Content warning. This episode features topics related to sexual assault and abuse, as well as struggles with drug addiction. For those in search of help, there are resources in our show notes for today's episode.
Fire Department of twenty six baby not breathing. He was just found like this question, Karen, I don't know you.
Called me crying. On October fifth, twenty seventeen, Dori orders three week old baby a boy named Boez stops breathing and a man who calls it in. The man on that nine to one one call is Carmen Puliafido.
When I found out that Polyofido was the one to call nine on one, I just almost broke down.
That's Dora's sister, Miriam Jones.
Because it's just so painfully obvious that he is responsible for my sister's drug habit. And at this point I found out that Sarah Warren and others who were involved with him were addicted to drugs, and I just could not believe that nothing was being done about this. No one cared.
Pulliafido tells the paramedics that Dora is his quote girlfriend, like Sarah Warren, He's been subsidizing her lifestyle with money and drugs. In exchange for sex. The reporting team at the La Times, Matt, Sarah, Harriet, Adam and Me had learned about Dora Yoder during our reporting on Sarah Warren. Dora was one of a number of young people in Pulliafido's circle. But when we learn of the baby's death, we have questions, how exactly did this three week old
boy die? Why was Pulliafido the one to make the call, And finally, if he's involved in this tragedy, we'll pull the a Fido finally face justice. My name is Paul Pringle and this is Fallen Angels. This is episode eight Bad Doctors.
I got a text one day and I was like standing in my front yard doing some kind of like yardwork or something, and the text was just like their baby died.
Reporter Harriet Ryan.
I think the first direction we had is just all feeling like guilt and just should we have done something more?
But then we just you know.
Started going into reporter mode. We've done a lot of door knocking of associates of Polifido, including Dora Yoder, and she hadn't talked to us, but being out in that area, we had developed some sources.
I remember kind of frantically checking the La County Coroner's website looking for a baby with the last name Yoda, and there it was that this infant had died, and it was like a holy shit moment. It's like, oh my, like how could this happen? Matt Hamilton, I remember immediately filing a bunch of public records requests for everything about Dora Yoda calls for service. So I did that for Dora at all her addresses and got a bunch of
records within a few weeks. One was a call from Dora's father, Meno Yoder, a few years prior.
I'll do you a share station, you may I help you.
I would like to make a report on my daughter. Okay, and my daughter's been known to do drugs and she's involved with a doctor that's also known to do drugs. Okay, last Saturday night, my daughter left and we haven't seen her talk to her since. But the doctor keeps showing up at the house and telling us you did a moto some one place and what she's doing at a moodkill is that's true, But we just don't know. This is all coming from this doctor that she's involved with.
And I got his name. He's an eye doctor.
Dora's father, Meno, had made these calls when the family was trying to get Pullia Fido out of Dora's life after it had become clear to them he was supplying her with drugs and had gotten her hooked on myth.
And then the other was the nine one one call from the morning the baby died.
Baby not breathing yet, baby not breathing.
And like, as soon as it played, I remember hearing Pulli Fido's voice and it was the same voice heard in those videos he and Sarah Warren using drugs, and it was just like, oh my gosh, that's Pulli Fido. I can still hear him saying, baby not breathing, like it was very calm clinical. That phrase is stuck with me because it's like, if a child was dead, I think you'd put in more personal terms, but it was a baby not breathing in like a very direct, calm,
almost composed way. And those recordings are playing at my desk and I'm like, oh my god, they took my breath away. Now, in La County, you don't know why someone died for several months sometimes because the toxicology reports take forever. I mean up to six to eight months, and frankly, the corner didn't know how the baby died.
While the police are still waiting for the coroner's toxicology report, Miriam and her family are already convinced that Puliafido is accountable for what happened.
I learned about this from my parents. They called to tell me that doors baby died. It just from the day this happen, I knew he was directly or indirectly responsible for this baby's death. My sister, according to medical records, was not on drugs when she had the baby. She had the baby in a hospital. When she left the hospital, the baby was healthy. She left the hospital and stayed with Ariel's parents' house in Sherman Oaks.
Ariol Franco is Dora's boyfriend, the baby's father.
