The Cowboy | Lonesome Doc | S5-E5

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“About 12 miles north of Cody, where Heart Mountain rises above open farmland,”

a lone car wound its way toward a secluded ranch. Over the entrance, a Pinewood arch carried the name, whispering winds. It's got this huge block cabin, everything's in good shape. He's got a huge full-size writing arena that's a separate building. A lawyer named Joe Womack followed the long drive to the house, passing hay fields and a well-stocked pond.

You could see the fish rising around the pond, so you could just go stand on the bank

and take your little fly line and stick it out there and catch some trout.

But Joe hadn't come for the fishing. He was there because John Schneider had declared bankruptcy. It had been a year since Schneider had been stripped of his Wyoming medical license,

“and now more and more of his former patients and their families were pursuing him for malpractice.”

The bill was potentially in the millions. Joe had been appointed by the court as the bankruptcy trustee to assess the scope of Schneider's wealth. He was claiming that he just didn't have the ability to pay any of his debts that he didn't have any assets. Yet here was his home, replete with a writing arena and a fishing pond. As Joe parked his car, Dr. Schneider came out to greet him.

He's got a nice cowboy hat on, and his toaster that goes all the way down to the ground. And he's got his cowboy boots on. I see somebody like that and I just say, "Man, you are such a dude, want to be cowboy." He's clearly not a working rancher. Those guys don't show off like that.

Dr. Schneider played the gracious host walking Joe around, pointing out the crops hit planted in the fields. Then he showed him around the house, Joe took photos of the wooden furniture and dining room set. He was hoping he might be able to sell them to pay Dr. Schneider's debts, but Dr. Schneider told him that the furniture wasn't his to sell him. He tried to claim it was all owned by his wife.

The same went for the ranch itself. Schneider didn't technically own that either. He had transferred it into a trust for his children. Back at the office, Joe began digging through the vast mountain of paperwork detailing Dr. Schneider's financial affairs. It wasn't easy to untangle.

Joe reckoned that at one time Schneider had been worth as much a $17 million.

But not anymore, at least not according to these papers. That made me very suspicious. When you see something like that, when I see something like that, that means that got to make some inquiry and date. And the things to see what was going on. The more Joe died, the more questions he had.

Schneider didn't transform from multi-millionaire to penniless overnight. It seemed pretty clear to Joe that he was shielding his assets and the timing caught his eye. His doctor Schneider's money had been vanishing at exactly the same time as everything else in his life. What's falling apart? I'm Leon Naifak.

“What happens when only fans becomes more than just a side hustle?”

It's an in-depth look at the world's newest profession and how the rules of human intimacy are being rewritten online. Listen wherever you get your podcasts or binge all episodes of only fantasy add free only on audible. From audible originals, I'm Laura Beale and this is Dr. Death, the Cowboy. This is episode 5, Lonesome Doc. Joe Womack, the bankruptcy trustee, worked on building the timeline of Dr. Schneider's financial transactions.

In 2011, the same time that Schneider had been dueling Dr. Narotsky, he was anxiously emailing his accountant.

I want to maximize my asset protection.

“Is it worth opening an account outside of the country in an extradition-free environment like Nevis or the Caymans?”

We don't know the accountants' response, but pretty soon Schneider began transferring millions of dollars worth of assets by his children. By December of that year, everything began to fall apart.

First, WrestleMania died, and Dr. Schneider's license to practice was suspended.

Then Jimmy Biles sued him for defamation. Quickly, Dr. Schneider's remaining money and assets began to start flying around in a complicated web of trusts and companies all owned by different members of his family. I met a state planning Schneider said, "Joe wasn't buying it." So I believed that all these transfers were bogus. He did it strictly to keep him away from creditors.

And then when it goes to zero, Files bankruptcy and says, "I got nothing. Give me a discharge. I just didn't believe it."

Although his family wasn't suspected of wrongdoing, it looked like Dr. Schneider was hiding his money to avoid paying the very patient.

