Response to Dr. Williams: A More Complete Timeline

 Note: Discussions with my friend Medawar contributed significantly to this piece.

*Update at bottom.*

RESPONSE TO DR. WILLIAMS: A MORE COMPLETE TIMELINE

A recent issue of the local newspaper here contained a lengthy op-ed piece penned by Dr. Michael Williams, a former head of the local hospital, regarding the recent highly controversial sale of the hospital to the Methodist system and the behemoth HCA. In his piece, Dr. Williams gave quite a bit of good information on the history of the hospital in a timeline-type format—much more detail than I’ve previously seen anywhere else. However, the information he gave on a subject I happen to have considerable knowledge on doesn’t go nearly far enough in explaining both the relevant history of the hospital and what’s really going on. In fact, despite how lengthy and detailed his information is, I estimate that he has omitted at least two-thirds of the facts needed in order to truly understand what’s going on with this issue. I intend to fill in many of the gaps here.

I agree completely with Dr. Williams that in order to fully understand the situation with the local hospital, you do have to delve deeply into its history. The relevant history actually begins in 1973, when witnesses who were there at the time told me a man drove his pickup truck up to the entrance of the emergency room, got out, went inside, and announced without any discernible emotion, “The body is in the truck.” Upon hearing this, medical personnel rushed outside and opened the truck doors—to find no one there. But then they looked into the bed of the truck—and were shocked to see the nearly decapitated and obviously dead body of a teenage girl. It was the man’s daughter, and her body had been tossed into the back of the truck like a dead deer. At that point, a second pickup pulled up, driven by a new young police officer who happened to also be a close family friend of the man and his family. This officer immediately took charge of the situation. And so, the Great Cover-Up began, with the local hospital front and center right from the start.

You see, the father of the dead girl (and his father before him) was extremely well-connected politically and professionally, and for personal reasons, was also extremely desperate to cover up the truth about what had happened to his daughter. He was not himself the killer, but he knew who was, and the truth would have ruined him in his estimation. So he used every tool at his disposal: very high level connections, threats, lies, and more to make sure his version of the truth (that his daughter’s death happened later at the hospital after lifesaving measures were attempted and that the death was accidental) was the only one given out. Which could never completely work, given that this is a small town where gossip runs rampant, but he was absolutely determined to conceal the truth anyway, and so he did. The hospital and law enforcement at all levels were involved in the cover-up.

All of this told the girl’s actual killer that he could do anything he wanted to without fear of prosecution, so he began to do exactly that. Preventable tragedies began to spread outward like ripples in a pond. But this killer was highly intelligent as well as psychopathic. [Note from Medawar: Being a psychopath is an emotional handicap rather than a mental one.] The killer went off to college and medical school and became a doctor, after which of course he came back here to practice where he was a very big fish indeed. He learned to fly as well and obtained a pilot’s license and several planes, which caused the ripples to spread out even further. And, most importantly for the topic at hand, he became Chief of Staff at the hospital for many years (because, again, no one could or would touch him).

At some point this doctor and his friends realized that the biggest money of all could be made by building and opening, and most importantly, owning an ambulatory surgery center. This would be in direct competition with the local hospital though, and would siphon off most of the funds from the hospital, so the doctor and his friends began to run the hospital, which was non-profit and publicly owned, into the ground.

The doctor also became desperate to own the land the new ambulatory surgery center was to be built on because of the huge potential amounts of money to be made. This was when I began to be a big problem for him, because I owned the main tract near the hospital that was the perfect, and therefore the intended, site.

By 1999, plans for the new center must have been in full swing, because there had been a series of strange new incidents over the previous year or so (that I can’t go into right now). It was then that the second death critical to the hospital’s current situation took place. Because everything these days has become international, a very well-known and much-loved public figure from another country came to know about this area and, by virtue of having trained a young journalist who ran afoul of the local medical community and their friends in law enforcement and high-level politics by filing a malpractice suit, what was happening here. They either were, or were assumed to be, planning to publicize it all hugely because it would have been a major news story, but this never happened because the foreign public figure was shot to death in a brazen killing that was clearly done by a professional. This high-profile murder sent shock waves around the globe that still reverberate today.