The baby was at a checkup two days before this baby died and it was healthy. There were no drugs. And remember at this point, Poiafido had not met the baby, had not been in the hospital, had not been near this baby. Ril said that Luiafido insisted she come to the house by herselves. He wanted to meet the baby, and all of this stuff, and she agreed, So she took the baby, went by herself to her Altadain house, the house Fido pays for, and by morning she's on drugs and the baby's dead.
At that point, we were one of the only people to have put together some of the dots in the situation and connected some of them. So we're like, how do we approach Dora's family, or do we approach Dora's family?
We hadn't done any outreach to the Yoders, but in researching her family, we realized that our colleague at the newspaper had written about Dora's older sister years prior, and Dora's older sister was a hairdresser, and she had been profiled in Yella Times about being former Amish now being a hairdresser in Los Angeles. Miriam had had a great experience in working with Yelly Times. Before she answered the
phone and she's like yes, Like oh my God. She had almost been waiting for the call, it seemed, but she just was ready to talk. And I felt like this was the Warren's Part two in a sense of just another family recognizing Pullifido's influence in their sister or daughter's life. And are kind of powerless for how to extricate their loved one.
The nine to one to one call and this conversation with Miriam are the basis for our first story about BoA's Yoda. It runs in January twenty eighteen.
The first story we did was really just to kind of point out what we did now, which was you have the nine one one call, you have Pullifidos in the picture, he's paying the rent, and that Dora's sister is kind of pushing authorities to investigate.
Two months later, the coroner's Talks of Collegey report confirms what Mariamne her family have suspected. There was meth in the baby's body. So now the La County Sheriff's Department opens an investigation with the DA's office into Pulliafido.
There was a criminal investigation, a homicide investigation opened up into this incident with Boaz because I went to the homicide department and I gave a statement for almost three hours about everything I knew about Pulifido and my sister and Ril, how he gives her drugs, how he monitors her, about how he gives Ril drugs, and they agreed to investigate further.
In the face of a homicide investigation, Pulliafido starts to feel real heat. He hires a law firm and claims he never gave drugs to Dori Yoder, and he threatens the La Times with a libel lawsuit. He also tries another tech to intimidate the witnesses.
Only a month or two after the investigation began, I received some strange visitors at my house and they didn't identify themselves fully except by name. They didn't say who they worked for or that they were private investigators. They just simply said they had some questions for me, and
they started asking me questions about baby's death. I told them the same thing I told the Sheriff's department, and I figured it out when they were asking me questions that they were clearly working for Puliafido, and I told them to leave and never come back. And at that end of the conversation, they left and instead approached my family and they literally provided my parents with a completed
written statement for them to sign. The statement was obviously in favor of Puliaffido the entire story of everything that happened.
Dora's parents won't sign the statement, and based on the suspicion that Pulliafido was the source of the myth in BoA's bloodstream, La County Sheriff homicide detectives began building a case for involuntary manslaughter.
They did interview Dora because she admitted using meth the night before the baby died.
But the detectives have one big problem. Dora won't say anything to implicate Puleiofido. She won't testify whether he provided the myth. She won't say whether he was using drugs with her the night before the baby's death, and Pulliafido himself, is it any more forthcoming?
He did acknowledge that he had gone to Dora's apartment the night before for to see the baby, but he claimed that he saw no drug use and that in the morning, he said he was at home with his wife in Pasadena when Dora had called him, and that his first instinct was to call nine one one, and that after the call, he said he drove over to her apartment, but it was swarming with empties, so he kept driving.
But when the coroner rules on the cause of death, it's not a drug poisoning. Despite the fact that there was myth in a baby system. It's deemed a quote accidental asphyxiation caused by the blankets in the crib. Meth Amphetamine exposure from breast milk is listed as a quote contributing condition, but not related to the immediate cause of death. But Matt and Harriet discovered that the deputy medical examiner who conducted the autopsy had changed her ruling after learning
that the Times was asking questions. Initially, she had determined the cause of death was inconclusive, but now it's an accident.
I mean, a baby doesn't just have meth in its system.
It was fifty nanograms per milla leader a meth in the baby's body, which is not super high.
There's not a lot of studies that are done. It was a very tiny amount and it wasn't enough for them to determine that it played a role in the death, so they have never charged anybody.
