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Wondering Dr. Benjamin Gilmer waited anxiously at a long metal table in the visitors area of a maximum security prison in Virginia. He had driven 2 hours from North Carolina to see a prisoner who had committed a gruesome murder. When that inmate finally approached the doctor, Benjamin saw a thin, sickly looking man who, according to those who knew him, had once been a kind and gentle person. Something had clearly turned him into a cold blooded killer.

Benjamin wasn't sure how or why, but he was determined to find out.

From Ballin Studios and wondery I'm Mr. Ballin, and this is Mr. Ballin's medical mysteries, where every week we will explore a new, baffling mystery originating from the one place we all can't escape. Our own bodies. If you like today's story, kindly invite the follow button to go to a party with you.

But instead of a party, bring them to a recruiting meeting for a pyramid scheme's episode is called what's wrong with vents? One morning in the spring of 2000, and 939 year old Dr. Benjamin Gilmer quietly got dressed before dawn. Without waking his sleeping wife and young son. He walked out the front door of his home in Asheville, North Carolina.

He got in his car and pulled off into the foggy morning. Benjamin drove about 15 miles until the city streets became narrow country roads. In the distance, he saw the peaks of green mountains jutting into the sky. The area was breathtaking, but Benjamin's stomach was in knots. He was about to start his new job as a doctor at the Cane Creek clinic, a rural medical center in the small town of Fletcher.

A few minutes later, Benjamin turned off the main road and into the driveway of an old repurposed farmhouse. The farmhouse was the clinic's location, which had been founded by another doctor whose last name was Gilmer, except this doctor's name was Vince Gilmer. Benjamin found it od that he happened to share the same last name as the previous doctor. He knew it would confuse some patients. In fact, having the same last name as the clinic's founder had almost kept him from getting the job.

The board of directors was hesitant to hire him because the first Dr. Gilmer had done something so heinous that they wanted to completely disassociate themselves from that name. Dr. Vince Gilmer had murdered his own father and mutilated the corpse five years earlier, on June 28, 2004. He was now serving a life sentence in prison.

Benjamin Gilmer understood why having the same last name as this killer would give the board of directors pause, but Benjamin was grateful that they gave him a chance. His goal wasn't to work in a big hospital or make a ton of money. It was to help people who needed it most in small communities.

Benjamin parked, then got out of his car and walked toward the clinic. He took a deep breath and then stepped through the creaky front door. The clinic wouldn't open for another ten minutes, but there were already a handful of people sitting in the waiting area reading the local paper. A few people glanced up at him, but no one gave him a strange look. He smiled and waved back.

Relieved that he didn't seem to be causing any confusion, Benjamin headed into the back and greeted his staff, who had already been told Benjamin was not related to the other Dr. Gilmer. Benjamin checked his busy schedule. He had back to back to back appointments from 08:00 a.m. To 06:00 p.m.

He refilled his coffee mug, put on his white coat, and got to work. By the end of the day, 06:00 p.m. He was tired and ready to go home, but he had one more patient to see, a woman who was there for a follow up on her arthritis. But when he walked into the exam room, he was startled by what he saw. The woman was sitting on the exam table with her head down almost to her knees, and she was hyperventilating.

Her breaths were shallow and her face was pale. She was clearly having a panic attack. But as soon as Benjamin stepped all the way into the room and shut the door, the woman looked up at him and visibly began to relax. Her breathing slowed down and her color started to come back. Once she had steadied herself, she reached out and touched Benjamin's shoulder and apologized.

When the nurse had first mentioned she'd be seeing Dr. Gilmer, she was terrified because she thought it would be the other Dr. Gilmer, the murderer. Benjamin smiled and told her it was all right. He was just glad she was feeling better.

Once the woman was ready, Benjamin began to examine her, and as he checked her vitals, they talked about the other Dr. Gilmer, Vince Gilmer. Despite her fear that it was going to be the first Dr. Gilmer walking into the exam room, she had said to the new Dr. Gilmer that she actually only had fond memories of Vince Gilmer.

She remembered Vince as being very kind and caring before she found out he had murdered his father. One time when she was at the clinic, she'd seen Vince rescue a mouse from a no kill mousetrap. Then he walked out back and released it right next to a koi pond he'd built himself. He cared deeply about every living thing, which had made his crime all the more shocking to her. Benjamin thanked her for being so open.

