In Plain Sight

The audio from all three of these stories has been pulled from our main YouTube channel and has been remastered for today's episode.

“The links to the original YouTube videos are in the description.”

The first story you'll hear is called "Dating Game" and it's about a reality show contestant who is not who he says he is.

The second story you'll hear is called "Something Scratching" and it's about two brothers that make a discovery two decades after their mother disappears. And the third and final story you'll hear is called "Be Still There Hearts" and it's about a medical center where something deeply unsettling begins to unfold. But before we get into today's stories, if you're a fan of the strange dark and mysterious delivered in story format and you've come to the right podcast because that's all we do and we upload four times a week.

Monday, Wednesday, Thursday and Fridays. So if that's of interest to you, please invite the fall of button to come over to your nice, calm backyard barbecue, but be sure to replace their hot dog with a lit stick of dynamite.

“Okay, let's get into our first story called "Dating Game."”

Before the Batch Thorett pitted 30 men against each other to win one woman's heart, Americans watched another show about random strangers competing for a mate. It was called "The Dating Game." Starting in 1965, this reality show featured a woman asking three men questions without seeing their faces and based on their answers at the end of the show she would choose one to go on a date with.

On the surface, the September 13, 1978 showing of the dating game looks like every other episode with lots of unsuttle in Ywendo. But this episode would go down in history as a one-of-a-kind and not in a good way. At the end of this particular show, it was time for the Batch Thorett Cheryl Bradshaw to make her decision and she would choose Batch Thore number one who would turn out to be this tall,

good-looking, long-haired guy whose name was Rodney. Rodney comes around the partition and they see each other for the first time and everybody laughs and they hug. And the show looks like every other show and on stage Rodney looks like every other contestant that's ever been on the show. But after the show ended and Cheryl and Rodney went back stage and actually began having a real conversation that was not being filmed, Cheryl would say that Rodney completely changed.

He became incredibly creepy and was saying things like, "I always get the girl."

“And then at some point he says, "Hey, you should come out with me tonight.”

It'll be a date you'll never forget." And she turns them and just says, "No thanks." This would turn out to be a really wise decision because Rodney was a horrible, horrible person. Had the show done a background check on Rodney, they would have discovered that he assaulted an eight-year-old and went to jail for three years for it and was currently on parole.

But even if they had done a background check on Rodney, the check would not have discovered what he did at night. Rodney was shamelessly cocky and self-confident and unlike a lot of men, he had no issue walking right up to any woman anywhere and flirting with her. And he used that to his advantage. He would go up to women and bars and he would convince them that he was a fashion photographer and that they were so beautiful when you come back to my apartment and do a photo shoot with me. And just like Cheryl on the dating show, these women were immediately kind of charmed by him and would say yes.

Once they got back to his apartment, he would shut and lock the door and then become that creepy guy that Cheryl saw backstage. But unlike Cheryl who at the time she saw this, just said I'm not interested and was able to leave, these women were trapped. And then whether they wanted to or not, they would do a photo shoot with him and then he would strangle them to death. Because Rodney all call out was not your typical dating game contestant. He was a serial killer who by the time he stepped foot on that show and was chosen by Cheryl Bradford to win the game.

He had already killed four people. In over a two year period, he killed as many as 130 people. But if you're doing the math, is over those two years he was killing at least one person a week.

Alcala was finally apprehended and he was sentenced to death.

Our next story is called Something Scratching. On the afternoon of June 1st, 2018, 36 year old Luis Garcia headed into Mexico City to meet up with his older brother.

When Luis was 14 years old and his older brother was 15, their parents had gone through a really messy divorce

“and during it, their father had just walked out on them and they never saw him again.”

Shortly after that, their mother remarried and her new husband moved in with the family and shortly after that, their mother just vanished. And the boys, they asked their stepfather like, "Where is she? Where is she gone?"

But the stepdad would say, "I don't know, she went out on an errand and she never came back."

And the boys, I mean, they were very suspicious of their stepfather because this did not feel like something their mom would do, like she would not abandon them. But just a couple of days after their mom disappeared, their stepfather disappeared too. And so all of a sudden, these teenage boys are just left to fend for themselves. Now, the boys would contact police, and specifically they said, "Hey, we think something happened to our mom.

