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. See omnystudio.com/listener https://omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:05Robert Evans?

  Welcome back to Behind the Bastards, a podcast that you're listening to, you're aware of what's happening, you know that this is the show that we do. You know, what else, what else need I say? Bad people, we talk to you about them. How are you doing today? Brandy Posey, our guest.

• 0:22Speaker 01

  Oh, I'm doing good, just with my one name over here.

• 0:28Robert Evans?

  I give you two names, what?

• 0:30Speaker 01

  Oh, no, no, no, I'm thinking about our person we've been talking about on the last episode in this one.

• 0:34Robert Evans?

  Yes, yes, your singular name that people know you by, yeah.

• 0:37Speaker 01

  Yeah, I've been keeping notes on all of the different ones.

• 0:40Robert Evans?

  Yeah, yeah. Look at what they've taken from us, you know? Look at what they've taken from us.

• 0:45Speaker 01

  Exactly, yeah.

• 0:46Robert Evans?

  Heartbreaking.

• 0:49Speaker 02

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• 0:54Speaker 03

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• 1:21Robert Evans?

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• 1:56Robert Evans?

  You know what's not heartbreaking?

• 1:59Speaker 04

  That woman taking all of, uh...

• 2:01Robert Evans?

  Yeah, where things ended last episode with that lady like turning things around on him. His fucking marry you and then take all your money scam. Amazing stuff.

• 2:11Speaker 04

  She said carnival style, fuck you.

• 2:14Robert Evans?

  Yeah, she's so cool.

• 2:17Speaker 01

  We love a queen. Oh, man.

• 2:19Robert Evans?

  We have to stan.

• 2:21Speaker 01

  Do you think at any point, any of them were like, said a different name or he like reacted to a different name? Like, was anybody aware of how many scams he's running?

• 2:29Robert Evans?

  I think he did a lot because he gets caught constantly.

• 2:32Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:33Robert Evans?

  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 funny, but he'll also like cop to everything that 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 of 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 at this point. It's kind of hard to say, like a lot of women.

• 3:16Robert Evans?

  His biographer, Jerry Jamison, author of Vanishing Act, notes, "Humiliated and mortified at being duped and outplayed at his own game, 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 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 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

• 4:01Robert Evans?

  and I'm worth $50 million or however 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 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 started to be a major factor in American life. You know, this isn't 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?

• 4:42Robert Evans?

  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 be able to trust, you know, your brothers and fraternal organizations like the Freemasons. Or your colleagues, if you're like all dentists 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, gain their trust, pretending to be this eccentric rich guy. And then ask them about their lives, like he's quizzing them about details about their family and like what life is like back at home.

• 5:24Robert Evans?

  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 with it. Or he'll be like, oh, my God, your husband's been arrested by some crooked local cop. And I need the equivalent of like five to $10,000 in modern money to bail him out, right? Like I can, I can, we can get him out of jail, but these, these crooked local cops in whatever small town this convention's in. They're, they're not gonna 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'd guess, right? Although maybe not more often than you'd guess, because one of the more popular scams right now is an AI version of the same thing.

• 6:08Robert Evans?

  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 gotta send these guys money or they'll kill me. And then grandma wires 10 grand to whatever fucking scammer.

• 6:26Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's a big problem right now. I told my dad, I was like, we need to have a family safe word. If it doesn't sound like me.

• 6:33Robert Evans?

  That's a very good idea. If you've got especially elderly relatives that you're worried about might get victimized 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 1926 Freemason Convention in St. Louis, which sounds awesome. Initially, the cops think he's running a brothel because he's got so many girls coming and going at all hours of 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.

• 7:19Robert Evans?

  That way he can automate the process because it's a numbers game. You want to make as many calls as possible in 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.

• 7:31Speaker 01

  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.

• 7:40Robert Evans?

  He's getting high off of this, right?

• 7:41Speaker 01

  Yeah, definitely. Yeah.

• 7:42Robert Evans?

  That's, that makes a lot of sense. So this actually, he gets busted when he's in St. 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 merry, wearing merely skimpy night clothing and claimed to be spending the night only after missing their ride 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?

• 8:12Speaker 01

  Yeah, exactly.

• 8:13Robert Evans?

  I doubt he paid reliably, I gotta say. So the cops give up on busting him after they failed 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 kind of incapable of taking 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 St. Louis, a bunch of ads for

• 8:54Robert Evans?

  manufacturing jobs in 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 30% above market wages, like way more money than people are used to. And, you know, times are tough. 1926 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 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 upfront. This is just money to make sure you actually show up for your first day of work, you know? Because we gotta like buy some stuff to get things set up for you. We don't want you to run out on us.

• 9:39Robert Evans?

  So 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 $2,500 in cash as a fully refundable charity fee. This is a real bona fide proposition, and we invite the strictest investigation of our firm by all interested parties. This is a one-time offer. This ad will not appear again." Now, to allow for strict, that's a lot of money, first off.

• 10:05Speaker 01

  No, $2,500 at this time has got to be crazy. That's like all you have, probably.

• 10:10Robert Evans?

  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, basically.

• 10:21Speaker 01

  Well, now I don't like him. And I did, and now I don't.

• 10:25Robert Evans?

  He frames himself as a Robin Hood, and he does 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?

• 10:39Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 10:40Robert Evans?

  Now, in that ad, he noted that like, we allow for the strictest investigation. What 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 periodically. So he's got a partner who's manning the line. And when people call, his partner's like, oh yeah, real business opportunity for sure. Now, we're talking about like 1926. This is a beautiful time to carry out a scam like this. People are still getting used to phones. Phones are not like, people aren't over how weird a phone is.

