WEST'S SLY STORY - The serial imposter who abused trust, hearts and souls in 1990s Cincinnati

He was glib, well dressed and punctual, and he dispensed pharmaceuticals and performed outpatient surgery with the competent air that reassures any hospital patient.
 

Thomas D. West of the Cincinnati suburb of Erlanger, Ky. had everything you could ask for in a doctor.

Except a diploma.

For 14 months in 1990 and ‘91, West, then in his early 30s, impersonated a doctor as he regularly roamed four hospitals in Cincinnati, donning medical scrubs and carrying stethoscopes and fake IDs while performing outpatient procedures, injecting people with medicine, and making false prescriptions.

Sometimes he would arrange to meet up with people at a particular hospital after getting to know them in restaurants and learning of their ailments.
Other times West would enter emergency rooms and patients’ rooms to seek out victims.

The procedures West performed are known to have included two pap smears and the treating of a leg lesion with a medicated cream and an unidentified type of acid.

The game was up in August 1991 when West was arrested for allegedly stealing travelers checks from one of the people receiving his treatments, who was also a police officer. The police investigation that ensued blew the lid off the 32-year-old West’s bogus medical practice.

Though all of West’s “patients” consented to the procedures, his lack of a medical school education changed everything: the pap smears got him charged with two counts of “gross sexual imposition” and the lesion treatment was alleged to be “felonious assault.”

West’s list of charges also included making false prescriptions, practicing medicine without a license, use of a scalpel on one person and of a hypodermic needle on two others, trespassing at one of the hospitals, and – as the original check thievery charge indicates – West was no more scrupulous away from hospitals. He was charged with stealing $11,000 from a girlfriend.

For Cincinnati’s Good Samaritan, Christ, University of Cincinnati, and Jewish hospitals, nationwide news reports that an imposter with no medical training had unfettered access to innocent people’s most personal realms brought the public image catastrophe of CEOs’ nightmares.

Yet, the hospitals seemed to adopt a PR strategy of downplaying this gigantic breach of safety and dignity. The Associated Press reported:

“Spokesmen for University and Good Samaritan hospitals have said they see no reason to change safety procedures. The hospitals use security cameras, require doctors to produce identification on demand and restrict access to drug cabinets.”

Nancy Strassel, spokeswoman for the Greater Cincinnati Hospital Council, also exuded ice water in the veins, telling media the Cincy area’s 34 hospitals were not exceedingly troubled by the revelation of West’s charade.

“Security at hospitals is something that is continually monitored,” she said. “I can't say that there has been one specific thing hospitals looking at this have found they needed to change.”

One absolute change was Thomas West’s residency. He was sentenced to three years in a prison at Lima, Ohio after pleading guilty to 12 charges in October 1991 in return for prosecutors’ agreeing to drop 13 others.

The hospital spokespersons’ statements sounded so understated perhaps because of the prospect of civil litigation by the people West had conned.

Indeed, three years later, the Ohio Court of Claims ruled that one of the four institutions, the then state-owned University Hospital, was 60 percent liable for the damage to three of West’s victims. The exact awards would be determined later.

"We will be arguing for high damages. These people suffered an invasion of the deepest privacy rights," John Metz, a Cincinnati attorney who represented the three victims, told the Cincinnati Enquirer.

The morning newspaper and its afternoon counterpart the Cincinnati Post quickly began digging into West’s past as soon as news of his 1991 arrest broke. And the deeper reporters probed, the stranger the story of Thomas David West became.

For starters, he had changed his name a few years after he graduated from Holmes High School in Covington, Ky. in 1976 as Thomas Wietholter. (Who am I to judge? I changed my legal name in my 50s -- but read on.)

The Enquirer reported that West/Wietholter had worked as a police dispatcher in nearby Florence, Ky. from age 21 to 25. He resigned for unspecified personal reasons, but his departure followed complaints he had passed himself off in public as a police officer and displayed other bizarre behavior on the job.

The Florence Police Chief told the paper West seemed to undergo an identity change, dressing, styling his hair, talking and walking in the manner of a particular Florence police officer, whom the chief would not identify. The fixation went so far as West buying an automobile like the one owned by the officer of his obsession, the chief said.

Between 1980 and ‘91, West married 

and divorced twice, had no children with either wife, but had two children with a third woman with whom he lived while he was single or separated. The paper said her name was Sandra Murray West, but did not indicate whether she changed her name because of their co-habitation, or the name was pre-existing. (His change from Wietholter to West was between 1978 and ’80, the Post said.)

