medicine physician and fletcher in, north carolina. he has lectured across the country about medical ethics bias in medicine and criminal justice reform. he lived with his wife and two children in asheville, north carolina. welcome, dr. gilmer. thank you. and to his left is chip jones author of the organ thieves. he's been a journalist for nearly 30 years at the richmond times-dispatch the roanoke times, virginia business magazine and others as part of a reporting team at the roanoke times. he was nominated for a pulitzer prize for news coverage of the pits and cole strike. welcome chip jones. thanks to you both for coming today and agreeing to share your stories. i'm so pleased to be with both of you. so one thing that really stuck with me about both of your books, is that there seem to be no one advocating on behalf of the subjects of your book? in your case chip a black man who was sent to the hospital after a fall. without his family's knowledge. had something very terrible happened to him. can you tell us about bruce tucker? and what happened to him and give us a little bit of background on your book? sure. thanks kristen. thanks for being here everybody. dr. gilmer ben well, bruce tucker was a 54 year old man who lived in richmond virginia in 1968. he was a factory worker. he was had a good employment record by all accounts was a very steady and strong worker at a is actually a egg processing plant down in chaco bottom. what's in chaco bottom in richmond today. and mr. tucker was from dinwiddie county came from a rural, background, virginia on grew up on a family farm and he came to richmond like his brother. to to make a better life and he and he was doing well. he was supporting a son teenage son abraham. back down on the family farm in stony creek, virginia, and i can during the question and answer if you some people read the book want to actually go to the cemetery that i described in the book and i can give very easy directions off of i-95, but it's just south of petersburg. so bruce tucker was celebrating the end of a work week on march 24th 1968 he was up on church hill if some of the you know richmond, which is where saint john's churches he was sitting on a low wall talking things over with his friends drinking wine. had the misfortune of falling backwards of a low wall suffered a very severe head injury. was rushed down to the emergency room at what was then the medical college of virginia for those of you who don't know that terrain. i'm going to go back and forth between mcv and today, it's virginia commonwealth university or vcu health. so he's rushed down to the emergency room. he was still speaking. he was agitated, but still speaking still all this vital signs were were okay. and he was taken into the hospital that night. and less than 24 hours the transplant team at the medical college of virginia had removed life support and without any knowledge but of anything by his from his family any awareness that he was there made the decision to remove his heart and while they were at it. they took his kidneys, too. and unfortunately as a black man with a bit of alcohol on his breath bruce tucker was considered like many black americans before him easy to exploit easy to exploit and and oregon supplier at that point at the medical college of virginia, which was ready to its first heart transplant. so kristen that that in a nutshell is the book in three minutes or so. i love it. benjamin the subject of your book is a white family doctor who grew up in poverty and was a victim of intergenerational abuse. who ultimately murdered his elderly father shocking his patients and the whole community tell us about vince gilmer and how you came to know him and why you decided to write a book about him in three minutes. i first have to say that if you haven't read the organ of thieves, which i started listening to early this morning. as i neared charlottesville, i wanted to just keep driving because it's so good. so you should definitely check it out. so my book is about character who's a real person. his name is dr. vince gilmer. and dr. vince gilmer, it was a rural family physician outside of asheville. when picked up a little bit louder and he in 2004 went to broughton hospital mental hospital in north carolina to pick up his father. and that evening while driving home he killed him. i learned about vince gilmer only because i helped a resurrect the clinic that he had built himself. so it was news to me that there had been a my predecessor. was also named dr. gilmer in the he had killed his father. and so naturally i became curious about who this other person was. and wanted to find out why this beloved physician became a committed this brutal act. and so i had inherited his patience and inherited many many stories about this this incredible physician and it didn't there's so much dissonance about who i the person that i knew through stories and the person that i read about in the newspapers. and so the year started a quest that last his lasted a decade now to discover who this person was why his brain unraveled? i was curious about this as a previous neuroscientist before i went into real practice. and wanted to understand what happened to him and and then ultimately why he was put in prison. ultimately. why did he represent himself for his own murder trial? why did he never get an appropriate examination that that might propose other reasons why he killed his father. he was labeled as a malinger that he was faking his symptoms. and so after visiting him once in prison, i learned that he was not a malinger. he was a very sick man. and it took very little time to come up with a diagnosis. i'm not going to tell you what that is in case you haven't read the book yet or heard the story that we told on this american life back in 2013. there was i needed some help to pursue this and so i asked sarah koenig who did serial to help me. and ultimately this is us very personal story a memoir about myself learning to be a fledgling as a fledgling doctor learning to be a doctor and learning how to mmm fight for justice. so benjamin the early section of your book or revolves around your kind of fear of vince gillmore once you learned that you shared a name and that he was so highly thought of but then you learned that he was also in prison for killing his father. so what what do you think that was about and sort of how did you get past that? like, why did you ultimately spend the decade working to understand him? so here all defined by preconceptions, and we're easily swayed and i was easily swayed that that he was a murderer and i had been