• 11:22Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 11:22Robert Evans?

  Give someone a phone number and say, this is the headquarters of a big company that wants to hire you. Most people, if the number works, aren't gonna 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.

• 11:44Robert Evans?

  Of course, you can only run a scam like this for so long before somebody calls the cops, 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 St. Louis Police put out an APB that also kind of doubles as like a dating app description for our friend here. It describes Oscar Delano, which remember is the name Robert is working under now, as quote, "good-looking, a flashy dresser, well-groomed, tall and fair, and a favorite with the opposite sex." Like, work harder to get this guy laid. God, fucking St. Louis Police.

• 12:18Speaker 01

  For real.

• 12:19Robert Evans?

  Manning this con man.

• 12:20Speaker 01

  Yeah, his like, yeah, his dating profile would just be like-

• 12:23Robert Evans?

  Incredible in bed.

• 12:24Speaker 01

  All of his wanted posters just in one place.

• 12:27Robert Evans?

  Mm-hmm. Yeah, it'd be like saying, like, one of those old FBI, like, tip line things for the Unabomber that was like, "We suspect he fucked really well." Like, crazy good dick game.

• 12:38Speaker 01

  Yeah, exactly.

• 12:39Robert Evans?

  Why are you even talking about this? Why does that matter?

• 12:43Speaker 01

  Wow. Foreplay for days, son.

• 12:45Robert Evans?

  He was robbing people. Why do we care if he's a... We don't care if he's dating people well?

• 12:52Robert Evans?

  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 20s. So he starts going under the name Eastern Mystic Kigab Jipturm, which I think is, you know, is 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 and credulous. His advice to all clients just happened to involve spanning the coffers of Guru Jipturm." Right? Now, that is, this shows, this is the first time he's gonna show like, an interest in like,

• 13:35Robert Evans?

  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 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.

• 14:05Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 14:05Robert Evans?

  Pretending to be a vaguely, like, ambiguously foreign spiritual guru.

• 14:13Robert Evans?

  So 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, Mrs. 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 gotta bail him out." And, or, sorry, I think, no, in this case, he is pretending to be her husband, right? He's like, doing a reasonably good impression of his voice, but it's not per- 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 his, this other guy's wife has sent. But the operator is like, this guy's supposed to be bald. He obviously has hair.

• 14:57Robert Evans?

  The clerk calls the cops and that's it, right? He's, he's busted.

• 15:00Speaker 01

  Makes sense. His luscious locks gave him away.

• 15:03Robert Evans?

  His beautiful, gorgeous hair, his sexy, sexy hair got him 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, being 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, but it helps burnish his reputation because a lot of local press, he's always saying like, well, you know, for the two weeks that I was committing this crime spree, I made $50,000 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, it's 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.

• 15:47Speaker 01

  Yeah. Does he have cooling down periods to spend any of this money? Cause he's making a lot of it, but like, what's he doing?

• 15:53Robert Evans?

  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 cars, you know, he's living large because he knows he's not going to stay free long any given time.

• 16:07Speaker 01

  Got it. That makes sense. Has it, does anybody tie this guy to Clyde? Is that connection ever made at this point in his life?

• 16:15Robert Evans?

  Yes. Not usually at this. Well, no, actually some of the people do report on this. He's, 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 1927 and was sent to Leavenworth Federal Penitentiary where he remains for about 18 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 a con man, no matter what happens.

• 16:52Speaker 01

  What am I gonna do? Get a job?

• 16:54Robert Evans?

  Nah. So, once he gets out of Leavenworth, he goes right back to conning and petty theft, and soon enough finds himself behind bars again, this time in Missouri State Penitentiary. 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 Allen Taylor. And he's a con man, he 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.

• 17:35Robert Evans?

  Like, the vibes between these two, you should read as like 50% the wet bandits from Home Alone, and Taylor is Marv, for sure, like, he's the dummy. And 50% like a cult of two, where, where our boy is the cult leader, Robert Spears, whatever name he's going under, is the leader, and Taylor is the follower, because Taylor is absolutely devoted to this guy.

• 17:59Speaker 01

  A true henchman's henchman, yes.

• 18:00Robert Evans?

  A true, 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, and they get out in like 1940, and Al Taylor is like, it's been almost 10 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 Mae Steele Henry, who has no idea that he has

• 18:45Robert Evans?

  like two, at least, 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?

• 18:57Speaker 01

  Oh, no.

• 18:58Robert Evans?

  Imagine burying someone, and for 10 years, they were a con man, and just never say a word of it to you.

• 19:05Speaker 01

  Just, I'm just gonna add that to the first date questions. I think you gotta be like-

• 19:08Robert Evans?

  Yeah, are you a, were you a con man for 10 years? Did you rob people at conventions for like a decade?

• 19:13Speaker 01

  I just need to ask this, and this might sound silly, but I just gotta know.

• 19:16Robert Evans?

  How many marriages have you had? How many kids did you abandon before we met? These are all questions to ask, folks.

• 19:24Speaker 01

  Wow.

• 19:25Robert Evans?

  When he and his wife get 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. This is around 1942.

• 19:40Speaker 01

  Oldie but a goodie.

• 19:41Robert Evans?

  He and Al had split up after doing time together in Maryland in 1940, 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 20s is kind of when interest seems to peak, early to mid 20s. But it's pretty popular in that area in this period of time, in like the early 40s. And so he's, 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 go straight."

• 20:25Robert Evans?

  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, he at least initially, the first career he goes for when he's trying to make it legitimately is he becomes a journalist. You could still make money doing that back then. And he like has some articles published for a local Methodist paper. 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. People notice that Bob's really charismatic.

