Part Two: The Naturopathic Doctor Who Bombed a Plane

Robert concludes the thrilling story of Dr. Robert  Spears, who absolutely was not a doctor or actually named Robert Spears.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:01):
Also media, Welcome back to Behind the Bastards, a podcasts.

Speaker 2 (00:09):
That you're listening to. You're aware of what's happening. You
know that this is a show that we do. You
know what else? What else need I say? Bad people?
We talked to you about them? How are you doing today,
Brandy Posey our guest.

Speaker 3 (00:22):
Oh, I'm doing good. Just with my one name.

Speaker 2 (00:25):
Over here, I give you two names?

Speaker 4 (00:29):
What Oh no, no, no, I'm I'm thinking about our person
we've been talking about in the last episode and this
oh yes.

Speaker 2 (00:34):
Yes, yes, singular name that people know you by. Yeah.

Speaker 3 (00:37):
Yeah, I've been keeping notes on just.

Speaker 2 (00:39):
Because look at what they've taken from us, you know,
look at what they've taken from us exactly heartbreaking. You
know what's not heartbreaking?

Speaker 5 (00:56):
That woman taking all of uh where they where?

Speaker 2 (00:59):
They ended last episode with that lady like turning pigs
around on him. His fucking marry you and then take
all your money scams amazing stuff she.

Speaker 3 (01:08):
Said, Carnival style. Fuck you.

Speaker 2 (01:11):
Yeah, she's she's so cool.

Speaker 3 (01:14):
She love a queen.

Speaker 2 (01:15):
Oh man, do you think he have to stand?

Speaker 3 (01:18):
Do you think at any point any of them were
like set a different name or he like reacted to
a different name, Like, was anybody aware of how many
scams he's running?

Speaker 2 (01:26):
I think he did a lot because he gets caught constantly. Yeah,
I don't think he's a very smooth operator. And he
kind of treats it like tag like when the cops
finally he'll run, but if the cops actually get him,
be like, oh, okay, you got me, you got me,
Come on, you got me. Guys like yeah, it's it's
it's funny. But he'll also like cop to everything that

(01:47):
he's done, which is weird. He's like a weird kind
of criminal. Today. He would have just gone to prison
forever after his first crime, and we would have been
deprived so much comedy and also maybe a lot of
people's deaths. I don't know. So Spears is livid when
Laura flips the script on him and betrays him, even
though this is nothing more than he'd done to at
least like, I don't know, like a half dozen women

(02:10):
at this point. It's kind of hard to say, like
a lot of women. His biographer Jerry Jamison, author of
Vanishing Act, notes humiliated and mortified at being duped and
outplayed in his own games, Spears would redirect all of
his energy from spontaneous and short lived crimes forgery, theft, mail, fraud,
and larceny towards more substantial long cons Now, somehow, probably

(02:30):
just by reading newspapers and magazines, he'd become aware of
a real millionaire playboy named Oscar el Delano. The real
Oscar Delano or whatever was rich as hell and an
absolute psychopath. Right, He's like a Jay Gatsby type, but
the most like crazy, creepy, soulless version of that kind
of guy. And he lives out in Connecticut. Right, So

(02:51):
he's real enough that you can find news articles mentioning
this guy that you can use to bolster your claims
that like, no, I'm a real dude, and I'm worth
fifty million dollars. How are much money this guy's worth? Right,
Like spears can prove that there is a real rich
guy with that name, but far enough, like he's never
anywhere near Connecticut, so he feels pretty confident. No one's

(03:11):
gonna call me on my bullshit if I pretend to
be this guy. And by this point he's traveling around
like the South and the Midwest, and he's doing what's
called he called the convention grift, right. So the Roaring
twenties are a time when there's a lot of different
fraternal clubs and professional organizations. That's really starting to be
a major factor in American life. You know, this isn't

(03:32):
quite the first time, but it's sort of coming into
like this is when that peaks for the first time.
Is that being a really common thing? And there's all
these in person meetups at resorts and fancy hotels around
the country for different like fields, professional fields, and as
with modern conventions, people who attend these things are there
to get drunk and socialized, and you're supposed to people

(03:53):
to trust, you know, your brothers in fraternal organizations like
the Freemasons, or your colleagues if you're like, oh didn't
or whatever, and so attendees have their guard down. They're
not prepared to like be victimized by someone when they're
in this situation. And so Spears playing Delano will meet
people game their trust, pretending to be this eccentric rich
guy and then ask them about their lives. Like he's

(04:16):
quizzling them about details about their family and like what
life is like back at home, because he wants to
get enough detail to impersonate them over the phone, and
then he heads back to his hotel room, generally while
the person he's met was still drunk and partying, and
he'll like call home to their wife and he'll either
pretend to be them if he thinks he can get away,
or he'll be like, oh my god, your husband's been

(04:36):
arrested by some crooked local cop and I need the
equivalent of like five to ten thousand dollars in modern
money to bail him out, right, Like I can, we
can get him out of jail, but these these crooked
local cops and whatever small town this convention's in, they're
not going to let him free unless we come up with,
you know, thousands of dollars the equivalent of thousands of dollars.
And this works a lot more often than you need, guess, right,

(04:58):
although maybe not more then you'd guess, because one of
the more popular scams right now is an AI version
of the same thing, where like scanners, scammers will find
gen z or millennial people who have like too many
videos posted with their face and voice, and they'll use
AI to fake that person's voice and then call like
their grandma and be like, Grandma, I've been kidnapped. You
got to send these guys money or they'll kill me,

(05:19):
and then Grandma wires ten grand to whatever fucking scammer.

Speaker 3 (05:23):
Yeah, problem right now.

Speaker 4 (05:25):
I told my dad it's a big We need to
have a family safe word. If it doesn't sound like me.

Speaker 2 (05:30):
That's a very good idea if you've got especially elderly
relatives that you're worried about my convictimized by something like that.
But Spears is doing the analog version of this. He's
really on the ground floor, and he gets away with
this for like two years. He gets more ambitious as
time goes on, and he decides to gather a group
of young female sex workers together to crash the nineteen
twenty six Freemason convention in Saint Louis, which sounds awesome. Initially,

(05:55):
the cops think he's running a brothel because he's got
so many girls coming and going at all hours the night.
But what these girls are doing is they're each meeting
people at this convention and getting all the information so
that like Spears can call their family and do the
con right. Like, they're gathering marks for him basically, or
people whose families will be the marks. That way, he

(06:16):
can automate the process because it's a numbers game. You
want to make as many calls as possible and the
hope that you can trick you know, a handful of
people a day, right and get and get money coming in.
So the cops actually, yeah.

Speaker 4 (06:28):
Massive adrenaline. The adrenaline junkiness of this guy is like that,
I think is like what it is. It's chasing that like, ooh, yeah,
that feeling has got to be crazy.

Speaker 2 (06:36):
He's getting high off of this, Yeah, definitely, Yeah, that's
that makes a lot of sense. So this actually, he
gets busted when he's in Saint Louis not because of
the actual crime he's doing, but because the cops think
he's running a brothel basically, and so they bust into
his hotel room and they find him quote, entertaining multiple
ladies in one bed who were wearing merely skimpy night
clothing and claim to be spending the night only after

(06:59):
missing their right home. I think they're just you know,
he's handsome, he's handsome and charming, and these ladies are
in on the crime, right, so why not trust him?

Speaker 3 (07:09):
Yeah?

