Dr. Death - April 3 2026

I love finding new podcasts. What I love even more though is sharing my new favorite shows with you guys. This time I want to tell you all about every town. Every town is hosted by Andrew Fitzgerald, and he takes you on a wild ride through some of the darkest corners of the human psyche and uncovers some of the most chilling true crime stories out there. Each week he explores murders and mysteries that happen all across everyday towns in America, and peels back the layers of normalcy to reveal the grim realities behind closed doors and familiar faces. The episodes take you on a wild journey beneath the surface of a town and reveals their darkest secrets. Like Staten Island's Nightmare, the urban legend that turned out to be real, which dives into the tale surrounding Cropsey and sleep over Nightmare, which covers the terrifying story of Polyclass. These are just a few of some amazing and horrifying episodes you can hear on every town. If you're a fan of true crime and the unexplained, every town is the podcast for you. Who knows, your town might be next. Listen to every town on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen. In a quiet town in the Spanish countryside, Miguel Angel Hernández, best friend, murdered his sister, an hours later, jumped up a clip, taking his secrets with him. 20 years later, Miguel returns home in an attempt to reconstruct the tragic night, but revisiting the past will awaken personal ghosts. Based on true events, the Pain of Others is a chilling audiobook that reckons with a question that still haunts the author that he missed the warning signs that his best friend could commit murder. Find the Pain of Others at Pushkin.fm/audiobooks, or at audible, Spotify, or wherever you get your audiobooks. We have a weird humus, yes. Seemed described by one investigator as reminiscent of a weird murder. Doctors are some of the most trusted individuals in the world, or at least they should be. On April 3rd, 1971, a man was born who would, over the course of less than two years, earn the moniker, Dr. Death. So, if you like your coffee hot, but your bones chilled, sit back and start your day with a morning cup of murder. Christopher Daniel Dunge was born on April 3rd, 1971, and spent most of his young life in Memphis, Tennessee. The eldest of four children raised by a physical therapist and missionary father, and a schoolteacher mother. After initially attending Mills-Sabs College and playing Division 3 football, Christopher transferred to the Division 1 Colorado State University to continue playing. Former teammates remembered him as a player who trained hard, but lacked any innate talent for the game, which might explain why he eventually transferred back home to Memphis State University, and exhausting his football eligibility. He switched things up and started concentrating on a career in medicine. He managed to complete his undergraduate degree in 1995, and in 2010, finished his MD-PhD and neurosurgery residency program at the University of Tennessee Health Science Center before going to do a fellowship program at the Sims Murphy Clinic in Memphis. Now, on paper, all of this was incredibly impressive. The programs he completed were ambitious, and by completing them, he proved himself to be a very good student and well on his way to be a successful doctor. Except if you actually dug deeper into the numbers, you would learn that Christopher Dunge only participated in about 200 or less surgeries throughout his entire residency. Though that seems like a lot, typical neurosurgical residents participate in well over 1,000 surgeries during their programs. So his number was staggering in comparison. He was also suspected of being under the influence of cocaine while operating during his fourth year of residency training, and had to be sent to a program for impaired physicians, where he remained for several months before returning to residency. According to his friends at the time, a regular at the Memphis Strip Clubs, he would go to work after a night of doing drugs, and one even said that he would never allow Christopher to operate on him personally. Yet despite all of this, Christopher was able to complete all of his programs. In 2011, one of the exotic dancers at the club he frequented, a woman named Wendy Renee Young, approached Christopher and began chatting him up. Finding out that he was a doctor, they quickly began a relationship, she immediately moved in and together the pair had two sons. Though they broke things off before the birth of their second son in 2014. Now, though his name appeared on several papers and patents, and T. Tick Part and a number of biotech startups, by the time he met Wendy Young, Christopher was over $500,000 in debt. Having previously focused more on the PhD side of his degree, he decided to turn to the neurosurgery aspect as a means to make money. And in 2010, he moved to Dallas, Texas and got a job at the Baylor Regional Medical Center in Plano. On paper, he was extremely qualified, a real win for the program. He had 15 years of training between