Travesty of Justice: The Dr. Adam Frasch Case

By Jennifer L. Armstrong

Fingers and toes with no pruning.
No rigor mortis. No livor mortis.
Blood glucose levels that revealed a recent death.
Neighbors who saw Samira Frasch alive two and a half hours after her husband left the house.
Phone records and eyewitnesses to support his alibi.
A prison snitch who told a story filled with contradictions.
A golf club that mysteriously appeared in the master bedroom a year after the controversial death.
A handyman who lied repeatedly.
Mental health issues that were ignored.
A prosecutor with a grudge.
It all said the same thing, that Dr. Adam Frasch had not killed his wife. The true and frightening story of how the State of Florida created a case out of planted evidence and disjointed testimonies to put an innocent man in prison.

• Language: English
• Publisher: LifeRich Publishing
• Release date: Dec 14, 2021
• ISBN: 9781489739667

Jennifer L. Armstrong

Jennifer L. Armstrong studied Theology at Ambassador College. She is widely read, but has a special interest in English history and vintage thrillers, including the works of authors like John Dickson Carr, Talbot Mundy, and Erle Stanley Gardner. In the course of over six years of writing to men and women incarcerated in American prisons, she has become passionate about telling their stories, particularly if they have been the victims of a miscarriage of justice. She now lives outside of Toronto with her three cats and four children.

Book preview

Copyright © 2022 Jennifer L. Armstrong.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced by any means, graphic, electronic, or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, taping or by any information storage retrieval system without the written permission of the author except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.

LifeRich Publishing is a registered trademark of The Reader’s Digest Association, Inc.

LifeRich Publishing

1663 Liberty Drive

Bloomington, IN 47403

www.liferichpublishing.com

844-686-9607

Because of the dynamic nature of the Internet, any web addresses or links contained in this book may have changed since publication and may no longer be valid. The views expressed in this work are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the publisher, and the publisher hereby disclaims any responsibility for them.

Any people depicted in stock imagery provided by Getty Images are models, and such images are being used for illustrative purposes only.

Certain stock imagery © Getty Images.

ISBN: 978-1-4897-3965-0 (sc)

ISBN: 978-1-4897-3966-7 (e)

LifeRich Publishing rev. date: 12/13/2021

CONTENTS

Prologue

Chapter 1 The New Cellmate

Chapter 2 Life Before Prison

Chapter 3 A Tawdry Case of Infidelity and Excess

Chapter 4 The Drama Begins

Chapter 5 The Prosecutor’s Expert Witness

Chapter 6 Enter Gardner

Chapter 7 An Unassailable Alibi

Chapter 8 Contradictory Pictures

Chapter 9 False Witnesses

Chapter 10 The Arrest

Chapter 11 Protecting A Legacy

Chapter 12 Putting the Marriage on Trial

Chapter 13 Witness for the Prosecution

Chapter 14 Getting Personal

Chapter 15 Better Days

Chapter 16 A Weak Case

Chapter 17 In the Pool

Chapter 18 Trying to get Help for Samira

Chapter 19 Creating a Myth

Chapter 20 Inept…or Intentionally Misleading?

Chapter 21 The Forgotten Gardner

Chapter 22 The Life Insurance Policy

Chapter 23 A Revealing Interview

Chapter 24 An Incident Between Tallahassee and Thomasville

Chapter 25 Detectives not Interested in Details

Chapter 26 Psychological Issues

Chapter 27 Speaking Out

Chapter 28 Public Scrutiny

Chapter 29 Problems with Tiger

Chapter 30 The Hole

Chapter 31 A Tallahassee Lawyer Tells People what to Think

Chapter 32 The Jury is Managed

Chapter 33 Alcohol

Chapter 34 Doc tries to Tell them Things

Chapter 35 The Plot Thickens

Chapter 36 Fraud…Makes me Sad

Chapter 37 The Missing Purse

Chapter 38 A Gal Born in the Jungle and other Tall Tales

Chapter 39 American Monster

Chapter 40 Money & Sex

Chapter 41 Another Inmate

Chapter 42 The Robe and other Clues

Chapter 43 Uphill Battles

Chapter 44 The Battle for Hyrah & Skynnah… and the Million Dollars

Chapter 45 The Myth Gets even more Strange

Chapter 46 Moral Obligations & Last Ditch Efforts

Chapter 47 What Happened to the Science?

