Deep Dive
Shownotes Transcript
This episode is brought to you by Experian. Are you paying for subscriptions you don't use but can't find the time or energy to cancel them? Experian could cancel unwanted subscriptions for you, saving you an average of $270 per year and plenty of time. Download the Experian app. Results will vary. Not all subscriptions are eligible. Savings are not guaranteed. Paid membership with connected payment account required.
There is another way. What is going on? You've found Chameleon, season eight. And this is Dr. Miracle. A production of Campside Media. Oh. The Bench. In the spring of 2011, the California Medical Board ramped up an investigation into Robert Young's Miracle Ranch. Two investigators showed up unannounced at the ranch to look into Doris McCullough's claim that Young was practicing medicine without a license.
So then it seems that Young may have tried to cover his tracks by moving medical records and IV infusion sets to another location. And that's when things got really chaotic. He just started spiraling, according to the people we talked to. Anytime anybody tried to advise him on what to do or told him not to do something like administering IVs when he didn't have a medical license, he allegedly exploded in anger.
Dr. Young just did what he wanted. There was no dissuading him. Don Colley and Caroline Robitaille. He said, listen, when you can't go through the front door, you go through the window. When you can't go through the window, you go through the garage. When you can't go through the garage, you go through the chimney. You get what you want, no matter what. And it seemed like he was getting what he wanted. He had a mistress in New York, and she'd had his child. So he often flew out to visit them.
Robert's wife, Shelley, apparently didn't know about these visits, even if other people on the ranch did. Shelley never really knew that he was going and spending time with her. He wasn't supposed to be doing that. In general, things between Shelley and Robert weren't going well. What did you see of his relationship with Shelley at that time? It was strained, very strained, bitter.
The couple's marital problems were widely noted around the ranch. June Assisi, did you ever witness their arguments? There was one time we had people at the ranch for a class with the author of Men Are From Mars, Women Are From Venus. She was asking questions about how, why men, basically rubber, treated her so badly. And then
Robert was trying to defend himself. Shelly seems like she was projecting this image of the perfect wife, sticking to her husband's diet, devoting herself to his business and its success and the health of her children. But Caroline Robitaille, who worked with Don at the ranch, saw a private side of Shelly that seemed miserable, almost frantic.
She and I are pretty similar in age, and we talked about our kids and marriage, and we'd have these long conversations on the phone. And she cried a lot to me, so I had a soft spot for her. I saw Shelly in a very vulnerable, weak woman, insecure, scared to death to be out on her own, but being abused by this man with his infidelity.
Shelley was supposed to be his partner, but it seems like no one could tell anything to Robert Young. And Shelley wasn't the only one in this position. In March 2012, there's a PH Miracle board meeting. Robert Young is there. So is his wife, Shelley. There's June the accountant and John Baird, his legal advisor, who is pretty much the only person who regularly stood up to Young.
At the meeting, Dr. Young explains that he'd been speaking with a doctor who was pushing to form a private medical association so that the California Medical Board wouldn't have jurisdiction over the center. And then, poof, all this medical board nonsense could just be eliminated like acids from the body. The only problem? Starting a new private medical association doesn't get rid of the California Medical Board. So John Baird, his legal advisor, called Robert out on it.
And that's when Young allegedly lost it. He just went on a huge temper tantrum. He went nuts and just fired John right there. The one person who checked Young's worst impulses was gone. And from here, it feels like Shelly shrank away from her husband even more. After seeing Shelly's reaction to how he fired John Baird,
That actually really made me feel for Shelly and kind of understand what she probably went through in their marriage. How do you mean? What was, I mean, what was her physical reaction to it? She just withdrew. She was, she was, she just drew him on herself.
It basically went back to Robert being able to do whatever he wanted to do. From Sony Music Entertainment, Campside Media, and Dorothy Street Pictures, I'm Larison Campbell, and this is Dr. Miracle, Episode 4.