Speaker 2 (07:10):
I doubt he paid reliably, I gotta say so. The
cops give up on busting him after they fail to
find any evidence of a crime, because they're not very
good at their jobs and they think that something very
different is going on from what's actually going on. But
Spears is too greedy and impulsive to take full advantage
of this, and he's he's kind of incapable of taking

(07:30):
like this is a message from the universe, and like
back off, try a new town. Instead, he continues to
operate an entirely separate con at the same time that
the Freemason conference is going on, and this one is
a lot more evil, I guess, because he didn't think
he'd get enough money from working the convention, So Spears
placed a bunch of ads prior to showing up at
Saint Louis, a bunch of ads for manufacturing jobs in

(07:53):
the local yellow pages, claiming that like, we're a new company,
we're opening a factory in this town, and we're so
desperate for skilled workers we're willing to pay like thirty
percent above market wages, like way more money than people
are used to and you know, times are tough, that
nineteen twenty six is a good time for some of
the country economically, but a lot of working people are suffering,
and so a lot of folks like respond to these

(08:15):
ads because they need work and this seems like great
paying work. And when they show up. Anyone who shows
up for a job interview at Spears's hotel room gets
hired immediately. But then they get told you have to
pay a broker fee up front. This is just money
to make sure you actually show up for your first
day of work, you know, because we got to like
buy some stuff to get things set up for you.
We don't want you to run out on us. So

(08:36):
this makes sure you can lock down the job for yourself,
per the contract that he presented them with. To qualify
for this connection, you must have personality, first class references
and twenty five hundred dollars in cash is a fully
refundable shirty fee. This is a real bonified proposition and
we invite the strictest investigation of our firm by all
interested parties. This is a one time offer. This ad

(08:56):
will not appear again now to allow for that's a
lot of money for money today.

Speaker 3 (09:03):
This time has got to be crazy. That's like all
you have probably.

Speaker 2 (09:07):
Yes, and people are going into debt to put this up.
They're getting loans from their friends and their family, Like
people are endangering their families in order to afford this
down payment.

Speaker 3 (09:17):
Basically, well, now I don't like him, and I did, and.

Speaker 2 (09:20):
Now I'm not. He frames himself as a Robin Hood
and he doesn't rob a lot of rich people, but
he robs a lot of working people too. Anyone who's
like trying to show up for a factory job that's
advertising the Yellow Pages isn't someone who can afford to
lose the money, right. Yeah. Now, in that ad he
noted that like we allow for the strictest investigation. What

(09:41):
that means is the ad had a phone number for
the company operating the factory, and you could call and
they would confirm, yep, we're a real company, and we're
really these are real job offers. Now, what's actually going
on is that the number is the phone number to
the room next to where Spears is staying in the hotel,
and he's working with a separate grifter. He takes on partners, period,
so he's got a partner who's manning the line, and

(10:03):
when people call, his partner's like, oh yeah, real business
opportunity for sure. Now we're talking about like nineteen twenty six.
This is a beautiful time to carry out a scam
like this. People are still getting used to phones. Phones
are not like people learned over how weird a phone is.
So if you give someone a phone number and say
this is the headquarters of a big company that wants

(10:23):
to hire you, most people, if the number works, aren't
going to look more into it. Why would they? Who
else would have a phone? No one could fake having
a phone line, you know, that's not like that hasn't
really people aren't aware of the possibilities for cons yet
they're more trusting. Of course, you can only run a
scam like this for so long before somebody calls the cops,

(10:45):
which is why Spears bribed hotel employees to warn him.
If the police showed up, he escaped on time. For
this time, he doesn't get caught immediately, but the Saint
Louis Police put out an APB that also kind of
doubles as like a dating app. Description for our friend
here describes Oscar Delano, which remember is the name Robert
is working under now, as quote good looking, a flashy dresser,

(11:06):
well groomed, tall and fair, and a favorite with the
opposite sex. Like work harder to get This guy laid
god fucking Saint Louis police con man.

Speaker 4 (11:17):
Yeah, his like yeah, his dating profess, all of his
wanted posters just in one place, just like like.

Speaker 2 (11:27):
One of those old FBI like tip line things for
the UNI bomber that was, like, we suspect he fucked
really well, like crazy good dick game.

Speaker 3 (11:34):
Yeah, exactly where are.

Speaker 2 (11:36):
You talking about this? Why does that.

Speaker 3 (11:39):
Matter to play for day robin people?

Speaker 2 (11:42):
Why don't care if he's a We don't care if
he's dating people. Well, So, for his part, Spears fled
right away with the money and relocated to Kansas City,
where he invented a new and much more racist name
for himself. Again, it's the twenties, so he's starts going
under the name Eastern Mystic kegab jipterm, which I think

(12:04):
is you know, he's kind of meant to reference the
slur for a specific group of people. The roma right
per the book, self styled the International Man of Mystery,
with robes, bejeweled headgear, crystal ball and the whole shebang,
was cashing in on doling out health and financial advice
to the concerned incredulous. His advice to all clients just
happened to involve spanning the coffers of Guru jipterm right

(12:27):
now that is this show says, the first time he's
going to show like an interest in like healthcare stuff
and like selling people diagnoses and like treatments for ailments
that they've got. But he's flying too close to the
sun here. He is wanted in multiple states at this point,
and every news article about him makes a point of
discussing how hot he is, which turns him into a

(12:47):
Robin Hood figure, only without the whole giving to the
poor after robbing the rich thing. And also, you know,
he's not just robbing the rich, but he gets kind
of famous. And that's bad for staying like hidden under
the radar if you're continuing to commit crimes pretending to
be a some vaguely like ambiguously foreign spiritual guru. So

(13:10):
this period of grifting fell apart for Spears. Right as
he was doing yet another convention con in Topeka, he
telegrams the wife of a conference attendee, missus George Jarvis,
and asks for money and is like, you know, I've
got your husband. He's you know, he's in jail, but
I've got to bail him out, and or I think
in this case, he is pretending to be her husband. Right,

(13:31):
he's like doing a reasonably good impression of his voice,
but it's not perfect. So this lady gets suspicious and
she sends the money. She telegrams it to him, but
she sends it with a note for the telegram operator
that says George Jarvis is bald. So Spears shows up
pretending to be Jarvis to pick up this money that
is this other guy's wife is sent but the operator

(13:51):
is like, this guy's supposed to be bald, he obviously
has hair. The clerk calls the cops, and that's it, right,
he's busting sense.

Speaker 3 (13:58):
His luscious locks gave him away, his.

Speaker 2 (14:00):
Beautiful, gorgeous hair, his sexy, sexy hair, gottam in trouble
yet again, now one of the most interesting. Again. Every
time he's caught, he has a habit of like praising
the police, been like, good work, you guys really did
a good job getting me down this time and admitting
defeat and admitting to all of his crimes. And this
is probably a bad idea from a criminal defense standpoint, Yeah,
but it helps burnish his reputation because a lot of

(14:23):
local press. He's always saying like, well, you know, for
the two weeks that I was committing this crime spree,
I made fifty thousand dollars or something like that, right,
and the press will get to write about that, and
it makes this guy's legend grow, right, he kind of is.
It's just he's is sort of turning himself into a
little bit of a mythological figure during this period of time.
There's a lot of money in writing about him.

Speaker 4 (14:44):
Yeah, does he have cooling down periods to spend any
of this money because he's making a lot of it,
but like.

Speaker 2 (14:49):
Yeah, I think he think a lot of it does
get captured, but I think he's spending it. He likes
to stay in fancy hotels, he only wears nice clothes.
He drives exclusively like nice like fancy car. You know,
he's living large because he knows he's not gonna stay
free long and he give a time.

Speaker 3 (15:04):
Got it? That makes sense?

Speaker 4 (15:05):
Does anybody tie this guy to Clyde? Is that connection
ever made at this point?

Speaker 3 (15:11):
It is his life?

Speaker 2 (15:11):
Yes, not usually at this well no, Actually, some of
the people do report on this. He's well known enough
that people are usually saying, you know, like Robert Spears,
who went by this name and this name and this name,
or whatever name he gets caught under. It's usually obvious
his other that this is the same guy, because all
of his crimes are pretty similar. So Spears pled guilty
to wire fraud in March of nineteen twenty seven and

(15:32):
was sent to Levenworth Federal Penitentiary, where he remains for
about eighteen months. By this point, he's in his late twenties,
and Robert is probably feels like he's too old to change, right, Like,
I'm not. I've gotten this far as a con man.
I'm gonna stay at cod man no matter what am
I gonna do?