There was also a burn on Bos's hand. I know, like kids get injuries generally. That I mean, there was a burn on the baby's hand, and Yoda had told investigators that her eighteen daled infant had reached out and touched a hot pan and that's how he got the burn. This pathologist had told us that in his view, the burn that was described to him was from more than just touching something hot.
Dennis kill Coin was a homicide detective with the LAPD for thirty six years. He investigated high profile cases like the serial killer, Grim Sleeper, and the Black Widow murders. He's worked extensively with medical examiners.
We were required to as part of our investigation and required to attend the autopsies, and because that was deemed to be a continuation of your crime scene investigation, because you would gather information from the body and the wounds and this and that, and recovery of bullets from the body and that type of stuff. I've never heard of a baby dying of asphyxiation because of too many blankets put on them, not blankets put over their face, blanket
waiting down their chest cavity is what they're claiming. That seems pretty off the wall to me. There shouldn't be methamphetamine traces in any kid's body.
It's something that.
Shouldn't be there, you know, any more than rat poison should be there. You've got a baby that's got methanie system. You've got a baby that has about a week old burn injury to his left hand. And the mother's story with that is that she has the baby in some type of a rap that holds the baby close to the mother's chest, and she said, well, when she had the baby in this wrap up against her, that the
baby reached for a hot pan. Well, I've got a handful of kids myself, and I've never seen any baby at twenty days old reach for anything.
The former detective is also skeptical about the fact that the deputy medical examiner had changed her conclusion about the cause of death.
I never had a case where that happened.
The detectives after they told me what the medical examiner ruled and told me the DA can't file charges, the detectives were, in my opinion, genuinely upset. They felt, just like I did, that all the evidence pointed to Puliaffido. They made it clear that they referred this to the DA as a homicide and that Polifido should be charged at minimum with manslaughter. The DA would not budge because of the medical examiner's ruling, and so they were very upset.
I would guarantee you that the prominence of this doctor and USC and all that stuff had had something to do with it. If this was Joe Blow's kid, Joe Blow probably would have been in jail right now. He just, you know, dance through the raindrops, as they say, and it's just it's maddening.
In Puliafido's medical board hearing, he denies ever giving drugs to anyone, and he lies about his relationship with Dora.
I was asked under oath about his relationship with Dori Yoder and the prosecutor asks him, you know she's a known drug user, right, And his response is I don't know what her current status is. And the prosecutor says, but you have use with her, correct, and he says, no, I have not. And he initially said that he had no firsthand knowledge of Yoda's drug use, but acknowledges eventually
that he knew of her addiction. He's paying for her apartment, but denies he's a sugar daddy and describes himself as her healthcare consultant. So he's situated himself in this under oath as kind of a practicing Catholic who is trying to help a young mother save her unborn baby's life.
But after hearing the testimony of the Warrens, Don Stokes, and Devon Khan. The Medical Board has had enough. It strips Puliafido of his medical license for now, at least he won't be able to practice medicine in the state of California. For Miriam, it's not enough. Pulliafido is still in her sister's life, paying for drugs and her silence, and he's dangerous.
Pulifido is paying for her things to keep her from talking to the police. That's the only explanation. And when it becomes too inconvenient for him, she might conveniently overdose on drugs. It's only a matter of time. And because of their inaction, because the DA's office refuses to take any action, I wrote them this email and I explained to them that you're letting him murder my sister because if she dies, who's to say that he didn't murder her? Because look what he's done.
One thing is different at the LA Times as the reporters keep working on the Yoder story. The top editors are fully on board for the investigation.
Obviously, the story was scrutinized, edited that it for legal risks, but ultimately we were able to publish with a reasonable amount.
Of time, and it turns out we're going to need their support. It's February twenty eighteen. Harriet Ryan is in the newsroom at the La Times.
It's actually related to the baby ca a little bit. Because I was sitting at my desk. I have a phone on my desk. When I looked down, it was from a block number, and the police always call on block numbers, And because I was working this baby death story, I was like, it might be one of those guys. So I picked it up and it ended up being this tip about George Tendall.