Chapter 48 Their Last Full Day Together

Chapter 49 The Final Day

Afterword from Jennifer

Afterword from Doc

Works Cited

Fingers and toes with no pruning.

No rigor mortis. No livor mortis.

Blood glucose levels that revealed a recent death.

Neighbors who saw Samira Frasch alive two and a half hours after her husband left the house.

Phone records and eyewitnesses to support his alibi.

A prison snitch who told a story filled with contradictions.

A golf club that mysteriously appeared in the master bedroom a year after the controversial death.

A handyman who lied repeatedly.

Mental health issues that were ignored.

A prosecutor with a grudge.

It all said the same thing, that Dr. Adam Frasch had not killed his wife. The true and frightening story of how the State of Florida created a case out of planted evidence and disjointed testimonies to put an innocent man in prison.

Prometheus: It’s painful even to speak these things, but also pain not to speak them.

Prometheus Bound

Aeschylus

I have comfort knowing my last words to her were that I loved her. I kissed her and said, ‘Enjoy your rest and call me later when you get done and then we’ll decide what to do with the rest of our day.’

Dr. Adam Frasch about February 22, 2014,

the day his wife, Samira, died

PROLOGUE

39588.png

I don’t know when I first started believing that Dr. Adam Frasch was innocent.

John Henry Newman, a doctor and a saint in the Catholic Church, talks of the grammar of assent, of all the little things that lead up to you believing something. And such was the case for me when it came to Doc’s innocence. But in a way, I think I knew it from the very first letter. I had written to murderers, and he just didn’t sound like one.

That was on August 18, 2020.

Doc was the cellmate of ‘Tiger,’ a man I had been writing to for a couple of years. Before Tiger, I had been corresponding with prisoners for about three years. Tiger got my address from another inmate, Juan, who had been released and sent back to Cuba.

Tiger was serving three life sentences for armed robbery, a crime he said he didn’t commit. He had a long list of other offences, but this one he said he didn’t do. There was video surveillance at the place he had supposedly robbed that would have proven it wasn’t him, but the footage hadn’t been played at the trial.

Inmates have no internet access, so we decided at some point that I would start a blog for Tiger. I had my own blog, one that I created in case my God moments going through a tough marriage could give someone else hope. At his blog, Tiger could tell his story, which included a terrifying account of being harassed by a police officer who threatened that if he didn’t confess, members of his family would be incarcerated on fictitious charges.

Tiger also had me sending letters for him—to innocence clinics, to the Florida Bar, to an author in New York who wrote about over-incarceration in America. Even Kim Kardashian, who Tiger asked me to write to, is getting involved with the alarming high rate of false convictions and over-sentencing in America. (Her organization was kind enough to say they would keep Tiger’s case on file.)

When Tiger told me that he had a new cellmate and that his new cellmate was also innocent, I was open-minded. Working with Tiger on his blog, I had learned about some of the flaws with the American justice system. Not that there was much I could do about it. I’m not even American. And in any case, at the heart of it seemed to be a desire on the part of law enforcement officials to get a certain type of criminal off the streets—the kind who basically starts stealing cars at a young age, works his way up to robbing convenience stores, and doesn’t quit until he dies or kills someone.

But working with Doc to tell his story made me realize just how far some people in the American justice system are willing to go to get their conviction. It also changed how I feel about the media. After reading more about Doc’s case and comparing the raw evidence with the way the media reported it, I realized that at best, journalists are working under deadlines and don’t have time to check all the facts. At worst, they have a bias.