• 21:08Robert Evans?

  He gets asked to deliver 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 patter. 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?

• 21:27Speaker 04

  The sponsors that support this podcast?

• 21:31Robert Evans?

  Never.

• 21:31Speaker 04

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• 21:32Robert Evans?

  Never. Absolutely not. They, they will never learn from their mistakes. Number one of which is sponsoring my podcast. Thank you all for your money.

• 21:43Speaker 05

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• 22:12Robert Evans?

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• 23:12Robert Evans?

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• 23:41Robert Evans?

  And we're back. So yeah, we're, uh, we're talking about, uh, Robert Spears, who's trying to make a go of it in Minneapolis. You know, he's, he's, he's writing for the Methodist Papers. He's become a figure in his community and he meets a young woman, Bonita Foster, and she falls in love with him. She's like 32, 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 was like, oh, I was a war correspondent in the opening stages of World War II. You know,

• 24:26Robert Evans?

  I've been all over the world, all these exciting places and seen all these horrible things. Um, the two get married because she just falls for this dude. And you can guess what happened next. You know what this guy is gonna do when he gets married to a lady?

• 24:41Speaker 01

  He's gonna leave in the night.

• 24:43Robert Evans?

  He is absolutely going to abandon this lady. From the book Self-Styled, of course, he's going to abandon her. That's his only move in relationships is abandon them and rob them blind. From the book Self-Styled. Almost as soon as he signed the marriage license, Spears had started making other plans for California, a life that didn't include his intended bride, Bonita. He answered an advertisement in the local paper from the Schirzers, who were traveling to the West and looking for a paying passenger for the ride. $15 secured a seat in the back of the car. So this like family, the Schirzers, and there's like one other guy, Novak, who's paying for a ride in the car, and he pays 15 bucks to get a ride to the coast. Now, before he leaves,

• 25:26Robert Evans?

  he's got to have some money for California, so he steals everything Bonita has and makes off with like 500 bucks, which is about $8,300 in modern money, right? That's like your savings. Uh, the road trip with the Schirzers starts off normally enough, but the days, uh, 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 The 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 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, it doesn't, this is not like

• 26:10Robert Evans?

  a happy reunion and last meeting between the two.

• 26:13Speaker 01

  Dang.

• 26:13Robert Evans?

  So the car, they get back in the road and Spears is just, just an awful person to be around.

• 26:19Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 26:19Robert Evans?

  And when the car stops outside of Oklahoma City, he starts looking for his money and he realizes that like the 500 bucks that he'd stolen from his latest wife is gone. And he immediately assumes that one of the other passengers, probably like the Schertz or Boy or Novak had taken it. Now, I might say that like, well, you just visited your mom, the veteran thief and con woman.

• 26:40Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 26:41Robert Evans?

  Maybe she robbed you.

• 26:42Speaker 01

  One last heist.

• 26:43Robert Evans?

  That's kind of her thing. Right? That's kind of her thing. One last heist from your mom.

• 26:49Speaker 01

  Just Matilda, just like reaching like a gnarled hand slowly towards his bag as he's weeping over her body.

• 26:56Robert Evans?

  Doesn't notice it. Yeah. Robs his ass blind. I don't know who stole his money. Maybe he just lost it.

• 27:02Speaker 01

  Yeah. Also, they're in the car with you for the next like 2,000 miles.

• 27:06Robert Evans?

  They did it now? So there's a fight, right? He gets incredibly angry and accuses Schertz or Novak of taking his money. They deny it and he goes crazy and he pulls a 38 on them. He pulls a fucking gun and he demands the driver, Mrs. Schertz, pull over. This, this whole crime is insane. I can't wait to tell you about this, Brandon.

• 27:28Speaker 01

  Oh, man. I can't wait to hear this.

• 27:31Robert Evans?

  He makes her pull over to the side of the road so he can tie everyone up in a cornfield and search them.

• 27:37Speaker 01

  Oh, no.

• 27:39Robert Evans?

  Yeah. Yeah. You have now gotten kidnapped into a cornfield. I want to read from Alan Logan's book. He used a small plank of wood to start digging a hole and threatened to shoot to maim them and then bury them alive, they said, if they didn't return his $485. He got $45 from Novak and 14 from young Schertz. They continued to deny all knowledge of his missing stash. Next Spears shuffled them back into the car, all of them in the backseat. Bizarrely, they say, he then soaked a blanket with chloroform and placed it over them. He forced them to inhale until they lost consciousness.

• 28:12Speaker 01

  Oh, no.

• 28:14Robert Evans?

  That's how this crime opens, by the way.

• 28:18Speaker 01

  Wow.

• 28:19Robert Evans?

  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? Cause 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 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 chloroformed a blanket, he gets behind the wheel and he's driving to the nearest town, Weatherford. And he says his plan is he's gonna turn these former traveling companions of his in to the cops for stealing the money that he'd rightfully stolen from the wife that he just abandoned.

• 28:59Robert Evans?

  Now, unfortunately for him, I don't know if you've ever had to chloroform somebody, listeners, Brandy.

• 29:07Speaker 01

  Hands in the air, no, not yet. We'll see how the next few years go.

• 29:12Robert Evans?

