I'm Mary Kay McBrayer, host of the podcast The Greatest True Crime Stories Ever Told. This season explores women from the 19th century to now.
Women who were murderers and scammers, but also women who were photojournalists, lawyers, writers, and more. This podcast tells more than just the brutal, gory details of horrific acts. I delve into the good, the bad, the difficult, and all the nuance I can find.
To understand the intersection of society, justice, and the fascinating workings of the human psyche. Join me every week as I tell some of the most enthralling true crime stories about women who are not just victims, but heroes, or villains, or often somewhere in between. Listen to The Greatest True Crime Stories Ever Told on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Welcome to My Legacy. I'm Martin Luther King III and together with my wife, Andrea Waters King, and our dear friends, Mark and Craig Kilberger, we explore the personal journeys that shape extraordinary lives. Join us for heartfelt conversations with remarkable guests like David Oyelowo, Mel Robbins, Martin Sheen, Dr. Sanjay Gupta, and Billy Porter.
Listen to My Legacy on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. This is My Legacy. I'm Mark Seale. And I'm Nathan King. This is Leave the Gun, Take the Cannoli.
The five families did not want us to shoot that picture. This podcast is based on my co-host Mark Seale's bestselling book of the same title. Leave the Gun, Take the Cannoli features new and archival interviews with Francis Ford Coppola, Robert Evans, James Caan, Talia Shire, and many others.
Yes, that was a real horse's head. Listen and subscribe to Leave the Gun, Take the Cannoli on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. This is Mel Reed, Elf Beauty Tour winner and six-time Ladies European Tour winner. And Kira K Dixon, NBC Sports reporter and host. And we've got a new podcast, Quiet Please with Mel and Kira. We are bringing you spicy takes on sports and pop culture, some interviews with incredible people who have figured out how to make golf their superpower. An iHeart women's sports production in partnership with Deep Blue Sports and Entertainment. You can find us on iHeartRadio app, or wherever you get your podcasts.
Presented by Elf Beauty, founding partner of iHeart Women's Sports. And we continue with our American stories. Our next story comes from Oxford, Mississippi, the home of all myths. And it's a story told by Dr. David Berry. Here he is to share his remarkable story of faith, failure, and redemption.
Take it away, David. I'll just start at the beginning. I was born. I was a product of a one-night stand.
I was born in Houston, Texas. My birth mother, I think, only saw my birth father one other time after their night together. Interestingly enough, to give kudos to my birth mother, she, uh, it was in the 1970s.
I was born March 9th, 1971. And as you can imagine, you know, the pressure on a woman at that point to be married or to not have a pregnancy was huge. And in fact, her aunt pressured her. She went in and spoke to the doctor and the doctor told, you know, went over the procedure, said, you got to decide in the next two weeks because otherwise it's going to be too late. And when she came back out to the car, her aunt asked her what had happened.
And, uh, her response was the doctor said it was too late. I guess that's when they started the adoption process. And I was, I was adopted by two loving parents. We ended up living in Baton Rouge.
They were in New Orleans at the time and, uh, the adoption was closed. So they never knew any of my genetic history or my birth mother or anything like that. My passion in life is aviation. I always wanted to be a pilot, always wanted to fly. Well, the ultimate goal for me was to be a naval aviator. But I found out my junior, between my junior and senior year in college that I was not going to be able to fly for the military. I was colorblind.
And so that was a pretty big blow. At that time, for whatever reason, whether it was God's calling or what he had, he had been kind of putting on my mind this desire to go into medicine. Now, before we pass it off as miraculous, my dad was a physician. So I saw what he did.
He's probably the man I respect most in life. And so he, he played a big role in that desire. And I started focusing on how to get into medical school and went to Tulane University in New Orleans, which obviously has a lot of drinking associated with it. You know, I always enjoyed drinking. I started drinking at an early age.
I remember being 14 at a friend's house. We brought his dad's entire bar up to his room with, you know, 30 bottles as if we were Casanova or something. Anyway, that was my first night with alcohol.
I liked it. I continued to seek opportunities to imbibe. I never drank to the point of causing any problems for myself until later on. About my second year in medical school, I met a lady that was also in medical school or was a year behind me. And we ended up getting married between my second and third year in medical school. And then about my fourth year in medical school, we had a child.
