Part Two: The Naturopathic Doctor Who Bombed a Plane

of criminal. Today. He would have just gone to prison forever after his first crime, and we would have been deprived 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. His biographer Jerry Jamison, author of Vanishing Act, notes humiliated and mortified at being duped and outplayed in his own games, 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, and I'm worth fifty million dollars. How are 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 starting 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? 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 people to trust, you know, your brothers in fraternal organizations like the Freemasons, or your colleagues if you're like, oh didn't

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 game their trust, pretending to be this eccentric rich

guy and then ask them about their lives. Like he's quizzling them about details about their family and like what life is like back at home, 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, 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 ten thousand dollars in modern money to bail him out, right, Like I can, we can get him out of jail, but these these crooked local cops and whatever small town this convention's in, they're not going to 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 need, guess, right, although maybe not more then you'd guess, because one of the more popular scams right now is an AI version of the same thing, 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 got to send these guys money or they'll kill me, and then Grandma wires ten grand to whatever fucking scammer.

twenty six Freemason convention in Saint 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 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. That way, he

can automate the process because it's a numbers game. You want to make as many calls as possible and 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, yeah.

missing their right 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?

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 Saint Louis, a bunch of ads for 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 thirty percent above market wages, like way more money than people are used to and you know, times are tough, that nineteen twenty six 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 up front. This is just money to make sure you actually show up for your first day of work, you know, because we got to like buy some stuff to get things set up for you. We don't want you to run out on us. 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 twenty five hundred dollars in cash is a fully refundable shirty fee. This is a real bonified 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 that's a lot of money for money today.

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, period, 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 nineteen twenty six. This is a beautiful time to carry out a scam like this. People are still getting used to phones. Phones are not like people learned over how weird a phone is.

So if you 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 going to 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. 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 Saint Louis Police put out an APB that also kind of

doubles as like a dating app. Description for our friend here 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 Saint Louis police con man.

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 incredulous. His advice to all clients just happened to involve spanning the coffers of Guru jipterm right now that is this show says, the first time he's going to show like an interest in like 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 pretending to be a some vaguely like ambiguously foreign spiritual guru. 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, missus 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 got to bail him out, and or I think 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 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 is this other guy's wife is sent but the operator is like, this guy's supposed to be bald, he obviously has hair. The clerk calls the cops, and that's it, right, he's busting sense.

local press. He's always saying like, well, you know, for the two weeks that I was committing this crime spree, I made fifty thousand dollars 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 is 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.

about eighteen 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 at cod man no matter what am I gonna do?

was William Allan 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. Like the vibes between these two, you should read is like fifty percent the wet bandits from home alone and Taylor is Marv for sure, like he's the dummy and fifty percent like a cult of two where where our boy is the cult leader, Robert Spears whatever name he's going on, is the leader, and Taylor is the follower because Taylor is absolutely devoted to this.

Taylor is like, it's been almost ten 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 may Steele Henry, who has no idea that he has like two 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.

of naturopathy was beginning to take hold. Now, I wouldn't say it was beginning in this period of time, like the early twenties, is kind of when interest seems to peak early in the mid twenties, but it's pretty popular in that area in this period of time, in like the early forties, and so 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 goes straight. 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, at least initially, the first career he goes for when he's trying to make it legitimately is he becomes a journalist.

You can 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. He gets asked to liver 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 pattern 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?

in love with him. She's like thirty two, 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, and the opening stage is of World War two. You know, I've been all over the world, all these exciting places and

seeing all these horrible things. The two get married because she just falls for this dude, and you can guess what happened next. You know what this guy's gonna do when he gets married to a lady, He's gonna leave it, right, He is absolutely going to abandon this lady.

in the back of the car. So this like family the Shirtzers, and there's like one other guy at Novak who's paying for a ride in the car and he pays fifteen bucks to get a ride to the coast. Now, before he leaves, he's got to have some money for California, so he steals everything Benita has and makes off with like five hundred bucks, which is about eighty three hundred

dollars in modern money, right, that's like her savings. The road trip with the Shirtzers starts off normally enough, but the days 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 of 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 it 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 doesn't This is not like a happy reunion and

last meeting between the two. So the car they get back in the road and Spears is just just an awful person to be around. And when the car stops outside of Oklahoma City, he starts looking for his money and he realizes that like the five hundred bucks that he'd stolen from his latest wife is gone, and he immediately assumes that one of the other passengers, probably like the shirts are Boy or Novak, had taken it. Now I might say that like, well, you just visited your mom.