  We'll see. Look, if you can get your hands on some chloroform, do. No. It does knock people out, but it doesn't like reliably keep people out? Like when you just sign to 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 and one of them tosses the drugged blanket onto Spears as he drives into Weatherford? So he's, he's now partly chloroformed. 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're all

• 29:54Robert Evans?

  in the car and they're all presumably still fucked up on chloroform? So he's, they're fighting and he has the gun out as they're wrestling him with it. He fires three times during the fray. He hits Novak in the head once, but thankfully it doesn't hurt him badly. He hits the Scherzer boy, I think in the chest, but again, doesn't wound him badly. And he also pistol whips Miss Scherzer, although that may have been an accident. Like he may have just been, cause he was flailing and couldn't really see, cause he's got a chloroform blanket on him? Like, he shoots himself through the hand during this fight. Eventually-

• 30:26Speaker 04

  What is happening?

• 30:28Robert Evans?

  The car comes to a stop and our boy hops out and fucking runs like the wind.

• 30:35Speaker 01

  Yeah, he does.

• 30:35Robert Evans?

  It is unclear what his plan was at this stage, 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 just starts running 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.

• 31:09Speaker 01

  Wow.

• 31:10Robert Evans?

  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 if it's like a pepper ball gun or like a grenade launcher, but he tear gases the whole town, including the mayor. Like he tear gases the mayor, this small town, as he's dragged to run away.

• 31:30Speaker 01

  They're like, who is this man that just came to cause chaos? This is a chaos demon.

• 31:36Robert Evans?

  It's like a Tuesday. We're just chilling in downtown bumfucksville, Oklahoma, and this guy gases everybody.

• 31:42Speaker 01

  Yeah. Sir, this is a Walmart.

• 31:46Robert Evans?

  Yeah, normally you gotta be cops to do that kind of shit to random people and the mayor in the middle of the day. Alan Logan summarizes how this all ends. "It was all just a big 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 claimed that he had been robbed and was driving the shirtsers in Novak to the authorities to alert them of the crime. Spears was back in the headlines again. Two men shot, three anesthetized in wild thousand mile car ride."

• 32:19Robert Evans?

  Great. He makes so many good news stories.

• 32:22Speaker 01

  Wow. Incredible. And then those reporters were having a ball. They're like, wait, what happened?

• 32:27Robert Evans?

  You're eating out on that. He did what? Where'd he get a tear gas gun?

• 32:31Speaker 01

  Oh, there's something new to write about. Thank God.

• 32:34Robert Evans?

  One of my favorite just nonsense crime sprees. Absolutely gained nothing from it. No, 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.

• 32:54Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 32:55Robert Evans?

  Like, that's, that's, I don't know, man. When you tear gas the mayor to escape, bro.

• 33:01Speaker 01

  Yeah. Bad call.

• 33:03Robert Evans?

  You chloroformed a whole family and held him at gunpoint. You tried to shoot him. I don't know, man. I don't know, in a cornfield? Jesus.

• 33:11Speaker 04

  How long does he, uh, get, does he, does he go to, does he go to, what happens?

• 33:16Robert Evans?

  He does go to prison. He gets a great defense attorney. He's really lucky with that. He gets a really good defense attorney and is able to plead down to just four years in prison for second degree robbery. Uh, he enters prison in March of 1942. And when he was asked to write down why he had been incarcerated, his answer was a single word, framed.

• 33:37Speaker 01

  Wow, man.

• 33:38Robert Evans?

  Very funny. You gassed them.

• 33:40Speaker 01

  Yeah, dude, you had the tear gas gun.

• 33:42Robert Evans?

  The whole town.

• 33:44Speaker 01

  The best case scenario is you're extremely sus with a tear gas gun. That's best case.

• 33:50Robert Evans?

  Like, why would you eat? Yeah, yeah. The best, and the chloroform too. What was the, why did you have all that chloroform?

• 33:56Speaker 01

  Yeah, exactly.

• 33:58Robert Evans?

  I kinda think he might've 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 gross. It's like a bad, it's like a nasty crime for nasty people. I'm not an armed robber. I'm a con man, you know?

• 34:14Speaker 01

  Gentleman bandits.

• 34:16Robert Evans?

  That's really how he sees himself. And I think this is just, 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 psycho, 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 framed. I was framed.

• 34:40Speaker 01

  Framed.

• 34:40Robert Evans?

  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 1940s and he himself is pushing 40. Now, the life of a traveling con artist is not easy on your body, nor are repeated prison stints or shooting yourself in the hand during a chloroform gunfight. As a general rule, most physicians avoid again, advise against getting into chloroform gunfights, if you can.

• 35:17Speaker 01

  Yeah, you want to stretch, drink some water and vitamin C.

• 35:20Robert Evans?

  Always be hydrated before a chloroform gunfight. Absolutely. Yeah. Vitamin C. I always take that, uh, 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 moments.

• 35:36Speaker 01

  What if these are things that his mom gave him on the deathbed as she was stealing the money? She was like, I have this tear gas gun and this bottle of chloroform.

• 35:45Robert Evans?

  Wait, take this too?

• 35:47Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 35:48Robert Evans?

  This is your, this is the family chloroform?

• 35:50Speaker 01

  Yeah, exactly. It goes to you now, boy.

• 35:53Robert Evans?

  And now it's your chloroform. Use it well.

• 35:56Speaker 01

  Incredible.

• 35:57Robert Evans?

  Uh, 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, he's, he's traveling around Texas during the oil boom, figuring there's so much money flooding into the state. There's gotta be a way for me to grift some of it. But he actually fails at this. He can't find a way to like 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, Spears, as Spears was kind of traveling around 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 naturopathy medical centers."

• 36:43Robert Evans?

  Spears was vaguely familiar with the term. As we'd noted 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 runaround on the whole medical system. By becoming a naturopath, you can, 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. So our man decides to move to Dallas because by the late 40s, 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.

• 37:22Speaker 01

  A lot of things don't change, buddy.

• 37:24Robert Evans?