Haley is a little girl. And unfortunately, she had a condition called spinal muscular atrophy, and she had the worst kind of type one. Unfortunately, that's not compatible with life, and she died in our arms at home January 3rd of 1999. At that point, I was in my first year of residency, but I can remember that being a breaking point in a lot of things psychologically and in my addiction. As I mentioned before, I've always been a bit of a drinker, but this really turned the page. I mean, I can distinctly remember going to the bar by myself for the explicit purpose of stopping the pain. I didn't care about being around friends anymore. I didn't care about drinking socially, although I would use that as an excuse. I was off and running. I mean, I was drinking alone to excess as much as I could. Now, I still kind of prided myself on the ability to turn it off for short periods if I needed to. That was probably the most dangerous thing I could have done because it gave me a false sense of security. Opiates.
I remember I had a colleague who was a year ahead of me in residency. He was a doctor, and he told me, you know, you can go to the pharmacy, and they'll give you some phenergan with codeine, and it's not a problem. I tried that. I liked it. And so gradually, I used opiates more and more and used alcohol less and less. And I thought I had hit the mother lode because nobody could tell I was impaired, or at least I thought they couldn't. I didn't smell bad.
I didn't, you know, stumble around, slur my words. My drug of choice was something called Tussianex, which is a cough syrup. They don't make it anymore because of how dangerous it is, I guess. It had twice the hydrocodone of other cough syrups. It even had a coconut flavor with little bits of coconut in it. I mean, it like came from the devil himself, you know. I mean, I would have drunk it even if it didn't have the hydrocodone in it, but it did. And once I got on that, I was addicted. I can remember waking up one morning thinking, you know, I can get through a hangover, but this is what addiction is. I can't even get to the bathroom without a little bit of opiates in me.
I need a little of that cough syrup just to be able to function. And I'll tell you this, I had a system set up where what I would do is I would find patients at work about my age and male, and I would take one of their stickers that when you check into the emergency room, they'd print a sheet of stickers with your name and date of birth and medical record and all that stuff. And legitimately, we'd use the stickers and put them on top of a prescription, write the prescription out, and that would be a legitimate prescription we'd give to patients. So what I would do is I'd find someone that would kind of match me, and I would steal their stickers.
I'd steal, you know, ten of them. And I'd put them on prescription, I'd write the prescription for the tussonex, and then I would just go to the pharmacy and present the prescription. And most of the time, they'd just fill it and give it to me. I always pay cash because I was worried about them tracking a credit card or something. And I ended up having to set up a pretty elaborate system.
I had probably 100 pharmacies between Lafayette, Louisiana, and east of New Orleans that I knew how many prescriptions I'd gotten, how many refills I had left, when I got them, so that I would keep my suspicion as low as possible. It was like a runaway train heading for a brick wall. I mean, I knew it wasn't going to end well, and I knew that it was going to cause great pain, but I felt like there was nothing I could do to stop the train. I was able to get away with it for a while. One Sunday, I believe, I had run out, and the withdrawal started setting in, and I just didn't care anymore.
I was at the end, I was ready for something to stop. I didn't have any stickers, so I went to the pharmacy near my house, and I just told the pharmacist, hey, I'm a physician, can you give me a little tussing next for a cough? And he did.
He didn't say a word about an eye. He gave it to me. Well, the next day, the police showed up at my house. They had looked up my prescriptions, they knew they were fraudulent, and they arrested me. And they arrested me at my house in front of my neighbors, put me in an unmarked car.
I guess that's fortunate. My family was away. My wife at the time was in New Orleans, so nobody really knew that I'd been arrested. It was a Friday night, so they brought me to the local precinct, and they put me in a big holding tank, and I remember I was in this holding tank, and I was the first one in there because it was like 3.30 in the afternoon.
And I remember thinking, you know, I'm not going to be alone forever. Somebody's going to get put in here with me, and I start thinking, if I tell them I'm a physician that wrote prescriptions, they're going to tear me limb from limb. So I started thinking of these stories, and sure enough, as the evening went on and the night went on, I started to fill up and had some pretty rough-looking characters in there, and a couple of them asked me, what are you in for? And I told them I was dealing OxyContin, and they caught me, because I'd rather say I was dealing OxyContin than telling the truth.