medical school, residency and his fellowship, claimed he graduated Magna Cum Laude from St. Jude's Children's Research Hospital with a doctorate in microbiology, a program the hospital did not offer when he attended, and his CV was about 12 pages long. He was charismatic, charming and happily accepted, their $600,000 a year, plus bonuses, offered to work as a minimally invasive spinal surgeon. But it wasn't long before all that charm melted away, and he began making a poor impression on his fellow surgeons. He boasted about his abilities, yet when he actually got a scalpel in his hands, he couldn't seem to back up his vibrato with any real skill. So much so, that his surgeries at Baylor Plano started leaving several patients severely named. The first to suffer from his incompetence was Kenneth Finell, who was left with chronic pain after Dr. Christopher Dunge, operated on the wrong part of his back. He had of a second operation, also performed by Dr. Dunge, in order to relieve the pain and was instead left paralyzed. He required months of rehab just to relearn how to walk with a cane and was left unable to move for more than 30 feet or stand for more than a few minutes. Then there was Lee Passmore, a Colin County medical investigator who experienced chronic pain and limited mobility after Dr. Dunge cut a ligament that normally would never be touched during that particular procedure. He misplaced hardware in the man's spine, incorrectly located a screw, stripped the item's threads so it could not be removed, and even if it could be removed, the location in which he placed the screw would have caused the patient to bleed out. A vascular surgeon who assisted with the operation later recalled how the doctor seemed completely oblivious to the considerable amount of bleeding his patient was experiencing, and the other doctor was so disturbed by Dr. Dunge's actions that at one point he physically restrained him, telling the man he was dangerous. Another victim of this so-called doctor was Barry Morgalof, who was left with bone fragments in his spinal canal after Dr. Dunge tried to pull a damaged disc out of his back with a grabbing tool. He refused to give the man any pain medication, claiming he was a "drug seeker" and Barry lost most of the function in the left side of his body, requiring a wheelchair. A doctor who assisted in this surgery recalled the number of mistakes Dr. Dunge made even after having the correct anatomy pointed out to him, and Barry, during a follow-up visit, noted how the man showed clear signs of being inebriated. When Jerry Summers, a longtime friend of Christopher's, came to have two neck vertebrae fused, the doctor botched the removal of a disc so badly that he left the man a quadriplegic. He then performed a follow-up surgery to try and fix the mistake and packed the space with a large amount of gel foam, constricting the spinal cord. The anesthesiologist present that day recalled how Jerry lost almost 1,200 milliliters of blood on the table. Everyone expected there to be a revision surgery, but Dr. Dunge refused to do it. Jerry later stated that he and Christopher both used cocaine the night before he was admitted. After this comment, and despite passing a drug test, Baylor officials forced Christopher Dunge to leave the hospital pending a peer review. Though he was clear to resume operating while the review was underway, officials requested he limit himself to minor surgeries until they were finished. Jerry later said he made up the cocaine claim after his friend refused to check on him, angry and feeling vengeful. remained a quadriplegic, never recovering from the mistakes that were made during his surgery, and he died in 2021 due to an infection related to the complications from the operation. The last patient from Baylor whose life was forever changed by Dr. Christopher Dunge was Kelly Martin, an encounter that ultimately cost her her life. After going a completely routine back operation, the doctor cut through her spinal cord and severed an artery. Despite clear signs that she was losing a large amount of blood and ignoring the warnings of his colleagues, Dr. Dunge kept operating, refusing to acknowledge that anything was wrong with his patient and therefore hindering all of the ICU team's efforts to save Kelly Martin. When she woke from anesthesia, she was screaming and clawing at her legs, forcing them to quickly re-inestitize her. While all of this was happening, Dr. Dunge stayed out in the ICU waiting room, writing notes instead of attending to his patient, even after Kelly went into hemorrhagic cardiac arrest and blood to death. Eventually Baylor Plano officials found out that Christopher Dunge failed to meet their standards of care and permanently revoked his surgical privileges. Initiating another peer review, before anything further could be done, he decided to resign rather than officially be terminated. And the hospital, in an effort to avoid the cost of fighting and possibly losing a wrongful termination suit, agreed with his lawyers that if he resigned, they would issue a letter