Immediately after this killing, residents of at least one neighboring community and their small hospital began putting as much distance between themselves and the doctor and hospital here as possible, but rumors and quiet whispers were rampant. Then in the foreign country where the high-profile murder had taken place, a man who was obviously not guilty was arrested and charged with the killing. The minute he was arrested, the attempts to obtain my land either illegally or on the cheap began again, at first semi-seriously and, the moment the obvious patsy was convicted, in earnest [causing me to start this blog!].

This man spent several years wrongly incarcerated. Investigative journalists from the victim’s own organization became involved at the request of the wrongly-convicted man’s sister, and they eventually got his conviction overturned and him freed despite potentially contemptuous letters to three appeal court judges written by a different colleague of the victim instructing them to deny the appeal!

Also, immediately after the 1999 high-profile murder in the other country, people who owned property around me suddenly began dying under various suspicious circumstances. The first of these deaths that I know of was in or around 2000, the second was in 2001, and there were three in the first four months of 2003, one of which was the woman who lived on the place next to mine. She was shot execution-style, and her death was ruled a suicide despite there being two bullets in her head, not one.

Meanwhile, the man who had lost his daughter had been a driving force behind the local hospital almost from the start, and when he saw the entity he’d worked so hard for being run into the ground deliberately, he fought back. He had always made sure he controlled the hospital board and finances. Now he used his high-level connections and helped Dr. Williams, the new CEO who was already well-respected locally but without any ties to any clique, attract experts (production engineers as well as physicians) from the outside to run the hospital properly. They turned things around, and the hospital won awards and accolades under their tenure. They also purchased property a little further out of town with an eye toward expanding the hospital facilities in the future in a nearby and more easily accessible location that was more open and level and would allow more room for expansion.

But this was not to last. The man who’d lost his daughter in 1973 (who was no saint, by the way; he could be quite ruthless himself, but he had his reasons for keeping the hospital in good shape) became seriously ill and died in 2014. At which point all the people who’d done so much to improve the hospital were ousted and the hospital began to be run into the ground again. And low and behold! the focus was once again on the group of doctors (plus at least one local attorney and one local dentist) who still desperately wanted to start their own ambulatory surgical center that would compete with the hospital and siphon off the most profitable parts of its income into their personal pockets. Because the intent was to bleed the hospital dry financially, of course it needed to be sold off while it was still a going concern to make someone else take the losses. (No doubt the fact that the hospital is no longer locally owned and run but the new ambulatory surgical center is will be extremely well publicized, too!) It’s also worth noting in this regard that the hospital foundation, Wellness Center, Rehab Center, and other related entities that would not compete with the planned outpatient surgery facility were kept out of the recent sale of the hospital. And sure enough, I’m once again receiving ridiculously low offers for my property from all sorts of people, companies, and groups who all claim to have no connections whatsoever to the doctor and his friends, and the property intended for expansion is now slated for development as a subdivision instead.

My own hospital-related timeline complete for now, it’s time to talk about how to move forward—properly versus “business as usual”. The tragic truth is that the original lies and coverups starting at the local hospital back in 1973 have allowed a shocking number of additional homicides and other criminal acts to take place over many years that should never, ever have been allowed to happen. These truths are now public knowledge, so continuing to try and deny them only makes the whole situation worse. And the inescapable truth is that the hospital here is now forever tied to what is probably the most high-profile murder case of the late twentieth century—by the same person who is now behind the undermining of the hospital for personal profit—and that this fact is widely known both here and abroad where the crime took place. And because countries tend to get upset when persons from outside their borders come in and execute their most popular citizens, you can bet they’re never going to stop seeking justice. In fact, there continues to be an open and active investigation into this particular homicide that has already cost that country the equivalent of millions of dollars. There are no statutes of limitations on murder cases there, either, so all law enforcement has to do is sit back and wait until it’s politically expedient to make their move. Personally, I wouldn’t want that hanging over my head and the preventable deaths and serious crimes that were never stopped to be on my conscience.

I say it’s time to start being proactive: to tell the whole story connected with the local hospital, not just part of it; to put a stop to all the wrongdoing, not just the most convenient parts; and to demand a complete accounting of exactly what was paid for our hospital and exactly who gets (or gets control of) that money, down to the last penny. Whether you like it or not, the whole world really is watching.

UPDATE 09/06/24: The privately owned outpatient surgery center is now being built across the street from my property on a much smaller tract of land. The listed head of the group of investors building the facility is the former junior partner of the doctor written about above, who is now retired.