He prescribed some medication for her arthritis, walked her back to the waiting room, and then he returned to his office. Benjamin wrote up his patient notes from the day, and then he left the clinic. But on the way home, he kept thinking about Vince Gilmer. He wondered how a man who had been a doctor, committed to saving lives, was now serving a life sentence for murder. His mind wandered as the trees on the side of the highway whipped by.

Benjamin blinked and forced his eyes to stay on the road. He didn't want to think about a murderer, especially one who shared his last name. Finally, Benjamin arrived home. He had some dinner, and then he crawled into bed and fell asleep.

Over the next several months, Benjamin tried to push thoughts of Vince Gilmer out of his head. Taking over the clinic was a demanding job, and Benjamin often worked 14 hours days. But even when he was busy, he couldn't shake the feeling that there was something more to Vince's story. Time and time again, longtime patients who came into the clinic who had known Vince Gilmer would tell Benjamin about Vince's generosity and compassion. How he would take payment in the form of corn and tomatoes from patients who could not afford to pay the bill, how he still made house calls, how he treated everyone with decency and respect.

Benjamin just couldn't believe someone like Vince could transform into a violent criminal with no explanation. He wondered if there could be a medical explanation for Vince to snap and become this killer. Did something break inside of him? Until he knew more, Benjamin just could not let it go.

A few weeks later, Benjamin's receptionist walked into the clinic with a stack of newspaper articles about Vince Gilmer. She knew about Benjamin's interest in the case and had done some research on her own at the local library. Benjamin eagerly sat down at his desk at the end of the day, clearing away his medical reports and charts to focus on the newspapers. He didn't know what he was looking for, but he was excited to find out any new information about Vince Gilmer. That was not just word of mouth.

As he read the articles, Benjamin discovered that Vince had actually been about Benjamin's age when he killed his father, Dalton Gilmer. Five years ago, Dalton had been diagnosed with some form of schizophrenia and Alzheimer's, which is a form of dementia. He had been living in a psychiatric hospital that treated Alzheimer's patients. The part about schizophrenia caught Benjamin's attention. He wondered if Vince inherited a genetic vulnerability to the crippling mental disorder.

But as he thought more about the possible link, it seemed unlikely. Schizophrenia typically appears in early adulthood, and he doubted that Vince could have developed the disease without any prior signs. There are some cases that appear later in life, but they're rare. Whatever changed in Vince had changed suddenly. Benjamin kept reading.

On the day of the murder, Vince was supposed to come help his father. Dalton moved to a nursing home, and witnesses saw him come pick Dalton up. But two days later, Vince reported his father missing, claiming he'd brought his father back home and then he'd probably just wandered off. Vince had no idea that the police had already found his dad's body on a road 2 hours drive from the hospital. And there was evidence linking Vince to the murder.

The articles said that Vince had told police during the investigation that he had not been feeling like himself lately because he was withdrawing from an antidepressant medication called Lexapro. People who suddenly stop taking antidepressants can experience a range of symptoms, including trouble sleeping, nausea, and psychological reactions such as suicidal impulses or psychosis. The articles also said that Vince had gotten seriously injured in a car accident about a year before the murder. And after that, he and his wife had divorced. Now Benjamin's mind was racing.

Was it possible that the combined effects of antidepressant withdrawal and a bad head injury from a car accident could have dramatically altered Vince's personality? Could they have transformed him into a murderer? It was getting late, and he should have been home by now. His wife was probably wondering where he was. But before Benjamin shut off his light, he noticed a blurry photo of Vince from one of the articles.

He looked big and burly. He had a shaved head, and he was wearing a prison jumpsuit. His eyes seemed haunted. Benjamin suddenly felt like he was trying to build a jigsaw puzzle without all the pieces. But he didn't have the time to figure out what he was missing.

Over the next year, Benjamin's life got much more hectic. He and his wife had a second child, and he was just so busy running the clinic that ultimately, he was not able to keep up his research into Vince. And if Benjamin was being honest with himself, he knew the Vince Gilmer subject was taking up way too much space in his head. His obsession with this murderer would just have to wait until he had more time to think.