This is how reporting works. A hotel manager happens to meet a photographer who works for The Times and tells me he has a tip. The photographer comes to me, We report and report, find documents, get witnesses on the record, and ultimately publish an expose about a powerful doctor using drugs to control the lives of young women. And that leads us to this guy, doctor George Tindall. If us he had problems with pull your Fido. Tindall is a liability on a whole other level.
The person asked if we could speak confidentially and give their name. Did not like explain who they were and just said, like, I know you guys have been writing a lot about USC. I'd really encourage you to look into doctor George Tyndall. I was like asking a bunch of questions.
Who is he?
I think they told me he was at the Student Health Center, and then the person was just like, I'll call you back, wouldn't give me their number. So yeah, so I started googling George Tyndall. I saw that he had been a gynecologist at the student Health clinic, and that alarmed me because I mean, that's if it's like somebody who's the manager at the bookstore, like who cares, you know, but like, yeah, that's a very sensitive job.
When the tipster calls back and describes Tyndall as a quote creepy gynecologist, Harriet digs in more. She learns that the doctor who still licensed actually doesn't work for USC anymore, but apparently he's trying to get his old job back.
He was trying to return to us at the time. The person that had called me was very concerned that he might be working someplace else.
Harriet came over to Paul and me shortly afterward, and Harriet's not someone who's rattled. But there was something about the call that rattled her. I remember her telling us that the fear in the person's voice was just very palpable and memorable. And she was taken aback by that level of caution and hesitancy, because all this person was saying was look at doctor Tindall and why he left the university.
We started working looking at court records. He didn't really have any lawsuits against him, nothing as far as USC.
We looked at databases across the United States, at court systems across the US. We really found nothing. Usually there's some sort of indicator in the public record that there's some smoke and potentially some fire, and we found none of that. Doctor Tindall had a clean medical board record, find any evidence of him having kids. There was a woman who appeared to be his wife. Her name's Daisy Patricio, and she showed up on a lot of public records. So I did call the DMV and wanted a list
of all vehicles doctor Tyndall owned. And I remember two or three coming back and the license plate on one of the vehicles was co ed Doc. And when the DMV tells you this, they don't pronounce it like that they say each letter, so they're like see Charlie, oh ed DC, and I'm like, wait, that says co ed doc. So that was one of the early indicators that was just like how many guynecologists on a college campus would call themselves co ed doc. It was a little alarming.
We also wanted to talk to people that worked.
Around doctor Tindall one on LinkedIn. We would use the Wayback Machine archive dot org for the roster of the student health clinic to figure out not just who was working there now, but who would work there and quit,
you know, dating back like a decade. We would focus on, you know, specific people that maybe we're more likely to know, and then we would just like go into Nexus or voter egs, figure out what that person's address was, put their dress under their name, and then we would just start out in the morning and either my Pontiac Vibe or Matt had this like orange car.
It was like bright orange.
People would always be like, oh yeah, I saw the orange car, and we would just go and like we just go all day.
It's painstaking work and it's frustrating no one they approach. We'll talk about doctor George Tindall until someone finally does.
Went to this house and it had like a one of those la like metal screens that people got after Charles Manson, So it's like they opened their door, but there's still this like rough metal screen. You can't see the person. They can see you, but you can't see them. And it was like near the airports. It was really loud. It was the first time we'd like aggressively made or pitched somebody to talk.
And it was like me and Matt are standing there.
You're asking this person to take a huge risk to talk to you, to even just like open their door to you. That they cost them their job, their livelihood, and I was just trying to make the case that.
It was worth it.
And it seemed like I was talking for like ten minutes straight, but it was probably only.
A few minutes.
And then there's like a long pause and then the person just opened the door and we sat down at the kitchen table and they were like a first hand witness to doctor Tandall, and they just laid it out and they were like, I think he's been sexually assaulting women for years.
You Over of twenty twelve USC master's student Lucy g called the student Health clinic to make a gynecology appointment, a routine visit. This is six years before Harriet and Matt first hear about doctor George Tindall.
When I made the appointment, I made it a point to ask for a female doctor, and I was told that I would have to wait weeks, maybe even up to a month, or I could see the male doctor the next day.
But when Lucy agreed to see the male doctor that day, she got an odd reaction from the receptionist handling the appointment.