One of the earliest articles to appear in the media about Doc’s case was by Jennifer Portman of the Tallahassee Democrat on February 26, 2014, headlined, Frasch arrested in SUV with children. It opened with, The night before his former French model wife Samira Frasch was found dead in the pool of her Golden Eagle home, Dr. Adam Frasch was seen by neighbors with a woman at a Gulf Coast house he owns in Panama City Beach. That woman he was with was his wife, Samira. This article came out four days after her death and more than one person—including investigators assigned to the case—could have told Jennifer Portman that Doc had spent that day with her, not some nameless woman.

I grew up reading Perry Mason novels. As it turned out, that was exactly what I would need for this situation. Have you ever seen those lawyer shows where they use a dolly to wheel in brown box after brown box of evidence and materials related to a case? That’s how it was with Doc’s case in terms of the material online. I had to just randomly open up the first metaphorical box and start reviewing everything.

This book is about what I found.

I would learn that phone messages he left for his wife the day she died were put forward by the prosecution and the media as his effort to create an alibi for himself, or at the very least, to create the sense that all was normal.

I would see documentary reenactments of what happened on the day of Samira’s death that didn’t line up with the police report.

Furthermore, I saw the prosecution take a strong, independent businesswoman and turn her into a victimized immigrant housewife murdered by her 6’4", 240-pound husband. It was ironic that the prosecutor turned herself into a champion of domestically abused women in a case that actually had a twist to it—Samira was the abuser, not the abused. I didn’t have to take Doc’s word for it. This element about the Frasch marriage came up time and time again when police interviewed people who were part of the Frasch family’s inner circle.

Before this case, the only police interviews I watched were fictitious ones on TV. With Doc’s case, I watched and read each one that was available. The story the prosecution told at the trial didn’t line up with what I watched and read. As I went deeper into the case, only one narrative made sense of all the facts, and that was the one told by Dr. Adam Frasch. Prosecutor Georgia Cappleman admitted in an interview three years after the trial that she didn’t answer all the questions in this case for the jurors. She just gave them what they needed in order to give her the verdict she wanted.

Cappleman was savvy in terms of her legal strategy, and I’m just a single mom a thousand miles away from Tallahassee with no expertise in the area of law, but there is one thing I’m certain about, and that is that Dr. Adam Frasch is innocent.

I never had to take his word for it, although his consistent insistence that he was innocent and his refusal to accept all deals that would have had him out of prison even before I met him, as long as he would admit his guilt, was a strong case all by itself. But, as I would come to learn, the science and the facts were all on his side.

Doc has been talking and telling the true story of what happened in the last 24 hours of Samira’s life since the day of her death on February 22, 2014 in Tallahassee, when he was arrested in Panama City Beach. And he has given long interviews to the media that have always gotten pared down to leave the story open for the insinuation that he really did do it.

It says a lot about his resilience and passion for the truth that when he met me six years after his wife’s death he was still willing to tell it all over again. I promised him that this time, with his blog, it would be in a way where he wouldn’t be interrupted or edited to suit a producer’s bias. Certainly the producers have no shortage of people willing to step into the floodlights and enjoy their 15 minutes of fame for being a Frasch ‘expert.’

These so-called experts all want to talk about the marriage. They all have their thoughts and opinions on the unique combination that was Adam and Samira Frasch. But the more I looked into it, the more I came to realize it is completely irrelevant what the marriage was like. There are two factors in Doc’s case that don’t just make it unlikely that he murdered his wife, they demonstrate that it was impossible that he did it. For me, this is the most difficult and emotionally challenging part of this whole story—that an innocent man can end up in prison for life in a country that prides itself on having the freest citizens in the world.

I’ve learned firsthand how hard it is to share everyday life with someone in prison. Everyone else I write to in prison has been abandoned by their wives, girlfriends and friends. Some have even been abandoned by their mothers and brothers. Juan told me how not only had his mother and brother never bothered to visit him, his brother had even emptied out his bank account.

Family members aren’t sitting around waiting eagerly for their incarcerated loved ones to get out. They have gotten on with their lives. Having met Doc, however, walking away isn’t an option. His story is just too important.