  Hasn't changed.

• 37:24Speaker 01

  A lot of things don't change.

• 37:26Robert Evans?

  Well, now Dallas, what's changed is now Dallas is like a major hub for real and fake doctors.

• 37:32Speaker 01

  Correct.

• 37:32Robert Evans?

  Huge numbers of both in Dallas. Like Dallas, the city of anyone who calls themselves 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.

• 37:45Speaker 01

  Yeehaw, baby.

• 37:46Robert Evans?

  Yeah. So for an idea of how inundated Dallas, Texas was with fake doctors, Harry Hoxey, 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 Hoxey had made a shitload of money and he'd invested it in oil, which had allowed him to bribe local politicians to support the nascent movement of Christian fundamentalists who didn't believe in real medicine. That's a big thing for Hoxey. And there's, there's some other guys, some major like super wealthy, like including the wealthiest man in the world at the time, who like live in and around the Dallas area, who are major advocates for like snake oil medicine. And so they're kind of like bribing elected leaders

• 38:28Robert Evans?

  to make sure that Texas stays a friendly climate for this kind of shit.

• 38:32Speaker 01

  Is this like crossing with like Christian scientists?

• 38:35Robert Evans?

  Like, is that kind of? Well, it's Christian fundamentalism.

• 38:38Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 38:39Robert Evans?

  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 1949, Texas created a state board of naturopaths who admit to monitor the field and ensure all practitioners were performing ethically and were competent to do so. They announced new 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 degree and you have to pass a medical exam before we'll call you a naturopathic doctor. That sounds okay, right? Like, given the standards of the time, that's not nothing, you know?

• 39:17Speaker 01

  Yeah, that's, that's not nothing. I like that it's like the high-minded grifters are like, we need to put some, we need to put some rails.

• 39:24Robert Evans?

  We gotta put some guardrails on this.

• 39:25Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 39:26Robert Evans?

  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.

• 39:35Speaker 01

  How dare they?

• 39:36Robert Evans?

  These requirements thus had a loophole. Out-of-state naturopaths could present a license valid in any other state and pay $50 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, Dr. Robert Reddick. He was like the psychiatrist for the Manhattan Project. Like, this is a major figure, actually, in the field. But Reddick, after the Manhattan Project, had come to work at like a state mental hospital, and is 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

• 40:17Robert Evans?

  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 cynical about if you're working in a state mental hospital in the fucking 40s. 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 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.

• 40:58Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 40:58Robert Evans?

  I think that's kind of his attitude.

• 41:00Speaker 01

  That makes sense. Like, watch how bullshit this actually is.

• 41:03Robert Evans?

  Yeah, look at how bullshit this is. Because I'm making it bullshit. I'm not going to defend him on that.

• 41:08Speaker 01

  Yeah, no, no, no.

• 41:10Robert Evans?

  I have more understanding where like, yeah, that is, I get why you'd be really angry at everything after that set of experiences.

• 41:17Speaker 01

  Yes, of course.

• 41:18Robert Evans?

  So Spears cobbles together like five grand worth of modern money and he gets his license from Dr. Rennick. 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 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 money, basically. Like, and he gives, he provides 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

• 42:03Robert Evans?

  board in Texas. Overnight, he becomes a doctor. Now, he's not an M D, but he starts writing his name out as Robert Spears M D because who's gonna stop him? Right? Like, he's gonna stop me. He starts his practice in 1950 and by 1955, 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.

• 42:25Speaker 04

  What the fuck?

• 42:26Robert Evans?

  He is really good at this.

• 42:28Speaker 04

  Why?

• 42:29Robert Evans?

  Being a fake doctor.

• 42:30Speaker 01

  Of course. The guru bullshit of it all. I'm sure he's great at it. Yeah.

• 42:35Robert Evans?

  It's a confidence scheme and he's great at that. He's a confidence man.

• 42:39Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 42:39Robert Evans?

  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 gonna primarily visit that doctor for one of three things. To lose weight, to have a back alley 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.

• 43:15Speaker 01

  Yeah. Desperate people in a lot of ways, yeah.

• 43:18Robert Evans?

  Yes, and from what we know, at least, I don't 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 it's illegal.

• 43:41Speaker 01

  Right, right, right.

• 43:43Robert Evans?

  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 cures primarily and some other quack remedies. He's got these pills he calls B-Slim reducing pills, which I'm gonna guess were just methamphetamine or amphetamine of some sort, or at least just pure Phaedra concentrated. He's also got his radionics machine, which uses electromagnetic waves to treat illnesses. Another popular product among the Dallas

• 44:24Robert Evans?

  Wine Mom set was the electrocyrometer, which Jamison describes as promising to quote, "provide insights into the mental state of an individual and thus provide, in 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?

• 44:43Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah.

• 44:44Robert Evans?

  That's the primary business, at least at the start of this, and he does very well. These 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 like, the early to mid 50s, he's pulling in like, four grand a month, which is about $50,000 a month in modern money. And not a Dr. Spears was not only popular with the rich ladies, in 1954, he was named president of the Texas Naturopathic Association. So he is running the whole association four years into his career.

• 45:18Speaker 01

  He's like, I see the top of that pyramid, and I want it.

• 45:21Robert Evans?

  And I want to be there.

• 45:23Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 45:24Speaker 04

  Wow.

• 45:25Robert Evans?

  Now Spears became hugely influential in the burgeoning field. His natural charisma and skill at lying made him the most interesting fake doctor at any professional event. He was now attending 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 caused by a gardening accident.

• 45:44Speaker 01

  Classic rake through the hand.

• 45:45Robert Evans?

  Yeah.