told by other patients one patient in particular that when he got out that he was going to come after me. it seems sort of natural since i inherited his life and inherited his his life's work his clinic his patients as wealth. and so after i heard this patient tell me that he was probably going to come after me when he gets out of prison. it's triggered a few things. my family wanted me to leave, asheville. colleagues told me to you know, i should. appear for a while, which was kind of crazy at the time but that was a prompt that either i had to dig a little bit deeper to figure out who he was if i wanted to stay in this clinic and continue my professional life there. so i sort of traversed the threshold. where the paranoia and fear became an intense commitment curiosity or obsession to understand why this happened? and and why i shouldn't be fearful anymore. can you guys talk about why no one or not enough people advocated for either of the subjects of your book like chip? why why did no one? i guess i would say no one to our knowledge or to from your reporting knowledge. try to save bruce tucker's heart from being taken from him. like where was the care and concern for him and his family just to summarize. i think the word is power. you know and we can look at any situation in your life today if you're having problems with it. power often is the root. problem, especially dealing with large institutions. okay. so in the case of bruce tucker and i know ben will appreciate this because most physicians understand a lot about the history of medicine. so i'm always i'm always a little bit. shy to make pronouncements about the history of medicine around real md. so you can help me overcome my fear and paranoia, but really at that point and i've heard of the doctors tell me this. it was what what was known as the the what wild west of medical research, especially with heart transplants. and so when i say power and wild west what i mean is the physicians that doctors inside of the medical college of virginia, they were in a international race. to perform the first heart transplant and one of the things you'll see in my book or if you've read it already. i actually started out thinking of the book purely as kind of like tom wolfe's the right stuff the race to the moon but the race to the heart transplant and and indeed a lot of that is in the book. this was a amazing medical research that went back well into the, you know, probably early part of the 20th century, but in the 50s it picked up a lot and so you had a number of famous doctors who were involved in it and two of them are or three of them are in my book one four actually dr. lauer. and mcv who was recruited by david hume, who was the top kidney transplant specialists and started the transplant center at medical college of virginia, which is still there. you had a gentleman named dr. norm shumway at stanford where dr. laura as a young resident was invegled by him to work in the basement of his leaky lab it stanford, which was then and the hospitals in downtown, san francisco. so you have all these characters that were really working hard. to get what they wanted and imagine surgeons have big egos imagine that they should have big ego's because they they're doing a lot of important work. benjamin mentioned ethics as part of his his book ethics medical ethics is a big part of my book. so what happened was when bruce tucker was rolled into that emergency room when the nine of may 24th 1968. i always say he was in the wrong place at the wrong time, especially again for an african-american male with alcohol in his breath because the assumption was that nobody cared about him. they made you'll see how they made some very i'll just use the word lame attempts. to contact his family. if you're mature enough like me to remember right after the assassination of martin luther king, this was the month later the socio, you know political environment was not in a place where anyone was going to help the richmond police find a black man's family. so once they had made basically a just sort of a superficial attempt to find his family. kristen there were no internal controls at this point. there are now by the way and this book if you happen to be in the transplant realm it's not meant to deter anyone from being an organ donor. in fact, the opposite has happened. i'm happy to say that northwestern university has used an nbc there did a series on race in chicago where my book and i was interviewed for that. so on my website if you want to see it, which is chip. jonesbooks.com. i'll just say it once. you mentioned twitter, but i i saved a lot of those interviews because they're very interesting and actually actually kristen and i as journalists. i'm actually been very impressed a lot of times print journal is kind of putting this in aside, but put down tv journalists. well, there's some really sharp people out there doing stuff. so i'm glad that the injustice and the lack of oversight or any controls on that at that moment in time. it just and it's still it's stunned me when i first learned about it and what i always say is the book went from my head to my heart. because you know it started excuse. it started about this race. but it really was about killing man. you now i'm going to start crying. we all work on really sad books. but important both of your works are so important. thank you for sharing that. i don't want to give away the ending benjamin if you don't want to but you mentioned that there were preconceptions about who vince gillmer was. and i mean, i thought it was so moving that you talked about. how caring he was for his patients and how they loved he was. and that nobody could you know put together could make could work out in their mind how someone that they knew is such a loving family doctor a caring member of their community. i really giving person could have have gone transitioned from that person or could have been the same person that killed his father in sort of a brutal way. and not to give away what you found, but you did you did learn that. there was a mental illness. that explain this can you can you talk a little bit about like how his? if you don't want to give away the diagnosis, it's fine. but talk about how it presents itself early and why no one would have noticed it and basically how no one ever came to advocate for him like how no one before you figured out that there was something really wrong with him and that's why he killed his father and not because he was hiding some evil side his whole life. yeah, i think this. so much boils down to preconception and bias. and when