The couple’s second child was born after West had moved out of the residence he and Sandra West had shared. Even though he had proposed what would have been his third marriage to another woman before the second child was born, Thomas West moved back in with Sandra West and both of their children, and soon moved with them to another Northern Kentucky apartment shortly before he was arrested.

On 1988 records of his second divorce, Thomas West listed his occupation as physician and his age as 38. He was in fact 29 and had never studied medicine, but the Enquirer interviewed several people who recalled West during that period telling them he was a doctor.

On his filing for his first divorce, in 1983, West listed his occupation as psychoanalyst.

Nancy Geppert, the woman West asked to become his third wife, had a long on-and-off association with him. Geppert, a co-worker with West in the mid-1980s in the repossession department of a furniture store, said West told her he was quitting that job to earn a law degree.

The two kept in touch, and she recalls West telling her a few years later he earned his law degree and would soon start pursuing a doctorate in psychology from the University of Cincinnati.

The Enquirer said the university had no record of West enrolling there, or in the UC medical school, where Geppert said West told her he was taking courses. The paper said Cincinnati police investigators found no record of West having any college degree.

Geppert told the Enquirer that West persuaded her to let him use the upstairs of her Cincinnati home as the office of a medical firm he was establishing. He told her it was called Physicians Consultations and Medical One, and though the Enquirer said it was listed in the telephone book, state records did not show West as the owner of any business.

One of several landlords West rented from in the Cincinnati area told the Enquirer West often used the excuse of a doctor’s busy routine to explain being late with the rent.

Joe Fischer, who rented an apartment in Erlanger, Ky. to Thomas West and Sandra Murray West and their children told the Enquirer that long before he evicted the family and sued for back rent and other charges, he figured Thomas West was making up his story of being a doctor.

"I quickly had his number. He had a story for everything… and they were always bizarre," Fischer told the newspaper. "He was either up with a 'patient' all night, had an emergency operation, or had to take his daughter to the hospital…. I learned after a while he was full of bull. I even told him once: 'Just save your breath, Tom, I'm not buying it.'"

The Ohio parole board in late 1993 was buying the idea that West had learned his lesson and paroled him from prison after he served 18 months of his three-year term. They were right, in that he stopped faking it as a doctor.
 
But in not much more time than it took him to drive the 200 miles home from Lima and get resettled in greater Cincinnati, the free man Thomas David West was on the phone asking two private investigators to help him weed out corruption in Kentucky politics as – wait for it -- Thomas D. West attorney at law.

Before heading back to prison for posing
 as a lawyer, a somber appearing Thomas
D. West confers with his real lawyer. 

West told the PIs he was a lawyer with the Cincy-based law firm Taft Stettinius & Hollister investigating an unnamed state senator in connection with the construction of a $20 million juvenile detention center in Northern Kentucky.

Though anyone who knows Kentucky politics would know you don’t have to look far to find a legislator worthy of investigating, this example of corruption existed only in the toxically overactive imagination of Thomas David West.

And because three years ago he got caught lying to untrained people such as landlords, restaurant customers and significant others, maybe trying to fool private investigators this time would be safer. Nope, West’s parole was quickly revoked.

He was sent back to the same prison, sentenced to six to 15 more years, his tearful statement to judge John Keefe that, “All I ever wanted to do is help people” contradicted by the harm, insecurity, stress and mistrust West's misdeeds inflicted on Ohio and Kentucky residents.

"You say that,” Keefe replied, “But actions speak louder than words.” Sharper observations came from some of West’s victims and acquaintances.

"I think the system failed the first time," said Roberta Frazer of Cincinnati, one of the people to whom West passed himself off as a doctor. "I think he needs help. I think he needs counseling."

Erlanger, Ky. Police Detective Dave Wood knew West’s family, and worked as a patrolman with West’s brother, officer Ronald Wietholter, in nearby Fort Wright for five years. After West’s 1991 arrest, Wood told the Enquirer: "It just floored me, because I'm such good friends with his brother. His parents are such good people.”

Yet, Wood knew of West’s claim to be a doctor, though he figured it was just harmless fantasizing. "I certainly didn't know he was practicing."

Also after West’s 1991 arrest, the woman in whose home he set up a bogus medical company before proposing marriage to her talked freely to media about being bamboozled.

"I'm very hurt by it. I don't understand why he's done what he has done," Nancy Geppert said. "He used my car, used my house, my money, my emotions.”

                           ____________________

Brian Arbenz contributed news coverage of the Thomas David West story as a reporter and desk editor for Associated Press in the early 1990s. His legal name and byline then was George Morrison, though his new name did not portend any fake professional practices.