In the spring of 2011, three years after Benjamin began his research into Vince Benjamin was in a meeting at the clinic when he received a phone call. The caller identified herself as Sarah Koenig, a journalist from New York. Sarah had heard about the case of the previous Dr. Gilmer, and she was interested to find out more. In fact, Sarah wanted to do a podcast about it.

She asked Benjamin if he would be willing to speak with her about his experiences as the second Dr. Gilmer at the clinic. Benjamin was intrigued by Sarah's call, but he was also hesitant. He didn't want to get sucked back in to Vince's dark past, so he told her he was actually not interested in doing the podcast. But after he hung up, his old feelings began to resurface.

He wanted to move on with his life, but he just couldn't forget about Vince Gilmer. It took another year, but Benjamin would call Sarah back now. He wanted to be a part of her project if she was still interested.

Shortly after Benjamin called in the spring of 2012, Sarah came out to North Carolina and they got to work. Sarah interviewed Benjamin first. To his surprise, Benjamin felt himself tearing up as he talked about Vince's story. It was cathartic for him to finally let out how invested he had become in this stranger's life. Together, he and Sarah planned to interview Vince's old patients, friends, and co workers.

The first person on their list was Vince's old office manager, Terry. She had seen Vince's decline firsthand, so one night they met Terry in another office space near the clinic. Sarah prepared the recording equipment and then tapped the microphone to test it. Benjamin could see Terry's shift in her seat. She was nervous.

He understood he'd felt the same way. Sarah pressed the record button and the interview began. Terry took a deep breath and described when she thought Vince's personality first started to change. It was about a year before the murder in 2003. Vince's truck had hit a telephone pole and overturned.

First responders found him unconscious, and an ambulance had rushed him to Mission hospital in Asheville. And when Vince woke up, he didn't know his own name and he didn't recognize his wife. Terry said Vince's amnesia cleared up after about 24 hours, but after that crash, he was never really the same. Her voice shook as she told Benjamin about how Vince had filed for divorce, moved into a new house alone, started drinking heavily, and began dating random women. He got into debt and spent money he didn't have.

Clearly, Vince's mental health had gone steadily downhill in the last year before the murder, and so Benjamin wondered why Vince was even found mentally competent to stand trial. Benjamin decided he needed to see the official documents from Vince's trial in hopes of getting some new insight.

The week after Sarah came to visit, Benjamin drove to Washington County, Virginia, where Vince's trial had taken place. He asked the court clerk for all documents available on Dr. Vince Gilmer and received a thick stack of papers, hundreds of pages long. It was the transcript from Vince's trial. Vince had insisted on representing himself in court and argued that he was not in his right mind when he murdered his father due to antidepressant withdrawal.

He had stopped taking them cold turkey two days before the murder. But Vince didn't present any expert medical witnesses who could corroborate this theory. And he didn't even bring up the bout of amnesia he suffered after his car crash. The prosecution argued that Vince was faking an illness to escape punishment. They presented a psychiatrist who had judged Vince to be perfectly sane the night he killed his father.

The jury agreed and found him guilty and sentenced him to life in prison. Benjamin wasn't sure what to think. On the one hand, a traumatic brain injury and antidepressant withdrawal could explain the dark turn in Vince's personality. On the other hand, he could see why the jury believed the prosecution killing and mutilating your father is something a sociopath would do. When Benjamin got back home, he talked it over with Sarah.

They both agreed there was only one way to get the full story. The two Dr. Gilmers would have to meet directly.

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It took several months to organize, but in early January of 2013, Benjamin and Sarah made the two hour drive to Wallens Ridge State prison in Virginia. The maximum security building was huge and flat, a cinder block fortress nestled deep in the Virginia mountains. After Benjamin parked and stepped out of the car, he immediately heard the buzing sound of the electrified razor wire lining the prison's fence. He noticed snipers perched on guard towers. The place made Benjamin extremely nervous.

He and Sarah left their belongings in the car. They showed their ids to the guard and then walked through the metal detectors. Finally, they were led down a hallway to the visiting area. The room was large and filled with long metal tables. Benjamin could smell old food and bleach.