Speaker 3 (15:49):
Get a job?

Speaker 2 (15:50):
Not so. Once he gets out of Levenworth, he goes
right back to Conning and petty theft, and soon enough
finds himself behind bars again, this time in Missouri State
at Tenterie. He meets another inmate there, Ollie Thompson. Now
Ollie had just been arrested for the first time, and
his real name was not Ollie Thompson. His real name
was William Allan Taylor, and he's a con man. He

(16:13):
comes from like a good family, but he just kind
of gets into the con man life, I think, because
he doesn't want to work a real job and it
gets him in trouble. Eventually he runs out on at
least one wife and kids by the way, during this
period of time, but he and Spears become friends behind bars,
and Taylor kind of worships Spears. Like the vibes between
these two, you should read is like fifty percent the

(16:35):
wet bandits from home alone and Taylor is Marv for sure,
like he's the dummy and fifty percent like a cult
of two where where our boy is the cult leader,
Robert Spears whatever name he's going on, is the leader,
and Taylor is the follower because Taylor is absolutely devoted
to this.

Speaker 3 (16:54):
Guy, true henchman, henchman, a true.

Speaker 2 (16:57):
He's a true henchman. And for like seven or eight years,
these guys are traveling the country. They're conning the shit
out of people, and it's all the same stuff that
we've been talking about, Like they're running different versions of
all of these kind of cons. They make a lot
of money. They also get in trouble several times and
ultimately get locked up together for like a year or so,

(17:18):
and they get out in like nineteen forty, and al
Taylor is like, it's been almost ten years. I feel
like I'm done traveling around the country grifting like this
is just an exhausting way to live. And I loved
it and I love you, but I just don't have
it in me anymore. So he bids a fond, sad
farewell to his friend and he moves back home to Tampa,
where he eventually marries a young woman, Alice may Steele Henry,

(17:40):
who has no idea that he has like two I
think it's two previous families, or that he's been crisscrossing
the country as a con man for most of the
last decade. He just hides this from her. She doesn't
find out until after he dies that any of this
was happening to him.

Speaker 3 (17:54):
Oh No, imagine marrying.

Speaker 2 (17:56):
Someone in for ten years they were a con man
and just never say a word of it to you.

Speaker 4 (18:02):
I'm just gonna add that to the first eight questions.
I think you're going to be, like, are you a
were you.

Speaker 2 (18:05):
A con man for ten years? Did you rob people
at conventions for like a decade?

Speaker 3 (18:10):
I just need to ask this And those might sound silly,
but I just gotta know.

Speaker 2 (18:13):
How many marriages. Have you had? How many kids did
you abandon before we met? These are all questions to
ask folks.

Speaker 4 (18:21):
Wow.

Speaker 2 (18:22):
When he and his wife getting married, Taylor invites Robert
Spears to the wedding because again he worships this guy,
but Spears is unable to show because by that point
he is doing a four year bid in Oklahoma State
Penitentiary for you Guessed It check fraud is around nineteen
forty two.

Speaker 3 (18:36):
Only Body Guy.

Speaker 2 (18:38):
He and Al had split up after doing time together
in Maryland in nineteen forty when Al leaves for Florida,
they get out of like a prison in Maryland and
Al goes down to Florida and Robert moves to Minnesota, where,
per the book Vanishing Act, he heard the new art
of naturopathy was beginning to take hold. Now, I wouldn't
say it was beginning in this period of time, like
the early twenties, is kind of when interest seems to

(19:00):
peak early in the mid twenties, but it's pretty popular
in that area in this period of time, in like
the early forties, and so he's kind of finds himself
interested in this, you know. Author Jerry Jamison writes, always
attracted to the medical field for its inherent status. He
wanted to learn more and felt it was a good
place to reinvent himself once again, possibly even goes straight.

(19:21):
But he doesn't do this right away. He starts thinking,
you know, maybe a naturopathy, Maybe that's like a way
I could kind of get out of this lifestyle. But he,
at least initially, the first career he goes for when
he's trying to make it legitimately is he becomes a journalist.
You can still make money doing that back then, and
he like has some articles published for a local Methodist paper,

(19:42):
and he's fairly popular in town. He's like a pretty
well known like Methodist reporter in the town where he's living.
His landlady at the Times later said, I never saw
him go to church. He just wrote about church people.
And for a while this seems to be like he
seems like he's turned a new leaf. He's making legitimate money,
and he's like starts to have a reputation in town.

(20:03):
People notice that Bob's really charismatic. He gets asked to
liver sermons at church and speeches over the radio for
like the Methodist community, because people are like folks like
listening to him talk. You know, he's got a good
pattern and it kind of think, you kind of think
maybe he might turn things around. That's not what's gonna happen.
But you know who else will never turn themselves around?

Speaker 5 (20:24):
The sponsors that support this podcast never.

Speaker 2 (20:28):
Question never, absolutely not. They will never learn from their mistakes.
Number one of which is sponsoring my podcast. Thank you
all for your money, And we're back. So yeah, we're
we're talking about Robert Spears, who's trying to make a

(20:52):
go of it in Minneapolis. You know, he's writing for
the Methodist papers. He's become a figure in his community.
And he meets a young woman, Foster, and she falls
in love with him. She's like thirty two, so she's
a mature adult, but she doesn't seem to have ever
considered questioning whether or not any of Robert's stories about
his previous life as a fighter pilot were true. And
by this point, because he's working as a journalist, he

(21:14):
was like, oh, I was a war correspondent, and the
opening stage is of World War two. You know, I've
been all over the world, all these exciting places and
seeing all these horrible things. The two get married because
she just falls for this dude, and you can guess
what happened next. You know what this guy's gonna do
when he gets married to a lady, He's gonna leave it, right,

(21:34):
He is absolutely going to abandon this lady.

Speaker 3 (21:38):
From the book.

Speaker 2 (21:39):
Of course, he's going to abandon her. That's his only
move in relationships is abandoned them and rob them blind
from the book self styled. Almost as soon as he
signed the marriage license, Spears has started making other plans
for California, a life that didn't include his intended bride, Benita.
He answered an advertisement in the local paper from the Shirtzers,
who were traveling to the West and looking for a

(22:01):
paying passenger for the ride. Fifteen dollars secured a seat
in the back of the car. So this like family
the Shirtzers, and there's like one other guy at Novak
who's paying for a ride in the car and he
pays fifteen bucks to get a ride to the coast. Now,
before he leaves, he's got to have some money for California,
so he steals everything Benita has and makes off with

(22:22):
like five hundred bucks, which is about eighty three hundred
dollars in modern money, right, that's like her savings. The
road trip with the Shirtzers starts off normally enough, but
the days in close quarters together soon wear on them,
and Spears begins to get annoyed with the other passengers,
particularly Novak. They stop in Kansas City for a couple

(22:42):
of days and Spears visits his mother, who is dying
and in a home at this point in time, And
we don't know what happens between them, but the meeting
goes very badly, and when it they reassemble, everyone can
tell that Spears is in a terrible mood, like I
don't know what his mom says to him, but they
don't doesn't This is not like a happy reunion and
last meeting between the two. So the car they get

(23:05):
back in the road and Spears is just just an
awful person to be around. And when the car stops
outside of Oklahoma City, he starts looking for his money
and he realizes that like the five hundred bucks that
he'd stolen from his latest wife is gone, and he
immediately assumes that one of the other passengers, probably like
the shirts are Boy or Novak, had taken it. Now

(23:26):
I might say that like, well, you just visited your mom.
The veteran thief and con woman. Yeah, maybe she robbed you.
That's kind of that's kind of earthing one last ice
from your mom.

Speaker 3 (23:40):
Just Matilda, just like reaching like a gnarled hand slowly
towards his bags.

Speaker 2 (23:47):
Notice that, Yeah, robs his ass blind. I don't know
who stole his money. Maybe he just lost it the
car with you.

Speaker 3 (23:55):
For the next like two thousand miles.