Dawn Calley was in pain. Her back hurt. Her bones hurt. She had a young child, and whenever she did events with Dr. Young, she'd have to do things like lift full boxes of supplements, physical labor that made the pain so much worse. She worried her cancer had spread to her bones. Of course she was afraid of dying, but she was most afraid for her children. Around this time, she writes in her diary about being scared that she's never fully lived.
and scared that she's going to leave her children without their mother. So Young orders some tests. Some of the ways he'd monitor my cancer was through cancer markers. So the cancer markers are just going up and up and up. I got there and they were around 60. Normal is like under 25. And they were about to be 100. These are real tests that are used in conventional medicine. If Dawn's numbers are going up,
That means her cancer is probably getting worse. I'm freaking out. Like, I needed those numbers to go down, not up. And it's like, everything that I've been doing, like, what's happening? Like, am I dying? And he said, I don't care if 16 more tumors show up. You just keep doing this. So Dawn kept up with Young's protocol. She would just focus on the diet and her job.
One of her responsibilities at the ranch was to take calls from clients and schedule appointments for them. And one day, she gets a call from a woman named Karen Brown. It feels like a typical call to Dawn, who listens as Karen explains that she's been living with colon cancer for years, had some chemo and radiation, but it was horrible. Now she's done with all that. She wants an alternative. So Dawn tells Karen what she tells everyone. Sure, you can have a consultation with Dr. Young for...
This is a recording of Karen's visit to the ranch. Young and Karen and someone else in the office chit-chat about the traffic getting there. Small talk. It's friendly.
They talk about Karen's blood labs, which she has faxed over for him to review. He quickly diagnoses her with anemia. So it looks like you're slightly anemic. What was that level? Anemic. Your red blood count is 4309.
The thing is, Young is not a medical doctor, so it's actually illegal for him to practice medicine in any way, which includes diagnosing patients. But Karen is inquisitive. She's curious about what Young might do to help her.
Young suggests she read his books. He sells her on a plant-based diet. And then the conversation turns to Karen's colon cancer. Have you been through chemotherapy or surgery, Young asks. I had surgery. I had chemo and I had radiation. Let's get copies of that.
And then Young gives her the big sell, the thing that makes Miracle Ranch different from other kinds of treatments. Our approach is not to treat cancer. Our approach is to improve the quality of the blood and improve the quality of your health. I strongly believe that lifestyle and diet is the cause of many of these problems, particularly colon cancer.
Actually, Karen's right. There's no evidence that chicken causes colon cancer. I look at cancer as not a disease of the tissues, but in acidic condition of the fluids of the body. Cancer is a liquid, it's not a cell. These liquids affect the cells, and so it's very important to manage the...
After this, Karen Brown leaves the consultation, pays the money, but she never returns. Because Karen Brown isn't really Karen Brown.
She doesn't even have cancer. She never had it. And the medical records she faxed over? They're fake. Karen's real name is Robin Hollis. She's an undercover investigator with the medical board. And now, she has Robert Young on tape.
If somebody says the right words, promises the right things, anybody can become a victim. Since the early 2000s, millions of handwritten letters were landing at people's doors all across America. She truly believed that this was going to save her mind from going further astray.
into the depths of demand shut. I'm investigative journalist Rachel Brown, and I'm going to tell you the story of a scam unlike anything I've ever seen and the shape-shifting mastermind who evaded capture for more than 20 years. We never in our wildest dreams thought that these schemes were at this scale. They'd been without water for two months. All they wanted in return was whatever it was that Maria Duval was promising them.
From ITN Productions and Sony Music Entertainment, listen to The Greatest Scam Ever Written. Subscribe on Apple Podcasts to binge all episodes now, or listen weekly wherever you get your podcasts. The following interview is being videotaped at the Dade County Public Safety Department, Miami-Dade County, Florida. And sir, would you identify yourself? My name is Ronald F. Proud of 30.
In 1976, a man in Florida tells a cop he has a confession to make. But instead of becoming his victim, I became his confidant, one of the people closest to him, as he recounted and was tried for his horrific crimes.