We think maybe our stepdad had something to do with it, but everybody's abandoned us. And the police would launch an investigation and they would go looking for their mother, but they couldn't find her. And they couldn't find these stepfather or the biological father.

“And so after the police wound down their investigation, the two boys, again, they've been orphaned now,”

and they, you know, learned to fend for themselves, but they never stopped looking for their mom.

For nearly two decades, they continued to search Mexico City for their mother, and they just could never get any sort of closure. They really didn't know what happened to her. And so today, the two brothers had met up, not to go looking for their mom, but instead to meet at their childhood home.

So after their mother and stepfather and their biological father had abandoned them, the two boys had lived in the childhood home on their own, you know, fending for themselves. They'd grown up there. And then eventually, when they were old enough, they'd moved out and started their own adult lives on their own,

but they'd never sold the house.

They'd just kind of kept it in their possession and let it sit there. But now, they were going back to, you know, go through and sort of clean it up, and you know, decide if they wanted to do some renovations, and just kind of fix the place up, you know, maybe to sell it. They didn't know.

And so the two brothers, they met up at the home, they'd go inside, and, you know, they're still photos on the wall, you know, old family photos, and there's, you know, all these memories that come rushing back, many of which are very sad and troubling, but, you know, like the brothers, they're having a good time just kind of going down memory lane.

“And at some point, they decide, okay, you know what?”

Not only are we going to clean this place out, but also there's some basic renovations that really need to happen here. Like the place has been sitting here for years, it's sort of fallen into disrepair. Let's fix this place up. And so over the next couple of days, they would call in some contractors to begin to do some basic renovations in the house, while the brothers continue to clean it up, and pack things up, and sort of get it ready for whatever it was going to be.

And on one particular day, when a group of contractors were working in the master bedroom, the brothers were in the living room, doing their own thing, when they heard a big commotion coming from the master suite. One of the contractors began yelling for the brothers to get in here and look at what he had found. It's the two brothers, they got up, they bolt into the master suite, and they look at something that was just sitting on the ground. And at first they didn't even know what they were looking at, but then the contractor after composing himself told them what it was.

And suddenly the boys understood what had happened to their mother. It would turn out the brothers were right, their mother had not simply gone out in abandoned her sons. Instead, on the day their mother left and never came back again, somehow or another, she was bound and gagged and stuffed inside the wall of their family home. And we know this, because when that contractor, two decades later was doing renovations for the brothers inside that home, his sledgehammer went into the wall in the master suite, and when he pulled it out again, a white object came tumbling out of the wall.

And that object was their mother's skull. And after pulling apart the wall and looking inside, they would find the rest of her skeleton clearly bound and gagged. And then perhaps most disturbingly of all is that in the wall, they would also find all these scratch marks. Suggesting, she was alive when she was put in there, which means she was in there desperately trying to get the attention of her sons to save her, but nobody could hear her. Following this horrific discovery, the two brothers went to police in Mexico City and told them what happened.

And the police would come to the house, they would look all over the place and try to figure out what happened to their mother, who killed her, but they couldn't solve it. Now, the police always did suspect that the stepfather very likely had some level of involvement here, just given the fact that he himself went missing a couple of days after the mother did. But they could never locate him, and very likely they never will, because today he'd be well over 90 years old and is very likely already dead.

The next and final story of today's episode is called Be Still Their Hearts. On May 27, 2022, an anesthesiologist named Dr. Chad Marston, stood inside of an operating room with a nurse, a surgeon, and their unconscious patient.

That day, Dr. Marston and his colleagues were wrapping up a routine life-suction procedure on a middle-aged woman.

“The surgeon had just finished stitching up the woman's incisions, and so Dr. Marston, following protocol, began taking her slowly off of anesthesia to wake her back up again.”

And so Dr. Marston turned off the anesthesia machine, which is this big rectangular device that takes the liquid anesthesia drugs and converts it into a vapor, so it can be breathed in, and then Dr. Marston removed the breathing mask from the woman's face. Then he changed her IV from an anesthetic drug mixture to regular saline, and so now that these drugs were not being pumped into her system, she would wake up over the next half hour or so. After that, Dr. Marston and the nurse and the surgeon took their patient on the stretcher, and they pushed her out of the OR into the hallway, and began making their way down towards the recovery room.