So I guess it shows how far addiction can take you to where you lying about dealing OxyContin is better than the truth. When we come back, more of the story of Dr. David Berry, here on Our American Stories. Take the cannoli.
The five families did not want us to shoot that picture. Leave the Gun, Take the Cannoli is based on my co-host Mark's best-selling book of the same title. And on this show, we call upon his years of research to help unpack the story behind the godfather's birth from start to finish.
This is really the first interview I've done in bed. We sift through innumerable accounts. Many of them conflicting. That's nonsense.
There was 60 pages. And try to get to the truth of what really happened. And they said, we're finished. This is over.
It only stopped going to work. You better get rid of those guys. This is disaster. Leave the Gun, Take the Cannoli features new and archival interviews with Francis Ford Coppola, Robert Evans, James Caan, Talia Shire, and many others.
Yes, that was a real horse's head. Listen and subscribe to Leave the Gun, Take the Cannoli on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Welcome to My Legacy. I'm Martin Luther King III. And together with my wife, Andre Waters King, and our dear friends, Mark and Craig Kilberger, we explore the personal journeys that shape extraordinary lives. Each week, we'll sit down with inspiring figures like David Oyelowo, Mel Robbins, Martin Sheen, Dr. Sanjay Gupta, and Billy Porter. And their plus one, their ride or die, as they share stories never heard before about their remarkable journey. Listen to My Legacy on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
This is My Legacy. Something about Mary Poppins? Something about Mary Poppins, exactly.
Oh man, this is fun. I'm AJ Jacobs, and I am an author and a journalist, and I tend to get obsessed with stuff. And my current obsession is puzzles.
And that has given birth to my podcast, The Puzzler. Dressing. Dressing.
French dressing. Exactly. Oh, that was good. Now you can get your daily puzzle nuggets delivered straight to your ears. I thought to myself, I bet I know what this is. And now I definitely know what this is. This is so weird. This is fun.
Let's try this one. Our brand new season features special guests like Chuck Bryant, Mayim Bialik, Julie Bowen, Sam Sanders, Joseph Gordon-Levitt, and lots more. Listen to The Puzzler every day on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
That's awful, and I should have seen it coming. All just people we like, plus tales from the road and everything in between. By the way, golf isn't just for the dads, brads, and chads.
Yeah, it's actually life's cheat code, and we're not going to be quiet about it on or off the course. We're bringing on some of our friends like Michelle Wee, Heather McMahon, Amanda Baliotis. So, if you want to keep up with us and hear us yap, tune into our new podcast. Listen to Quiet, Please with Mel and Kira, an iHeart women's sports production in partnership with Deep Blue Sports and Entertainment. You can find us on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
Presented by Capital One, founding partner of iHeart Women's Sports. And we return to our American stories and with the story of Dr. David Berry telling the story of his own struggles with addiction. And eventually you'll hear his story of recovery. When we last left off, he was in a jail cell. He was getting filled up, and he even managed to tell a lie about, well, being an actual drug dealer, rather than tell the truth about how he'd ended up there.
Let's return to Dr. Berry. I stayed in there all night. Well, most of the night. And because it was a Friday, they transfer all the prisoners to the central, I think it was the central East Baton Rouge Parish Sheriff's Department, way out by the airport. It's a big, it's where the main prison is. So, we got ready to go and they handcuffed us. One hand got handcuffed to another prisoner and the other hand to another prisoner, and they put us in the back of this van. And I can remember I was handcuffed to this guy. I don't know if his first name was Dole or last name was Dole, but he, I don't know if he thought I was his psychologist or what, but he kept talking to me, like laying his problems on me. And he kept saying to me, he said, Dave, can you imagine the judge saying, Dole, you got life in prison. Life. And he kept saying, I can't believe I got life in prison. And I have to say, man, here I am counseling this guy that just got life in prison for God knows what.
And, you know, really, I'm the one that needs, needs the counseling. Over this next couple of years, my family basically, I hate to say abandoned me because it sounds like it was their fault, but they cut off all contact with me. And so I got to the point where I didn't have a house to go to. I didn't have much money. I had to get rid of my truck. And eventually I found myself homeless for like a year and a half.
And over that year didn't, didn't, didn't happen all at once. But, you know, with opiates, I would try to wean myself off. And when I say a try, I meant it probably took me two years of this endless cycle of trying to wean myself off, almost getting there.
