — as enabling Duntsch to continue operating. Defense experts and others have argued the case reflects institutional breakdowns rather than only individual malice; prosecutors counter that Duntsch's email and repeated dangerous conduct showed criminal intent.
The Surgeon They Called “Dr. Death”
Between 2011 and 2013, a newly arrived spine surgeon in the Dallas–Fort Worth area left behind one of the most shocking records in American medical history.
Christopher Daniel Duntsch, a neurosurgeon with sterling credentials on paper, operated on at least 38 patients in North Texas. Thirty-three were injured. Thirty-one were maimed. Two died.
Hospitals hesitated to believe a surgeon could be so catastrophically incompetent. Regulatory systems moved slowly. For nearly two years, patients kept going under his knife.
In 2017, long after his license was revoked, Texas prosecutors took an unprecedented step: they put a doctor on trial for what he’d done in the operating room. A jury sentenced him to life in prison.
Early Life and Shift to Medicine
Christopher Duntsch was born April 3, 1971, in Montana and grew up in Memphis, Tennessee. His father, Donald, worked as a physical therapist and Christian missionary; his mother, Susan, was a schoolteacher. The oldest of four children, he attended Evangelical Christian School in Cordova, where he played football.
Football was his first ambition. He went to Millsaps College to play Division III, then transferred to Colorado State University, a Division I school. Former teammates remembered him as someone who trained hard but lacked natural talent. Eventually, he returned to Memphis to attend Memphis State University (now the University of Memphis). By then his football eligibility was exhausted. He pivoted: if he couldn’t make it as an athlete, he would pursue medicine.
He completed his undergraduate degree in 1995.
A Long Training — With Early Red Flags
After college, Duntsch entered an MD–PhD program at the University of Tennessee in Memphis. He earned his medical degree and PhD in 2001–2002 and went on to complete a neurosurgery residency at the University of Tennessee Health Science Center. He finished that training, plus a spine fellowship at the Semmes-Murphey Clinic in Memphis, in 2010.
On paper, this was elite preparation. In practice, there were warning signs.
Neurosurgery residents typically participate in more than 1,000 surgeries. Duntsch took part in fewer than 100, an extraordinarily low number for such a complex specialty. During his fourth year of residency, he was suspected of operating under the influence of cocaine. He was sent to a program for impaired physicians for several months, then allowed back—but his supervisors restricted him from operating without direct supervision.
Friends later recalled him going to work after nights of using drugs. One said he would never have allowed Duntsch to operate on him.
Outside the hospital, he became a regular at Memphis strip clubs. In 2011, he met exotic dancer Wendy Renee Young, who approached him after noticing other dancers were flocking to him once they learned he was a doctor. They quickly moved in together, and she followed him to Texas. The couple had two sons before breaking up just before the second child’s birth in September 2014.
From Biotech Dreams to Spine Surgery
For much of his training, Duntsch focused on the research side of his MD–PhD. His name appeared on papers and patents, and he joined several biotech startups. But by the time he met Young, he was more than $500,000 in debt.
Neurosurgery offered a way out. In 2010 he relocated to Dallas, Texas, bringing Young with him to her home region. He arrived in North Texas with a striking résumé: 15 years of postgraduate training and a 12-page, single-spaced curriculum vitae.
He embellished it further. He falsely claimed to have graduated magna cum laude from St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital with a doctorate in microbiology, a program the hospital did not offer at the time he claimed to attend.
Despite this, Baylor Regional Medical Center at Plano (now Baylor Scott & White Medical Center – Plano) hired him as a minimally invasive spine surgeon with a salary of $600,000 a year plus bonuses.
It didn’t take long for his colleagues to worry.
Baylor Plano: The First Wave of Catastrophic Surgeries
Veteran vascular surgeon Randall Kirby remembered that the new spine surgeon boasted constantly about his skills. But in the operating room, Kirby was stunned. As he later put it, Duntsch “could not wield a scalpel.”
Soon, patients began emerging from surgery permanently injured.
Kenneth Fennell
Fennell was the first patient Duntsch operated on at Baylor Plano. Duntsch operated on the wrong part of Fennell’s back, leaving him in chronic pain. A second surgery—again by Duntsch to fix the problem—left Fennell paralyzed in his legs.