He was accused of harming, and Joe realized the pattern went even further. When Schneider had to make a list of everyone he might owe money to, he didn't stop with the people already threatening to sue him. He included seemingly every person had ever operated on in Wyoming and Montana. Not because they had sued him or had, in fact, made a claim against him, but he was looking to prevent any other people from suing him in the future.

For Joe, the suspicion was undeniable. Schneider wasn't just shielding himself from current lawsuits. He was trying to avoid any further claims. On a chilly winter's day in Billings, Montana, Joe Womack watched as Dr. Schneider settled into his seat.

“Dr. Schneider, would you please raise your head hand?”

Do you solemnly swear or affirm that testimony you're about to give will be the truth? I knew. They were there for a formal meeting, an opportunity for Dr. Schneider's creditors and their lawyers to ask him questions under oath. Joe started running through all the entities and assets connected to Schneider. It was a long list.

Properties, land, bank accounts, and vehicles, and then one particular vehicle caught his attention. They hardly Davidson motorcycle that he indicated was gifted in 2002 the brother-in-law. Correct. Okay, so you have not had possession of it. You have not possession of that since 2002.

Well, I've been able to use it periodically, but I'm a neurosurgeon, so I tend to shy away from motorcycles, but it's not mine. Something didn't quite add up.

“You write it out here, and then you use it, or how does it come to be that you use that motorcycle when he's in California and tell recently you been in Montana and Wyoming?”

He has written it out here, and he has periodically left it here and periodically brought it back to California. All right. Joe casually moved on to other questions, but Schneider's answer stayed with him. I'm very suspicious of that. It doesn't sound like it was legitimate to me. Joe called up Schneider's sister.

I said, "Did your brother give your husband the Harley-Davidson motorcycle?" And she said, "Are you kidding? My husband was in a horrible motorcycle accident some years ago.

He hasn't written a motorcycle in years. He can't write a motorcycle. Jon never gave him a motorcycle."

Joe almost couldn't believe it. All it had taken was one phone call to find Schneider apparently lying when he was sworn to tell the truth. The guy's stupid. I mean, obviously he has a certain level of smartness of brilliance. But when it came to making up a lie, he was just stupid. So at that point, I know he's a liar. I know that I can't trust anything he says anymore. And so that's a reason for me to start digging deeper into everything that he tells me.

Joe asked her about another large asset Schneider had supposedly gifted to her. There was a country home outside of Billings. Schneider said he gave it to his sister as payment for some administrative work. But now, when Joe pressed his sister, she admitted that half the proceeds from the sale of the house went straight back to Schneider.

But he kept a hold of the ATM card.

That was clear bankruptcy fraud. You know, that was taking assets along to the bankruptcy estate that should have gone to creditors and trying to use it for his own personal benefit. To Joe, this was all money that should have gone to patience and families. So when he filed his report with the relevant authorities, he didn't hold back. He's committed fraud. He stole him from bankruptcy estate. And when they get that, then they go through the process and investigate things to see if they find anything further.

Soon enough, the case landed on the desk of special agent John Teeling at the FBI Field Office in Billings. As he read through the background, it became clear this wasn't a normal bankruptcy case.

But don't mean to be vulgar, but there was a shit load of allegations just flying all over the place in this case.

You had an allegation of a doctor that killed somebody. You had allegations of a doctor that maimed someone. The allegations of a doctor that tried to destroy the practice of reputation of other doctors see at all these issues. Personality conflict, addictive behavior, threats, all the spun into this financial situation. Where he's got some judgments against him and he needs to hide money.

Spread out in every direction, following John Schneider as he crisscrossed from Montana to Wyoming and back. For Teeling, the question was where to start? I couldn't spend two years just unraveling everything he did I couldn't.

“And that's why I took the most readily provable criminal act right in my backyard.”

A financial crime in his jurisdiction in Montana. So Teeling reached out to a federal prosecutor he often worked with, Colin Rubitch. John would call and say, "Hey, I've got something that I think is worth our time." And I said, "Okay, what do you got?" Teeling laid out the case, how Schneider was a doctor who'd had his license stripped for over-prescribing medication,

which had led to the death of a patient and was accused of injuring others. Despite denying any wrongdoing, he'd paid millions of dollars settling a defamation lawsuit brought against him by another doctor. And now it looked like he was lying and hiding his assets. This was an isolated, you know, this lying that he was doing was part of a bizarre sort of pattern of behavior. I mean, he's lying and lying and lying.