stating that there were no issues during his time working in their program. Had he been officially fired, they would have been required to report him to the National Practitioner Data Bank and flagged as a problematic physician, which meant he likely wouldn't have been hired at the Dallas Medical Center in Farmer's Branch and the story would have and should have stopped here. Given temporary privileges while the hospital obtained his records from Baylor, red flags immediately began waving when nurses started whispering about the doctor who seemed to be on drugs while on call. They noticed how he seemed to show up to work multiple days in a row wearing the same tattered scrubs and how incompetent he seemed for someone who was supposed to be a practicing and accomplished surgeon, then came the issues with his patients. Less than a week after starting the job, Dr. Dunst severed the vertebral artery of fluella brown and refusing to abort the surgery despite clear blood loss. He packed far too much substance to try and stop the bleeding and the woman suffered from a stroke. He did not respond to the messages from the hospital for a few hours and the following day scheduled an elective surgery for Mary Eferd rather than check up and care for fluella. He refused to delay the surgery despite the hospital's multiple requests to do so. They even asked him to transfer her out of his care, but again, he refused. He suggested he perform a craniotomy to relieve the pressure in her brain, but was refused permission both because he was unqualified and because the hospital lacked the equipment and personnel to perform such an operation. All the while, fluella was left in a coma for hours before finally Dr. Dunst agreed to allow her transfer. By then, she was already brain dead. Back at the spinal fusion for Mary Eferd, the doctor severed one of her nerve roots while operating on the wrong portion of her back, twisted a screw into another nerve, and left screw holes on the opposite side of her spine. He failed to remove the disc that he was supposed to remove, left hardware in her muscle tissue, so loose that it moved when touched, and again ignored all the warnings by fellow doctors that he was doing things incorrectly, or that he was putting screws into muscle instead of bone. Several people in the surgery room with him that day suspected that he might have been intoxicated, recalling his dilated pupils. Mary was left paralyzed and an excruciating pain. The doctor who performed the salvage surgery on her likened what he saw when he opened her up to the result of a child playing with tinker toys or an erector set. He called what Dr. Dunst did and assault, and said the woman would have spent the rest of her life bedridden if the salvage surgery had not been done. He could not believe a real doctor would botch a surgery this badly, or anyone with even the most basic knowledge of human anatomy. Less than a week after arriving at Dallas Medical, Mary Eferd was severely maimed, and Florella Brown had passed away. Yet, despite how horrifically his time there was, they did not report him to the NPDB, because at the time, hospitals were not required to report doctors who only had temporary privileges. He was let go from Dallas Medical, and soon received privileges at Southampton Community Hospital in Dallas, while also taking a job at an outpatient clinic in Frisco called Legacy Surgery Center. While at these jobs, he damaged Jeff Cheney's spinal cord, leaving him without feeling on the right side of his body, and left Philip Mayfield partially paralyzed from the neck down. After trying to remove a degenerated disc from Marshall text muses back, the doctor left him in an immense amount of pain. But when text asked about it, he convinced him that that was totally normal. Yet he prescribed him so much percussive, the pharmacist refused to fill the prescription, fearing the doctor was trying to kill this man, and texts eventually spiraled into a full-blown opioid addiction while trying to manage the pain. He lost his wife and job in the process. He later recalled reading about Kelly Martin's death the day before the surgery, but when he called Christopher to ask him about it, he cursed him out. Then, while operating on Jacqueline Troy, he damaged her vocal cords, her trachea, and an artery, leaving her barely able to speak over a whisper, and eating through a feeding tube. At some point, Dr. Dunn's applied for privileges at Methodist Hospital and Dallas, and when they looked him up in the NPDB, nothing was flagged, because no one had reported him during all those years of him maiming and in two cases killing his patients. So, shortly after, he had Jeff glide well on his table, and after mistaking part of his neck muscle for a tumor during a routine cervical fusion, he severed one of his vocal cords, cut a hole in his esophagus, and sliced one of the man's arteries. He stuffed a surgical sponge in Jeff's throat to stop the bleeding, and when he closed the wound, he kept the sponge in place, despite others warning him of his mistake, this triggered a