Months of rehabilitation allowed him to walk with a cane, but he could no longer walk more than about thirty feet or stand for more than a few minutes.
Lee Passmore
Passmore, a Collin County medical investigator, underwent spinal surgery that turned into a nightmare. During the operation, Duntsch:
- Cut a ligament that should not have been touched in that procedure
- Misplaced hardware in Passmore’s spine
- Incorrectly positioned a screw used to secure that hardware
- Stripped the screw’s threads so it could not be safely removed
Even if the stripped screw could have come out, it was lying in a position that could have caused Passmore to bleed out if tampered with.
Vascular surgeon Mark Hoyle, assisting that day, recalled significant blood loss that Duntsch seemed to ignore. At one point, Hoyle became so alarmed he physically restrained Duntsch. He later told him to his face that he was dangerous and began to question his sanity.
Barry Morguloff
Morguloff, a pool service company owner, came in for back surgery. In trying to remove a damaged disc, Duntsch pulled at it with a grabbing tool, leaving bone fragments in the spinal canal.
Morguloff woke to excruciating pain. Duntsch initially refused to prescribe pain medication, dismissing him as a “drug seeker.” Morguloff eventually lost most function on his left side and required a wheelchair.
Kirby, who assisted the surgery, recalled that even after colleagues pointed out correct anatomical landmarks, Duntsch kept making the same mistakes. At a follow-up visit, Morguloff said he walked out after perceiving that Duntsch appeared inebriated.
Jerry Summers
Summers, a longtime friend of Duntsch, underwent a neck fusion at Baylor Plano. During the procedure, Duntsch botched the removal of a disc and left Summers a quadriplegic.
He then performed a second surgery and packed the area with an excessive amount of gel foam, compressing the spinal cord. An anesthesiologist later reported Summers lost almost 1,200 milliliters of blood—over a fifth of his total blood volume, and nearly 24 times more than typical for a spinal fusion.
Staff expected a revision surgery to correct the damage. Duntsch refused. Summers would remain a quadriplegic until his death in 2021 from an infection related to complications from the surgery.
Summers later said he and Duntsch had used cocaine the night before the operation, a claim that prompted Baylor Plano to place Duntsch on leave pending peer review. Although a drug test came back clean, hospital officials restricted him to minor surgeries while they investigated. Summers later recanted the drug-use claim, saying he’d made it up out of anger when Duntsch did not check on him.
Kellie Martin
Martin arrived for what should have been a routine decompression—the simplest type of spine surgery. Instead, Duntsch cut through her spinal cord and severed an artery.
Her blood loss was massive and obvious. A trauma surgeon and the anesthesiologist warned him, but he pushed ahead, refusing to acknowledge he was in the middle of a catastrophe.
In the ICU, Martin awoke from anesthesia screaming and clawing at her legs, forcing the team to re-sedate her. Duntsch stayed in the waiting room, writing notes instead of helping treat his patient, even after she went into hemorrhagic cardiac arrest. She bled to death.
How He Walked Away From Baylor Plano
Baylor Plano concluded that Duntsch had failed to meet standards of care and permanently revoked his surgical privileges. They opened another peer review and prepared to act—but he resigned before they could formally fire him.
That decision mattered.
If the hospital had terminated him for cause, it would have been required to report him to the National Practitioner Data Bank (NPDB), a federal clearinghouse that tracks problem physicians. Instead, to avoid the risk and cost of litigation—and potential exposure to lawsuits over the patients he had already harmed—Baylor Plano agreed that he could resign in exchange for a letter stating there were no issues with him.
Armed with that benign separation, he went looking for work elsewhere in the Dallas area.
Dallas Medical Center: Two Patients in a Week
Duntsch next secured temporary privileges at Dallas Medical Center in Farmers Branch while administrators waited for his records from Baylor. Almost immediately, staff noticed problems: he wore the same dirty scrubs to work for three days, and nurses wondered if he was under the influence.
Within a week, two surgeries ended in disaster: one patient dead, another paralyzed.
Floella Brown
During Brown’s operation, Duntsch severed her vertebral artery. Faced with massive bleeding, he refused to abort the surgery, stuffing the area with too much hemostatic material. Brown suffered a stroke.