By the end of the call, Colin Rubitch was in. He hate to say it. He's screwed with the wrong people.

It's like, "Now you did it. It looks like you finally crossed the line. You finally went one step too far."

And this is your day of reckoning. They heard Dr. Schneider was hold up near San Diego. So Rubitch and Teeling took their time before making a move, including lining up testimony from Schneider's own sister. By June of 2017, they were ready. An indictment was issued and a court summons was sent to Dr. Schneider's address in California, but he had vanished.

“God damn it. The son of a bitch didn't show up for court. I got to drop everything, find out where the hell I think he is.”

And a restaurant went out. The local FBI was asked to help with the search. And still, they couldn't find him. Back in Montana, prosecutor Colin Rubitch was at a loss. He's here for me to find drug dealers, then this guy. Why haven't we found him? The answer was simple. They were looking in the wrong place. He wasn't in San Diego. He wasn't even in California.

He was more than 1,800 miles away in Iowa City, back in the operating room. [Music] I'm Leon Nefock. Best known as the co-creator of Sloburn and Fiasco. I, of course, heard of only fans.

“But always with a distant and quiet skepticism, a silent judgment you might say. Who is actually using this platform?”

I am. Hi. I'm only fans creator and comedian, Gracie Cainan. My journalistic curiosity got the best of me when I found out that my own sister had started it only fans account.

I felt like I wasted 3.5 years for something that wasn't real.

“What happens when connection comes with a price tag?”

Only fantasy wherever you get your podcasts. Or binge all episodes of only fantasy ad free right now, only on audible. Start your audible subscription in the audible app or on Apple podcasts. Eight months before the arrest warrant was issued, Dr. Schneider had been charting a new course. It was hired by a cadaver lab teaching spinal surgery by demonstrating surgical techniques on dead bodies. But then something caught his eye.

A veteran's hospital in Iowa was looking for a surgeon.

Even though he'd lost his medical license in Wyoming, he still had licenses in Montana and Utah, at least while his appeal in Wyoming was still playing out. Schneider dusted off his resume and submitted an application to the Iowa City VA Medical Center.

“The form required him to disclose the loss of his Wyoming license, as well as any other outstanding legal problems.”

So he included a five page letter explaining his complicated record. His words are read by a member of our production team. My issues with the Wyoming Board of Medicine began with an emergency suspension because of perceived over prescribing of the drug fentanyl.

Dr. Schneider said WrestleMania's death was the fault of his physician assistant and he claimed that medical boards in Montana and Utah had looked at the same evidence.

Physicians with the guidance of their lawyers reviewed the evidence and concluded that I did nothing wrong. When we asked him, Dr. Schneider declined to provide evidence for this. In fact, his license in Montana was revoked at a later date and the one in Utah was allowed to expire. But that wasn't the only scandal that Dr. Schneider needed to explain in his application to the VA. There was also the small issue of his bankruptcy.

He was he wrote the victim of a violent, unanticipated and malicious attack. And my family were raked over the coals accused of fraud and lying and concealing assets. Now he said it was all behind him. He wrote that he and his family had been unable to defend ourselves for access to funds and under great coercion that nearly cost me my marriage and faith. A settlement was reached that allowed us to close this chapter in our lives. He claimed that he had found a new perspective on the true meaning of life.

He said, "Although these lawyers do everything in their power to drive a man into the dark abyss, our faith in God and Christ, the strength of our family bond and the irrelevance of material wealth allowed my family to persevere and continue on, unfractured." We don't know what the hiring team at the hospital made of all this. This stage there were no criminal charges, so they wouldn't have known about the FBI investigation. But if the VA had looked up Schneider's record at the Wyoming Board of Medicine and surely they must have, they would have found the order stripping him of his license.