CHAPTER ONE

THE NEW CELLMATE

39594.png

In 2015, a logical syllogism dropped into my life.

As my Christian world expanded, I discovered that St. Augustine and St. Thomas Aquinas were men of God. But St. Augustine and St. Thomas Aquinas were both Catholic. Therefore, was it possible that in order to know God in a deeper way, I should join the Catholic camp?

I did. In spirit anyway. I read. I watched things online. What held me back from actually going to Mass was the father of my children. To have told him that I was heading toward a conversion to the Catholic Church would have been analogous to Eva Braun telling Adolf Hitler that she was considering Judaism.

I kept my secret at first. But I longed for Catholic friends. I went online, and after some searching, I chose one of the many doors open to me. Writing to Catholic prisoners. St. Michael’s Penpal Ministry included people of all denominations, but I easily selected several Catholics to write to. I was inspired by a passage in the Bible where Jesus said, if you do it to the least of these my brothers or sisters, you do it for me. Among the types of people he specifically mentioned were people in prison. I don’t have a thing for bad boys and I’m not the kind of person who likes to reform people.

One of the people I initially wrote to was Juan and we wrote for several years until he was released. Before he left, he gave my address to Tiger.

In all my years of writing to prisoners, they never discussed their cellmates with me. But Tiger started talking about one particular new bunkmate from the first day of his arrival in his cell. His letters were filled with his thoughts about a murder, a pool, a doctor. I didn’t pay attention at first. I had other concerns. The kids and I had started attending Mass. I was working out budgets on paper in anticipation of getting a divorce, talking to mortgage brokers and realtors about the housing market. But Tiger’s mind was on Dr. Adam Frasch. He asked me to go online and look for a photo of the interior of the doctor’s house with a golf club in it. At the time, I didn’t understand the significance of this request.

Even the information that Dateline NBC had done a show about him, and that CNN was going to be interviewing his cellmate sometime soon, and that VH1 also wanted to talk to him, didn’t tempt me to do anything more than a quick Google search.

I found a picture of an exotic master bedroom that looked like it could be a room in the Palace of Versailles and could see no golf club. There were other photos and I glanced at them but my heart wasn’t in it. Life might be hard on the inside but I had enough troubles on the outside to want to keep my leisure time available for an escape into a good read, not hunting down golf clubs in a Where’s Waldo kind of game. I discerned one thing, though. The media certainly seemed to think that Tiger’s new cellmate was guilty.

I reported back to Tiger that I had viewed one photo of a master bedroom and it didn’t have the kind of decor where you would expect a golf club to be lying around. I immediately forgot about it and got on with surviving the new upheaval in my life, this time, one that affected the whole world. The covid lockdown had arrived and at first I thought that despite its gravity, it wouldn’t affect us greatly. We would miss going to the library, but we had plenty of books at home. My kids were gamers, not out playing sports. Our recreational activity was movies and television. Our only big event was the weekly Sunday trip up to Our Lady of the Lake.

Meanwhile, in prison, his cellmate talked all the time, Tiger told me. Tiger was especially interested in his money. Why was he certain the Tallahassee doctor was wealthy? Because he had turned down a two million dollar settlement offer from the state. All the doctor had to do was sign something saying he was guilty. Tiger’s conclusion: he had to be wealthy to turn that down. Or innocent, I thought.

As the world went crazy hoarding toilet paper and hand sanitizer, our lives did gradually change, although it was small things at first. I had to learn to make covid bread using only a 1/4 teaspoon of yeast. I started making homemade candy. (A few failures, but the brilliant success of peanut butter fudge made up for it.) We signed up for some online classes so that we could keep our minds focused on something other than our shrinking lives.