Speaker 2 (23:57):
They did it now, so there here's a fight, right.
He gets incredibly angry and accuses Shirtzer and Novak of
taking his money. They deny it, and he goes crazy
and he pulls a thirty eight on them. He pulls
a fucking gun, and he demands the driver, missus Shirtzer,
pull over. This this whole crime is insane. I can't

(24:18):
wait to tell you about this.

Speaker 3 (24:19):
Brand man, I can't wait to hear it.

Speaker 2 (24:21):
Certainly, he makes her pull over to the side of
the road so he can tie everyone up in a
cornfield and search them. Oh no, yeah, yeah, you have
now gotten kidnapped into a corn field. I want to
read from Alan Logan's book. He used a small plank
of wood to start digging a hole and threaten to
shoot to maim them, and then bury them alive. They said,

(24:42):
if they didn't return his four hundred and eighty five dollars,
He got forty five dollars from Novak and fourteen from
Young Shirtzer. They continue to deny all knowledge of his
missing stash. Next, Spears shuffled them back into the car,
all of them in the back seat. Bizarrely, they say,
he then soaked a blanket with chloroform and placed it
over them. He forced them to inhale until they lost consciousness.

(25:05):
That's how this crime opens. By the way. Wow, yeah,
it's fucking nuts. So this is one of the crazier
for a spur of the moment crime. And I wonder
was it really spur of the moment, because like he
had chloroform on him and a gun and something else
that we'll talk about. Maybe he was planning to do
this from the jump, Maybe the money was a lie

(25:27):
to begin with. I don't know. But he is ready
to chloroform and hold these people at gunpoint. So since
they're knocked out because he chloroform to blanket, he gets
behind the wheel and he's driving to the nearest town, Weatherford,
and he says his plan is he's going to turn
these former traveling companions of his in to the cops
for stealing the money that he'd rightfully stolen from the

(25:48):
wife that he just abandoned. Now unfortunately for him. I
don't know if you've ever had to chloroform somebody listeners,
brandy hands.

Speaker 3 (25:58):
In the air. No, yeah, we'll see how the next
few years ago.

Speaker 2 (26:03):
We'll see. Look, if you can get your hands on
some chloroform. Du No, it does knock people out, but
it doesn't like reliably keep people out, like when you
just sign a spray a blanket with it and throw
it over their heads. Like apparently that's not I wouldn't
have known, but apparently that's not a reliable way to
keep people knocked out. And so his passengers wake up

(26:25):
and one of them tosses the drugged blanket onto spears
as he drives into Weatherford. So he's now and so
he loses control and he rams into a bunch of
parked cars, but his vehicle keeps like rolling forward, and
everyone starts fighting him for the gun while they'll they're
all in the car, and they're all presumably still fucked

(26:47):
up on chloroform. So he's they're fighting and he has
the gun out as they're wrestling in with it. He
fires three times during the fray. He hits Novak in
the head once but thankfully doesn't hurt him badly. He
hits the Shirtser boy I think, in the chest, but
again doesn't wound him badly. And he also pistol whips
miss Shirtzer, although that may have been an accident, like

(27:08):
he may have just been because he was flailing and
couldn't really see because he's got a gloroform blanket on him.
Like he shoots himself through the hand during this fight.
Eventually happen, the car comes to a stop and our
boy hops out and fucking runs like the wind. Yeah,
it is unclear what his plan was at this stage,

(27:29):
but bystanders had seen the struggle. They hear the gunshots.
They see this car careening around town as he's fighting
for a gun with everyone else in the car, and
I think the crowd is just like, if there's one
guy fighting a family of like for a gun, probably
the one guy is the bad guy. So they just
start chasing him. This town in Oklahoma. Everyone starts running

(27:50):
after him as he's like trying to sprint away, and
in response, Spears pulls a second gun out of his
like whatever he's wearing at the time, and this one
was a it was some form of tear gas launcher.
It's it's just described as a gun that shot tear gas.
I don't know, it's like a pepper ball gun or
like a grenade launcher. But he tear gas is the

(28:12):
whole town, the mayor. Tear gas is the mayor small town.
As he's trying to run away.

Speaker 3 (28:22):
Who is this man that just came.

Speaker 2 (28:25):
This is Kao Moos day. We're just chilling in downtown
bump Fucksville, Oklahoma, and this guy gases everybody.

Speaker 3 (28:33):
Yeah, sir, this is a Walmart.

Speaker 2 (28:37):
I gotta be cops to do that kind of shit
to random people in the mayor in the middle of
the day. Alan Logan summarizes how this all ends. It
was all just a big under misunderstanding, said Spears. The
tear gas gun was a product sample from his job
as a salesman of such wares. The chloroform was also
a medicinal agent obtained legally from the druggist. Furthermore, he

(28:58):
claimed that he had been robbed and was dry having
the shirtzers in Novak to the authorities to alert them
of the crime. Spears was back in the headlines again.
Two men shot, three anesthetized and wild thousand mile car. Right,
he makes so many good news stories.

Speaker 3 (29:13):
Wow, now those reporters were having a ball.

Speaker 2 (29:16):
Yeah. Wait, but streaming out on that he did? What
where do you get a tear gas gun?

Speaker 3 (29:22):
Oh, there's something new to write about, Thank god.

Speaker 2 (29:25):
One of my favorite just nonsense crime sprees. Absolutely gain
nothing from it. Now, nobody dies of their injuries, but
Spears could have been in that day. In those days
in Oklahoma, first degree robbery was a capital offense, so
you could get the death penalty for first degree robbery.
And honestly, he committed first degree robbery. Yeah, like that's

(29:48):
I don't know, man, when you got hear gas here
mayor to escape? Bro? Yeah, you horrorformed a whole family
and held him at gunpoint. You tried to shoot him.
I don't know, man, I don't have a cornfield Jesus.

Speaker 5 (30:02):
How long does he get does he go to what happens?

Speaker 2 (30:07):
He does go to prison. He gets a great defense attorney.
He's really lucky with that. He gets a really good
defensive attorney, and he's able to plead down to just
four years in prison for second degree robbery. He enters
prison in March of nineteen forty two, and when he
was asked to write down why he had been incarcerated,
his answer was a single word framed, how you gassed them?

Speaker 4 (30:31):
Yeah, dude, you had the tear gas gun all the town.
The best case scenario is your extremely suss with the
tear gas gun.

Speaker 2 (30:40):
That's that's like why would you eat?

Speaker 1 (30:41):
Yeah?

Speaker 2 (30:41):
Yeah? And the chloroform too, What was the why did
you have all that chloroform?

Speaker 3 (30:47):
Yeah?

Speaker 2 (30:47):
I do. I kind of think he might have believed
some of his own bullshit here, right, because and this
is something that I think Logan points out, Spears doesn't
consider himself a stick up man, right. Armed robbery is growth.
It's like a nasty crime for nasty people. I'm not
an armed robber. I'm a han man sent That's really
how he sees himself. And I think this is just

(31:09):
he probably just had like a break, you know, between
everything going on with his mom, and he's just not
a very good person. But he's not proud of himself
for snapping, So maybe just he needs to convince himself
that this was all someone else did this. I don't know.
I can't psychoanalyze this guy. It is interesting. Usually when
he's caught, he honestly admits, this is what I did.
And in this case he's like, I was Frank. I

(31:30):
was Frank the whole time, right, So maybe he really
convinced himself that he had to defend himself. I don't know.
As was usually the case, he got out of prison early.
He only serves half of a sentence due to good behavior.
He's always really well behaved when he's behind bars, so
he gets out early. So by the time he gets
out of prison for this latest crime spree, it is
the mid nineteen forties and he himself is pushing forty now.

(31:53):
The life of a traveling con artist is not easy
on your body, nor are repeated prison stints or shooting
yourself in the hand and during a chloroform gun fight.
As a general rule, most physicians avoid against advice against
getting into chloroform gun fights if you can.

Speaker 3 (32:08):
Yeah, you want to stretch, drink some water and vitamins.