The one that found Schneider's defense to be "not credible or believable." The reddest of red flags. A week later, a letter arrived in the mail with an answer. Dear Dr. Schneider, congratulations! Welcome to the Iowa City VA Healthcare System.

Dr. Schneider would now be operating on U.S. veterans. Less than four months later, a net rainsford was in a waiting room at the Iowa City VA, anxiously waiting for word about her brother Rick.

“You want to know, how are things going? Is it okay? Did they find anything else?”

He'd been undergoing an operation on his brain, and it had been four hours, was no news. He just don't know what they're going to find. Rick Hopkins was a former Army vet in his mid-60s. He loved animals, and after leaving the Army, he got a job at the locals' zoo. When that shut down, he worked on a dairy farm.

At lunchtime, he'd go to the local tavern and his muddy boots and drink a dirty martini with two olives. On this day, at the hospital, Dr. Schneider came out to see his family.

And he explained to us that it was larger than he thought that everything should be okay,

and that everything went very well. We were hanging on every word that he said. And, you know, we were hugging each other, and my sister was crying, and it's a cry of relief. But like so many others before her,

and that noticed something different about what Dr. Schneider was wearing. I looked down and he had dirty cowboy boots on and no booties. And I thought, that's the doctor.

Why is he wearing dirty cowboy boots?

So she decided to confide in one of her brothers about it.

“And my brother goes well on hand, I think he's just trying to make us think he's normal, like us.”

Well, we're not normal, but he's trying to make us feel comfortable with his demeanor and wearin those boots. Dr. Schneider believed the surgery to have been a quote resounding success. But then Richard to recovery took a sudden turn. They said he was bleeding, and his brain. Three days after the surgery, Richard's daughter Amy McIntyre got a call.

It was Dr. Schneider saying that the bleeding out of the marker and the half to go back in and do a revision. Amy couldn't understand it. She asked the staff, how could this happen? The answer of this is sad, but it's not an unexpected post-surgical complication. But Richard's sister and net still wasn't so sure about Dr. Schneider. I couldn't get past the dirty cowboy boots, and I didn't trust him.

She tried asking the nurses and the ICU. They said, "No, they know nothing about him because he's new." Then one day she was with her sister when she saw Dr. Schneider making his way down the hall. We followed him down. We weren't acting like secret agents or anything like that.

“We were just slowly walking and keeping an eye on him, and you know what?”

He started walking fast, or how was afraid we were going to lose him, and with the same boots on. The same ones he had in surgery. The two women followed the sound of Dr. Schneider's boots into the staff parking area. Speaking from behind a pillar, they saw him hop onto a motorcycle. I thought, "Why would someone that treats people with head injuries or neck injuries

or any injury be riding a motorcycle?" I couldn't understand that. As Dr. Schneider put his helmet on and net edged out, far enough to see the back of the bike. I saw the license plates okay. Iowa! It's got Iowa Plate.

“Once she got back home, she began furiously Googling.”

Start looking John Schneider, Iowa Surgeon, and Neuro Surgeon, nothing. I was researching Indiana Surgeons, Illinois Surgeons, Missouri. So couldn't find him. To a net Schneider seemed to have appeared in Iowa City out of the blue. She had no idea that he was being investigated for fraud by the FBI.

Meanwhile, Richard's health got worse. He developed a lung infection and was placed on a ventilator. A CT scan revealed that the bleeds on Richard's brain had dramatically increased. So Dr. Schneider operated again, and then again, to tackle more complications. After four brain surgeries in less than a month, Richard slipped into a coma.

Even this as Amy saw it, did not seem to trouble Dr. Schneider. Schneider was still coming into the room saying, "Oh no, he's going to be fine. He's going to be fine. He just needs to go to rehab for a little bit. He's going to come out of the spine." Amy was a nurse herself. She knew Richard wasn't coming back. In a care conference, the family made the agonizing decision to end life support.

His sister and net entered his hospital room to say one last goodbye.

The girls were sitting around him. Amy was always listening to his heartbeat.

And the other two were on the other side. Their whole in his hand, you know, stroking him, "Tell him you they loved him."

What else could I say? What can I say?