From Orbit Media and Sony Music Entertainment, listen to My Friend the Serial Killer. Subscribe on Apple Podcasts to binge all episodes now or listen weekly wherever you get your podcasts. The medical board's investigation continued slowly. They needed a smoking gun to get Dr. Young in trouble. And what, quote, Karen collected when she visited the ranch wasn't quite it.
There was no talk of IVs from Dr. Young, no clear promises of a cure. But the Miracle Ranch family here at home is starting to break down. Dessa, the cleaner at the ranch, is about to quit. Her last straw was a patient named Carl Trampore, a real patient. Carl was maybe in his 50s, so not old, desperate, wanting to live. Carl had terminal prostate cancer, and Young was happy to have him.
especially since Carl was willing to pay. Carl's sister says he racked up a bill of over $80,000. But one day, something went wrong. They took Carl down to the colonics room, gave him his high colonics,
Dessa was freaked out. She felt Miracle Ranch was not safe. Now, the man basically was dying or near death.
They loaded him up into the back of the SUV. They take him to emergency out of San Diego County. Dessa didn't actually witness this, but Carl was driven to the hospital. And not even the closest one, which would have been about half an hour away. They drove him all the way to St. Joseph Hospital in Orange County, more than an hour's drive away.
then dropped him in the lobby alone and left. I don't know if it contributed to his death. I'm not a doctor. I just know that the condition that Carl was in when I left on Friday, to him being taken off the property to die in a hospital, and I don't know if Carl survived it.
Carl lived for another year, but Dessa left the ranch. I went up to June and said, "I quit. I'm not giving you my two weeks notice. I'm working for a shyster." What Dessa didn't know was that Carl wasn't the first patient to be left at a hospital. Whenever it seemed like a patient might die at the ranch, an official source alleges they would be taken to a hospital to avoid directing negative attention towards the ranch.
And this started happening more often. Here's Junosisi. I know the medical board was evaluating prior to this, but once we started having sick clients down at the hospital, the local hospital, they really started after and then. They stopped taking them just to the local hospital and started taking them to hospitals further out.
As employees at the ranch watched this happen, they sort of split into two groups: the ones who were pretty horrified by what was going on and tried to stop it, and the ones who stayed completely loyal to Robert Young and believed him when he said that when patients got sicker, they were actually getting better. At this point, Don was part of the latter group, still loyal to Young.
June Assisi, the accountant, was part of the horrified group. And in March 2013, she would also leave the Miracle Ranch family. It started when a woman from Saudi Arabia, also with terminal cancer, was scheduled to arrive at the ranch. Apparently her husband was very wealthy.
and he flew her to LAX on a private plane. One of the women who works in the office, her name is Donna, heads out to pick her up. Donna went to LAX to pick her up and bring her to the ranch and found that she was bedridden. There was no way she should hit the ranch. She was basically on a stretcher in the plane.
And so Donna called me and said, we can't bring this woman to the ranch. She's too far gone. She went straight from the airport to the hospital. Her family had paid $45,000 for her to stay at the ranch, and she never even set foot there. But when her husband asked for a refund, Robert Young refused. This guy was going and sitting at the bank waiting for a wire transfer.
I went to Robert and I just told him, you have got to refund this portion. But according to June, there wasn't enough money in the ranch's account to issue a refund, but have to come from somewhere else. Now the following account is June's, and we don't have Shelly's side of this because she did not respond to our queries. Shelly was adamant that she received so much money every month and it go into an account for her account.
And I told Robert I had to take money out of that account and transfer it back to this guy. So he agreed. He told me to do it. And within two days, Shelly saw that the money was gone from her account. And I was accused of stealing money and fired. June was out. At that point, I was just glad to get out of there.
Mary, the cook on the ranch. The next day, one of the ranch employees says to Mary...
And they were sitting there, all on one side of the table, and Dr. Young. I sat on the opposite side of the table. They pick up a phone, and they play that recording. So I didn't know June's phone belonged to the ranch. So they were mad at me. But I called her, and I talked to her, and I wasn't allowed to do that. By calling June, Mary was violating an unspoken rule. Caroline Robitaille.