Speaker 2 (32:11):
Will always be hydrated before a chloroform gunfight. Absolutely, yeah,
Vitamin C. I always take that with that airborne stuff
before I get into chloroform gunfights. The vitamin C really
helps you overcome the chloroform. I assume I'm usually not
aware of what I do in those mo What if.

Speaker 4 (32:27):
These are things that his mom gave him on the deathbed.
As she was stealing the money. She was like, I
have this dear gas gun and this bottle of chloroform.

Speaker 2 (32:37):
Take this too, yeahs your this is the family chloroform. Yeah, exactly,
my granddaddy and now it's your chloroform. Use it well.
Incredible good stuff. So he decides I'm kind of getting old,
I'm tired of getting arrested all the time. I need
a new career, I need a new grift. And initially

(32:58):
he's traveling around Texas during the oil boom, figuring there's
so much money flooding into the state. There's got to
be a way for me to grift some of it.
But he actually fails at this. He can't find a
way to make money off the oil boom, which is
amazing actually really hard not to in that period of
time in Texas. But as Jerry Jamison writes in the
book Vanishing act As, Spears was kind of traveling around

(33:21):
trying to figure out a con He starts to notice something. Quote,
an unusual number of clinics were popping up in every community,
large and small, urban and rural, that were curiously called
natural apathy medical centers. Spears was vaguely familiar with the term,
as we'd not it up in Minneapolis. He'd become aware
of it as a thing, But once he starts doing research,
he realizes, oh shit, these guys have figured out a

(33:43):
run around on the whole medical system. But becoming a
natura path you can't prescribe like the drugs a doctor
can totally, but you can prescribe treatments and diagnose diseases
to patients in like a lot of the United States,
and the AMA can't really do anything about it.

Speaker 3 (34:00):
Out it.

Speaker 2 (34:00):
So our man decides to move to Dallas because by
the late forties, Dallas is the friendliest place in the
country for fake doctors. It is the it is the
capital of the fake doctor world. Dallas, Texas well now Dallas.
What's changed is now Dallas is like a major hub

(34:20):
for real and fake doctors, huge numbers of both in Dallas.
Like Dallas the city of anyone who calls themself a doctor.
We don't care if you're selling bullshit or real medicine.
If you call yourself a doctor, Dallas is the city
for you.

Speaker 3 (34:36):
Eh.

Speaker 2 (34:37):
Yeah. So for an idea of how inundated Dallas, Texas
was with fake doctors, Harry Hoxy, who was a Dallas resident,
had created a fake was a naturopath who created a
fake cancer cure that was so dangerous the AMA and
the FDA labeled him the country's number one cancer quack.
But Hoxy had made a shitload of money and he'd
invested it in oil, which had allowed him to bribe

(34:59):
local politicians to support the nascent movement of Christian fundamentalists
who didn't believe in real medicine. That's a big thing
for Hoxy. And there's some other guys, some major like
super wealthy, like in cleaning the wealthiest man in the
world at the time, who like live in and around
the Dallas area, who were major advocates for like snake
oil medicine. And so they're kind of like bribing elected
leaders to make sure that Texas stays a friendly climate

(35:22):
for this kind of shit.

Speaker 3 (35:23):
Is this like crossing with like Christian scientists.

Speaker 2 (35:27):
Well, it's Christian fundamentalism. Christian science is a different thing. Generally.
I'm sure there are some Christian scientists mixed up in this,
but it's not wholly based in that. In nineteen forty nine,
Texas created a state Board of Naturopaths, who had meant
to monitor the field and ensure all practitioners were performing
ethically and were competent to do so. They announced new

(35:48):
requirements to call yourself a naturopathic doctor. First, you had
to have a college degree from a real school. And
second you had to have a state certified medical exam
in order to get licensed. Right, so you have to
have a real and you have to pass a medical
exam before we'll call you a notchropathic doctor. That sounds okay, right,
Like give it the standards of the time.

Speaker 3 (36:07):
That's not nothing, you know, that's that's not nothing. I
like that. It's like the high minded grifters or like
we need to.

Speaker 2 (36:12):
Put some to put some guard rails on this. Yeah, however,
this is Texas, and if you grew up there like
I did, you know the government isn't allowed to do
good things or even competent things. Now. These requirements thus
had a loophole. Out of state naturopaths could present a
license valid in any other state and pay fifty dollars

(36:34):
to be admitted to practice in Texas. So when Robert
Spears finds this out, he's like, all I gotta do
is get a fake diploma and find another doctor to
call me a doctor, right, So he finds a psychiatrist.
And this guy's a real psychiatrist, a pretty prominent one,
doctor Robert Reddick. He was like the psychiatrist for the
Manhattan Project, Like this is a major figure actually in

(36:56):
the field. But Reddick, after the Manhattan Project, had come
to work work at a statemntal hospital and it's just
horrified because it's a nightmare in there. He sees they're
testing drugs on people, they're performing a lot of medical
operations without consent, They're doing a lot of horrible things.
And he becomes both deeply cynical about like the mainstream
medical establishment for good reason. There's a lot to be

(37:17):
cynical about if you're working at a state mental hospital
in the fucking forties. And he also becomes a whistleblower
and he tries to tell everybody about the illegal things
that are happening in this facility and other facilities around
the country. Now, the other side of that is, as
he's becoming increasingly angry at like the mainstream medical establishment,
he gets obsessed with natural cures, and one day he

(37:38):
just gets angry enough that he starts issuing medical licenses
in the state of Maryland to anyone who will pay
him money, which is a weird way to go. I
guess it's all bullshit. Look I'll show you. I think
that's kind of his attitude. That makes sense.

Speaker 3 (37:52):
It's like, watch how bullshit this actually is.

Speaker 2 (37:54):
Look at how bullshit this is. Because I'm making it bullshit.
I'm not going to defend him on that.

Speaker 3 (38:00):
Yeah you do.

Speaker 2 (38:01):
I have more understanding where like, yeah, that is, I
get why you'd be really angry at everything after that
set of experiences. Yes, of course, so Spears cobbles together
like five grand worth of modern money and he gets
his license from doctor Reddick, and he gets that. Alongside
he has a diploma that's forged for him by another
naturopathic doctor. And this doctor who forges his diploma had

(38:23):
previously just recently gotten arrested after providing a fatal botched
abortion and then providing poison. He'd also gotten in trouble
but not convicted of providing poison, like I think it
was fucking bacteria to a group of people who like
murdered this whole family of rich people and then adopted
their son and eventually murdered him to like get the
get the money basically like and he gives he provides

(38:44):
them with the poison. So that's the doctor who gives
Spears his fake diploma. Spears takes the products of these
two august individuals and presents them to the naturopathic Board
in Texas. Overnight, he becomes a doctor. Now he's not
an MD, but he starts writing his name out as
Robert Spears, MD, because who's gonna stop him? Right, like

(39:05):
he's gonna stop me. He starts his practice in nineteen
fifty and by nineteen fifty five he had gone from
being a newbie to one of the most successful and
famous naturopaths in the entire state and thus the whole country.
What the fuck he is really good at this? Why
being a fake doctor?

Speaker 3 (39:22):
The guru bullshit of it all. I'm sure he's great
at it.

Speaker 2 (39:25):
Yeah, it's a confidence scheme and he's great at that.
He's a confidence man. Now, when you've got a group
of legal fake doctors who can hand out quote unquote
medicine as long as it's not the drugs real doctors prescribe,
and you don't have to abide by any ethical standards.
People are going to primarily visit that doctor for one
of three things. To lose weight, to have an back alley,

(39:48):
or illegal abortion, and to cure an incurable disease. Right,
those are the three reasons people go to doctors like this.
Either they just it's something cosmetic, it's not there's no
access to legal abortion, or a doctor has told them
we can't cure you and they don't want to believe that, right,
Those are the reasons people are going to these guys. Yeah.

Speaker 3 (40:06):
Now, Spears people in a lot of ways. Yeah, yes, And.