“Then you know, right now I wish I could just walk into that tavern with him and have a martini.”

Shaken, not stern, he'd say. After Rick passed away, the family packed up his things and went home, broken-hearted. His deterioration had been so sudden. The number of complications so overwhelming, they struggled to make sense of it. They assumed it must have just been an unavoidable tragedy.

The kind of thing that can just sometimes happen. It was just before Thanksgiving in 2017, and a net was getting ready to leave for work when her phone rang. It was her husband. He said in that, somebody called from USA today and they wanted to talk to you.

“I said, "What?" He said, "Yeah, it's concerning your brother, Rick."”

I said, "I want to look for it, that's weird." On our way home, she called the journalist, Donovan Slack. She said, "A net, I said yes, Richard Hopkins has stressed, yes." And she said, "I found your brother's a bituary." And he was in the armed services, I said, "Yes."

Then he had brain surgery and she said, "Can you tell me who has surgeon?" She said, "I was. I said, "John Schneider." And I heard her go, "It's him."

Finally, Dr. Schneider could no longer outrun his past.

On December 3, 2017, USA today published the story about Dr. Schneider.

“The headline read, VA knowingly hires doctors with past malpractice claims,”

discipline for poor care. A net scrolled through the USA today article and disbelief. Her brother's surgeon had seen his license stripped. That should have been a red flag right now. You hired him. I still can't get over that. I cannot get past that.

No one should have hired him." And Dr. Schneider was just one. There were others too. A VA hospital in Oklahoma knowingly hired a psychiatrist previously sanctioned for sexual misconduct who went on to sleep with a patient. In Louisiana, a VA clinic hired a psychologist with felony convictions.

The VA ended up firing him after they determined that he was a direct threat to others. Yet even in this company, the story of John Schneider stood out. The piece also included quotes from some of Dr. Schneider's former patients in Montana and Wyoming. They painted a picture of a doctor who had been accused of repeatedly harming his patients and still been hired. Quickly, the story snowballed into a national scandal.

While our Iowa veterans affairs hospital doctor was hired, despite having multiple lawsuits have now practiced against him. This after USA today reports as multiple VA hospitals across this company won against hiring standards hiring doctors despite claims of substandard care. Word began to spread among former patients.

My sister actually called me up and she said did you see the USA today article and Dr. Schneider, I said no. Marine veteran Anthony French was at his home near Cedar Falls, Iowa when he read the news. Holy shit. What did they do to me? Maybe this is why I developed these headaches. Back in the summer, Dr. Schneider had operated on him to remove a tumor at the base of his brain.

But for months afterwards, the headaches had gotten worse. Anthony told Schneider about it at his follow-up appointments. And he kept saying, "That's normal. You just had made your brain surgery." He said, "It's going to take a year or a half." Anthony says that Dr. Schneider told him there was no need for a follow-up MRI.

He said, "I removed everything. There's not a centilla of it left." Now, for the first time, Anthony realized that he'd put his life in the hands of a surgeon,

who never should have been allowed back in an operating room.

It would take another three months before the VA finally gave him a follow-up MRI.

“When he walked into the exam room to get the results, he found the new doctor already waiting.”

Two computer screens up, and he just looked up at me and shook his head. They said, "Don't tell me it's grown back." The surgeon walked to Anthony through the two scans, one from before the surgery, and the other, taken that morning.

He said, "He never removed anything."

And I said, "Well, Jesus Christ has even grown." Anthony says the surgeon told him he should have had an MRI within 30 days of the operation. He seemed to be a plausible medical reason for him not to have been given one. I said, "Sol, you're telling me he didn't do the MRI because he knew he didn't remove the tumor." And he said, "That's exactly what he did."

When we asked Dr. Schneider about Anthony, he described the accusations as baseless, and that he didn't recall Anthony. Meanwhile, Amy and Annette were searching for their own answers.

Two months after the USA today article broke, they sat down for a meeting with hospital administrators.

I see this opportunity in the sense I'm sure you're quite a bit of questions. Amy recorded on her phone, which she placed in the middle of the table.

“She was concerned. Along these lines is, you know, how did it happen anyway?”