But as they were walking down this hallway, they bumped into more of their colleagues, another nurse and another anesthesiologist, and the hallway was tight enough that Dr. Marston had to step aside to let these two pass, and then after they did and they sort of waved at their colleagues, Marston and the nurse and the surgeon continued walking, and as they did, Marston happened to look down at their patient, and immediately he knew something was wrong. This woman's skin had turned completely gray.

“Dr. Marston was totally caught off guard by this. He looked at her vital sign monitor and saw that her blood pressure, which just moments ago had been normal, was now dangerously high,”

and then as he's staring at her monitor, her blood pressure plummeted, and then also her oxygen levels fell, and then she began foaming at the mouth. It was clear this woman was going into cardiac arrest, which meant if they didn't act quickly, her heart was going to stop. Now Dr. Marston again has sort of been shocked at how quickly this is happening, but he just jumped into protocol. He began giving the woman chest compressions to make sure blood was flowing to her heart, meanwhile the surgeon administered oxygen and blood pressure medication, and the nurse called for an ambulance.

The reason she had to call for an ambulance is because the surgical center was not equipped to handle medical emergencies. It was only for scheduled surgeries, and so if there was a medical emergency, all they could do was just stabilize the patient until paramedics arrived.

“And that's exactly what Dr. Marston, the nurse and the surgeon did. They got this woman stable, and then just a minute later two paramedics came running down the hallway.”

They took possession of the patient, they put her onto their stretcher, out the door they went, they put her in the back of the ambulance, and they sped off to the local hospital. As Dr. Marston watched the ambulance disappear down the road, he knew his patient was now in good hands, but he was still very shaken by the whole experience. Because this type of emergency, somebody going into unexplained sudden cardiac arrest, following a totally routine surgery was extremely rare. Meaning for this to happen even just once over the course of somebody's medical career to witness something like that was very rare.

But for Dr. Marston, this was not the first time he had seen this.

In fact, literally the day before a different patient at the surgical center had also gone into sudden unexplained cardiac arrest following their routine procedure. So, as Dr. Marston went back inside and began heading upstairs to the hospital administrator's office to tell them about this latest emergency, he kept thinking to himself how crazy it was that he had just witnessed these two unexplained sudden cardiac arrests, basically back to back. But Dr. Marston just thought to himself, you know, hopefully this is just a really bad coincidence.

The surgical center's administrator was a woman named Ashley Berks, and when she heard about this second unexplained cardiac arrest, she knew she had to call a staff meeting. And so that evening, she, along with Dr. Marston and over two dozen other medical staff, doctors, nurses, other anesthesiologists, they met in this conference room in the back of the building. And once everybody was assembled, Ashley began by updating everyone on the two patients who had been rushed off to the hospital for their cardiac emergencies,

and she said they had stabilized and they'd be okay. But Ashley then said what everybody in the room was thinking, which is sudden unexplained cardiac arrest is so rare, we can't just treat these things like coincidence, like something specifically must have caused these incidents, and we need to figure out what that thing was. Now, it was possible that the cause or causes behind these incidents were quite simple.

Ashley said to the group, you know, the first thing she did was she looked at the two patient's files,

to see if they had specific drug allergies or medical risk factors that might have been overlooked by staff. But when she looked at their files, neither patient had those risk factors or allergies, so that couldn't have been it. Ashley said she also looked for just a common thread between these two incidents, like were the patients doing something similar, were they in for similar reasons, were they in the same room, but no, they were in different operating rooms, going through different procedures with different medical teams.

And so there was no obvious common thread between the two incidents.

was that perhaps the equipment in the Surgecare Center had malfunctioned.

“And so what she was going to do out of abundance of caution was just begin testing all of the equipment in the building.”

And so Ashley told the group that in the meantime, while she was doing that, the rest of the staff should be extra attentive to their patients, and also be on the lookout for potential problems with hospital equipment. Ashley watched the medical staff all nod their heads in agreement and begin sort of talking to each other, and then she thanked them all for being there and told them they could leave. Three weeks later, on the afternoon of June 22nd, Ashley stood outside the OR in the hallway,

looking through a cabinet that contained surgical drugs. Ashley was still trying to find a connection between those two sudden cardiac arrests. She'd already checked all the Surgecare Center's equipment from the anesthesia machines to the vital sign monitors

to the breathing tubes, and everything was in perfect working condition.