Speaker 2 (40:10):
From what we know, at least I know, Spears seems
to have not gotten too far into the third business.
He makes his money primarily selling weight loss treatments and
performing illegal abortions, right, or at least telling people he's
performing illegal abortions. A lot of the times he's just
giving them bullshit and like nothing happens because again he's
a con man, and they can't come after him because

(40:31):
it's illegal. You know, then they'd be admitting to having
committed a crime. Now his primary customer base are rich
suburbanites who live in fancy neighborhoods like Highland Park in
the DFW area, which I think is still the wealthiest
suburb in the country. He would put together groups of
rich white ladies and he would hold presentations kind of
like someone trying to sell their friends on an MLM,
only he was mainly he was like pitching weight loss

(40:54):
cures primarily and some other quack remedies. He's got these
pills he calls b Slim Reducer pills, which I'm going
to guess we're just methamphetamine or amphetamine of some sort,
or at least just pyrophedra concentrated. He's also got his
radionics machine, which uses electromagnetic waves to treat illnesses. Another
popular product among the Dallas Wine mom set was the

(41:16):
electro psychrometer, which Jamison describes as promising to quote, provide
insights into the mental state of an individual and thus
provide and much the same way as a licensed therapist
might some coping mechanisms for the triggers that cause weight gain.
So he's mostly selling all these ladies on these things
as cosmetics, right, that's the primary business, at least at
the start of this, and he does very well. These

(41:38):
groups of high society ladies are really profitable. He calls
them his milk routes. And he has a different group
of ladies that he'll go to every single day and
pitch to, and he brags at the time. By the
early to mid fifties, he's pulling in like four grand
a month, which is about fifty thousand dollars a month
in modern money, and not a doctor. Spears was not

(41:59):
only popular with the rich ladies. In nineteen fifty four,
he was named president of the Texas Naturopathic Association. So
he is running the whole association four years into his career.

Speaker 4 (42:09):
He's like, I see the top of that pyramid and
I want it.

Speaker 2 (42:13):
And I want to be there. Yeah. Well, now, Spears
became hugely influential in the burgeoning field. His natural charisma
and skillet lying made him the most interesting fake doctor
at any professional event. He was now attending of the
kind of conventions he'd once robbed from At cocktail parties.
He would claim the scar from the gunshot wound on
his hand had been cast by a gardening accident.

Speaker 3 (42:35):
Classic rake through the hands.

Speaker 2 (42:36):
You know, ched myself bad.

Speaker 3 (42:40):
But you couldn't heal that.

Speaker 2 (42:41):
But you can feel that. Yeah, come on, man, I
was way worse. You should have seen it. The whole
hand was gone.

Speaker 3 (42:46):
It used to be fair. This hand used to be
so fat.

Speaker 2 (42:48):
This hand used to be fat as hell.

Speaker 3 (42:50):
Yeah, look at it now.

Speaker 2 (42:52):
Much of his popularity was due to the success of
his radionics machine, which briefly became a must have item
for suburban DFW housewives. And speaking of wives, Robert Spears
was about to get his first real one, Francis Massey.
She was the most similar to him out of all
his wives except for the one who conned him. Before
they met. Francis had gotten interested in bogus medicine and

(43:14):
even taken a class in the use of the electro
psychometer in Waco. She decided this made her basically a professional,
and she started marketing herself as a licensed psychiatrist. After
this point, she charged five dollars a treatment, which is
like fifty dollars to day, and scammed enough people that
the FBI actually had a sizable file on her, totally
separate from the one on her husband. Here's how one

(43:35):
report from one of her patients recorded her work operating this.
I found this in Jamison's book, but this is from
an FBI report. In the summer of nineteen fifty six,
I was directed to Francis Spears when I had a
nervous breakdown. She would take me to an upstairs room
where she would have me lie on a day bed
and give me a handle type object on a cord
to hold in my hand. The cord was attached to
some type of machine, but I don't think it was

(43:56):
plugged into an electrical outlet. She would tell me to
imagine I was in a mental institution and how terrible
that would be, and tried to make me concentrate on
the absolute worst situations I could imagine. At the same time,
I had headphones on listening to a record with extremely
high pitched notes, and she said this would fix any
sinus trouble I might have. After that, I determined that
Miss Spears was not competent to help me, and I
did not return.

Speaker 3 (44:17):
Just like a touch of the MK.

Speaker 2 (44:22):
Yeah, and these devices, one of them that when it's
plugged in, it sounds like it's basically a galvanic skin
response measuring things, which is what an E meter is
like the scientologist. There's a lot of a lot of
grifts who are kind of using the same like tools, right,
So it's it's not a surprise that Francis is this

(44:42):
is gonna be a love connection for doctor Spears.

Speaker 4 (44:44):
I wonder if he walked into her office and saw
that machine unplugged and was like, oh.

Speaker 2 (44:49):
Baby, this is a grifter who knows that a grift. Yeah,
they get hitched, and in an uncharacteristic move, Spears sticks around.
He buys a huge, fancy house for them in Dallas
and they they have like two kids together, I think,
like and he actually sticks around to try to raise them.
So this is he has really made a change. Yeah,
he's still a grifter, but he has he has shown

(45:10):
some growth here, Like he actually does care about this
last family of his.

Speaker 4 (45:16):
Well, and he's technically straight by the eyes of the
quote Uno law like he has yeah, yeah.

Speaker 2 (45:21):
And I think that's why he's able to function because
he's still getting whatever kick conning people gives him, but
it's legal now and he's making a lot of money
and he's like partying with the mayor of Dallas, Like
he's holding Evince at his house that high society goes
to he's a respected man For a while. Near the
end of nineteen fifty six, Spears started talking to his
friends and colleagues about his next scam, medical device, which

(45:43):
he described as quote an electronic machine which was for
the purpose of testing a single drop of blood and
then from that test diseases could be ascertained. And that's right,
motherfucker's this guy invented farrahnos like sixty Yearslaney. It's the
same con and he had exactly as much real technology
is therapous.

Speaker 3 (46:01):
Did That's amazing? But how are you looking?

Speaker 2 (46:07):
Yeah he was, Yeah, I bet not nearly as good.
But he was doing the grift way before turtleneck Lady.

Speaker 3 (46:14):
There ain't an original thought in this world anymore.

Speaker 2 (46:17):
No, No, he was the last original thinker, Robert Spears.
So now because he's Robert Spears, he does start marketing
this gadget is being able to cure illnesses to writing.
The electrical impulses made by the machine could cure polio?
What sir, s share, man, share you're polio? Why not? Bro?

(46:38):
Fuck it now? So far, nothing he's done as a
natural path is quite evil enough to like crass. It's
bad but like, I wouldn't do a whole episode of
Behind the Bastards on this guy if he was just
yet another kind of grifter in an age in which
those were thick on the ground. That changes, and the
amount of harm he's doing is he gets more and
more into providing illicit abortions. Now, he first got connected

(46:58):
to that chunk of the field when he met another naturopath,
Donald Loomis, at a convention in Saint Louis. Donald had
been previously a major fitness influencer of his day, and
like Hollywood, studios would for years bring him in to
help actresses cut weight or actors like put on muscle.
And then after that he becomes a naturopath and he
sort of uses his connections to become the go to

(47:19):
abortion doctor for MGM studios. Like if MGM has a
starlett who has an wanted pregnancy, they called Donald and
he takes care of this, and he's bribing the cops.
He's bribing everybody so it doesn't get in trouble. He
used appendicitis as a co word for pregnancy and an
appendectomy to refer to abortions. So many actresses were booked

(47:40):
for appendectomies in the late forties and early fifties that
appendicitis was described as a Hollywood epidemic. Jamison writes, Loomis,
with a built in clientele and the impurmature of his employer,
quickly built up a lucrative business, even providing a mobile
service to the stars, arriving at the Beverly Hills Mansions
in his white paneled van. The health grew would show
up for a purported work out, perform his duties, and

(48:01):
be on his way, receiving compensation from both the studios
and the patient, willing to pay well for his services
and discretion. Thus, Loomis preferred abortionists to the rich and famous,
not only found himself wealthy, but in demand. Clark Gable,
it was once said, nearly kept Loomis busy on his
own little Clark Gable fact for you there.