It almost felt like a school cafeteria, except for the fact that prison guards loomed in the corners and each table had a metal divider down the middle to separate inmates from visitors. Benjamin and Sarah sat down at one of the tables and waited. A few minutes later, an old man shuffled slowly into the room. He was rail thin, with a gaunt face and barely any hair. Benjamin watched the old man walk, thinking he must be visiting someone else.

But then the old man pulled a chair out at their table. It was Vince. He was 50 years old but looked nothing like the burly, broad shouldered man Benjamin had seen in older photos. Benjamin could feel his heart pounding. This was the man he'd been fixated on for the past four years.

He took a breath and then introduced himself, but it seemed like Vince barely heard him. Vince kept opening and closing his mouth, almost like he was chewing, except he didn't have any food in his mouth. Benjamin could see he was missing most of his teeth. Vince's eyes wandered around the room as he clenched and unclenched his hands. He was trying to speak, but he was clearly struggling.

Slowly, Vince began to talk about the voices in his head and how his brain didn't work. After a while, he seemed to run out of things to say. There was an awkward silence, so Sarah stepped in. She followed up with questions that Benjamin didn't have the nerve to ask. Questions like why Vince killed his father and whether he planned it.

Vince seemed to expect the questions he slowly answered that he hadn't planned it. He said the voices in his head told him to do it, but there was just a lot he couldn't remember. Looking at him now, Benjamin felt certain that Vince was not a psychopath. He wasn't evil or manipulative, and he wasn't faking these symptoms. He was suffering, and for years nobody had believed him.

Now Benjamin had new questions for himself. What exactly was Vince sick with? And was there any potential treatment? Just then a prison guard walked over and told Benjamin and Sarah that their time was up. Vince stared at them, his eyes brimming with tears, and he asked them to please help him.

Benjamin promised he would try, and then he and Sarah said goodbye. They left the prison and drove the winding roads back to North Carolina.

About a week after visiting the prison, Benjamin realized he might actually know someone who could help Vince. Benjamin grabbed his phone, and he called a colleague named Dr. Steve Bowie. Benjamin knew Dr. Bowie from a nearby medical school where they both sometimes taught classes.

Dr. Bowie was a psychiatrist and an expert at diagnosing brain diseases and mental illnesses. Benjamin called Dr. Bowie up and poured out Vince's story. Benjamin told Dr.

Bowie that, in his opinion, Vince had been showing signs of some kind of brain disease for at least a decade, and his condition had only deteriorated since he was imprisoned. And if Vince didn't get help soon, he could die.

Three days later, Benjamin drove with Dr. Bowie through the Virginia mountains, discussing Vince's case. As they headed back towards the prison. Dr. Bowie didn't think antidepressant withdrawal could be the answer.

It had been nine years since the crime, which meant it had been nine years since Vince stopped taking his antidepressants. Yet his symptoms seemed to have only worsened. There was just no way he could still be going through drug withdrawal after so much time. And Dr. Bowie didn't think Vince's car accident could explain his behavior either.

He'd worked with many patients who had traumatic brain injuries, and their symptoms did not match Vince's. Benjamin was confused. He wanted to believe that Vince had been driven to kill by forces beyond his control. But if neither a traumatic brain injury or the lexapro withdrawal had caused Vince to kill, then what could it be? Maybe, Benjamin thought, Vince belonged in prison after all.

After almost four years of digging into Vince's case, Benjamin didn't want to believe that he could have been so wrong about Vince. Benjamin sighed, not knowing what to think. Benjamin and Dr. Bowie eventually arrived at the prison, and they parked the car in the prison's parking lot. Benjamin led Dr.

Bowie through security, down the prison's echoey hallways and into the visitation area. Vince eventually walked in, looking just as sick as the last time Benjamin visited. He seemed happy to see Benjamin, though, and he smiled. But then, after he sat down, his lips curled into an exaggerated frown and he squeezed his eyes shut and his hands trembled uncontrollably as he tried to lay them flat on the table. Dr.

Bowie asked Vince questions about the night of the murder, and Vince sort of stumbled through a slow recounting, Dr. Bowie listened patiently, and when Vince finished, Dr. Bowie asked him something that was totally unexpected. He wanted to know what it was like growing up with his father. Vince looked off in the distance for a moment.