The veteran thief and con woman. Yeah, maybe she robbed you. That's kind of that's kind of earthing one last ice from your mom.

Young Shirtzer. They continue to deny all knowledge of his missing stash. Next, Spears shuffled them back into the car, all of them in the back seat. Bizarrely, they say, he then soaked a blanket with chloroform and placed it over them. He forced them to inhale until they lost consciousness. That's how this crime opens. By the way. Wow, 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, because 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 chloroform to blanket, he gets behind the wheel and he's driving to the nearest town, Weatherford, and he says his plan is he's going to 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. Now unfortunately for him. I don't know if you've ever had to chloroform somebody listeners, brandy hands.

as he drives into Weatherford. So he's now 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'll they're all 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 in with it. He fires three times during the fray. He hits Novak in

the head once but thankfully doesn't hurt him badly. He hits the Shirtser boy I think, in the chest, but again doesn't wound him badly. And he also pistol whips miss Shirtzer, although that may have been an accident, like he may have just been because he was flailing and couldn't really see because he's got a gloroform blanket on him. Like he shoots himself through the hand during this fight. Eventually happen, the car comes to a stop and our

boy hops out and fucking runs like the wind. Yeah, 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 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, 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, it's like a pepper ball gun or like a grenade launcher. But he tear gas is the whole town, the mayor. Tear gas is the mayor small town. As he's trying to run away.

of the crime. Spears was back in the headlines again. Two men shot, three anesthetized and wild thousand mile car. Right, he makes so many good news stories.

and held him at gunpoint. You tried to shoot him. I don't know, man, I don't have a cornfield Jesus.

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 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 Frank. I was Frank 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 nineteen forties and he himself is pushing forty 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 and during a chloroform gun fight.

As a general rule, most physicians avoid against advice against getting into chloroform gun fights if you can.

But he actually fails at this. He can't find a way to 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 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

natural apathy medical centers. Spears was vaguely familiar with the term, as we'd not it 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

run around on the whole medical system. But becoming a natura path 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.

If you call yourself a doctor, Dallas is the city for you.

who didn't believe in real medicine. That's a big thing for Hoxy. And there's some other guys, some major like super wealthy, like in cleaning the wealthiest man in the world at the time, who like live in and around the Dallas area, who were major advocates for like snake oil medicine. And so they're kind of like bribing elected leaders to make sure that Texas stays a friendly climate for this kind of shit.

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 and you have to pass a medical exam before we'll call you a notchropathic doctor. That sounds okay, right, Like give it the standards of the time.

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, doctor 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 work at a statemntal hospital and it's 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 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 at a state mental hospital

in the fucking forties. 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. I think that's kind of his attitude. That makes sense.

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 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 Board in Texas. Overnight, he becomes a doctor. Now he's not an MD, but he starts writing his name out as Robert Spears, MD, because who's gonna stop him? Right, like

he's gonna stop me. He starts his practice in nineteen fifty and by nineteen fifty five 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. What the fuck he is really good at this? Why being a fake doctor?

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. Yeah.

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 Reducer pills, which I'm going to guess we're just methamphetamine or amphetamine of some sort, or at least just pyrophedra concentrated. He's also got his

radionics machine, which uses electromagnetic waves to treat illnesses. Another popular product among the Dallas Wine mom set was the electro psychrometer, which Jamison describes as promising to quote, provide insights into the mental state of an individual and thus provide and 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, 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 the early to mid fifties, he's pulling in like four grand a month, which is about fifty thousand dollars a month

in modern money, and not a doctor. Spears was not only popular with the rich ladies. In nineteen fifty four, he was named president of the Texas Naturopathic Association. So he is running the whole association four years into his career.

psychometer in Waco. She decided this made her basically a professional, and she started marketing herself as a licensed psychiatrist. After this point, she charged five dollars a treatment, which is like fifty dollars to day, and scammed enough people that the FBI actually had a sizable file on her, totally separate from the one on her husband. Here's how one report from one of her patients recorded her work operating this. I found this in Jamison's book, but this is from

an FBI report. In the summer of nineteen fifty six, I was directed to Francis Spears when I had a nervous breakdown. She would take me to an upstairs room where she would have me lie on a day bed 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 Miss Spears was not competent to help me, and I did not return.

to he's a respected man For a while. Near the end of nineteen fifty six, 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's right, motherfucker's this guy invented farrahnos like sixty Yearslaney. It's the same con and he had exactly as much real technology is therapous.

natural path is quite evil enough to like crass. 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, and the amount of harm he's doing is 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 Saint Louis. Donald had been previously a major fitness influencer of his day, and like Hollywood, 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. Like if MGM has a starlett who has an wanted pregnancy, they called Donald and he takes care of this, and he's bribing the cops.