Speaker 3 (48:19):
Damn wrap it up, Clark.

Speaker 2 (48:22):
Yeah, not Clark's strong suit.

Speaker 3 (48:25):
I no, not so much. We do.

Speaker 2 (48:28):
On our second ad break, Sophie, we have not. Then,
why don't you all wrap it up and listen to
these ads and we're back. Yeah, we're talking about the
abortionists to the stars now, Lewis, I think he's pretty
good at this. I don't think like in terms of

(48:48):
the health outcomes of his patients are pretty good, So
I'm not this is important background setting. Spears is going
to be a lot less good at this, and there's
going to be a lot more negative consequence for the
women that he's working on than like Loomis experiences. So
these two meet up at a convention in the fifties
and Loomis takes Spears and another doctor named Tiska under

(49:10):
his wings and they perform an underground business, splitting up
the West and Southwest between their practices through the fifties
while he's like also a successful naturopath. The business booms,
but they start to get increasing police scrutiny on them,
and Spears is like, this doesn't seem safe. I want
to take a step back and keep selling fake medical
devices because that seems a lot safer and more reliable.

(49:33):
But then disaster strikes for him. So there's several high
profile deaths due to naturopaths in this period of time
in Texas because these people are selling fake medicine and
sometimes just poison as medicine, and the state is finally
stepping into regulate things like there's a real push to
seriously regulate what a naturopath can do and who can
call themselves that. One of Spears's fellow doctors, Howard Harmon,

(49:56):
winds up recording the state representative behind this push in
a hotel because so this representative is trying to push
for like a more restrictive law, but he's basically open
to bribes, and he records. Harmon records doctor Spears meeting
with this guy and being like, look, how much is
it going to cost for you to turn around on
this issue, and how the state rep is like sixty
grand and Spears is like, gun, I'll pay it. I've

(50:19):
got the foundation funds, Like, we'll bribe you with that. Basically,
this had been his real job since he'd become the
head of the state Naturopathic Association. Right as he's bribing
lawmakers and police to look the other way because a
lot of people are doing illicit abortions and other healthcare
procedures they're not supposed to be doing, and he's taking
bribes to keep that going. And once he gets caught

(50:40):
bribing a state official, his license was revoked and his
life starts to fall apart. He does steal hundreds of
thousands of dollars from the association's petty cash fund. But
I think he's burning through that pretty fast. His wife
has expensive tastes, the house isn't cheap to maintain, and
he's also got to be on the run now again
because he's in trouble increasingly and immediately he becomes a pariah.

(51:03):
And these high society places he and his wife had
gotten used to frequenting. So by this point he'd soured
on Loomis and the other guy, but because they had
been drawing too much attention, so he tries to, you know,
as he's kind of trying to figure out, like, what's
going to keep me in business, he gets back into
the abortion business, but he tries to at first basically

(51:25):
try a hands off approach. So there's this other naturopath
named Fyman, who's the guy he'd bought his fake degree from.
And Fiman had built this intrauterine paste, right, and he
marketed it under the name Metrovact. Now, there were a
lot of pastes that were meant to induce abortion in
this period of time, right, non surgical abortions, and they

(51:47):
look kind of like toothpaste tubes and you'd squeeze some
into the cervix and it would induce a miscarriage, you know,
within like a day or so. It's violet covered. There's
a very strong chemical smell to it. But also so
the name it's it sounds like like a modern product,
so it's people think like, okay, this is safe and
it's legal to sell. You can't transport it over state lines,

(52:10):
which Fireman is doing. Fireman is moving it through this
huge underground network. It's worth adding this fact about Fyman's
violet covered abortion paste from Jamison's book Vanishing Act. There
was no doubt that it induced abortions, but the FDA
quickly announced that this preparation was the most dangerous in existence.
The results were devastating. If the drug got under the bloodstream,
the patient always died. So it's not safe stuff, and

(52:33):
these guys don't really care about the impact it has
on people. In fact, Spears cares so little that he
tries to get Fimen to license this formula, and Fimon's like, no,
I'm making money off of it. So Spears has a
pharmacist with this an unbelievable name, Napoleon Bonaparte. Barbie Craft
him a lookalike paste. Then God knows what's in this shit.
It's just poison that burns people's insides, right, that's the

(52:56):
product that he's selling. He just has this pharmacist cook
up another pace that will burn people from the inside.
Fucking Napoleon Bonaparte, Barbie amazing name.

Speaker 3 (53:06):
Wow, that is crazy.

Speaker 2 (53:09):
Quite a name. By mid nineteen fifty seven, Spears's old
practice had been replaced by an underground traveling abortion clinic
offering house calls and motel calls. Now he didn't always
use the paste. He seems to prefer using herbs and
tees in many cases, and these usually don't do anything
at all. In fact, when he's caught for the first
time and arrested for providing abortion services in nineteen fifty eight,

(53:31):
when Dallas cop writes, he takes the money from women
and prescribes certain medicines, but these medicines are harmless. That will,
unfortunately not always be the case. After getting free from
these charges in Dallas, Spears moves the family to southern California,
where they can live closer to Don Loomis, whose abortion
business was thriving still. The two partnered up and were
soon making more than twenty two thousand dollars a month.

(53:52):
But this doesn't last long. In July of nineteen fifty nine,
one of his patients, a twenty two year old school teacher,
had gotten sick and I think eventually died after coming
into UCLA Medical Center. And when she'd come in, she
claimed that doctor Spears had performed an abortion on her
using a violet paste that per Jamison had destroyed the
soft tissues of her inner organs. So he is gotta

(54:16):
get in a lot of trouble for this. Yeah, this
is going to bring serious charges that he can't escape from.
He gets arrested while he's still on the phone with UCLA,
and the police raid his house. They find surgical tools,
they find ingredients to make more of the pay whatever
fucking paste he's using, and they find fake diplomas. They
also arrest Donald Loomis, even though he'd been bribing the

(54:37):
cops like Spears gets them all busted because he's so
lazy and does not care at all about the health
of the women he's working on. I think Loomis at
least cared about because he wants to repeat business. If
you're going to be MGM's abortion doctor, you can't have
that many bad reactions because it's MGM, there's a lot
of money they've got behind, right, they don't care about
their health, but there's a lot of money here. Fucking

(55:00):
Spears just doesn't give a shit. And because he's so
sloppy and reckless, a woman's life is destroyed. And yeah,
it also just rolls up this whole abortion market that
had been running. Point, Yeah, it's fucked up. Spears is
near seventy. He's old at this point, and he is

(55:22):
tired of running. He's been doing this his whole life.
He has no idea how to get out of this one,
and he kind of accepts I'm fucked, but he decides
I'm going to go out, leaving my family a bunch
of insurance money. Now we don't know exactly what happened next,
but you remember that old buddy of his, his crime buddy,
Al Taylor, right, yes, yeah, So while all this is

(55:44):
going on with Spears, while he's starting and falling as
a naturopath and becoming an abortionist, Al Taylor is kind
of laying low in Florida, living a fairly normal life.
You know. His ex wife is like later is like, yeah,
he was a normal guy. He seemed good with the kid. Periodically,
that weird guy Spears, who I never liked, would call

(56:04):
and he'd either travel to visit him or vice versa,
and Al would get really weird, Like he always talked
about his old buddy like he was a god, and
he seemed to be like hypnotized by him. What probably
was happening is that periodically Spears and Taylor would hook
up for like a couple of weeks or a couple
of nights to run a con or two for old
time's sake, because it was fun and like this was