Then his voice dropped to barely above a whisper as he described painful childhood memories. His father was a Vietnam War veteran who drank to excess, especially after returning home from combat, and he was a cruel man who had sexually abused Vince for as long as he could remember. Vince tried to answer more questions, but after a while, a guard came over and said it was time to go. Back in the car, Benjamin asked Dr. Bowie what he thought of Vince.

The psychiatrist leaned back in his seat with a thoughtful expression on his face. He told Benjamin that he was more certain than ever that Vince's condition had nothing to do with antidepressant withdrawal or a traumatic brain injury. But he was also convinced that Vince did not murder his father out of pure hate. In fact, he had a new theory for what was wrong with Vince. When he explained it, Benjamin just sat there, stunned.

He'd never even considered something like what Dr. Bowie was suggesting. But if Dr. Bowie was right, it would explain everything. They just needed a DNA test to prove it.

It took some time, but they did eventually get everything in order. Dr. Bowie had to get the prison hospital to obtain a blood sample from Vince, send it off for testing, and then wait for it to be processed. The DNA results came back a few months later. In March of 2013, Benjamin was at work, sitting in his rusty desk chair, when he saw an email notification on his computer from the prison hospital.

His heart skipped a beat as he opened the email. The diagnosis was finally there in black and white. It explained everything from Vince's car accident to his increasingly strange behavior to the murder that landed him behind bars.

This is what really happened on the day that Dr. Vince Gilmer killed his father, and why he did it. On the afternoon of June 28, 2004, Vince left the clinic early. He drove home. He grabbed a canoe from his garage and lifted it onto the top of his pickup truck.

He strapped the canoe down and then got back into his truck and drove across town.

About an hour later, he parked in front of the huge, multi story brick building where his father lived, Broughton Hospital. Vince went inside and told the receptionist he was there to pick up his father, Dalton. Dalton had been living at this hospital for two years, being treated for what doctors thought was schizophrenia and Alzheimer's. His overall health was deteriorating, and so Vince was there to check him out of Broughton Hospital and bring him to a nursing home in North Carolina, where he could live out his final days.

Vince helped his father out the door and into the passenger seat of the truck. Then Vince got into the driver's seat, and he told his father he had a surprise. Instead of going straight to the nursing home, Vince was going to take him to one of his favorite places, a lake in Tennessee, where they could canoe together. But while they were making this 70 miles drive to the lake, Dalton started making these horrible sexual comments towards his own son. Unfortunately, this was not anything new.

Vince had heard it all before, and he could ignore it. But then his father started humming the tune of Baba black sheep, the song that Vince's father used to hum while he abused Vince when he was a boy. For Vince, the sound of that song brought back a flood of traumatic memories. It was like a psychological trigger. And in that moment, something broke in Vince's mind.

He began to hear voices all around him and inside his head, demanding that he kill his father. The more he tried to resist, the stronger they became. The urge to kill his father became overwhelming. His head was pounding, and he felt like he was losing control. The tires screeched as he swerved onto the side of the road and slammed on the brakes.

The car stopped so quickly that his father's head jerked forward, then back, knocking into the headrest. Vince's eyes locked onto his dog's leash, which he'd left lying over the passenger seat headrest. The voices screamed at Vince to use it. And so Vince grabbed one end of this leash. He wrapped the other end around his father's neck, and then he pulled as tight as he could.

Dalton was too sick and frail to fight back. He died of strangulation. Afterward, it was still. All Vince could hear were the crickets and his own breathing.

Vince drove around for hours with his father's body sitting up in the passenger seat. Eventually, he pulled over on a rural road in Virginia. It was dark and deserted. Vince knew he'd just done something absolutely terrible. And as he sat in the truck, his heart began to race.

The quiet in his head was now replaced by a jumble of whispers and then shouts. The voices were back, and their message was clear. They were telling him he was going to get caught unless he covered his tracks. Vince stepped out of the truck and walked around to the passenger side. He dragged his father's body and left it in a grassy patch on the side of the road.

Then he rushed to the back of his truck and scooped up a pair of his gardening shears. He returned to the body, picked up one of his father's fingers and began to cut. It took some effort because the blades were worn, but in a few minutes, it was done. The finger landed on the dry leaves with a soft thud. Then, one by one, Vince cut the rest of his father's fingers off.

