Casefile Extra: Maria Cruz

When 35-year-old Maria Cruz failed to show up for work on April 14 2003, her colleagues immediately knew something was wrong. A visit to her Manhattan apartment revealed no signs of a struggle and no indication of where she might have gone. As investigators retraced her movements from the day before, they discovered she had attended a medical appointment. But when they tried to contact her doctor, nothing was as it seemed. Casefile Extra features bonus episodes exploring compelling cases, stories and topics beyond our regular weekly releases. --- Narration – Anonymous Host https://www.instagram.com/caseys.snaps/ Research & writing – Jessica Larsen Production & music – Mike Migas http://mikemigas.com/ Audio editing – Anthony Telfer Sign up for Casefile Premium: Apple Premium https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/casefile-true-crime/id998568017?ign-itscg=30200S&ign-itsct=casefile_podcastsSpotify Premium https://spotifyanchor-web.app.link/e/9gSwcv7USsbPatreon https://www.patreon.com/casefileFor all credits and sources, please visit https://casefilepodcast.com/casefile-extra-maria-cruz Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy https://acast.com/privacy for more information.

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• 2:58Speaker 00

  Our episodes deal with serious and often distressing incidents. If you feel at any time you need support, please contact your local crisis centre. For suggested phone numbers for confidential support and for a more detailed list of content warnings, please see the show notes for this episode on your app or on our website.

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  On the morning of Monday, April 14, 2003, staff at Barclays Capital Bank in New York City realised that something was wrong. Senior analyst, 35-year-old Maria Cruz, was known among her colleagues as a hard-working, dependable employee who arrived early and rarely took time off. But despite having a team meeting scheduled that morning, her desk remained empty. With no message or email explaining Maria's absence, her colleagues were immediately concerned. They made numerous attempts to contact her throughout the day, but their calls went unanswered. When Maria failed to appear again the following day, their unease grew.

• 4:09Speaker 00

  One team member left work to check on her, only to discover that the address he had for Maria was outdated and she hadn't lived there for months. Back at the office, her colleagues contacted the bank's Human Resources Department to see if they had her current address on file.

• 4:27Speaker 00

  Armed with the new address, the next morning, another colleague stopped by Maria's building on West 50th Street in Manhattan. When he arrived at Maria's apartment, his attention was instantly drawn to something in front of the door: a small stack of newspapers. Upon closer inspection, he saw that it was three days' worth of The Wall Street Journal, still sealed in their plastic wrappers.

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  With growing concern, Maria's coworker knocked and rang the doorbell repeatedly, but there was no answer. The door to Maria's apartment remained firmly shut.

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  Approximately six miles away, in Jersey City, the phone rang at the home of Maria's aunt, Rebecca. She listened with concern as Maria's boss told her that her niece had not been seen or heard from in days. As Maria's emergency contact person, he thought she should know.

• 5:49Speaker 00

  Like Maria's colleagues, Rebecca instantly recognised how out of character this was for the 35-year-old. She rang one of her nephews, who lived near Manhattan, and asked him to check on his cousin.

• 6:03Speaker 00

  The nephew gathered his two brothers, and together they headed for Maria's building. As soon as they saw the pile of untouched newspapers blocking her front door, they knew something wasn't right. The brothers sought out the building manager and explained the situation, asking if he could let them in so they could check on Maria. The building manager was unable to help. He wasn't allowed to let people into a tenant's apartment unless he was legally compelled to do so.

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  Undeterred, the brothers made their way through midtown Manhattan to the nearest police station, located on 54th Street. Two officers accompanied them back to the building and forced Maria's door open so the brothers could enter.

• 6:49Speaker 00

  Inside the apartment, they saw nothing out of the ordinary. There were no signs of a struggle and no hint of a hurried departure. The apartment was slightly dishevelled, but nothing out of the ordinary for a busy professional with a demanding job. The brothers looked around, but no valuables appeared to be missing. Even Maria's passport sat undisturbed in its usual spot, but there was no sign of their cousin.

• 7:20Speaker 00

  Maria Cruz had emigrated to the United States from the Philippines a decade earlier. When news of her disappearance reached her family back home, they began doing what they could to locate her from overseas. Relatives rang around hospitals in New York, checking to see if she'd been admitted. Meanwhile, two of Maria's older siblings, her brother June and sister Tess, boarded a flight to New York to assist with the search in person. They landed at JFK International Airport on Friday, April 18, 2003, five days after Maria was discovered to be missing, to find there were still no news on their sister's whereabouts.

• 8:02Speaker 00

  They also discovered that a formal missing persons report had not yet been filed. Their cousins explained that they'd tried to file a report as soon as they'd found Maria's apartment empty, but police had advised them to wait a full week, which, at the time, was the standard waiting period for adults who went missing.

• 8:23Speaker 00

  But June and Tess didn't want to delay any longer. Along with their uncle, they made their way to the NYPD precinct on West 54th Street to see what could be done. They explained to the officer on duty that Maria was not someone who would voluntarily run away without contacting her family or employer, and emphasised how deeply out of character it was for her to suddenly disappear. After hearing their concerns, police agreed to formally register Maria as a missing person, and an official investigation into her disappearance began. A detective then accompanied the three family members back to Maria's apartment to undertake another search. The apartment looked the same as it had during the first search.