Prisons, I learned, were on covid protocol. I sympathized with the people I was writing to because I understood what it was like for a small life to get a little smaller. But at the same time, for me it was the perfect excuse to extricate myself from the demands of the relationship with Tiger. In addition to treating me like his personal assistant, he was assuring me that we would be getting married once he got out of there. This was entirely his idea and I wrote back saying I would not be marrying again. His reply to that was, we could do it that way, too. At that point I was just going to stop writing altogether. And I almost did. But a still, small voice that had gotten me through troubled times and had talked me down from so many metaphorical ledges told me to keep writing anyway. Mysterious, but I listened. So instead, I wrote to Tiger and said in all honesty that I would have to cut back on how many letters I sent him. I had a finite amount of virtual stamps left. All the money in the house was going to the essentials. Since he and I were writing once a week or so, I suggested scaling back to once a month.

I underestimated the importance of my letters because Tiger immediately turned to his ‘wealthy’ cellmate about having some cash sent to me from the States. I was dubious about this ‘wealth’ thing. I knew enough about prison life to know that people did a lot of posturing. Juan had told me all about his life in the gang where he had been an Important and Powerful person. It was understandable that people in prison wanted to hold onto their glorious past and not completely embrace the comedown.

I figured it was the same with Tiger’s cellmate. He had money at one time, obviously, judging by the photos of his house. But why Tiger insisted on considering him currently wealthy, I didn’t know. Nonetheless, I didn’t oppose the idea of his cellmate sending me $25 so I could buy more virtual stamps from JPay, the email service for American prisons. It was certainly a reversal for me to have someone in prison send me money. (In the past, I had sent money to Juan so that he could purchase stamps and canteen items.) I only half-believed it would happen, anyway.

To my surprise, in his next email, Tiger told me the money was on its way. As I was waiting for it, Tiger and I continued to exchange emails at the rate of one or two a week, as always. He mentioned that his cellmate was interested in a blog, too, and said he had told Doc a bit about me. They referred to me as Canada.

But Tiger was now sharing that there was tension in the cell. And that he was starting to have doubts about his cellmate’s innocence. And, furthermore, that he had come up with a plan that would solve all of my financial problems.

August 17, 2020

Hello Dr. Frasch!

Thank you for your kindness! I received your father’s letter today with the $25. I’m glad to be able to take this opportunity to thank you personally.

I understand from Tiger that you’re interested in a blog like the one I created for him? If so, I’d be happy to post any words you’d like to share. A blog is easy to set up and I could copy your words straight to it.

A bit about myself. I’m 50. I’ve been writing to prisoners for about five years now. Made some good friends. I used the St. Michael penpal ministry online (I’m Catholic) and one of the first people I wrote to passed my address on to Tiger when he got out. Most of my life is taken up with my mostly-grown kids—four of them. We live with their father but we’re in the process of separating.

At college I majored in Theology and minored in English. When I’m not spending time with the kids, I love to read—fiction and non-fiction…

Anyway, that’s about it for me. I grew up in Toronto but now I live in a small town an hour north of the city. My kids keep me busy offline but I’m always happy to exchange emails with anyone.

God bless!

Jennifer

August 18, 2020

Hi Jennifer,

I’m glad to finally meet you and correspond. Wow! I did not know you have an undergraduate background in Theology and English. I took some classes in Religion, Twentieth Century Theatre, Classic Literature, Culture and Communication and even some Psychology courses. I mainly had a core science curriculum being pre med. I wanted to get a well rounded education and I enjoyed the Arts and Literature. So, ultimately I went for a Bachelor of Arts and a Bachelor of Science degrees with triple majors in Chemistry, Biology and Math, with minors in Theatre and Theology. We have something in common.

I would greatly appreciate any help you can give me with a blog and with moral support. I have been through one of the worst travesties a man could ever face. I am trying to stay focused on proving my innocence, and being not only exonerated, but getting ‘True Justice’ and avenging my beloved wife Samira DS’s death. I hurt so bad sometimes that I have to pray to God continuously to give me patience, strength, sanity and forgiveness to get through this tragedy. If it were not for my devout and ever enduring Faith and belief in God and my Lord and Savior Jesus Christ I would not have been able to endure all of this evil.