The voices told him to take the fingers, so Vince gathered them up, got back into his truck and sped away from the crime scene. A few hours later, a Virginia police officer found Dalton's body while it was still warm. The missing fingers shocked him, but he didn't have any problems figuring out who this victim was. He found name tags from Broughton Hospital in Dalton's shorts and in his shirt. Detectives quickly learned that Vince had picked Dalton up from the hospital that afternoon.

Within a few days, police were at Vince's house in North Carolina, arresting him for murder. They never found his father's fingers, even though Vince said he'dumped them in his clinic's Koi pond. But they did find blood stained paper towels in Vince's truck. When Vince was tried, he had said he was just as shocked by his behavior as everybody else was. And now, nearly a decade later, Benjamin finally understood what was actually wrong with Vince's mind.

And he now had the lab results to prove it.

Benjamin read the words from the prison hospital's email over and over. Vince had Huntington's disease. Benjamin opened up an Internet browser. He'd studied Huntington's in medical school, but it was so rare that he'd never diagnosed it in his career as a doctor. He began looking up articles in medical journals to refresh himself on the details.

The articles described Huntington's as being a sort of cross between three diseases that are each absolutely terrible. Als, Parkinson's, and Alzheimer's. It was a degenerative neurological disease, meaning it caused a person's brain cells to break down and die. This created physical and psychological problems like involuntary movements, cognitive impairments, memory loss, intense personality changes, and psychosis. The Huntington's diagnosis lined up with all the symptoms Vince experienced.

And while the majority of Huntington's patients weren't violent, the disease could cause people to act out in ways they normally would not. Benjamin thought that Vince might have been struggling with multiple problems at once. While a traumatic brain injury and antidepressant withdrawal could not explain his actions on their own, they could have combined with Huntington's disease to create a perfect storm of mental and physical illnesses that totally changed Vince's personality and behavior. Benjamin kept reading. Huntington's was genetic, meaning it got passed down from parent to child.

If someone's mother or father had Huntington's disease. Then they had a 50 50 chance of getting it as well. Suddenly, everything clicked for Benjamin. The doctors at Broughton Hospital thought Vince's father, Dalton, had schizophrenia and dementia. But it was much more likely that Dalton had Huntington's.

He was the one who passed it on to Vince. To Benjamin, the entire story was a tragedy. Two men, a father and son, who shared the same mental illness, both doing unspeakable things to each other. Then Benjamin read something else that made his heart sink even further. Huntington's is a death sentence.

There is no known cure, and the disease will eventually kill its victim. All Benjamin could do was try to get Vince the mental health care he needed.

Today, Benjamin still has a close relationship with Vince. His goal is to help Vince get out of prison and into a proper treatment facility. In January of 2022, the governor of Virginia granted Vince Clemency on the condition that a place was found for him at a psychiatric hospital. Technically, this made Vince a free man. But it wasn't as simple as him just walking out of prison and into a hospital, because every public mental health facility in Virginia refused to take him in, and a stay at a private hospital was far too expensive.

Benjamin continues to work hard to find a hospital for Vince, who remains in Wallens Ridge State prison. He hopes that one day the first Dr. Gilmer will receive the psychiatric care that he needs.

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From Ballin Studios and Wondery this is Mr. Ballin's medical mysteries, hosted by me, Mr. Ballin. A quick note about our stories. We use aliases sometimes because we don't know the names of the real people in the story, and also in most cases, we can't know exactly what was said.

But everything is based on a lot of research and a reminder, the content in this episode is not intended to be a substitute for professional medical advice, diagnosis or treatment. This episode was written by Karis Allen Posh Cooper. Our editor is Heather Dundas. Sound design is by Ryan Patesta. Coordinating producer is Sophia Martins.

Our senior producer is Alex Benedon. Our associate producers and researchers are Sarah Vitak and Tasia Palaconda. Fact checking was done by Andrew Rosenblum for Ballin'Studios. Our head of production is Zach Levitt. Script editing is by Scott Allen and Evan Allen.

Our coordinating producer is Matub Zaire. Executive producers are myself, Mr. Ballin, and Nick Witters. For Wondery. Our head of sound is Marcelino Villapondo.

Senior producers are Laura Donna Palavoda and Dave Schilling. Our executive producers are Aaron O'Flaherty and Marshall Louis. For wondery.