• 9:09Speaker 00

  But while Maria's cousins hadn't noticed anything out of place, as June and Tess walked through the space, they noticed the details that instantly rang alarm bells.

• 9:22Speaker 00

  Maria and her siblings had been born and raised in the Philippines, in a family where discipline and responsibility were highly valued. They were expected to work hard and excel, both at home and in their education, which they did. Maria in particular was highly conscientious. An outstanding student from a young age, she'd left Kazon City and moved to the United States on her own in pursuit of a better life. In New York, she'd steadily worked her way up to become a senior analyst at a major bank, her feat made possible because of her exceptional discipline and work ethic. June and Tess knew their sister was meticulous,

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  someone who took great pride in keeping her affairs and her home in impeccable order. But, standing in her apartment, they saw little evidence of that order. There were dirty dishes in the sink, loose papers on the table, and a bunch of grapes sitting on the kitchen bench.

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  While this might have been an ordinary amount of clutter for many people, it was unusual for Maria. If their sister had intended to go away somewhere, her siblings were sure she would have left her home spotless, not with leftovers in the fridge and the blinds undrawn. For them, the condition of the apartment suggested Maria had not planned to be away for long. They were now firm in their belief that she had not left voluntarily.

• 10:54Speaker 00

  As the days passed with no sign of Maria, efforts to find her intensified. Her family, both in New York and overseas, began pursuing every possible lead. Relatives continued contacting hospitals across the city, while others tried to get media attention on the case. A website was set up with information about Maria, flyers were handed out, and missing persons posters were plastered around the neighborhood. But none of it led to any new information. Detectives began canvassing Maria's neighborhood and reviewing surveillance footage, including from the cameras inside her apartment building.

• 11:35Speaker 00

  The footage confirmed that Maria had left her building on the morning of Sunday, April 13, but there was no footage of her returning.

• 11:45Speaker 00

  With no leads coming in and no evidence that a crime had been committed, investigators decided to reconstruct Maria's movements on the last day she'd been seen. If they could determine where she had gone, they hoped it might point them toward what had happened or where she'd gone next. Slowly, piece by piece, a picture of that final day began to emerge.

• 12:09Speaker 00

  Sunday, April 13, 2003, had been Palm Sunday, an important day in the Christian calendar. Maria was a devout Catholic who attended Mass regularly at St. Melikai's Church on West 49th Street, and that morning had been no different. Other parishioners recalled seeing her at the 11:00 a.m. service.

• 12:32Speaker 00

  After Mass, Maria headed to Park Avenue to visit the Barclays Building. Surveillance and transaction records showed that she entered her office, where she retrieved work documents for a meeting the next day. She was also captured withdrawing $400 in cash from an ATM before making her way on foot to 7th Avenue in Lower Manhattan. There, she went to Lowman's Department Store and purchased a pair of size 6 shoes and a shirt. After that, the trail went cold.

• 13:09Speaker 00

  Over the weeks that followed, the investigation into Maria's case struggled to gain traction. There were no breakthroughs and no new leads, leading her family to fear the worst. It took six months before the police were finally able to secure a warrant to access Maria's email account. As they worked through her inbox, they uncovered a new detail about the day she went missing.

• 13:36Speaker 00

  It appeared that in the months before her disappearance, Maria had been suffering from a minor skin condition on her tongue. She'd been seeing a dermatologist named Dr. Dean Fiallo for monthly laser treatments, and she'd had an appointment scheduled for the evening of Sunday, April 13. This was a significant discovery for the detectives. If Maria had kept that appointment, her dermatologist might have been the last person to see her alive. If she hadn't shown up, that would help narrow down their timeline further. The detectives looked up the address of Dr. Fiallo's medical practice. It was right near Lower Manhattan, where the last known surveillance footage of Maria had been captured.

• 14:21Speaker 00

  Feeling hopeful that they were on the right track, the detectives did a quick background search on the doctor and discovered something disturbing. Dr. Dean Fiallo wasn't a dermatologist at all. In fact, he didn't have any credentials as a doctor of any sort. But he did have a criminal record. Five years earlier, in 1998, Dean Fiallo had been convicted of possessing forged prescriptions. More recently, in October 2002, just six months before Maria went missing, he'd also been convicted for practicing medicine without a license. When he'd started treating Maria, he was out on bail and awaiting sentencing.

• 15:07Speaker 00

  Police had been curious about the $400 that Maria had withdrawn prior to going missing, as they hadn't been able to determine what it was for.

• 15:17Speaker 00

  The email showed that the so-called doctor had asked her to bring $400 in cash to her appointment so that he could purchase lidocaine and syringes. For the first time, the case had some momentum. Detectives now had an approximate timeline, a reason for Maria's movements, and a specific location that she had been headed for. They also had the name of a potential suspect and proof that he knew Maria was carrying cash.

• 15:47Speaker 00

  They needed to speak to Dean Fiallo as soon as possible. But, there was a problem. They couldn't find him.

• 15:56Speaker 00

  The detectives tracked down Dean's attorney, hoping she could provide them with his contact details, or at least some information about his whereabouts. But, she hadn't been able to find him either, and had no idea where he was.