You weren't allowed to talk to any of these people that left. You would be fired or dismissed on sight, and he had no qualms about telling you that if you ever talked to any of these people.
when they disappeared, when they were no longer working for them. There was always overtones or undertones of them being the problem, and that's why they were no longer there. I stood up and said, she's my friend. I like her. You can't tell me who I can talk to and can't talk to. And I just got up and hightailed it to the kitchen. Now Mary was out too.
But Dawn was still loyal to Young. She oriented her life around the alkaline lifestyle. She'd put so much time and effort into it. Not to mention, her job at the ranch is her bread and butter, or avocado, I guess. For Dawn, the sunk cost of following the diet and Young himself were so massive. If she leaves now, she loses everything she's put in.
Young was her father figure. He made her feel safe and taken care of, even when she was getting sicker, even when her pain seemed to be getting worse, even when she saw that sick patients on the ranch were not well. That started occurring to me over time. I was like, everyone's dying. Why is everyone dying? And, you know, he'd give you enough of his reasons, but eventually I'm sitting there
doing this protocol, and little questions are starting to pop into my head. The questions are popping into her head. But if she were to really sit with them, she would have to face something horrible. She'd been refusing conventional treatments for five years. Her friend and colleague Caroline was with her a lot around this time, trying to support her. And on one trip they both took to the ranch, they sat in on one of Young's microscopy courses.
When Young taught courses, he liked to analyze blood samples from students and give them real-life examples of patients' blood. He got some results back for Dawn, and instead of going to her and talking in confidence, he came into the classroom and talked as an example of
of what it looks like when you're not following the protocol. And he goes into this elaborate thing. And when she finally realized it was her, she got up and left the room and I followed her and she was in shambles. I mean, shaking and panic attack. Dawn jumps in here. I'm just total freak out.
And, you know, at this point, not even thinking about how mad he was at me and embarrassing me in front of the entire classroom. I'm just like, you know, in a panic. She was so afraid and didn't know what to do. But going to a doctor would...
end her relationship with Young. I mean, he would so disapprove of it and not want to work with her anymore, and then where is she going to be? Caroline had seen enough. She tells Don, We don't need to care about his response to this. You need to take care of yourself for no other reason for your mental health. Go to a doctor, see what they say. Don still felt loyal to Young.
still wanted him to be her diet Jesus dad. But she knew that she was not doing well. She had started drinking heavily. Keeping up with the diet as aggressively as she had been became hard. And she felt a lot of guilt when she slipped and cheated. Plus, she was still sick. And all of this was making her wonder if she needed to do something else about her health. Something beyond drinking green juice and baking soda.
Ultimately, the medical board investigation found enough evidence to suspect that Robert Young was practicing medicine without a license. And that's not just a medical board violation. It's a criminal offense. So they passed all their records on to the DA's office.
The investigation had been dragging along for a few years. Now, it was about to really move forward. My name is Jim Clark. I am an investigator for the San Diego County District Attorney's Office. We met Jim at his house. It's up in the hills of San Diego with a pool and a breathtaking mountain view. He's retired now and still carries himself with military posture. The medical board, they brought a case to us
And we reviewed it, and we decided there was a lot more work that needed to be done on this case. So that's how it started, and we kept moving forward with it. Jim talks to former employees and ex-patients and their families. The people who brought their loved ones in who had cancer, he's telling them what they want to hear, and he's saying it with conviction. And he's telling them that, follow my program.
and they're going to survive. I'm going to cure their cancer. And Jim understands that families will pay for this cure. A good con man isn't abrasive. He's a likable guy.