When the hospital tried to reach him afterward, he did not respond for several hours. The next day, instead of focusing on Brown, he chose to proceed with an elective case on another patient, Mary Efurd. Administrators repeatedly asked him to tend to Brown or transfer her care. He refused and suggested a craniotomy to relieve brain pressure—despite having no qualification in brain surgery and despite the hospital lacking the equipment and staff for such an operation.
Brown remained in a coma for hours. By the time Duntsch finally agreed to transfer her, she was brain dead.
Mary Efurd
During Efurd’s spinal fusion, Duntsch:
- Operated on the wrong part of her back
- Severed one of her nerve roots
- Twisted a screw into another nerve
- Drilled screw holes on the wrong side of her spine
- Failed to remove the disc he was supposed to take out
- Left hardware so loose in her muscle tissue that it moved when touched
Colleagues in the operating room repeatedly warned him he was placing screws into muscle, not bone. He pressed on. Efurd awoke paralyzed, later describing her pain as “ten-plus” on a ten-point scale. Several in the OR suspected he was intoxicated; they recalled constricted pupils and erratic behavior.
Longtime spine surgeon Robert Henderson was called in to perform salvage surgery. Anticipating lawsuits, he had the procedure recorded. What he found inside Efurd’s back reminded him not of surgery but of a child’s Tinkertoy or erector set project. He later described it as an “assault” on her spine and believed she would have been bedridden for life without his intervention.
Henderson could not believe a trained neurosurgeon had done such work. He briefly wondered if Duntsch was an impostor. He sent a photo to the University of Tennessee to confirm his credentials. The university verified that the man in the picture was indeed their graduate.
That revelation disturbed Henderson even more. If Duntsch was legitimately trained, Henderson concluded, “he had to have known how to do it right, and then did the opposite.”
He called Duntsch’s former supervisors in Memphis and learned about the earlier drug-related concerns and impaired-physician program.
Despite the disasters involving Brown and Efurd, Dallas Medical Center did not report him to the NPDB. At that time, hospitals were not required to report doctors who had only temporary privileges.
More Patients, More Damage
After leaving Dallas Medical Center, Duntsch obtained privileges at South Hampton Community Hospital in Dallas and began working at Legacy Surgery Center in Frisco (now Frisco Ambulatory Surgery Center).
There, the trail of injured patients continued.
Jeff Cheney: Left with spinal cord damage and loss of feeling on the right side of his body.
Philip Mayfield: His spinal cord was drilled, leaving him partially paralyzed from the neck down. After rehab, he managed to walk with a cane but suffered paralysis on his right side and in his left arm, along with constant shooting pains. Mayfield later died of COVID-19 in February 2021; his wife attributed his vulnerability to the complications of his injuries.
Marshall “Tex” Muse: Hardware was left floating between his spine and muscle tissue. When he woke up in severe pain, Duntsch told him this was normal and prescribed so much Percocet that a pharmacist refused to fill it, fearing a potential overdose. Muse slid into opioid addiction that cost him his job and marriage. He recalled calling Duntsch before surgery after reading about Kellie Martin’s death; Duntsch allegedly cursed him out for asking.
Jacqueline Troy: During surgery, Duntsch damaged her vocal cords, trachea, and an artery. Troy was left barely able to speak above a whisper, required weeks of sedation, and had to be fed through a tube because food was entering her lungs.
Despite these outcomes, when South Hampton was sold and renamed University General Hospital, the new owners kept him on staff.
His final known patient would be another turning point.
The Glidewell Case: The Last Operation
When Duntsch applied for privileges at Methodist Hospital in Dallas, the hospital checked the NPDB. Meanwhile, he operated on patient Jeff Glidewell at University General.
Glidewell was scheduled for a routine cervical fusion. During the operation, Duntsch:
- Mistook part of Glidewell’s neck muscle for a tumor and cut into it
- Severed a vocal cord
- Punctured his esophagus
- Cut an artery
To stem the bleeding, he stuffed a surgical sponge into the wound—then closed Glidewell up with the sponge still inside, despite warnings from others in the operating room.
The sponge triggered a severe infection. Glidewell became septic. When other physicians discovered the problem, they asked Duntsch to return to help; he refused.
Randall Kirby was brought in to repair the damage days later. He later described what he found as the work of a “crazed maniac,” saying it looked as if someone had tried to decapitate Glidewell. In his view, the botched surgery was unlike anything that “has not happened in the United States of America” before.