• 16:11Speaker 00

  While this was frustrating for the detectives, what they didn't yet realize was that they weren't the only law enforcement officers looking for Dean Fiallo.

• 16:28Speaker 00

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• 19:57Speaker 00

  Unbeknownst to the NYPD, the New York Attorney General’s office had already been searching for Fiallo for months in relation to his most recent conviction for practicing medicine without a licence. That case was being handled by investigator Brian Ford, whose job it was to locate the fake doctor and to bring him back into the system. But Ford hadn’t been able to find Fiallo either. That was, until one day in late 2003, when he received an unexpected phone call. Greg Buck had been in a relationship with Dean Fiallo for the past five years. During that time, Greg, a high-end interior designer in New York, had supported Fiallo

• 20:40Speaker 00

  financially, bailing him out, paying the bills and covering daily expenses. All up, he’d lent Fiallo around eighty-two thousand dollars. Greg knew that his boyfriend had problems and was reckless with money, but he’d always hoped that things would eventually settle down and they would be happy again. However, over the past few months, their relationship had broken down, culminating in Fiallo kicking Greg out of his house, changing the locks and badmouthing Greg to their friends. He then skipped town, leaving Greg tens of thousands of dollars in debt with no way to recover it.

• 21:21Speaker 00

  Despite all of this, Greg still felt a lingering affection for his former partner. Even though he’d known that the Attorney General’s office was searching for Fiallo, he hadn’t wanted to get him in any trouble. Now that months had passed with no word from Fiallo and with little hope of getting his money back, Greg was angry. Fiallo had ruined his finances and attempted to destroy his reputation, and Greg was finally ready to tell investigators all about it. He called the Attorney General’s office and spoke to Brian Ford. While Greg was expecting to be asked about Fiallo’s location and financial status,

• 22:03Speaker 00

  he wasn’t anticipating anything too serious. He was therefore caught off guard when Ford mentioned that investigators wanted to question Fiallo about a missing woman named Maria Cruz. Greg had no idea what Ford was talking about and had never heard Maria’s name before. Ford explained that she was a patient of Fiallo’s and that she’d had an appointment scheduled with him on the last day she’d been seen alive. Something about those words triggered a memory for Greg. Around six months ago, he’d been chatting with a mutual friend of his and Fiallo’s, an accountant named Martin Manert.

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  Martin had told Greg that Fiallo had once rung him out of the blue to say that a patient he was treating had passed out after he’d given her an anaesthetic. Martin had told Fiallo to take her to the hospital straight away, so Fiallo had rushed her to the emergency room. While Greg had found this story odd, he’d accepted it at face value and assumed that everything had turned out fine. But now, hearing that one of Fiallo’s patients was missing, the memory took on a more ominous light. Greg shared the story with investigator Brian Ford, who promised to call Greg back in the new year after the holidays were over.

• 23:26Speaker 00

  Not wanting to wait that long for answers, Greg reached out to Martin directly and asked him to recount the incident again. This time, Martin described Fiallo’s phone call in a more serious light. The patient hadn’t simply passed out, like Martin had originally said, but she’d had no vital signs. To Greg, there was a big difference. Still, he wasn’t convinced that the man he’d loved could be responsible for letting harm come to one of his patients. Hoping to put his mind at ease, Greg asked Martin if he could remember when the phone call took place.

• 24:06Speaker 00

  Martin wasn’t sure, but it was around the same time that Fiallo had kicked Greg out of their house and changed the locks. Greg then consulted his diary to narrow down the exact date. Piecing together the various things Martin had said, he realised the phone call had almost certainly taken place on Sunday, April 13, the date Maria Cruz was last seen alive. For Greg, the possibility that his former partner might somehow be involved in a woman’s disappearance was both horrifying and all-consuming. Unable to believe it, he kept going over that period of time in his mind, scouring

• 24:50Speaker 00

  his memories for something that could disprove his growing fear. Then, one day, whilst in the middle of setting up a Christmas tree display for one of his clients, a distressing memory resurfaced. In the weeks after April 13, Greg had spent a lot of time at Dean Fiallo’s house in Newark, New Jersey, helping him prepare it for sale. Fiallo had owned the three-storey colonial-style home for seventeen years, and the two of them had lived there for most of their relationship, commuting the eight miles to Manhattan each day for work.

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  But Fiallo’s mounting financial problems meant he’d had no choice but to sell it. The once-grand home was in a state of disrepair, and the buyers had put forward a long list of things that needed to be fixed before the sale contract could be finalised. To ease the load, Greg and some friends pitched in to help with the repairs and clean-up, racing to get it all done before the sale date arrived. What suddenly stood out in Greg’s mind was that during that time, Fiallo had begun stockpiling bags of concrete. Not just a few bags, but dozens. He even got Greg and another friend to buy bags for him from Home Depot.

• 26:15Speaker 00

  Greg had bought around twenty-five to thirty bags himself and wondered what they were going to do with it all. He had asked Fiallo, but he’d given him a vague answer, saying they were for repairs around the property. Greg had thought it was odd, but he didn’t press the issue any further. Around a month later, on May 27, 2003, they were checking the final repairs off their list on the day before the house sale closed. Greg had spent hours hauling rubbish and old pieces of furniture out of the house and into a dumpster on the street. Meanwhile, Fiallo had disappeared into the garage at the back of the property.