He's bribing everybody so it 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 forties and early fifties that appendicitis was described as a Hollywood epidemic. Jamison writes, Loomis, with a built in clientele and the impurmature 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 grew would show up for a purported work out, perform his duties, and be on his way, receiving compensation 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.

women that he's working on than like Loomis experiences. So these two meet up at a convention in the fifties and Loomis takes Spears and another doctor named Tiska under his wings and they perform an underground business, splitting up the West and Southwest between their practices through the fifties while he's like also a successful naturopath. The business booms, but they start to get increasing police scrutiny on them,

and Spears is like, this doesn't seem safe. I want to take a step back and keep selling fake medical devices because that seems a lot safer and more reliable.

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 stepping into 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 because so this representative is trying to push for like a more restrictive law, but he's basically open to bribes, and he records. Harmon records doctor 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 sixty grand and Spears is like, gun, I'll pay it. I've

got the foundation funds, Like, we'll bribe you with that. Basically, this had been his real job since he'd become the head of the state Naturopathic Association. Right as he's bribing lawmakers and police to look the other way because 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 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. And 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 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 Fyman, who's the guy he'd bought his fake degree from.

And Fiman had built this intrauterine paste, right, and he marketed it under the name Metrovact. 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 so 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 Fireman is doing. Fireman is moving it through this huge underground network. It's worth adding this fact about Fyman's

violet covered abortion paste from Jamison's 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 under 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 Fimen to license this formula, and Fimon's like, no,

I'm making money off of it. So Spears has a pharmacist with this an 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 product that he's selling. He just has this pharmacist cook up another pace that will burn people from the inside. Fucking Napoleon Bonaparte, Barbie amazing name.

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 twenty two thousand dollars a month.

But this doesn't last long. In July of nineteen fifty nine, one of his patients, a twenty two year old school teacher, had gotten sick and I think eventually died after coming into UCLA Medical Center. And when she'd come in, she claimed that doctor 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 gotta get in a lot of trouble for this. Yeah, this is going to 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 pay 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 health of the women he's working on. I think Loomis at

least cared about because he wants to 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. Fucking Spears just doesn't give a shit. And because he's so sloppy and reckless, a woman's life is destroyed. And yeah, it also just rolls up this whole abortion market that

had been running. Point, Yeah, it's fucked up. Spears is near seventy. 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 going to 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, right, yes, yeah, So while all this is going on 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 kid. 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 like blow off steam while he's a successful natural bath. So it seems like Spears kind of gets with his buddy and he's like, hey, I've got

another con. We don't know exactly what happened. We know that on November sixth, nineteen fifty nine, Robert Spears booked a plane flight from Tampa to New Orleans. He had previously taken out one hundred thousand dollars 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 thirty seven five hundred

dollars insurance. He calls his wife three times before getting on the plane and she could tell something was wrong with him. National Airlines Flight nine sixty seven took off at eleven twenty two pm. It last made radio contact at around twelve forty four 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

forty two people aboard are presumed to have died. Now we don't know what caused flight nine sixty seven to go down. There was a thorough investigation this 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 whose Spears and Taylor were kind of connected to, had killed himself on a plane, taking out the whole

plane for the insurance money. So this is probably a con that they kind of wrapped up from him. There are some people who doubted Taylor. Really it seems like he did. He Spears may have tricked him. Taylor may not have known that this was happening, yeah, 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 Natura path 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 it. Like he like something's fucked up here. Tursky gets like weirded out because Spears is traveling around with a trunk ful 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. Yeah, 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 worshiped him, to get on it instead, and tried to have his wife cash in that one hundred thousand dollars life insurance policy. His plan was for it to

support their kids, right, her and their kids. Well, 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 do something for his family, and so he may have orchestrated the murder of forty two people on a plane to try and get his wife and kids the insurance money. Yikes, that's probably what happens. Well,

we don't know. Wow, he does get caught, 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.

who else had the bomb? Yeah, 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. That's kind of bad business for the mob.

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