vince gilmer was labeled to be a malinger, that's what everyone believed he was. you know, we all try to enter as physicians we try to enter the exam room without preconception our bias, but it's so hard. it's so hard to enter into any relationship without preconception or bias because our brain often deceives us in one of the characters in this book is is the human brain. those preconceptions deceived a lot of people and so they deceived everyone during the initial during the arrest. even during his his psychological or forensic evaluation. that diagnosis of malingering just persisted. for a long time for over a decade malingering is just baking malingerie means he was he was thought to to be faking these symptoms. and so, you know once you have a label like that, it's it's hard to get over it once you have a diagnosis yourself as a patient. it's actually really hard to change that diagnosis even if you've seen a physician multiple times or you've seen a judge or you've seen a jury. so that label was was never changed and because of it people thought that he was a cunning sort of sociopathic type person. and nobody asked in the prison nobody else. i mean, how could you spend 10 years in a prison and never ask? why is this guy exhibiting this symptoms for so long? how could you how could you keep that up for so long? and so i was a fresh mind. i think to take a look at him and to to re-examine what had happened. and to think with a tabular rasa, you know, what happened to his brain? thankfully, there are other people's within within the prison system who are willing to begin to listen to but it took a decade before that happened. can you talk a little bit about the human brain and what like researching his life and told you about the is it the fallibility of the human brain or the it's not the fallibility? what is such a okay? thank you. so one of the pillar concepts in this book is that we all share a fallible brain. each of us does i do you do we all do and you know, there's a certain spectrum or resiliency or buffering capacity that we each share before we hit that moment and that moment is very different for for all of us in the book. i describe my fallible. well, i've had many fallible moments, but one fallible moment that i came dangerously close to traversing that would have changed my life forever. i think prevents like getting to know him deeply to getting to know his his family and friends understanding who he was a child understanding is his family in a very complex way. they it taught me that his fellow ability was defined by many different things in addition to this neurologic illness. and if you want to know more about it it dr. gilmer's neurologist is here today who's been an amazing. partner so vince's brain was defined firstly i think by incredible intergenerational abuse. he was sexually abused by his father his whole life. that defined him as a person. ptsd defined them as a person generalized anxiety disorder defined him as a person coming off a precipitously often an antidepressant medication called an ssri. tend to find you as a person. i see this in the clinic every day the spectrum of ways that our brains become vulnerable or fallible are immense. he had four things that were contributing to his unraveling all at once so it wasn't just this this neurologic disease that was confirmed by a genetic diagnosis. so it was it was a hundred percent certitude that he has this this disease. that wasn't what made him kill his father. it was a constellation of things that contributed to his brain really going awry. but nobody asked the question. nobody was curious to know what happened and as a family doctor with that sort of our niche where we're curious. we're by nature. we're ridiculous advocates chip did you want i just wanted to tag on something ben said about preconceptions because the light bulb went off when he said that. in terms of your question kristen would you know really gets at the heart of the matter? why wasn't a man protected from having an institution steal his heart when no one's approval. pulling them off life support when you start talking about ben preconceptions, it reminded me of like my own education by writing this book and sitting in places like this. i was at the virginia historical society a talk celebrating the 50th anniversary of the first heart transplant and i was there with the archivist jody kosti who really helped me a lot from vcu medical historian and basically, you know, there was not one black person in the audience and i know this is not a very diverse audience, so i'm not saying that to shame anybody but it was just sort of okay, here we are and the weird thing was i sat there like i think it was. 2018 right when i signed the contract with simon & schuster and jody knew i was getting serious about the book. we're listening to the words that were being used about the rep the lawyer the represented the tucker family and his name was l douglas wilder. well, he later became the first black governor ever elected the united states not just virginia. and they kept talking about them and and when i did interviews with with older doctors or people related to them. there was this preconception. that these were black people trying to get money out of the system. just if someone is there certain parallels in a way strange way to all stories probably but with yours, you know in a way though he was dead. and his heart had been taken from him and his son didn't have a father anymore and his brother who was looking for him didn't have a brother. he was considered a malingerer. why was that he was black. he didn't have any representation and so preconceptions still go on today. so much and that's the positive part of the my book is that it's being used in discussions at certainly at vcu and other medical colleges and also vcu made it their common book for freshmen this year. so every freshman has to suffer through my prose but the good thing about that is not only is a writer but as a human being, you know, definitely challenges everyone's biases and and they and vcu started a history and medicine program. so there what you said about biases ben really also ranked through with me because obviously if you're in the medical profession right now or you're in the legal profession or any academic profession financial, it doesn't matter if you're not talking about preconceived biases and you know, not not shaming people, but just these things then well, you're probably a political partisan trying to make people feel guilty about talking about those things, right so we can come to that later. but it really