• 26:57Speaker 00

  At some point that afternoon, Greg noticed Fiallo dragging a large plastic container toward the rear of the garage, which he then poured bags of concrete mix into. Greg asked what he was doing, but Fiallo brushed him off, saying he needed to fix some plumbing. Again, Greg found this explanation strange. Fiallo didn’t like physical labour; he usually hired professionals or convinced other people to do the work for him. But in this particular instance, he seemed unusually focused, spending hours alone in the garage. As the afternoon wore on, Greg became irritated.

• 27:41Speaker 00

  He was doing all of the heavy lifting while Fiallo was nowhere in sight. Eventually, he wandered into the garage to see what was taking him so long. There was a terrible smell in the air, as though something was rotting, but Greg assumed it was just rubbish. At the back of the garage, inside a small storage area cluttered with old building materials, he saw Fiallo on his knees smoothing the surface of a freshly poured concrete slab. When Fiallo realised Greg was there, he was startled and became instantly hostile. “Get the hell out of here,” he yelled, “go do something else.”

• 28:23Speaker 00

  Confused by this overreaction, Greg had left the house and returned to Manhattan. He’d filed the incident away as just another example of Fiallo’s erratic behaviour, but now, months later, when he added it together with the phone call to Martin and the missing woman, it painted a disturbing picture. For the first time, it hit Greg that the man he’d once loved might actually be responsible for someone’s death. With his suspicions raised, Greg was eager to hear back from investigator Brian Ford. But the holidays came and went with no call.

• 29:05Speaker 00

  Frustrated by this inaction, Greg wrote a letter to Ford at the Attorney General’s office, laying out all the details that he couldn’t shake from his mind. Again, he finished off by asking the investigators to get in touch. Weeks passed with no word. Greg began checking the news obsessively, wondering if an arrest had already been made without anyone letting him know, but there was nothing. Then, in early January 2004, Greg received a call from a friend. She’d just received a long, rambling email from Dean Fiallo. He hadn’t let slip where he was, but he’d mentioned that he was somewhere tropical

• 29:49Speaker 00

  and complained that hardly anyone there spoke English. The friend knew that Fiallo was wanted by authorities and was worried that she might get in trouble for corresponding with him. Greg urged her to contact the police and to tell them to contact him. She did as he suggested. Unbeknownst to Greg, investigator Brian Ford had been busy behind the scenes trying to convince others in the Attorney General’s office that Greg’s story needed to be taken seriously. Things had been further complicated by the fact that a potential homicide was involved, which meant responsibility of the case would shift to the NYPD.

• 30:32Speaker 00

  Within twenty-four hours of hearing about Fiallo’s email to a friend, an NYPD detective showed up at Greg’s door, eager to hear what he had to say. Greg told the detective everything he knew, including about the concrete slab and what he feared might be concealed there. At first, the detective was sceptical. It seemed unlikely to him that someone as smart as Dean Fiallo would bury a body under a concrete slab in his own garage. Regardless, on February 13, 2004, the detective drove to Newark to visit Fiallo’s old house.

• 31:15Speaker 00

  The property was in Forest Hill, a quiet neighbourhood filled with historic houses that had slowly been gentrified over the past few decades. The new owners had not yet been living there for a full year when the detective knocked on their front door, asking if he could take a look around. The owners agreed, and the detective headed to the back of the property and entered the garage. Up the back, he found a small section of roughly finished concrete. It was noticeably newer than the rest of the slab, and had clearly been hand-poured, just like Greg had described.

• 31:53Speaker 00

  No longer sceptical, the detective applied for a warrant to excavate the slab. Five days later, the property was abuzz with activity as members of law enforcement from multiple jurisdictions, including the NYPD, the Newark Police Department, and New Jersey State Troopers, gathered in anticipation. The media quickly became aware that something was happening, and numerous reporters, camera trucks, and news helicopters soon arrived on the scene too.

• 32:25Speaker 00

  Inside the garage, forensic technicians carefully excavated the site for two hours before they uncovered something.

• 32:34Speaker 00

  Buried in the concrete slab was a small, black carry-on suitcase, which had been taped shut, then wrapped in plastic garbage bags. Inside was a body. It took a few days for the official identification to come through, but for those at the crime scene, there was no doubt. Ten months after going missing, Maria Cruz had been found.

• 33:03Speaker 00

  With foul play no longer theoretical, and Dean Fiallo, the chief suspect in Maria’s murder, the investigation immediately shifted into a new phase. Police believed that Fiallo had fled the United States and was living in the Central American country of Costa Rica. A long-time associate of Fiallo’s confirmed that he had flown there in September 2003, and several emails he’d sent to France had been traced to its capital city of San Jose. Fiallo’s lawyer also admitted to having wired money there at his request. While this added significant complications to the investigation, Costa Rica and the United States had an extradition treaty in place.

• 33:48Speaker 00

  This meant that if Fiallo could be located and certain criteria was met, he could be returned to the US to face charges.

• 33:57Speaker 00

  Law enforcement in both countries began cooperating through formal channels, but with so much red tape to navigate, progress was slow. Eventually, Costa Rican authorities confirmed that Dean Fiallo had entered their country on a three-month visa, and they had no record of him ever leaving.

