When he returned from his second tour of Vietnam, Polsgrove, by then a sergeant, was stationed at Camp Pendleton in Carlsbad, California. He worked long hours as a payroll clerk, according to a news article in the Campbell Citizen. Often he would report to work late at night to catch up when the workload was demanding. Gatlin believes he and some friends also were writing themselves checks under fictitious names.
After one late night of paper-pushing, Polsgrove put on his gray sweat suit and blue tennis shoes a little before 6 a.m. While his wife, Cindy, prepared breakfast, he went for a jog on the beach.
Doug Boehm
Doug Boehm
Related Content
More About
A fellow beachcomber spotted the tennis shoes and sweat suit, reporting them the next day after a missing person's report went out.
Zhirakarov had been up and had a shower at the Fabre Clinic's Austin Street center the morning of May 3, 2002, according to Farquhar's March 7 letter. However, a clinic nurse hunting down another blood sample later found him "unresponsive" in bed. She quickly called for an ambulance.
Paramedics performed CPR but couldn't reinspire his drug-damaged heart. At Park Plaza Hospital, ER staff went so far as to install a pacemaker, according to Farquhar.
The autopsy report states that Zhirakarov was at the hospital a total of 11 minutes before being pronounced dead. A tracheal tube hung from his throat. Defibrillator pads and electrocardiogram wires were still pasted to his chest.
Was he schizophrenic? Did he belong in the trial? Fabre cites client confidentiality in not responding to questions about the death. Though Gatlin hadn't seen her brother in more than a decade, she denies the diagnosis but readily admits he had problems. "I personally think, like, Vietnam messed him up mentally," she says. "He seemed, you know, okay. But I sometimes think you have to be around people for a period of time, and these were just short visits."
Sellers knew Zhirakarov as a dependable -- if excessively private -- individual. Both he and Gatlin say he was extremely intelligent and likable. But Sellers says the ego-grinding nature of street life affects all homeless people, eventually leading to some form of mental illness.
Fabre likes to keep his business in the family. Ex-wife Pamela Waller ran the Houston clinics after the office manager was driven out in a storm of claims and counterclaims that involved an $85,000 legal dispute with Fabre. Though her case was dismissed in July 1999, the former manager accused the doctor of failing to honor maternity leave and severance agreements.
Former wives also worked his clinical trials, Mosher says.
"You would have people that would give honest results and the drug would start looking bad, so he'd fire them and put his wife in there doing the readings even though she wasn't medical personnel," he says.
Fabre's partnership with a new wife -- a 33-year-old acupuncturist named Nataliya Kurgut, wooed from the Ukraine via an e-mail romance -- could see the husband-and-wife formula continue overseas.
Since their reported 2003 Caribbean marriage, a new line has appeared on Kurgut's résumé: vice president of Specialized Psychopharmacology, Ltd. in Abaco, Bahamas. While this suggests the pair may be performing trials in the Caribbean, Fabre is on the verge of venturing into Eastern Europe as well. New drug trials under Fabre's supervision are being planned for Kharkov, Ukraine, according to one Ukrainian source who asked not to be identified. Both countries offer populations who are in need of cash and less likely to drop out of the trials before their completion.
One of the great unanswered questions is why the FDA took more than two years to cite Fabre in Zhirakarov's death. While investigators and public relations flacks would not answer any questions directly, politics is the most likely culprit.
As the agency has come under increasing fire for failing to police drug companies adequately, old investigations are being picked up with new vigor, some suggest.
"They are simply now trying to do what they should have done all along, because everybody's coming around and finding all the things they didn't do when they were nothing but drug company whores," Mosher says. "They're trying to clean up their act just a little and look like they deserve to be the agency protecting us from drug companies."
The new frenzy of regulatory activity comes a little late for Zhirakarov and his sister.
When 61-year-old Gatlin thinks about why her last living relative is no longer, she looks back thoughtfully to those early decisions made by a marine she says was still shocked by the horrors of war.
"The choices he made when he was young affected the rest of his life. I mean, like, we couldn't even visit like a normal family, I mean, like normal families do. So…It's just, uh, I guess just one of them things. I mean, I might not have saw him for years, but, you know, that don't mean it didn't hurt any less."
But if there were any horrors haunting Polsgrove, they weren't Vietnamese in nature, according to a spokesman for the U.S. National Archives and Records Administration. Per his military records, Polsgrove spent his entire five-year service period stationed in Carlsbad, California, and never rose higher than the rank of corporal. Of course, his file also indicates he died in April 1970.