I will send you a more detailed background of my upbringing, personal life, my marriage with Samira and other details about my case. I will also send you a short Bio I have put together called the ULTIMATE SCAPEGOAT. I would appreciate your input and even critique. My forte and interest was not in English during my early Academic years. I only realize now that I should have paid more attention to English courses. Especially those courses in composition. My sentence structure and flow of my thoughts to paper/email needs a lot of improvement. Thank God for modern technology because my handwriting is atrocious. lol fcol

I, as yourself, have been on God’s beautiful earth for over half a century. Ouch! That reference makes me feel old at just a mere 53. Good rhyme, maybe I should have been a poet and didn’t know it. There I go again. lol…

I love Toronto, I have been there while visiting Niagara Falls, Canadian side. Once we spent a lot of time there with a film crew filming a high-end baby clothing line and baby/infant accessory line that my wife was designing and launching on an online store. We had a wonderful time in Toronto and almost got arrested going up in the CN Tower with a film crew without permission. I did not realize that Canadian Mounties got their panties in such a bunch over a baby being filmed in a public place. lol And it’s only the 3rd tallest tower in the world. lol. Samira was ready to tear their heads off and went into one of her bipolar rages on them. With a little sweet talking, apologizing for my ignorance, and our film producer flashing his international press pass and credentials they calmed down and allowed us full filming except for trademarked Canadian and/or anything with CN Tower on it. Besides this little incident, we all enjoyed Toronto immensely. I was impressed with the cultural diversity and an extremely clean city. Great transportation system with nice wide roads. The people and workers were all very polite and extremely professional as in Paris, France. As a mixed couple we never felt uncomfortable or looked at with prejudiced eyes.

I’m sorry if this email is a little lengthy, but in prison we have a lot of free time and at 39¢ an email for 6000 characters I try and make full use of each and every letter. Before this I was never a big texting or email person and very rarely wrote letters…

Your new friend, God bless, Adam M. Frasch DPM aka Doc

CHAPTER TWO

LIFE BEFORE PRISON

39600.png

Although Doc’s case was new to me, I quickly realized that he was still getting media attention even three years after his trial. All of Tallahassee and swathes of America knew more about it than I did at that point. And in the first few months of us writing to one another, three journalists contacted him for interviews. He had become wary of telling his story only to have most of it edited out in the end. He sent me a copy of one of the interviews he was working on for VH1. From it I learned a lot of the basics about him.

He was born in Gregory, South Dakota, but raised in Nebraska. He went to high school in Pierce where he played all the sports and was involved in every extra curricular activity he could make time for. He went to undergraduate school in Iowa where he played basketball, golf, and tennis, all with scholarships. The golf and tennis I could relate to, although not at his level. I played both in college. He took basketball to the next level when he played professionally in the Philippines for Shell Oil at the age of 19. Returning home to the US to go to medical school in Des Moines at the University of Osteopathic Medicine and Health Sciences, he graduated in 1992 with a degree of Doctor of Podiatric Medicine. From there he completed his residency in Tampa, Florida.

When asked by the journalist about his childhood, he described being raised by loving parents in a God-fearing, Christian, and blessed home. He got his work ethic from his father, along with his love and ability for sports. Outdoor activities included hunting, fishing, camping, and farming. And he had a passion for cars and motorcycles. From his father he learned all the mechanical skills that went along with his passion for anything that could go fast.

From his mother he learned about the Bible, art, the humanities, an appreciation for architecture, etiquette, dance, music, and to be a gentleman and a scholar. At a young age he was taught to love others and to help those in need. He has three siblings, two older brothers and a younger sister.

The journalist asked him how he ended up in Florida. He had always wanted to live in Florida, he told her. His first wife, Karen Malley Banks, wanted to live in the Carolinas, so they compromised and ended up in Thomasville, Georgia. After their divorce, he moved 20 miles south to Tallahassee. After growing up in Nebraska with snow and cold weather, he didn’t understand why everyone didn’t live where there was nice weather year round, beautiful beaches, golf courses, and the Gulf of Mexico.