Can't take it anymore. I got to take a little bit more. Got to take a little bit more opiates to stave off the withdrawals. And the thing about withdrawals, opiate withdrawals is it doesn't let you take a break. If it takes 14 days to withdraw and you get to day 12 and stop, you don't get to pick back up there.
You've got to go all the way back to the beginning. So that was a hellish cycle just going through. And I won't describe, anybody that's been through it knows the darkness you feel and the loneliness and the despair. But there was one point one night I just decided, I said, I don't care how bad I feel. I don't care if this kills me.
I'm not putting any more of that stuff in my body. One of the reasons for it was I'd seen other people come along that were started off at my level and they got through it. They got through either their alcohol addiction or whatever it was, and they were back at work.
They were respected people. And here I was just still circling the drain. And I think that had a big part in me making that decision to just realize that I'm going to have to go through this.
There's no other way. And the other thing that happened to me is I remember laying down on the ground and just saying, God, you've got to, it's up to you to save me. I said, I got no more big ideas.
I got no more suggestions. Either you're going to completely intervene and save me or I'm just going to die. And I was OK with whichever way he wanted to go. But fortunately, he chose to save me.
And I can remember feeling just not, you know, the angels didn't descend and there wasn't a great light. But I remember for the first time, I felt a little bit of hope that it was going to be OK. And I can honestly say from that day on, each day, and sometimes I didn't feel like it was, but each day was a little bit better than the last. And eventually I was able to get the help I needed. Miraculously, my parents just randomly, after not speaking to me for a year or two, came up to Monroe and found me. I remember my mom was actually, she said, I can't believe how good you look.
Even though I was, you know, I look terrible, but I think she didn't think I would be sober, you know, and she didn't think I would be healthy. And so anyway, I can remember saying that the other thing that was kind of miraculous for me is I met a guy in Vicksburg who was a doctor. And he really took an interest in me named Randy. And he kind of from that point on, walked me through professionally to help me get back, get back my professional life, which I'd lost my license a long time ago. I wasn't even thinking I'd ever be able to practice again. And he gives me the hope that maybe there's a chance that I'll be able to practice again.
It took several years, but eventually he was right. I was able to get my license back. I was able to get back into practice. I have licenses now in multiple states. I was, fortunately, I was able through some people that I met, one being the CEO of my hospital, was able to put together a team and we developed and started our own alcohol and drug treatment center in Colorado.
It's still open to this day. And it felt good to be able to give back to people that you know are so desperate. But during this, I'm going to AA meetings all the time and AA is not for everybody. I don't particularly espouse to that being the end all be all answer, but at the time it was the only thing I had.
So it offered a routine for me. And I met somebody pretty early on in one of the AA meetings and we really, we became best friends. We were all, we were both heading in the same direction. We were, we both wanted the same thing out of our recovery in our life. And we really, really matched like I've never matched with a person before. And after several years of being best friends, we fell in love and we got married.
And that's who my soul mate, my wife to this day is. And so when Courtney and I got married, I didn't have my license back and she was working at a school. But maybe a year after we got married, I got my medical license back in Mississippi. And so I started working and applying for emergency medicine jobs.
That's what my training is. And I got one up near Oxford, Mississippi. And so I started going to this job, but I was driving two and a half hours back and forth from Jackson to this job. And, you know, pretty soon after we got here, she became pregnant with our oldest boy, Laughlin. And five years after that, we had our second boy. So, you know, God took away one child, but he gave me back two. And I just feel like I wouldn't be able to appreciate them or my life the way I do had I not gone through what I went through. I'm just so grateful for every day. I'm grateful for them and for Courtney. And I'm just glad to be able to be part of a community and be part of a church that can help others.
And kind of is on the same mission that I am. And a terrific job on the production, editing and storytelling by our own Monty Montgomery and Caleb Robinson. And a special thanks to Dr. David Berry for sharing his story and all the rawness, all the realness. And many, many families in this country, most probably, touched in some way or another by alcohol or drug addiction and mental health problems and the combination of the two. I wouldn't appreciate the life I have now without going through what I went through. Gratitude you could hear it gushing from this man's lips. The story of Dr. David Berry, his fall and his redemption, here on Our American Stories.