• 45:45Speaker 01

  You know.

• 45:46Robert Evans?

  I raked myself bad.

• 45:49Speaker 04

  But you couldn't heal that?

• 45:50Robert Evans?

  But you couldn't heal that? Yeah, come on, man. That was way worse. You should have seen it. The whole hand was gone.

• 45:55Speaker 01

  It used to be fat. This hand used to be so fat.

• 45:57Robert Evans?

  This hand used to be fat as hell.

• 45:59Speaker 01

  Yeah, look at it now.

• 46:01Robert Evans?

  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, Frances Massey. She was the most similar to him out of all his wives, except for the one who conned him. Before they met, Frances had gotten interested in bogus medicine and even taken a class in the use of the electrocyrometer in Waco. She decided this made her basically a professional, and she started marketing herself as a licensed psychiatrist after this point. She charged $5 a treatment, which is like $50 today, and scammed enough people that the FBI actually had a sizable file on her, totally separate from the one on her husband.

• 46:43Robert Evans?

  Here's how one report from one of her patients recorded her work operating. This, I found this in Jameson's book, but this is from an FBI report. "In the summer of 1956, I was directed to Frances Spears when I had a nervous breakdown. She would take me to an upstairs room where she would have me lie on a daybed 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 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 Ms. Spears was not competent to help me, and I did not return."

• 47:27Speaker 01

  Just like a touch of the MKUltra. I love that.

• 47:29Robert Evans?

  I love fake medicine, yeah.

• 47:31Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 47:31Robert Evans?

  And they're, this, these devices, one of them, that when it's plugged in, it sounds like it's basically a galvanic skin response measuring thing, which is what an E-meter is, like the Scientologist use. There's a lot of, a lot of grips. You're kind of using the same, like, tools, right?

• 47:48Robert Evans?

  So it's, it's not a surprise that Francis is, this is gonna be a love connection for Dr. Spears.

• 47:53Speaker 01

  I wonder if he walked into her office and saw that machine unplugged and was like, "Ooh, baby."

• 47:59Robert Evans?

  This is a grifter who knows how to grift.

• 48:01Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah.

• 48:02Robert Evans?

  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.

• 48:16Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah.

• 48:17Robert Evans?

  He's still a grifter, but he has, he has shown some growth here. Like, he actually does care about this last family of his.

• 48:25Speaker 01

  Well, and he's technically straight by the eyes of the quote, quote, "law." Like, he hasn't, yeah.

• 48:30Robert Evans?

  And I, 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 events at his house that high society goes to. He's a respected man for a while. Near the end of 1956 Spears started talking to his friends and colleagues about his next scam medical device, which 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, that's right, motherfuckers. This guy invented Theranos like 60 years before that turtleneck lady. It's the same con and he had exactly as much real technology as Theranos did.

• 49:11Speaker 01

  That's amazing, but how did he look in a turtleneck though?

• 49:15Robert Evans?

  He was doing, yeah, he was, he, yeah, I bet not nearly as good.

• 49:20Robert Evans?

  But he was doing the grift way before turtleneck lady.

• 49:23Speaker 01

  There ain't an original thought in this world anymore.

• 49:26Robert Evans?

  No, no. He was the last original thinker, Robert Spears. So now because he's Robert Spears, he does start marketing this gadget as being able to cure illnesses too, writing, "The electrical impulses made by the machine could cure polio."

• 49:41Speaker 01

  What, sir, sir?

• 49:43Robert Evans?

  Share, man, share.

• 49:44Speaker 01

  Yeah, cure polio, whatever.

• 49:46Robert Evans?

  Why not, bro? Fuck it. Now, so far, nothing he's done as a naturopath is quite evil enough to like, 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 in the amount of harm he's doing as he gets more and more into providing illicit abortions. Now, he first got connected to that chunk of the field when he met another naturopath, Donald Loomis, at a convention in St. Louis. Donald had been previously a major fitness influencer of his day, and like Hollywood's 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 abortion doctor for MGM Studios.

• 50:31Robert Evans?

  Like, if MGM has a starlet who has an unwanted pregnancy, they call Donald, and he takes care of this, and he's bribing the cops, he's bribing everybody so he 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 for appendectomies in the late 40s and early 50s that appendicitis was described as a Hollywood epidemic. Jamison writes, "Loomis, with a built-in clientele and the impermanence 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 crew would show up for a purported workout, perform his duties, and be on his way, receiving compensation

• 51:12Robert Evans?

  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.

• 51:28Speaker 01

  Damn, wrap it up, Clark.

• 51:31Robert Evans?

  Yeah, not Clark's strong suit.

• 51:33Speaker 01

  No, not so much. Damn.

• 51:36Robert Evans?

  Have we done our second ad break, Sophie?

• 51:38Speaker 07

  We have not.

• 51:39Robert Evans?

  Then why don't you all wrap it up and listen to these ads?

• 51:44Speaker 05

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• 52:15Robert Evans?

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• 53:14Robert Evans?

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• 53:55Robert Evans?