• 34:17Speaker 00

  As the story spread, tips began to flow in about his exact location. It seemed that he’d left the capital, maybe for a beach town somewhere more remote. Fiallo’s photograph was published in local newspapers, which prompted a call from the manager of a resort in the beachside town of Samara, around 120 miles west of San Jose. A security guard had noticed that one of their guests bore a striking resemblance to the man pictured in the newspaper. The guest had been staying at the resort for several days, spending his time by the pool, drinking, socialising with staff, and leaving them $100 tips.

• 35:01Speaker 00

  After passing this information on to the police, the hotel manager figured that the guest he’d just reported would need legal representation. He called a lawyer and arranged for him to come and meet the man he assumed was about to be arrested. When Costa Rican authorities arrived at the resort, they found Dean Fiallo lounging by the pool with a beer in his hand, and his new lawyer by his side. He did not resist arrest as he was taken into custody.

• 35:33Speaker 00

  Back in New York, the arrest sparked a media frenzy. Reports that the fake doctor accused of murder had been caught were front-page news. And it wasn’t the first time Fiallo had been in the headlines.

• 35:51Speaker 00

  Sixteen years earlier, in 1988, Dean Fiallo was working as a carpenter and construction worker in New York when he took on a project to renovate a beauty salon called The Beach. The owner was a man named Michael Hart. When Fiallo and Michael first met, they became smitten with one another and quickly moved in together.

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  Fiallo had always dreamed of becoming an engineer, but had dropped out of college after one year. Michael could see how unhappy he was working in construction, so he encouraged Fiallo to join him in the lucrative cosmetic industry. Michael said it didn’t matter that he had no experience, as there was plenty of services he could offer that only required a small amount of training.

• 36:39Speaker 00

  Some, like electrolysis and a laser hair removal, didn’t require any training at all. Keen to get out of the construction game, Fiallo followed his boyfriend’s advice.

• 36:52Speaker 00

  He undertook a short training course, became a certified professional electrolivist, and began working in Michael’s salon, where his confidence, good looks, and charming manner quickly won him clients. At the time, New York was in the grip of the HIV/AIDS epidemic, which was devastating the gay community. Both Fiallo and Michael were HIV-positive, but while Fiallo remained in good health, Michael’s condition worsened and developed into AIDS. When Michael died of the disease in 1995, Fiallo decided it was time to leave the salon. He wanted to move his thriving electrolysis practice to a setting that was more medical,

• 37:37Speaker 00

  so that he could charge higher prices. He met with a highly-regarded dermatologist, Dr Laurie Polis, whose client list included celebrities such as Madonna, Kate Moss, Drew Barrymore, Naomi Campbell, and Mel Gibson. She agreed that Fiallo could operate out of her facility as an independent contractor. It was a mutually beneficial arrangement for both of them. Dr Polis would refer people to Fiallo for electrolysis, and he would refer people to her for dermatology treatments.

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  Dr Polis was quickly impressed by Fiallo’s bedside manner and enthusiasm to learn. He appeared genuinely fascinated by the advanced procedures she performed on her patients, especially the laser treatments. One day, he asked if he could start observing her as she worked, telling her that if he knew how the process worked, “I will know when to refer a client to you for laser instead of performing electrolysis.”

• 38:41Speaker 00

  The doctor agreed, and found him to be a helpful and hard-working observer who asked good questions and took plenty of notes. As her professional trust in Fiallo grew, so too did his responsibilities in her practice, where he took on an increasing array of tasks. But only a few months into this arrangement, it all came to an abrupt end, when Fiallo stopped by Dr Polis’s office with some terrible news. He was dying of AIDS. Because of this, he needed to leave the practice and move to Florida, where he would see out his final days.

• 39:20Speaker 00

  His colleagues were stunned by the news. Fiallo had always seemed so fit and strong, but in the mid-'90s in New York, it was tragically common for young gay men to be struck down by the virus. They were devastated for him. Dr Polis and the rest of the staff held a farewell party in his honour, gave him goodbye gifts, and sadly bid him farewell.

• 39:50Speaker 00

  Life at the clinic soon returned to normal. Then, a few months later, Dr. Polis was reading a copy of New York Magazine when an advertisement caught her attention. It was for a new laser clinic opening up nearby called Skin Ovations. The wording in the ad was eerily familiar, almost identical to the language she used to promote her own practice. As she read on, she saw something that stopped her in her tracks. Listed as the clinic's director and CEO, was Dean Fiallo. Not only was he alive and well in New York City, he'd set up shop as a competitor.

• 40:34Speaker 00

  As a business owner, Polis felt betrayed. She now saw Fiallo's enthusiasm and helpfulness for what it really was: a way to learn the inner workings of her practice so he could replicate it for himself.

• 40:49Speaker 00

  But there was something else she'd spotted that was far more alarming. In New York at the time, it was legal to operate a laser machine without a medical licence, but only for the purpose of removing body hair. For everything else, you had to be a doctor. The list of services Fiallo was offering went well beyond hair removal. He was advertising procedures like skin resurfacing, facelifts, and the removal of moles, lesions, blood vessels, wrinkles, and birthmarks.