Glidewell survived but was left with:
- Only one functioning vocal cord
- Permanent esophageal damage
- Partial paralysis on his left side
He required more than fifty procedures to address the damage and, at one point, could only eat in tiny bites.
After Glidewell, University General pushed Duntsch out. He would never operate again.
The Texas Medical Board Acts
Kirby, horrified by what he’d seen, wrote a detailed complaint to the Texas Medical Board, calling Duntsch a “sociopath” and a “clear and present danger to the citizens of Texas.” He and Henderson lobbied the board relentlessly.
The board opened an investigation. According to its lead investigator, she wanted his license suspended immediately. Attorneys for the board hesitated. Many could not fathom that a neurosurgeon could be as inept as the reports suggested.
Board chair Irwin Zeitzler later said it took until June 26, 2013, for investigators to establish a clear “pattern of patient injury” sufficient to justify suspension. He noted that complications can be more common in neurosurgery than laypeople realize.
But the neurosurgeon the board consulted, Dr. Martin Lazar, was bluntly critical. He was especially outraged that Duntsch ignored clear signs that Kellie Martin was bleeding out. “You can’t not know [that] and be a neurosurgeon,” Lazar said.
On June 26, 2013, the board suspended Duntsch’s license. On December 6, 2013, it revoked it outright.
Collapse and Civil Suits
After losing his license, Duntsch moved to Denver, Colorado. His life unraveled. He declared bankruptcy with debts exceeding $1 million. He was arrested for driving under the influence in Denver, taken for psychiatric evaluation in Dallas on a trip to see his children, and later arrested in Dallas for shoplifting.
In March 2014, three of his former patients—Mary Efurd, Kenneth Fennell, and Lee Passmore—filed separate federal lawsuits against Baylor Plano. They alleged the hospital had allowed him to operate despite knowing he was dangerous.
The lawsuits claimed Baylor Plano made an average net profit of $65,000 on each of his spinal surgeries. Then–Texas Attorney General Greg Abbott intervened to defend the hospital, citing a 2003 statute that capped medical malpractice damages at $250,000 and removed “gross negligence” from the definition of legal malice.
Civil cases against the four hospitals that employed him remained ongoing even after his criminal conviction.
Building a Criminal Case
Henderson and Kirby weren’t satisfied with a revoked license. They feared Duntsch could move to another state and eventually obtain a new medical credential. They pushed the Dallas County district attorney’s office to bring criminal charges.
For years, nothing moved. Prosecutors struggled with a key legal question: could they prove his actions were not just negligent, but willful and intentional as required under Texas law?
As the statute of limitations loomed in 2015, the DA’s office intensified its review. They interviewed dozens of patients and family members. Gradually, prosecutors concluded that what happened in his operating rooms wasn’t just malpractice—it was criminal.
A key piece of evidence surfaced: a December 2011 email from Duntsch, in which he wrote that he was “... ready to leave the love and kindness and goodness and patience that I mix with everything else that I am and become a cold blooded [sic] killer.”
Assistant District Attorney Michelle Shughart, who led the prosecution, later said that Henderson, Kirby, and Lazar all pressed her to testify against Duntsch—an unusual move in a profession where doctors rarely testify against colleagues.
Inside the DA’s office, early skepticism gave way to what trial team members later described as “overwhelming disbelief” as they mapped out a “scary pattern” of similar injuries. Ultimately, the DA authorized them to present the case to a grand jury.
Arrest, Trial, and a Historic Conviction
In July 2015, about a year and a half after his license was revoked, Dallas police arrested Duntsch. He was charged with:
- Six counts of aggravated assault with a deadly weapon
- Five counts of aggravated assault causing serious bodily injury
- One count of injury to an elderly person
The indictments came just four months before the statute of limitations would have expired.
Prosecutors focused on the charge involving the elderly patient, 74-year-old Mary Efurd. Under Texas law, “injury to an elderly person” carried the broadest sentencing range, up to life in prison. It was also, in their view, the clearest case to prove: multiple colleagues had warned him mid-surgery that he was placing hardware incorrectly, and fluoroscopy images documented the errors.
Their goal was explicit: secure a sentence that would guarantee he could never practice medicine again.