So they start shelling out the money. They start these treatments. But eventually, they start seeing their loved one's health start to decline and go downhill. And so then the confrontations will start. Hey, Dr. Young, my wife or my brother or my cousin or whoever it is, they're getting worse. They're not getting better. Oh, well, that's the cancer leaving the body. You're always going to get worse before you get better. But then when things got worse,
Too bad Robert Young wouldn't cut ties with them. The more people Robert cut ties with, the more people were willing to talk with investigators, from the families of patients to ex-employees. Like June Assisi, who was back in Utah when she gets a phone call. It's one of the investigators from the DA's office. And now, June is willing to tell that investigator everything. I was able to tell the DA where they had moved everything to.
Now the DA's office was really making headway in the investigation. I mean, hiding records? That's pretty fishy. But something was about to happen that would blow the case wide open. Later on, a woman dies at the ranch. The patient was a very wealthy and very sick Australian woman. I think probably the one with the worst cancer she can get, pancreatic cancer. And Robert Young is just...
pumping her full of fluid. He knows he's got a big fish on the line. All right, these people have money. The Australian woman is getting tons of IVs. One of the things with cancer patients is giving them too much fluid, you can actually drown the person, you know, internally. You know, congestive heart failure, too much water around the heart. This woman's condition got worse and worse until she died.
right there on the ranch. When that happened, Robert Young panicked. He couldn't have a dead body on his ranch. So they didn't call 911. They didn't call the police. They didn't call the medical examiner's office. They didn't do anything. They let her body lie there. Robert Young got on the phone and called Dr. Ben Johnson in Atlanta, panicked, saying, hey, you need to get here fast. We had a woman die.
By the way, we haven't talked with Ben Johnson because he passed away in 2019. So he hopped on a plane. He can get San Diego probably till about maybe 12 hours later after her death. So she'd been sitting there for 12 hours. When he got here, he called the medical examiner's office.
And said, hi, I'm Dr. Ben Johnson. This woman's been under my care and she just passed away. So I'd like a waiver number from the office. Well, once he gets a medical waiver number, family can call for a funeral home service. All you got to do is provide that waiver number. They verify the waiver number. They can pick up the body. But one of the employees at the ranch had an attack of conscience and contacted one of Jim's colleagues at the DA's office right away.
He started looking and he located the funeral home that she was at. And he called the medical examiner's office and told them this is what's going on. Medical examiner went over to the funeral home and claimed jurisdiction and took her body and brought her down to the coroner's office. So they performed an autopsy and the cause of death wasn't the pancreatic cancer, it was congestive heart failure.
from being pumped full of too much fluids. She died maybe as a direct result of those IVs. The IVs that were heralded by Young as a kind of cure-all. Oh, this changes the game a little bit. We might have a homicide charge now to charge Robert Young with. The medical examiner, however, decided that they were not going to list the cause of death, homicide,
because her pancreatic cancer was so far advanced. They said that she probably maybe had a day or so, maybe two days to live. She was on death's doorstep. So the pancreatic cancer was a major contributing factor to her death, although the cause of death itself was the congestive heart failure.
The DA for this case argued with them about it, and I was beside myself. I was like, "Does that mean if somebody's that close to death, I can put a pillow over their face and suffocate them?" Where do we draw that line? But even if they lost that battle, the DA's office was winning the war. Because finally, after a years-long investigation, they had a warrant to search Miracle Ranch. And they were going to raid the place.
In July 2013, Dawn's friend Caroline was back home in Northern California after another visit to the ranch. As always, she was busy scheduling appointments and taking calls from clients. And she gets a call from one of those clients, a woman she's just booked into the ranch. She called me and said, "I don't know what to do. There's marshals, like 13 of them, lined up on the road with guns."
I said, "Just stay where you are. I will make some calls and get back to you." And that's when it all started. Someone had given the marshals the gate code, so they got on the ranch pretty easily.
More officers were at off-site locations where Young had stashed a bunch of documents. We found hundreds of these records. And in one of the other locations, there was a storage facility where he was keeping records. So we found the bulk of the records there. Jim was there at the ranch too, walking right into the office. He tells the four or five people in there to put up their hands and stop all work on the computers.