  And we're back. Um, yeah, we're talking about the abortionist to the stars. Now, Louis, I think he's pretty good at this. I don't think like in terms of the health outcomes of his patients are pretty good. So I'm not, I'm, I'm, 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 consequences for the women that he's working on than like Loomis experiences. So they, these two meet up at a convention in the 50s and Loomis takes Spears and another doctor named Tusk under his wings and they perform an underground business, splitting up the West and Southwest between their practices. Through the 50s, while he's like also a successful naturopath, the business booms, but they start to get

• 54:37Robert Evans?

  increasing police scrutiny on them. And Spears is like, this doesn't seem safe. I want to take a step back and like, keep selling fake medical devices because that seems a lot safer and more reliable. Yeah. 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 trying, stepping in to 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, winds up recording the state representative behind this push in a hotel room. Because so this representative is trying to push for like a more restrictive law, but he's

• 55:21Robert Evans?

  basically open to bribes and he records, Harmon records Dr. 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 60 grand and Spears is like, done. I'll pay it. I've got the foundation funds. Like we'll bribe you with that, basically. Oh, yeah, yeah. This had been his real job since he'd become the head of the state naturopathic association, right? Is he's bribing lawmakers and police to look the other way. Cause 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 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

• 56:05Robert Evans?

  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 in 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 they were 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 try a hands off approach. So there's this other naturopath named Feyman, who's the guy he bought his fake degree from.

• 56:50Robert Evans?

  And Feyman had built this intrauterine paste, right? And he marketed it under the name Metro Vact. Now, there were a lot of pastes that were meant to induce abortion in this period of time, right? Non surgical abortions, and they 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 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, which Feyman is doing. Feyman is moving it through this huge underground network. It's worth adding this fact about Feyman's violet covered abortion paste from Jamison's

• 57:34Robert Evans?

  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 into the bloodstream, the patient always died. So it's not safe stuff. And these guys don't really care about the impact it has on people. In fact, Spears cares so little that he tries to get Feyman to license this formula and Feyman's like, no, I'm making money off of it. So Spears has a pharmacist with this 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 the product that he's selling. He just has this pharmacist cook up another paste that will burn people

• 58:17Robert Evans?

  from the inside. Fucking Napoleon Bonaparte Barbie, amazing name.

• 58:22Speaker 01

  Oh, that is crazy.

• 58:24Robert Evans?

  Quite, quite a, quite a name. By mid 1957 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 teas 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 1958, one 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 $22,000 a month,

• 59:08Robert Evans?

  but this doesn't last long. In July of 1959, one of his patients, a 22-year-old schoolteacher, had gotten sick and I think eventually died after coming into UCLA Medical Center. And when she'd come in, she claimed that Dr. 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 gonna get in a lot of trouble for this.

• 59:34Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 59:35Robert Evans?

  This, this is gonna 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 paint, whatever fucking paste he's using, and they find fake diplomas. They also arrest Donald Loomis, even though he'd been bribing the cops. Like Spears gets them all busted because he's so lazy and does not care at all about the, the health of the, the women he's working on. I think Loomis at least cared about, because he wants 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.

• 1:00:16Robert Evans?

  Fucking Spears just doesn't give a shit. And because he's so sloppy and reckless, a woman's life is destroyed. And, uh, yeah, it also just rolls up this whole abortion market that had been running.

• 1:00:30Speaker 01

  That's so gnarly.

• 1:00:31Robert Evans?

  Yeah. It's fucked up. Spears is near 70. He's old at this point and he is 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 gonna 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?

• 1:00:57Speaker 01

  Yes, yeah.

• 1:00:58Robert Evans?

  So while, while all this is going on with, 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 kids. Periodically, that weird guy Spears, who I never liked, would call 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 how they would

• 1:01:42Robert Evans?

  like blow off steam while he's a successful naturopath. So it seems like Spears kind of gets with his buddy and is like, hey, I've got another con. We don't know exactly what happened. We know that on November 6th, 1959, Robert Spears booked a plane flight from Tampa to New Orleans. He had previously taken out $100,000 air travel insurance 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 $37,500 insurance policy. He calls his wife three times before getting on the plane and she could tell something was wrong with him. National Airlines Flight 967 took off at 11:22 PM. It last made radio contact at

• 1:02:27Robert Evans?

  around 12:44 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 42 people aboard are presumed to have died. Now, we don't know what caused Flight 967 to go down. There was a thorough investigation, this is 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 who Spears and Taylor were kind of connected to, had killed himself on a plane, taking out the whole plane for the insurance money.

• 1:03:09Robert Evans?

  So this is probably a con that they kind of wrapped up from him. There are some people who doubted Taylor really died. It seems like he did. He may have Spears may have tricked him. Taylor may not have known what was happening.

• 1:03:22Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:03:23Robert Evans?

  Or maybe he knew kind of what was, because he took out an insurance policy, but maybe he just had a bad feeling. 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 naturopath 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 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 like, like something's fucked up here.

• 1:04:08Robert Evans?

  Tereski gets like weirded out because Spears is traveling around with a trunk full 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.

• 1:04:21Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:04:21Robert Evans?

  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 worshipped him to get on it instead, and tried to have his wife cash in that $100,000 life insurance policy. His plan was for it to support their kids, right? Her and their kids while 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 like do something for his family. And so he may have orchestrated the murder of 42 people on a plane to try and get his wife and kids the insurance money.

• 1:04:56Speaker 01

  Yikes.

• 1:04:57Robert Evans?

  That's probably what happens, but we don't know.

• 1:05:00Speaker 01

  Wow.

• 1:05:01Robert Evans?

  He does get caught. This, 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.

• 1:05:12Speaker 01

  Yeah, just general shadery, I think is probably the charge that he finally caught at the end.

• 1:05:18Robert Evans?

  Yeah. Two years later, like while he's serving of his five-year prison term for car theft, Spears does an interview with Eddie Barker of KRLD TV 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 they could cash it on the insurance, but also like who else had the bomb?"

• 1:05:43Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:05:44Robert Evans?

  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.

• 1:05:51Speaker 01

  That's kind of bad.

• 1:05:52Robert Evans?

  Business for the mob.

• 1:05:54Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 1:05:55Robert Evans?