severe infection. Jeff became septic, and when others discovered the root of the problem, Dr. Dunn's refused to return to surgery and remove it. Another surgeon had to be brought in to fix a mistake, and when he did, he opened Jeff glide well up and described what he saw as the work of a "crazed mediac." He later told the patient it was clear his doctor was trying to kill him. Jeff was left with only one vocal cord, permanent damage to his esophagus, and partial paralysis on his left side. The doctor who came to fix Dr. Dunn's mess said it looked as though he tried to decapitate the patient, and that such a botched surgery "has not happened in the United States of America before." Jeff glide well had to undergo more than 50 procedures to correct the damage. This was the last surgery Christopher Dunn's ever performed. Randall Kirby, the surgeon, brought in to fix the Jeff glide well incident, was so shocked by what he witnessed, he wrote a detailed complaint to the Texas Medical Board, calling Christopher Dunn's a sociopath and a "clear and present danger to the citizens of Texas." With the help of another doctor who came into contact with him over the years, the Texas Medical Board eventually took the case on and suspended Dr. Dunn's license on June 26, 2013. According to the Board Chairman, many members found it hard to believe a trained surgeon could be as incompetent as Christopher appeared to be, but it took until June of 2013 to truly uncover the magnitude of his failings. His license was officially revoked in December. He moved to Denver, Colorado, and going into a complete downward spiral, he declared bankruptcy, was arrested for a DEY, was taken for a psychiatric evaluation in Dallas during his visit to see his children, and was then arrested for shoplifting. Then in 2014, three of his former patients, Mary Eferd, Kenneth Fennel, and Lee Passmore, all filed three separate lawsuits against Baylor Plano alleging that the hospital allowed him to perform surgeries despite knowing the dangers. Meanwhile, fearing he would move elsewhere and begin practicing again, Robert Henderson, the surgeon who performed the salvage surgery on Mary Eferd, and Randall Kirby, began pushing the Dallas County DA to pursue criminal charges. Though it was a difficult road, due in large part to the complexities of proving his actions were willful as defined by Texas Law, after interviewing dozens of patients, survivors, and their families, prosecutors determined that Christopher Dungeons' actions were indeed criminal, and that nothing short of prison time would keep him from practicing medicine again. In July of 2015, he was finally arrested and charged with six felony counts of aggravated assault with a deadly weapon, five counts of aggravated assault causing serious bodily injury, and one count of injury to an elderly person. The indictments were made just four months before the statute of limitations finally ran out, which is why the doctors, who demanded to testify against one of their own, which was almost unheard of, were so insistent. The last charge which carried a sentence of life in prison, if convicted, was for the maiming of Mary Eferd, which prosecutors believe was the most provable offense they had. Going to trial for this charge first, in the meantime, Christopher was held in custody for the next two years awaiting his day in court. By that time, he was almost completely penniless and had to be appointed a lawyer. The defense tried to argue that he had no clue how poorly the procedure was performed until he heard the prosecutors' experts tell the jury of his many missteps in the operating room. However, there were many there that day, who commented on the mistakes in real time and tried to correct his actions. After 13 days of trial and just four hours of deliberation, the jury found Christopher Dunge guilty and sentenced him to life in prison in February of 2017. Even with credit served, he is not eligible for parole until 2045, when he is 74 years old. His conviction was called a precedent-setting case, and is believed to be the first time in US history in which a physician was convicted on criminal charges for actions taken during the course of their medical work. Though he was only convicted for the horrors he committed against one of his patients, Christopher Dunge, later nicknamed Dr. Death, was responsible for 33 incidents of gross malpractice, maming 31 patients and causing the death of two. Of the 38 patients he tended to during his career, 33 were left with life-altering injuries during the less than two years he practiced. His case was so unbelievable, so record-breaking, it became the subject of the Wondering podcast Dr. Death, which later became an 8-episode TV miniseries. Thank you for joining me in my morning cup of murder. Please join me again tomorrow to hear what terrible thing happened on April 4th. Don't forget to rate and subscribe and let me know how you like it. If you want to help support the podcast, there's always Patreon, or just sharing it with your true crime obsessed friends. And remember, stay safe.