• 41:22Speaker 00

  Disturbed, Dr. Polis opened up his website to learn more. There, she saw that Fiallo was referring to himself as a medical practitioner and a member of the American Society for Laser Medicine and Surgery. He also said he was "one of the foremost specialists in laser usage who had trained hundreds of physicians in the latest techniques." None of it was remotely true.

• 41:50Speaker 00

  As a dermatologist and trained laser surgeon, Dr. Polis was alarmed. She knew that laser devices weren't benign tools, and that in untrained hands, they could cause catastrophic harm, including serious burns, blindness, and even death.

• 42:09Speaker 00

  She also knew that if something went wrong during a treatment, such as a patient having a heart attack or a bad reaction to the anesthesia, Dean Fiallo did not have the medical training to respond. But her greatest concern was the risk of serious health conditions being missed. Standard medical practice requires that a mole or lesion be properly assessed, and if necessary, tested for cancer before it's removed. That assessment determines what happens next. Fiallo had neither the training nor the ability to do that kind of testing, which could have fatal consequences. As she told The New York Post,

• 42:52Speaker 00

  "You can get a mole lasered off by one of these unqualified practitioners, and three years later, you're dead of brain cancer."

• 43:01Speaker 00

  Having discovered what Fiallo was up to and the high potential for harm, Dr. Polis felt like she had a moral duty to intervene. In her view, this wasn't about professional rivalry or misrepresentation, it was about public safety. She began making phone calls, first to the State Department of Education, then to the State Health Department. Both times, she was told the same thing: unless a patient makes a formal complaint, there was nothing they could do.

• 43:35Speaker 00

  Dr. Polis then contacted the police, but they appeared equally uninterested.

• 43:41Speaker 00

  "If it wasn't illegal for him to operate a laser," they asked, "what crime was being committed?"

• 43:49Speaker 00

  Dr. Polis called whoever she could think of that might be able to help, but was repeatedly told that it wasn't their jurisdiction or that no crime was being committed. Eventually, she ran out of people to call. By her count, she'd made more than 54 calls, each one leading nowhere. She even told the story at medical conferences, hoping her peers might know what to do. But no one did. It felt like she'd hit a dead end. Until one day, she encountered a colleague who had his own story to tell.

• 44:31Speaker 00

  Dr. Roy Geronimus had heard the name Dean Fiallo before.

• 44:37Speaker 00

  As a renowned dermatologist and a laser specialist in New York City, as well as president of the American Society for Dermatologic Surgery, he was used to patients coming to his clinic after receiving botched procedures elsewhere. He would do his best to fix the damage on his patients' faces, that is, if it wasn't permanent. He'd recently noticed that more and more of these patients, usually ones with irreparable scarring or skin damage, were telling him that their botched procedure had been performed by the same man: Dr. Dean Fiallo. He decided to look into this doctor he kept hearing about, and quickly discovered that he wasn't a doctor at all.

• 45:21Speaker 00

  Dr. Geronimus reported Fiallo to the state, telling them about his unlicensed medical practice and the damage he was causing to patients. And like Dr. Polis, he believed that once the right people were informed, action would be taken to shut him down and prevent anyone else from being hurt. So, he made his call and waited to hear back.

• 45:45Speaker 00

  Meanwhile, after months of unanswered calls of her own, Dr. Polis decided she had no choice but to move on. She forced herself to stop thinking about Dean Fiallo and get back to focusing on her own practice.

• 46:01Speaker 00

  It worked, for a while. Then one day, a shocking letter arrived in her office.

• 46:17Speaker 00

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• 48:09Speaker 00

  The letter Dr. Polis received was from a health insurance company. They were writing to ask if she could please explain why she was prescribing excessive quantities of a narcotic called Stato. Polis was stunned. Stato was a powerful opiate, stronger than morphine and highly addictive. It was not something she typically prescribed in her practice. Convinced that there must have been an error, she rang the insurance company and asked to see a copy of one of the prescriptions. When they faxed it through, Dr. Polis instantly knew it was a fake. It was from an old prescription pad she'd thrown away ages ago, which she thought had been shredded.

• 48:55Speaker 00

  The phone number printed on it was no longer in service, and the signature was not hers either. Then she saw the name of the patient the prescription had been made out to: Dean Fiallo. Finally, she had irrefutable evidence that Fiallo had committed a crime. Dr. Polis contacted the Drug Enforcement Administration again, and this time, they took action. In October 1998, 43-year-old Fiallo was arrested for forging prescriptions and possession of a controlled substance. He pleaded guilty to the charges and was sentenced to three years probation, along with court-mandated drug rehabilitation.

• 49:39Speaker 00

  To Fiallo's loved ones, it looked like accountability had caught up with him at last. While Greg Barker didn't like seeing his boyfriend in trouble, he was relieved that he would be forced into treatment. He hoped it might mark a turning point for Fiallo, that he'd get clean, stop pretending to be a doctor, and they could both be happy again.

• 50:02Speaker 00

  Fiallo dutifully checked into a rehab facility in upstate New York. Six weeks later, he emerged and almost immediately went back to work, posing as a doctor and performing medical procedures as if nothing had happened. In reality, though, his arrest had already set something else in motion.