And so now, checking these drugs inside of this cabinet was sort of like her last resort. She'd printed out a list of recent drug recalls and was now comparing that list against all of the drugs inside of this cabinet.

“And so one by one, she was reading a drug and checking the date on it and comparing it with her list”

to make sure they were not carrying a recall drug still. But after going through dozens and dozens of bottles, there was nothing in their cabinet that was on the recall list. So Ashley still just did not have an answer for why those two cardiac emergencies had happened. However, since that staff meeting three weeks earlier, the Surgecare Center had not had another cardiac emergency. And so Ashley was thinking to herself, you know, maybe, you know, despite not knowing how this happened, these troubles are in the past.

Ashley shut the drug cabinet and walked down the hallway towards the break room to grab her lunch. But the moment she walked inside, she saw a group of her colleagues sitting around a table looking very upset in fact some people were visibly crying, and so Ashley walked up to them and said, "Hey, what's going on?" And a nurse told her that one of their colleagues and anesthesiologists named Dr. Melanie Caspar was dead. Apparently, the night before she had had a heart attack at her home.

And her husband had found her and called 911, but unfortunately, by the time Paramedics arrived, she was already deceased. Ashley was shocked. She knew Dr. Caspar, and she knew she was in great shape. She was only in her mid-50s. I mean, she did not seem like someone who might just randomly have a heart attack.

“But Ashley did remember that over the last few days, she had heard that Dr. Caspar was not feeling well.”

And so Ashley wondered if maybe, you know, her heart attack had something to do with that. Either way, as the Surgecare Administrator, it was Ashley's job to plan staff events like memorial services. And so Ashley told the group, "Hey, I'll get to work putting together a small ceremony for Dr. Caspar." Five days later, on June 27th, Ashley was sitting in front of her office computer, ordering supplies for Dr. Caspar's memorial. When suddenly she heard these loud fast footsteps out in the hall, as if somebody was sprinting towards her office.

And then a moment later, Ashley saw her door burst open, and the anesthesiologist, Dr. Chad Marston, was standing there, and he looked absolutely horrified, and he just said to her, "It's happening again." Ashley's stomach dropped, and she jumped up and sprinted after Dr. Marston, and they made their way to the hallway outside of the O.R. And when they got there, Ashley immediately heard the sound of that long, single beep of somebody's heart monitor, flatlining, and she looked over, and she saw one of the doors to an operating room was open,

and inside, she saw a surgeon performing chest compressions on an elderly patient. And even from out in the hall, Ashley could tell this man was unconscious, his skin was gray, and he was filming it the mouth. It was exactly like the other cardiac emergencies that had happened before, except this time was worse, because that beep, that flatlining beep, meant that this man's heart had actually stopped. And so Ashley just stood there, and horror, watching the surgeon perform these chest compressions,

knowing that if that didn't work, they couldn't get this man's heart started again, he was about to die. Just then, Ashley heard the sound of the doors, leading into the O.R. hallway open, and these two paramedics came rushing inside, and right as they passed her and got to the doorway,

leading in to where this man was basically dying, Ashley heard the sound of the flatline beep,

turned into regular beeping, which meant the surgeon who was doing chest compressions had managed to restart this man's heart. And so Ashley was relieved, but by no means thought they're out of the woods yet. I mean, this man clearly is going through a medical emergency here, but the paramedics got the man off the O.R. table, they put him on a stretcher, and they wheeled him away. And so once they were gone, Ashley, Dr. Marston, and the surgeon who had been doing the chest compressions,

they all just looked at each other like, "What is going on here?" Clearly, there is something causing all these sudden cardiac arrests, but still, nobody knew what it was. Ashley just stood there for a moment, feeling absolutely sick to her stomach. If it wasn't the drugs, and if it wasn't the medical equipment that caused these sudden cardiac arrests,

then what was it? Well, Ashley was determined to find out.

to make sure they really were following their protocol absolutely to a T.

“And one after another, through her research, she discovered that they all worked.”

They were doing exactly what they were supposed to be doing. So, the cardiac arrests could not be chalked up to faulty equipment, recall drugs, or human error. And yet, the cardiac emergencies kept on happening at the surgical center.

There were three incidents in July, and four more incidents in the first three weeks of August.