We found a lot of medical records, which I don't really want to call medical records because he wasn't a doctor. The way he's running things, he's got an actual absentee doctor who's kind of signing off as long as he's getting his cut. On the walls of Young's office, Jim sees a number of diplomas. But later, when he looks into them, he learns that the most science training that Dr. Young had was
was one semester of biology that he took, pass-fail, his freshman year at the University of Utah. And he never even graduated. He made so many claims about so many different things. And every one of them was a lie.
Jim was repelled by all Robert Young had done, the way he treated people who came to him for help. These were desperate people. They were all diagnosed with serious forms of cancer, some of it terminal. These people were desperate to try anything to extend their lives. And they believed anything that was told to them out of desperation. Start doing what I tell you to do and die.
We'll cure you. Sure. And the regular medical doctors are saying there's no hope. And he's like, no, no, no, no. I got it. Yeah. Quit taking your medications. That's what's killing you. That's what's making it worse for you. Follow my instructions to a T. But you see, that's the thing. That's his out. Because if you didn't drink that one avocado shake that you should have drank at four o'clock in the afternoon. Okay. Well, you didn't drink that avocado shake at four.
"Well, that's why you're getting sicker." It's like the narrowest line that you have to walk. Right. And one slight step off of it. Right. And so you were at fault for your condition worsening. See, this is the real beauty of Jung's dogma. If you are the only one responsible for healing yourself, then you're also the only one responsible when you stay sick. He was never at fault.
But soon Robert Young would be facing questions about whether he was at fault. We went back there to serve the arrest warrant on him. Robert Young was arrested in January 2014 by U.S. Marshals. They found him in his exercise room.
He wasn't hiding or anything like that, but I think he was in there exercising. The news was big locally. Many people, the pH Miracle Wellness Center at Valley Center and the man who runs it, Robert Young, are seen as their last hope to beat cancer or other life-threatening diseases. The controversial care provider was arrested, though, this morning and booked into jail.
We get the entire investigation done before we go out and make the arrest. When it's time to make the arrest, we make the arrest, and then we're ready to start the prosecution. Prosecutors were ready with multiple felony counts related to practicing medicine without a license and grand theft, including one charge of stealing more than $200,000 from victims. But would they be able to convince a jury that Robert Young was in the wrong?
Or was he thinking faster than they could? Unlock all episodes of Chameleon, Dr. Miracle, ad-free right now by subscribing to the Binge Podcast channel. Not only will you immediately unlock all episodes of this show, but you'll get binge access to an entire network of other great true crime and investigative podcasts, all ad-free.
Plus, on the first of every month, subscribers get a binge drop of a brand new series. That's all episodes, all at once. Unlock your listening now by clicking subscribe at the top of the Chameleon Show page on Apple Podcasts or visit GetTheBinge.com to get access wherever you get your podcasts. Next time on Dr. Miracle.
Bottom line is, you know, I'm just like what my attorney says, we are going to fight this and we are going to win. I just asked him on a whim, did you use your theory to regrow your hair? He was like, yes, but I also did get surgery. But of all the things I threw at him, of all the accusations that I made during the course of his cross-examination, that was the one that got him mad.
A lot of people say, how stupid are you that you followed this man? And how did you not know after seeing so many people die? Or how come it took so long for the wool to come off your eyes? Dr. Miracle is a production of Campside Media, Sony Music Entertainment, and Dorothy Street Pictures. The show was hosted by me, Larison Campbell. I reported it with Lily Houston-Smith, our producer, and also our field recordist.
Shoshi Smolovitz is our managing producer and editor. Our executive producers are Vanessa Gregoriotis and me, Larison Campbell. From Sony Music Entertainment, our executive producer is Catherine St. Louis. Our sound designer and mix engineer is Michelle Macklem. Studio recording by Ewan Lai-Tremuin. Story editing by Amy Padula. Fact-checking by Julia Case-Levine.
Additional help from Rachel Yang and Rajiv Gola. If you're enjoying the show, please tell a friend. It really does help spread the word.