  They're like, we got enough going on here. Doing that.

• 1:05:57Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:05:59Robert Evans?

  I think Spears probably blew that plane up for the insurance money, which definitely, if, if the other stuff didn't, definitely qualifies him as a bastard.

• 1:06:07Speaker 01

  Yes, 100%. Does, did his wife get the insurance money? Did that happen?

• 1:06:11Robert Evans?

  No, no, you don't get that when you, because first off, he's not dead.

• 1:06:13Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 1:06:14Robert Evans?

  Once he's proven alive, there's not going to be an insurance payout. Like, you're fine, man.

• 1:06:19Speaker 01

  That's true. God. So all that for, like, I killed all those people for nothing. Wow. What an asshole. And a bastard. Wow. That's, you know, when I was so hopeful in the last episode when you said, no pedophiles.

• 1:06:36Robert Evans?

  Not a pedophile, probably.

• 1:06:38Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. So, you know, we're, we're still, we're still batting a thousand in that category for sure.

• 1:06:44Speaker 04

  Just a mass murderer and a guy who picked on people that were in vulnerable situations trying to get, you know, care.

• 1:06:55Speaker 01

  Yes, exactly. That should have been legal the entire time and.

• 1:06:59Robert Evans?

  Yeah, it never should have been okay.

• 1:07:00Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:07:01Robert Evans?

  But what is it gonna do? Stop people from committing crimes?

• 1:07:04Speaker 04

  Yeah, I mean, the, 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 purple paste is awful.

• 1:07:19Robert Evans?

  Not great.

• 1:07:19Speaker 04

  And, you know, there's things that could have been done so that they didn't need to go to that kind of person. But, uh, America, Texas.

• 1:07:29Robert Evans?

  Yeah, yeah, some of this is just yet, that's how things were back when all this stuff was illegal.

• 1:07:33Speaker 01

  Um, a good reminder for the future.

• 1:07:36Robert Evans?

  A good reminder, yeah.

• 1:07:37Speaker 04

  Yes.

• 1:07:38Speaker 01

  Yeah, there will be a way, it will always happen regardless. That's why it needs to be legal and easily accessible.

• 1:07:44Robert Evans?

  Yeah, legal and like regulated so that people are actually.

• 1:07:47Speaker 04

  It is healthcare.

• 1:07:48Robert Evans?

  Medicine.

• 1:07:49Speaker 04

  It is healthcare.

• 1:07:49Robert Evans?

  As opposed to poison.

• 1:07:51Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 1:07:52Robert Evans?

  Yep. Cool stuff.

• 1:07:54Speaker 04

  Brandy, you wanna plug your plugables for us one last time?

• 1:07:57Speaker 01

  Yeah, please. Um, so, uh, 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, uh, comedy record label that I've been running for a few years now. Um, 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, uh, starting this year with my special. Um, so Burn This Records on YouTube. I also have a podcast myself called Lady to Lady with, uh, Babs Gray and Tess Barker. We've been around for 15 years. It's a real good time. And, um, I'll be on Warped Tour all summer long. So, um, follow me at Brandazzle wherever you follow people that you like. And, uh, yeah, thank you.

• 1:08:38Robert Evans?

  Follow Brandazzle and follow this podcast to our inevitable conclusion, uh, when we get raided for providing fake medical treatments.

• 1:08:48Speaker 04

  No, no, no.

• 1:08:50Robert Evans?

  One day, Sophie, one day, God willing, you know? God willing.

• 1:08:53Speaker 04

  I think I was just relieved for a second that you didn't say anything about bombs.

• 1:08:58Robert Evans?

  Yeah. That, that's, that's for the best, probably best not to, not to poke that bear.

• 1:09:03Speaker 04

  Let's not do either of those things.

• 1:09:06Robert Evans?

  You know what? Poke a bear.

• 1:09:07Speaker 04

  You know what? Bye.

• 1:09:08Robert Evans?

  They seem like wimps.

• 1:09:09Speaker 04

  Nope, bye.

• 1:09:11Robert Evans?

  Bye.

• 1:09:15Speaker 07

  Behind the Bastards is a production of Cool Zone Media. For more from Cool Zone Media, visit our website, coolzonemedia.com, or check us out on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Full video episodes of Behind the Bastards are now streaming on Netflix, dropping every Tuesday and Thursday. Hit "Remind Me" on Netflix so you don't miss an episode. For clips and our older episode catalog, continue to subscribe to our YouTube channel, youtube.com/AtBehindTheBastards. We love about 40% of you, statistically speaking.

• 1:09:49Speaker 03

  Cash Flow Crunch. OnDeck's small business line of credit gives your business immediate access to funds, up to $200,000, right when you need it. Cover seasonal dips, manage payroll, restock inventory, or tackle unexpected expenses without missing a beat. With flexible draws, transparent pricing, and control over repayment, get funded quickly and confidently. Apply today at ondeck.com. Funds could be available as soon as tomorrow. Depending on certain loan attributes, your business loan may be issued by OnDeck or Celtic Bank. OnDeck does not lend in North Dakota. All loans and amounts subject to lender approval.

• 1:10:19Speaker 06

  If you're a fight fan and you haven't seen the BKFC app yet, you're missing the world's most exciting combat sport. Bare Knuckle Fighting Championship has changed the game. No gloves, no stalling, no boring rolling around on the ground. Just pure violence and pure entertainment. The BKFC app includes live events, past fights, original series, behind-the-scenes access, merch discounts, and more. Only $7.99 a month, or $49.99 a year. Get the BKFC app at BKFC.com.

• 1:10:50Speaker 05

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• 1:11:55Speaker 02

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