How was Schneider hired with such a string of questionable medical issues, the relocation of his license? I mean, that's blatantly against the law. Yeah, so it stepped back a bit. USA today reported the anti-revocation of the state license. Yes, so he was okay by the National Office and everything to hire him.

The VA administrator told Amy and Annette that the fact that Dr. Schneider still had licenses in Montana and Utah was good enough for the head office in DC to green light his appointment. And they believed they had vetted Dr. Schneider thoroughly. Anytime we hire somebody with any type of lawsuits, we check into everything. I had probably five to six references on him guarding his patient care. So no, anybody who has any type of lawsuit at all, a surgeon that we hire does a raise red flags.

And it was months of going through all these things before we hired him. But that still didn't explain why they'd hired someone who'd had their license revoked. The non-answer didn't escape Amy and Annette. They never answered it.

“It passed the fact, why? Why would you hire someone that had their license stripped?”

That's just the bottom line right there, isn't it?

That's everything. We asked Dr. Schneider about Richard Hopkins case. Through his lawyer, he denied any wrongdoing. He told us that he thinks Amy and Annette have been, quote, "misled" into believing that Dr. Schneider provided substandard care to Richard. Because his license had been suspended and/or the bankruptcy case.

A full-sum review of the medical records here would indicate that Dr. Schneider was not negligent in this man's death. He added that at no time was Dr. Schneider ever accused of medical malpractice in Richard Hopkins' care. But the Hopkins family saw it differently. They sued the government. As part of that suit, a neurosurgeon conducted an expert review of Richard's medical records. In his opinion, Dr. Schneider's treatment fell outside the standard of care.

And he concluded that it was probable that Richard would have survived if the VA had properly vetted Dr. Schneider. The case was settled without admission of wrongdoing. Unlike the Hopkins family and Anthony French, the VA knew who Dr. Schneider was. They knew he'd been found culpable in the death of a patient and they'd hired him anyway. In a statement, they told us that the VA has, quote, "Instituted policy changes to prevent similar hiring mistakes in the future."

When they heard the USA today's story was going to come out, they moved to Fire, Dr. Schneider. He resigned soon after. By then, he had even bigger problems. When he traveled back to his house near San Diego, an FBI agent had been keeping watch.

Dr. Schneider was put in handcuffs and placed in the back of a car.

“The word quickly got back to special agent dealing.”

The agent calls me and says, "I just picked him up and taken him to the lockup."

And my reaction is finally, you know, enough of this shit.

Accept responsibility in a apologize for what you've done. And throw yourself at the mercy of the court.

“With his name splashed across the National Press, Schneider's medical career was over.”

He was facing bankruptcy fraud charges and up to five years in prison.

But Dr. Schneider wasn't finished yet. He was trying to reframe his own narrative, including on video. Well, hello there. Thanks for coming over. I'm Dr. Schneider.

“To the outside world, he was recasting himself as a man both misunderstood and transformed.”

But prosecutor Colin Rubitch was determined to make sure that he didn't get away again.

That's coming up next on the final episode of this season of Dr. Death. Listen to Dr. Death, the cowboy, on the audible app, or wherever you get your podcasts. Audible subscribers can binge all episodes of Dr. Death, the cowboy, early and ad-free right now. Join audible in the audible app, or by subscribing on Apple Podcasts. This has been an audible original. I'm your host Laura Biel. Executive producers are Russell Finch and Marshall Louie.

Our senior reporter is Zachary Stalfer. Tom Wright is our senior producer. Our associate producer is Muhammad Ahmed. Joe Wheeler is the senior story editor. Senior development producer is Rachel B. Doyle. Our production managers are Sherry Huston and Sarah Mathis. Our associate director of production is Latta Pandya.

Fact checking by Jacqueline Coletti. Sound design and mixing are by Nicholas Alexander and Mark Pittam. Sound supervisor is Marcelino Villapando. Music supervision by Scott Villasquez for FreeSonsync. Production services provided by novel. Executive producer for novel is Max O'Brien. Music supervision by Scott Villasquez for FreeSonsync.