At first, she was very matter of fact about what the scheduling would be like. And I said, okay, then I'll just see the male doctor. And she said no, are you sure? And I said yeah, that's fine. And then she said you sure you can wait? And I said no, no, I'd rather not wait. So she was It felt like to me she was trying to encourage me to wait and see a female doctor. Looking back,
there were a lot of science. I remember getting to the clinic and checkie in, and the receptionist was smiling at me and we were talking about, you know, what a beautiful day it was, And then she saw who I was seeing, and then she immediately started a frown, and she tried to schedule me for a different day, just see a different doctor. And I remember I was just like, you know, I just want to get this
over with. I'll see him as fine. I was waiting in a waiting eric just outside of his office slash exam room, and I remember he opened the door and he gave me a really big smile. You know, I'm used to doctors being friendly but detached, not with such a big smile, and I remember that being a little strange. He also locked the door for me. He didn't close the privacy screen, and he made me change.
In front of him.
And then when I was changing from him, he turned to the side, but I could see that he was looking at me at the corner of my eye, can see his eyes looking and I remember thinking, I don't know what's going on. Let's just get this over with.
Tindall then pointed to a map of China on the wall of the exam emination room.
He asked me about that after I was in the stirrups. He said, are you Chinese? Can you tell me what part of China you're from? You know, it's it's very strange. I mean people people know that usually there's like anatomy pictures, they're like or like Broucheer's about diseases, you know, not like a map of China on the wall. He asked me if I'd ever modeled before, which to me is very strange because being in LA, I know what models
look like. I don't look like a model. You know, I'm short, i have bad skin, I'm like, I'm overweight, like like I you know, I know what a model looks like. And I don't know why he's asking me that question.
It's so strange.
It all fell off to Lucy, and once she was on the table, helpless, the doctor sexually assaulted her.
Tendall told me that when he was examining me that he needed to he lacked my vaginal muscles, and I believed him. You know, I internalized it. I think I never wanted to allow myself to believe what he was doing was wrong. I think I was still very idealistic about doctors and the medical field in general, and so I didn't allow myself to believe, you know, the things he was doing to me were wrong. You know, he
made vague excuses for when he was assaulting me. About how there was a medical necessity.
Then Lucy heard the voice of one of the nurses just outside the examination room.
She came when I was halfway through my exam, and she was knocking on the door and she's yelling through the door saying, are you in there with a patient?
Let me in.
Immediately after I left the exam room, I remember just wanting to get away as far away as possible, and there were so many female staff members. I was just running down you know, like a short hallway as staff members were calling me from left and right asking me if I was okay. Someone followed me out of the clinic to ask me if I was okay, to ask if there was anything that could help me with There were actually several instances that looking back that I realized, Oh, everyone knew.
It's not just the staff at the health clinic, the people who work with Dyndall who knew what he did and had been doing for years. The more we investigate, the more it becomes clear at the highest levels of leadership at USC, they knew. Next time on Fallen angels Us, he.
Just has this like had this culture of like no bad news, like nobody wants to hear any bad news just solve the problem.
But USC could no longer avoid bad news.
It seemed like they're a filibus strain to a certain extent.
We needed him to see it was over and ugly truths are finally revealed.
USC was not the only university to have a doctor who preyed on women's students, but USC again as the worst.
We're always gonna have predators, but it's the good people who stand by and do nothing that allow them to flourish.
That's next time on Fallen Angels. Fallen Angels, the Story of California Corruption is a production of iHeart Podcasts in partnership with Best Case Studios. I'm Paul Pringle. This show is based on my book Bad City, Peril and Power in the City of Angels. Fallen Angels was written by Isabel Evans, Adam Pinkas, and Brent Katz. Isabel Evans is our producer. Brent Katz is co producer. Associate producers are
Hannah Leebowitz Lockhart and On Paho Locke. Executive producers are me, Paul Pringle, Joe Picarello, and Adam Pinkus for Best Case Studios. Original music is by James Newberry. Episode was edited by Max Michael Miller, with assistants from Nisha Venkat. Additional editings, sound design, and additional music by Dean White. Harriet Ryan, Matt Hamilton, Sarah Parvini and Adam Olmarik are consulting producers.
Our iHeart team is Ali Perry and Carl Catle. Follow and rate Fallen Angels wherever you get your podcasts