• 50:26Speaker 00

  Over the next few years, while Dean Fiallo continued his charade as a doctor and spiraled deeper into drug addiction and debt, three separate undercover investigations were launched at the same time. After being tipped off by his initial arrest, The New York Post, the local Channel 9 television station, and the State Attorney General’s office were all digging into Fiallo’s activities. Both The Post and Channel 9 sent reporters into the clinic undercover posing as patients. Inside the consultation room, the pattern was the same. Fiallo presented himself as a doctor and offered to perform medical surgeries on them.

• 51:10Speaker 00

  Soon, investigators from all three groups were staking out his offices on East 18th Street, covertly watching the comings and goings at the clinic. Each wanted to be the first to break the story. When they spotted one another, they would nod or wave, acknowledging the unspoken competition they were now part of. The state needed enough evidence to prosecute before they could go public, but the media only needed enough evidence to publish. On Friday, October 4, 2002, four years after Fiallo’s initial arrest, Channel 9 aired its report, including hidden camera footage of Fiallo telling an undercover producer

• 51:55Speaker 00

  that he was a doctor. Two days later, The New York Post ran its story, adding further details about his crimes, including the medications he was giving his patients. The name Dean Fiallo was suddenly everywhere. Unable to escape the attention, Fiallo turned himself in four days later. He was charged with three counts of practicing medicine without a license, with each charge carrying the possibility of up to four years in prison. After posting bail and promising a judge he would stop seeing patients, Fiallo was released to await sentencing.

• 52:37Speaker 00

  Behind the scenes, he struck a deal with prosecutors. In exchange for helping them investigate real doctors accused of medical fraud, they would seek a sentence of just six months. The very next day, Fiallo was back in his office, treating clients. After this second arrest, the people around Fiallo noticed that his behavior was becoming even more erratic than usual. His drug use escalated, as did his debts. “He owed money in every direction,” his partner Greg told New York homicide. “The mortgage hadn’t been paid in months, credit card debts were through the roof.

• 53:22Speaker 00

  He’d been borrowing money from me, and then I had to post bail.” Eventually, Fiallo’s loved ones persuaded him to obey the conditions of his bail and stop practicing medicine. He complied, but without an income, his situation quickly deteriorated. By the end of the month, he could no longer afford his newer comb, and it was decided that it would need to be sold to appease his creditors. Not long after that, Fiallo began seeing patients again, this time in secret. He moved his lasers into a friend’s apartment on West 16th Street in Manhattan, set up

• 54:03Speaker 00

  a makeshift clinic, and resumed his work. In January 2003, three months after his second arrest, a new patient got in touch requesting an appointment. She was suffering from a condition known as “black, hairy tongue,” which is caused by a buildup of dead skin cells on the taste buds, giving the tongue a dark, hair-like appearance. The condition is typically harmless and usually resolves on its own with time and extra oral hygiene, but it can still be distressing for sufferers, and this patient was seeking medical-grade laser treatment to speed up the process.

• 54:44Speaker 00

  Fiallo, presenting himself as a doctor, agreed to treat her. The patient was Maria Cruz. Investigators determined that Maria attended Fiallo’s clinic regularly from January 2003 until the day she went missing. Their email correspondence showed that Maria never suspected he was anything other than what he claimed to be: a fully qualified dermatologist. In the days and weeks following Maria’s disappearance, while her family searched desperately for answers, Dean Fiallo was preoccupied with his dwindling finances and the sale of his house.

• 55:25Speaker 00

  It was during this time that Greg Buck noticed he was stockpiling bags of concrete and laying the mysterious concrete slab. By the end of May, the house sale was finalized, and Greg and Fiallo broke up for good. It was another seven months before Greg contacted Brian Ford for the first time. Two months after that, on February 26, 2004, Dean was arrested in Costa Rica on suspicion of murder. While Maria’s family felt some comfort at the arrest, their relief was short-lived. As soon as Fiallo was in custody, it became clear that he was not going to return to

• 56:07Speaker 00

  the US without a fight. Investigators from New York arrived in Costa Rica to interview Fiallo a few days after his arrest. During the interview, he was polite and gracious, displaying the charm that had allowed him to escape consequences for so long. The investigators found him strangely likable, with one even remarking: “For a murder suspect, he’s really a nice guy.” They tried to persuade him to go along with the extradition process, pointing out that the living conditions would be better in an American prison, with better food and better

• 56:48Speaker 00

  access to healthcare, something that was of extra importance given Fiallo’s HIV status. But Fiallo and his lawyers did everything they could to fight the extradition, filing petition after petition to drag out proceedings. They even tried to have Fiallo legally adopted by a Costa Rican couple, hoping that would shield him from being sent home. The plan fell apart when a court ruled the adoption invalid, noting that Fiallo was older than the couple attempting to adopt him, and that he was too old to be adopted in the first place. Eventually, a panel of Costa Rican judges ruled that Fiallo could be extradited to the

• 57:30Speaker 00

  United States, and on May 23, 2005, after more than a year of delay tactics, he was returned to the US and booked into New York’s Rikers Island prison on charges of second-degree murder. Facing a possible sentence of 25 years to life, Dean Fiallo agreed to plead guilty to the lesser charge of first-degree assault in exchange for a shorter sentence. As part of the deal, he agreed to tell the court his account of what happened to Maria Cruz on the day she went missing. According to Fiallo, when Maria arrived at her appointment on Sunday, April 13, 2003,