And so in total, that made ten patients at the surgical center who had all gone in to sudden unexplained cardiac arrest. Now, none of them had died, but Ashley knew a few of them had been left with permanent heart damage. People were getting seriously injured on her watch, and she felt like, you know, she can't figure out what's going on here, and so it's just a matter of time until somebody does die from one of these cardiac emergencies, and so she was feeling completely overwhelmed and stressed out and desperate until August 24th when two things happened in quick succession.

First, in the morning of August 24th, Ashley received a phone call from an officer at the Dallas Police Department,

“and they told her that the autopsy had been completed on Dr. Melanie Caspar, the anesthesiologist who had died back in June from a heart attack at her home.”

And this police officer thought that Ashley really needed to know that her heart attack had not been natural. It was actually caused by an overdose of a drug called UPIVICAN. So, Ashley knew what UPIVICAN was. It was a drug that was basically only used in surgical anesthesia,

but Ashley had never heard of anybody abusing this drug or overdosing on it, because UPIVICAN does not make you high, like morphine or fentanyl does.

It's closer to NOVICAN, it's like a numbing agent. And so Ashley told the officer how weird it was, the idea that she had died of an overdose of UPIVICAN of all drugs, and the officer agreed with her, but regardless, he thought Ashley should know, because he thought it was possible that Dr. Caspar had gotten the UPIVICAN from the surgical center. And so feeling totally confused, Ashley thanked the officer for telling her and they hung up,

“and then Ashley walked to the OR hallway to check the drug cabinet where drugs like UPIVICAN were stored.”

But, as soon as she entered that hallway, the second thing happened that day. Ashley heard chaos break out inside of an operating room, where she knew an 18 year old boy was undergoing what should have been a routine sinus surgery. And so she watched helplessly as the doors flung open and a nurse came running out into the hall to call an ambulance, and then inside the room, Ashley saw an anesthesiologist performing chest compressions on this boy,

and another doctor was administering oxygen and blood pressure medication. It was the same nightmare playing out now for an 11th time. But this time, after the EMTs, wheeled this boy away to be driven off to the local hospital, Ashley was so desperate to figure out what was going on here that she just couldn't wait. And so she rounded up a couple of hospital staffers that were nearby,

and they went into that operating room, and they checked the medical equipment, they checked the drugs that had been used, they searched the floor for anything that might have had something to do with this, I mean, they even searched the trash can.

And in the trash, Ashley found something that the second she saw it,

it made her blood run cold. She couldn't believe somebody would do something this awful, or why they would do this. And so she took the thing she found in the trash, and she ran out of the operating room and upstairs to call the police. Minutes later, two police officers arrived at the Surgecare Center, and they saw what Ashley had found in the trash. And when they looked at it, they knew they had a very serious situation on their hands.

And so right away, they roped off the operating room where this 18-year-old boy had been, and they began looking for evidence inside of there, and then also, they began reviewing the security camera footage from the OR hallway. And as they reviewed this footage, they would find something truly chilling going on in that hallway that totally explained all of the sudden cardiac arrests that had been happening inside the Surgecare Center. This is what they saw on the clearest piece of footage, which was shot five days earlier on August 19th.

A hospital employee is seen walking down the OR hallway carrying a stack of papers under his arm. He walks past a couple of his colleagues, and he arrives in front of this big metallic device that sort of looks like a refrigerator, and he opens it up, and he reaches inside, and he pulls out a saline IV bag. Now, when he does this, nobody else in the hallway bats an eye, because this is a totally normal thing to do. That metal device was a warming machine where saline IV bags were stored to be used during or after surgeries.

At any given point, this warmer would contain a few dozen IV bags, and whenever it got low, certain staff members would restock it. But the police watched this footage over and over again, and they saw this employee who walks up to the warmer was not just carrying a stack of papers.

And so before this man takes out an IV bag from the warmer, he takes this hidden one and places it in the warmer as well,

so he's basically swapped one for one.

“And this was absolutely bizarre because it was not his job to be restocking the warmer.”

He shouldn't have been putting anything inside of the warmer. And so about 30 minutes after, the employee has placed his own IV bag inside of the warmer. A nurse comes out of the OR, walks down the hallway, opens up the warmer, takes one of the warmed up IV bags. Harry's at down the hall goes back into the OR, and minutes later, her patient goes into cardiac arrest. It would turn out that nurse, inadvertently, grabbed the saline bag that the male employee had secretly placed just minutes before.

