Here's All That Has Happened to the Real Christopher Duntsch A.K.A 'Dr. Death'
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Peacock's Dr. Death is a chilling dramatization of the real-life story of former neurosurgeon Christopher Duntsch. As those watching the show know, Christopher was dubbed "Dr. Death" in D Magazine for his botched surgeries that caused the death of several patients and left others with disabling injuries.
It is said to be rare for a physician to be indicted on several counts of aggravated assault stemming from events in an operating room. Even more surprising, these crimes came from a doctor who looked great on paper. It was widely acknowledged that Christopher was a confident person, and D Magazine reported that many liked him immediately when they met him (though his fellow neurosurgeons reportedly found him to be "fast-talking and cocksure"). The former doctor even boasted a neurosurgical residency at the University of Tennessee College of Medicine at Memphis, earned millions in funding for research projects, obtained a research patent under his name and published academic papers, per Oxygen.
But as investigators took a look back at Christopher's history and consulted with those who knew him, what they discovered was quite disturbing. For one, there was alleged drug and alcohol abuse. According to what his former assistant Kimberly Morgan said in her deposition, Christopher allegedly would regularly drink vodka and kept a handle of Stoli underneath his desk. Another woman named Megan Kane claimed he ate a paper blotter of LSD and took prescription painkillers in the early 2000s on his birthday. She even alleged that after a drug-fueled night of partying, she watched as Christopher put on his lab coat "to make the rounds the next morning."
While Christopher caused harm to many, it wasn't until a patient Mary Efurd that he was charged with a crime. After Christopher performed a spinal surgery on Mary in 2012, Mary suffered crippling pain afterward. Per The Washington Post, when another surgeon named Dr. Robert Henderson went in to investigate, he was shocked to find spinal hardware left in her soft tissue, a severed nerve root, a nerve with a screw in it and several screw holes on a different area of Mary's spine.
As Dr. Henderson testified in part, "[O]ne of my thoughts that I expressed was that [appellant] must have known what he was doing because he did virtually everything wrong. So to be able to do that much wrong, I felt that he must have known at some point in time how to do it right. It was that egregious."
Mary's botched surgery was one of several in Christopher's record. Though many were passed off as accidents, a surgeon told D Magazine that these mistakes were "never events" and should not "ever happen in someone's entire career."
As a result, one patient died from a massive blood lost. Another suffered a sliced vertebral artery which led to a stroke and later death. A dissection of an esophagus led to significant blood loss in one patient.
Even Christopher's childhood friend, Jerry Summers, was unable to move his arms and legs after entrusting the surgeon with a cervical fusion surgery. He became a quadriplegic, and in February 2021, died from an infection connected to that very surgery one decade prior, per Local 24 News. According to the outlet, while Jerry's lawyer said Christopher could now be criminally charged after his client's death, he believes Jerry wouldn't want that "because he had forgiven his friend for what had happened."
Nevertheless, Christopher had his medical license stripped in 2013 and was eventually brought to justice after Mary took him to court.
Where is "Dr. Death" Christopher Duntsch now?
In February of 2017, Christopher was sentenced to life in prison. As D Magazine put it, "His outcomes were so poor, so beyond the accepted standard of care, that a grand jury indicted him on five counts of aggravated assault with a deadly weapon as well as a single count of harming an elderly patient." The "deadly weapons" were his hands and surgical tools.
Mary told reporters afterward, "I think it’s going to be like a floodgate that’s going to really open, crying. I’ll do some crying. And I’ll reflect back on how difficult those first months were afterwards. I had so much anger, because my life changed so much. I was very independent and I had to become dependent on others for transportation, for my meals, for a lot of things."
Per Bustle, Christopher is currently incarcerated at O.B. Ellis Unit of the Texas Department of Criminal Justice in Huntsville and will not be eligible for parole until he is 74 years old in 2045.
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