Held in the Dallas County jail for nearly two years, Duntsch by then was nearly broke. The court appointed a lawyer to represent him.
At trial in 2017, Shughart argued that:
- By the time he operated on Efurd, he knew his methods were harming patients.
- His repeated refusal to change made future injury “reasonably certain,” meeting the legal standard for intent.
- Across his cases, patients lost a combined 23 liters of blood—more than ten times what would be expected if he had operated properly.
The prosecution also criticized the University of Tennessee for signing off on his training despite his drug history, and faulted hospitals for failing to report him. They suggested that his financial desperation and the high pay of neurosurgery motivated him to keep operating regardless of the risk.
Over defense objections, prosecutors called multiple prior patients and family members, including those connected to the deaths of Kellie Martin and Floella Brown, to show a consistent pattern of catastrophic outcomes. They argued this proved that when he took Efurd into surgery, he knew he was likely to maim her.
The defense countered that he was a badly trained, poorly supervised surgeon—a product of systemic failures, not a criminal. An expert neurosurgeon for the defense would later say, “The conditions which created Dr. Duntsch still exist, thereby making it possible for another to come along.”
Shughart pointed again to the 2011 email about becoming a “cold blooded killer,” sent after his early surgeries had already gone wrong. To her, it undermined any claim that he was oblivious to the harm he was causing.
After a 13-day trial, the jury deliberated just four hours before finding him guilty of injury to an elderly person for maiming Mary Efurd.
During the punishment phase, prosecutors called 10 more patients injured after Efurd’s surgery. They argued that he had effectively “sentenced his patients to a life of pain (or death)” and deserved “the same lifelong sentence.”
On February 20, 2017, the jury took only about an hour to sentence him to life in prison.
In December 2018, a Texas Court of Appeals upheld the conviction in a 2–1 decision. In May 2019, the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals refused to hear his further appeal.
Imprisonment and Legacy
Christopher Duntsch, Texas Department of Criminal Justice #02139003, is incarcerated at the O. B. Ellis Unit outside Huntsville. With credit for time served in county jail, he will not be eligible for parole until July 2045, when he will be 74 years old.
His conviction has been described as a precedent-setting case, widely believed to be the first time in U.S. history that a physician was convicted on criminal charges for acts committed during surgery. The Dallas County district attorney’s office called it “a historic case with respect to prosecuting a doctor who had done wrong during surgery.”
At trial, UT Southwestern neurosurgery director Carlos Bagley, testifying for the defense, remarked that “the only way this happens is that the entire system fails the patients,” underscoring how hospital oversight, training programs, and reporting mechanisms all faltered as patient after patient was harmed.
The story has since spread widely through podcasts and television, including the Wondery podcast “Dr. Death,” the Peacock drama and docuseries of the same name, and episodes of Oxygen’s “License to Kill,” CNBC’s “American Greed,” and the series “Murder by Medic.”
Beyond the media coverage, the case remains a stark example of what can happen when a dangerous surgeon slips through the gaps of a professional system built on trust—and how long it can take for that system, and the law, to stop him.
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Birth
Christopher Daniel Duntsch was born in Montana.
MD–PhD completed
Duntsch completed his MD–PhD program at the University of Tennessee (degrees earned 2001 and 2002).
Residency/fellowship completed and moved to Dallas
Duntsch completed neurosurgery residency and a spine fellowship, then moved to Dallas to begin practicing as a spine surgeon.
License suspended
Under pressure from fellow surgeons, the Texas Medical Board suspended Duntsch's medical license while investigating a pattern of patient injuries.
License revoked
The Texas Medical Board revoked Duntsch's medical license after finding a pattern of catastrophic surgical outcomes.
Arrested and indicted
Duntsch was arrested in Dallas and indicted on multiple felony counts including aggravated assault and injury to an elderly person; indictments came as statutes of limitation neared expiration.
Convicted and sentenced
A Dallas jury convicted Duntsch for the maiming of Mary Efurd and sentenced him to life in prison.
Appeal affirmed
The Texas Court of Appeals affirmed Duntsch's conviction by a 2–1 decision.
Final review denied
The Texas Court of Criminal Appeals refused Duntsch's petition for discretionary review, leaving the conviction in place.
Earliest parole eligibility
With credit for time served, Duntsch's earliest possible parole date is July 20, 2045.