And she didn't know that that saline bag is what caused the cardiac arrest. Nobody knew until days later, when Ashley is so desperate to figure out why all these patients are going into cardiac arrest, that she began searching through the trash, and she would find an empty IV bag, and she would see very clearly, there was a little puncture on it, just big enough for a needle. And so after seeing this security footage, the police analyzed that empty IV bag that Ashley had found in the trash with a puncture on it,

“to see exactly what was in that IV that went into the 18 year old, who also went into cardiac arrest.”

And inside, they found a combination of three drugs that, when combined, are like a biological bomb that will send somebody into cardiac arrest within minutes.

They were light-accane, which is an anesthetic, epinephrine, which is basically pure adrenaline, and crucially, the third drug found was pubicane,

the anesthetic that Dr. Melanie Caspar had overdosed on, which caused her to die of a heart attack. And this discovery meant that Dr. Caspar's death was almost certainly connected to these poisoned IV bags. In the few days before Dr. Caspar's death, she had been feeling sick and dehydrated. And on the day of her death, she was feeling so unwell at work that unbeknownst to any of her colleagues, she had taken a saline IV bag from that warmer and brought it home with her to rehydrate herself.

But unfortunately, the one that she grabbed was one of the poisoned ones. When paramedics arrived at Dr. Caspar's home, they found her still with the IV needle in her arm. But at the time, nobody connected her death with all of the cardiac emergencies at the Surgecare Center.

“Well, nobody except for the employee who was actually poisoning the IV bags.”

That employee was an anesthesiologist, but it was not Dr. Chad Marston. It was the person that Dr. Marston had to get out of the way for, in the hallway,

that first time his patient had gone into cardiac arrest.

The man who was doing the tampering was Dr. Renaldo Ortiz. He was 58 years old, and he had only worked at the Surgecare Center for about a year. And he had flown mostly under the radar there until May 19th of 2022, which was about a week before the sudden unexplained cardiac arrest had begun at the Surgecare Center. On that day, on May 19th, Dr. Ortiz had allowed one of his patients to stop breathing,

nearly killing the patient. And so as a result of that incident, Dr. Ortiz had been placed under internal investigation by the Surgecare Center, and he was facing the possibility of losing his medical license because of negligence. So to try to avoid losing his medical license, Dr. Ortiz decided he would just try to make all the other doctors look negligent too, taking the attention off of himself.

And so he began sabotaging his colleague surgeries by injecting those drugs into their patients IV bags, knowing it would cause cardiac arrest. Now, none of the patients who went into cardiac arrest at the Surgecare Center died. However, Dr. Caspar, who took that tampered IV bag home with her, did die. And so ultimately, Dr. Ortiz was responsible for her death.

In April of 2024, Dr. Ortiz was found guilty on multiple charges, and he is currently facing a sentence of up to 190 years in prison. A quick note about our stories, they are all based on true events. But we sometimes use pseudonyms to protect the people involved, and some details are fictionalized for dramatic purposes.

The Mr. Ballenpodcast, strange dark mysterious stories, is hosted and executive produced by me, Mr. Ballen. Our head of writing is Evan Allen, produced by Jeremy Bohn, research and fact checking by Shelley Shew, Samantha Van Hoos, Evan Beamer, Abigail Schumway, and Camille Callahan. Research and fact checking supervision by Steven Eer.

Audio editing and post-produced by Whit LaCassio, Jordan Stittum, and Cole LaCassio. Production coordination by Samantha Collins, production support by Antonio Minata and Delana Corley.

Thank you for listening to the Mr. Ballenpodcast.

“And just a reminder, every new and exclusive episode we put out on the Mr. Ballenpodcast,”

you can also now watch on the Mr. Ballen YouTube channel that very same day.

And trust me, some of these stories you truly have to see to believe.

Again, my YouTube channel is just called Mr. Ballen.

“If you want to listen to episodes one week early and add free, you can subscribe to SiriusXMpodcast+ on Apple Podcasts”

or visit SiriusXM.com/podcast+ to listen with Spotify or another app of your choice. So, that's going to do it. I really appreciate your support. Until next time, see ya. [Music]