But what about Samira? The media loved the glamorous Samira DS Frasch, former model, native of Madagascar, and more recently a woman who truly lived the American dream, and who appeared to have never had a bad photo taken of her. Despite all the photos, at first, to me, she was an almost illusory figure. The people who talked about her said things like, she had a great smile. Well, yeah, I could see that for myself. What about who she was as a person? The only certainty I could find was that on February 22, 2014, she was found dead at the bottom of the Frasch family pool in their gated community home in Tallahassee.

In time, I would learn the full story of Samira, including the truth about the last 24 hours of her life. And I would learn the truth about what was really going on in the marriage. They had fabulous days, but they also had some dark days. Very little of what Doc suffered ever came out in the media and at the trial. His size actually put him at a disadvantage. He told me about one particular incident:

… Samira was arrested in Orlando 2 years earlier. She was charged for domestic violence with aggravated assault with great bodily harm against me, the 1st time in public, outside of a club. There were hundreds of witnesses and my limo driver tried to intervene and pull her off me before she choked me, after she had scratched me, pulled my hair out, kicked me in the nuts and gouged my eyes with her long fingernails.

I just stood there and took it. Because, as I have said before, even if I had raised my hands to protect myself, she and other women in the crowd would say that I tried to hit her. With some high-priced lawyers and a lenient judge and her not being a citizen, she got the charges dropped to disorderly conduct and a fine and anger management classes.

Anyone looking at his life would not have expected these kinds of problems. After meeting in Paris in 2006 and a long distance relationship—with Samira modelling in Paris and Doc practicing podiatry in Thomasville, Georgia—the two got married, first in Las Vegas, and then later in a more traditional wedding in Madagascar with all of her family. In time, as we went further back in the story of his life, I would learn more about how a young Nebraskan with ambitions to play in the NBA had ended up married to a French model from Madagascar, a beautiful, talented woman who would turn out to have had a troubled past.

Doc told me how, back in Nebraska, his first love had been caring for animals. But Veterinarian Medicine was almost impossible to get into at the time he was starting out. He had had a severe injury, a fracture to his foot in high school, that required reconstructive surgical repair. His podiatrist, Dr. Meyers in Nebraska, had encouraged him that if a career in professional sports didn’t work out for him, he might want to consider Podiatric Medicine and Surgery. So after his athletic career was over, he went to Plan B and applied to and was accepted into medical school.

He still liked to play basketball and any kind of sport he could, even after he had married and established his career. In addition to season’s tickets for his favorite teams, he also appreciated concerts, theatre, ballet, opera, art exhibits, museums, gourmet dining and fine wines—and comedy clubs. Our letters would soon be filled with our favorite jokes.

I appreciated the James Bond quality of his life—all the traveling he did combined with things like horseback riding, boating, jet-skiing, skydiving. He was on his way to getting a helicopter pilot’s license before prison and had some experience flying. And, like the British spy, he gambled and had been to some of the world’s finest casinos, including the one Casino Royale was based on.

It initially surprised me when I read the interview that at the top of his list of favorite things to do was attend church and praise-and-worship, as well as sharing the Gospel. And it didn’t take me too long to learn that his relationship with God was the most important thing in his life. Later, as I watched the documentaries (although classifying them as that genre is to dignify these tabloid shows beyond what they deserve), I thought if someone wanted to meet the man depicted in them, they wouldn’t get what they wanted in an encounter with the real Dr. Adam Frasch.

Meanwhile, Tiger’s emails included some details about the Frasch marriage, such as that Samira had anger issues. But his emails mostly contained his personal opinions on the whole thing. Tiger saw the weight disparity as being an indicator that Doc was guilty. Samira was about 120 lbs and Doc was twice that.

Tiger told me that he planned to let his bunky talk—and talk and talk—in the hope that it would all come out—the real story of what had happened that last day. His idea was I would then turn it into a bestseller.