(56:26):
how they would like blow off steam while he's a
successful natural bath. So it seems like Spears kind of
gets with his buddy and he's like, hey, I've got
another con. We don't know exactly what happened. We know
that on November sixth, nineteen fifty nine, Robert Spears booked
a plane flight from Tampa to New Orleans. He had
previously taken out one hundred thousand dollars air travel insurance

(56:48):
policy on himself, but he never gets on that plane. Instead,
his friend Al Taylor gets on and takes his seat.
Immediately beforehand, Al takes out a thirty seven five hundred
dollars insurance. He calls his wife three times before getting
on the plane and she could tell something was wrong
with him. National Airlines Flight nine sixty seven took off

(57:08):
at eleven twenty two pm. It last made radio contact
at around twelve forty four am. Nothing seemed to be wrong,
but then the flight simply disappeared off the coast of Mexico.
Debris washed up in the surrounding communities for months. All
forty two people aboard are presumed to have died. Now
we don't know what caused flight nine sixty seven to

(57:30):
go down. There was a thorough investigation this before black boxes.
Investigators suspect a bombing because of how the plane goes
down and how much is left that somebody smuggled a
bomb off and set it off. And right around this time,
another guy whose Spears and Taylor were kind of connected to,
had killed himself on a plane, taking out the whole

(57:51):
plane for the insurance money. So this is probably a
con that they kind of wrapped up from him. There
are some people who doubted Taylor. Really it seems like
he did. He Spears may have tricked him. Taylor may
not have known that this was happening, yeah, or maybe
he knew kind of what was because he took out
an insurance policy. But maybe he just had a bad feeling.

(58:12):
But Spears may have set him up with a bomb,
we don't really know. For his part, Spears takes Al
Taylor's car because he's got a nice car and drives
it from Florida to like the southwest, where he hooks
up with that other Natura path that he'd worked with
for a while, and he hangs out and that guy notices,
like when he's laying low, like because it's a major

(58:32):
story and he's reported on as dead, and like his
wife is talking to the press about how distraught he is,
and eventually Taylor's wife is saying, Hey, I don't think
that was hit. I think my husband's missing, and I
think maybe this guy killed him because he was supposed
to be on it. Like he like something's fucked up here.
Tursky gets like weirded out because Spears is traveling around

(58:55):
with a trunk ful of dynamite and repeatedly talks about
how he knows how to make bombs and eventually blows
up his friend Al Taylor's car with a bunch of
dynamite to try to hide the evidence. Yeah, so we
don't know who blew up the plane or that it
was blown up, but we know Robert Spears was supposed
to be on it and got his friend, the patsy
who worshiped him, to get on it instead, and tried

(59:17):
to have his wife cash in that one hundred thousand
dollars life insurance policy. His plan was for it to
support their kids, right, her and their kids. Well, he
was because he was gonna either go to prison or
have to flee the country because everyone thought he was dead.
But he wanted to do something for his family, and
so he may have orchestrated the murder of forty two
people on a plane to try and get his wife

(59:38):
and kids the insurance money. Yikes, that's probably what happens. Well,
we don't know. Wow, he does get caught, the guy
he's hiding with turns him in, he gets arrested, he
gets convicted of a he doesn't get convicted of blowing
up the plane, but of a bunch of other crimes,
and he dies in prison not long after.

Speaker 4 (59:56):
Yeah, just general shadery, I think is probably the charge
that he finally caught at the end.

Speaker 2 (01:00:02):
Yeah. Two years later, like while he's serving his five
year prison term for car theft, Spears does an interview
with Eddie Barker of krol DTV in Dallas and says, well,
I had knowledge of the probability of a bomb on board,
and basically because I knew someone else had a bomb
on board, I wanted to have a ticket in my
name and like a guy filling the seat so that

(01:00:22):
they could cash it on the insurance. But also like
who else had the bomb? Yeah, there's some there was
like a mob guy who was on the plane, but
like the mob didn't really do hits by killing a
whole plane of random people. That's kind of bad business
for the mob.

Speaker 3 (01:00:38):
Yeah. Yeah, there's a lot of trouble doing that. Yeah.

Speaker 2 (01:00:43):
I think Spears probably blew that plane up for the
insurance money, which definitely, if the other stuff didn't, definitely
qualifies him as a bastard.

Speaker 4 (01:00:51):
Yes, did his wife get the insurance money?

Speaker 3 (01:00:54):
Did that happen?

Speaker 2 (01:00:55):
No? No, you don't get that when you because first off,
he's not dead.

Speaker 3 (01:00:57):
Yeah yeah, yeah, yeah, once he's.

Speaker 2 (01:00:59):
Proven a lie, there's not going to be an insurance payout.
Like you're fine man, that's true.

Speaker 3 (01:01:04):
God, so all that I got killed all those people
for nothing?

Speaker 1 (01:01:07):
Wow?

Speaker 4 (01:01:08):
What an asshole? And as Wow, that's you know, when
I was so hopeful in the last episode when you
said no pedophiles.

Speaker 2 (01:01:20):
Not a pedophile probably yeah.

Speaker 3 (01:01:22):
Yeah, yeah, yeah, so you know we're still we're still
bat in a thousand in that category for sure.

Speaker 1 (01:01:28):
Just a mass murderer and a guy who uh picked
on people that were in vulnerable situations trying to get.

Speaker 3 (01:01:37):
You know, care, Yes, exactly. That should have been legal
the entire time, and yeah it.

Speaker 2 (01:01:44):
Never should have been okay, yeah, but what can I
do stop people from committing crimes? Yeah?

Speaker 1 (01:01:49):
I mean the the part that somebody was so desperate
enough that they went to him to end a pregnancy
and then they end up dying because he's given them
a toxic.

Speaker 3 (01:01:59):
Purpose paste awful.

Speaker 1 (01:02:03):
Great, and you know there's things that could have been
done so that they didn't need to go to that
kind of person.

Speaker 5 (01:02:09):
But uh, America, that'sis.

Speaker 2 (01:02:13):
Yeah, yeah, some of this is just yet that's how
things were back when all this stuff was illegal.

Speaker 4 (01:02:18):
A good reminder for the future. Yeah, yes, yeah, there
will be a way will always happen regardless that's why
it needs to be legal and easily accessible.

Speaker 2 (01:02:28):
Yeah, legal and like regulated so that people are Actually
it is healthcare medicine. It is healthy as opposed to poison. Yes, yep,
cool stuff.

Speaker 1 (01:02:38):
BRANDI you want to plug your pluggables for us one
last time?

Speaker 3 (01:02:41):
Yeah? Please?

Speaker 4 (01:02:43):
So, guys, I have a new album that just came out,
comedy album. It's called Milk Job. You can listen to
it wherever you listen to albums. I put it out
on my comedy record label that I've been running for
a few years now. It's called Burn This Records. And
the thing that you could do that would be super
helpful is if you followed us on YouTube, because we're
getting into the YouTube video world starting this year with
my special so burn This Record on YouTube. I also

(01:03:06):
have a podcast myself called Lady to Lady with Babs
Gray and Test Barker. We've been around for fifteen years.
It's a real good time. And I'll be on Warp
Tour all summer long. So follow me at bran Dazzle
wherever you follow people that you like, and uh yeah.

Speaker 3 (01:03:20):
Thank you.

Speaker 2 (01:03:22):
Follow brand Dazzle and follow this podcast to our inevitable
conclusion when we get rated for providing fake medical treatments.

Speaker 3 (01:03:32):
No, no, one.

Speaker 2 (01:03:34):
Day, so one day, god willing, you know, god willing.

Speaker 1 (01:03:37):
I think I was just relieved for a second that
you say anything about palms.

Speaker 2 (01:03:42):
Yeah, that's that's for the best, probably best not to
not to, not to poke that bear.

Speaker 3 (01:03:48):
Let's not do either of those things.

Speaker 2 (01:03:50):
You know what poke bear? What they seem like whimps? Nope,
Bye bye.

Speaker 5 (01:03:59):
Behind the Beast is a production of cool Zone Media.
For more from cool Zone Media, visit our website Coolzonemedia
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(01:04:20):
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