• 58:15Speaker 00

  he was under the influence of cocaine and alcohol. Before beginning the laser procedure, he injected Maria with lidocaine to numb her tongue, but he accidentally used too many vials. Shortly after the injection, Maria began convulsing. At this point, a trained physician would start the clinical protocol for lidocaine toxicity. With prompt intervention, it is considered a highly treatable condition. But Fiallo didn’t know what to do, and didn’t have any of the necessary medications or equipment on hand. Panicking, he rang several friends for advice, including accountant Martin Manert and an

• 59:00Speaker 00

  emergency physician named Dr. David Goldschmidt. Both advised Fiallo to seek urgent medical attention. In response to the doctor’s advice, Dean lied, saying that Maria had regained consciousness. Dr. Goldschmidt told him that it didn’t matter, he must call an ambulance or take her to the hospital without delay. Fiallo ignored this advice, too scared that doctors would discover he was still practicing medicine without a license and would get into even more trouble than he already was. So, he waited. Eventually, the seizures stopped, and Maria’s body went limp.

• 59:43Speaker 00

  Fiallo put his head on her chest and realized she was no longer breathing. Fiallo said he then made the decision to cover up what he’d done. He placed Maria’s body into a small black suitcase, then wheeled it out of the building, loaded it into his car, and drove it to his home in Newark. He kept it in his garage for weeks, until eventually he taped the suitcase shut, wrapped it in garbage bags, and buried it in a concrete slab. During sentencing, the judge was scornful of Fiallo’s confession, noting: “It did not ring from the heart, but we know you’re heartless, as demonstrated by your senseless

• 1:00:26Speaker 00

  and depraved act.” Maria’s family, who had flown in from the Philippines, agreed. They were relieved to have been spared a lengthy trial, but were distressed by Fiallo’s callous recounting of events. Maria’s father later told The New York Daily News: “I was crying because he did not do justice to my daughter. If only he brought her to the hospital, she would still be alive today.” Fiallo was sentenced to 20 years in prison, bringing resolution to one chapter of the case. But a larger question remained: how had he been able to act with impunity for so long?

• 1:01:15Speaker 00

  In New York at the time of Maria's death, the practice of laser hair removal existed in a legal black hole. While other laser procedures were classified as medical treatments and could only be performed by a doctor, a court ruling from the 1930s, decades before laser technology even existed, meant that laser hair removal was not classed as medical. The result was that, unlike every other state in the US, New York had no regulations around laser hair removal. Not only did you not need a medical degree, you didn't need any training or certification at all. Most consumers had no idea that this was the case.

• 1:02:00Speaker 00

  When Bloomberg reporter Elizabeth Roy Stanton was injured by an untrained laser operator, she was stunned to learn there were no training requirements whatsoever.

• 1:02:11Speaker 00

  She noted that, "To remove hair with scissors in New York State, a person needs to take a 300-hour approved course of study and pass written and practical exams. But to operate a laser, they needed nothing."

• 1:02:28Speaker 00

  With no regulatory body, it was also easy for practitioners to drift beyond the limits of what they were legally permitted to do and difficult for such indiscretions to be reported or addressed. In 2002, one year before Maria died, the New York State Board for Medicine attempted to address this problem, recommending that all laser use, including hair removal, be classified as "the practice of medicine" and performed only by or under the supervision of a licensed physician. That recommendation was not adopted and despite repeated lobbying by medical professionals in the decades since, New York is the only state in the US

• 1:03:12Speaker 00

  where laser hair removal remains entirely unregulated. Attempts at reform have continued in the years since Maria's death. In 2025, a state bill was introduced to establish some regulations, though medical groups warned it didn't go far enough. In January 2026, the bill quietly stalled and failed. At the time of this recording, the legal black hole still stands.

• 1:03:42Speaker 00

  Even if laws had been in place, the question remains: would they have stopped Dean Fiallo?

• 1:03:49Speaker 00

  In an interview with author Diane Fanning, a criminal profiler Pat Brown described Fiallo as "A guy who always wants power and control. He simply won't take himself out of the driver's seat."

• 1:04:05Speaker 00

  In Brown's view, this need to be in control was the driving force behind his actions. Brown explained, "He practiced medicine illegally because he liked the powerful feeling he got from it. He got busted and continued to practice medicine because he liked the power."

• 1:04:25Speaker 00

  Fiallo's former partner Greg Barke offered a similar assessment, telling Diane Fanning, "There is a part of him that really thinks he is Dr. Fiallo. I think he can disassociate from himself and believe his own lies because it is too painful to be him."

• 1:04:46Speaker 00

  For Maria's family, no explanation could account for what they had lost. At her funeral, she was remembered as someone who'd put everything on the line for a chance at the American dream and made it.

• 1:05:00Speaker 00

  During the eulogy, Tess Cruz spoke directly to her younger sister.

• 1:05:06Speaker 00

  "You are not afraid to move out of your comfort zone, away from your family, away from the life you had always known, to face challenges, hurdle obstacles, do whatever it takes to make your dreams come true." Tess was adamant that Maria's death would not be without meaning, later adding, "It takes a very extraordinary person to change things. My sister is going to change something. Many nameless, faceless people are going to be saved because of my sister."

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