THE detective who helped cage an oral surgeon for killing his girlfriend has told The U.S. Sun about the crucial intervention of a family member which helped blow the shocking case wide open.
Ian Iacoviello, a drug-diversion specialist, was on the cusp of retiring after 30 years in law enforcement when the death of Sarah Harris landed in his lap.
Harris, a former beauty queen, had been found dead at the Maryland home of oral surgeon boyfriend Dr. James Ryan, who was 48 at the time, on January 26, 2022, with police at the scene initially treating the 25-year-old’s demise as a suspected overdose.
Just over a month later, a colleague handed Iacoviello a binder and asked him to take a look.
He came in on Sunday, March 6 — his birthday — and began reading.
Inside was information relating to Sarah, but what ultimately transformed the case was the work of her sister, Rachel.
She had been trying to understand what had happened.
After finally working out Sarah’s passwords, she uncovered a collection of chilling text messages between her sibling and Ryan documenting their warped relationship with drugs.
“As you read that, you’re watching her die,” Iacoviello told The U.S. Sun. “Because it just gets worse and worse. Slipping through that was a, ‘Oh, I can’t believe what I’m reading.’
“Her pleading and her begging for drugs just gets worse. I’ve been dealing with addicts for a very long time, but you can see the desperation in her.
“I need this, I need this, I need this. And nothing else matters. I would say to this day, Rachel is the reason why this whole thing, the whole trial and the case happened.
“What Rachel gave us was good to look at, but not evidence. So we just needed to obtain the information ourselves.
“That would have been done. I know how I am as a detective. I would have gotten everything that Rachel had. But she gave us a massive head start though which can be so important. It was all her.”
The messages offered a disturbing picture of Sarah’s increasingly desperate relationship with drugs, which will be depicted in Lifetime’s new flim A Doctor to Die For: The Sarah Harris story which airs on Saturday.
The couple first met in the summer of 2020, when Sarah went to his oral-surgery practice for wisdom-tooth removal.
Soon afterwards, Ryan offered her a job as a surgical assistant, and she began working at his practice. According to Maryland court records, the two started dating in January 2021.
Their relationship progressed quickly. Sarah moved into Ryan’s home in August 2021, only about seven months after they began dating. By that point, Ryan was both her employer and romantic partner.
He was aware of some mental health struggles and suggested drugs to ease her worries.
On February 11, 2021, Ryan told her: “I can give you an injection … the anxiety will be completely gone in 6 seconds … it will work. Let’s try it.”
Months later, Sarah asked whether they had ketamine at the house. She was hooked. In November, she wrote: “We need syringes … I feel like s***.”
The following month she asked Ryan about propofol while struggling to sleep. All the drugs used – including Midazolam – are normally used before surgeries.
Then, on December 20, just weeks before her death, Ryan appeared to tell Sarah that he had administered ketamine to her while she was sleeping.
“If you wake up … I just went to change, after I gave you Ketamine just now …” he wrote.
The day after Sarah’s death, Iacoviello, who was working on another case involving a medical professional, was told about an overdose involving a doctor, his girlfriend and a large amount of prescription drugs.
It took another six weeks however for Rachel’s discoveries to find themselves to the right detective.
Iacoviello said that as there were indications that Ryan himself had been using drugs, urgency was key.
At the time, he was still practicing medicine and had a large patient base, including infants.
“The last thing we need is for him to still be operating and putting kids under, even adults,” Iacoviello said.
The case was brought to the crime-scene group a few days later. The response was immediate, and search warrants followed, including at Ryan’s dental office.
Iacoviello had spent the previous nine years specializing in pharmaceutical drugs and drug diversion — investigating situations where prescription drugs ended up somewhere other than their intended purpose.
He had developed contacts with the DEA and medical boards, and had experience serving search warrants on medical professionals.
“It was almost like everything that I had experienced and dealt with for those years prior all kind of came together,” he said. “I had all of this there in my toolbox.”
Montgomery County State Attorney John McCarthy, who was involved in the prosecution of Ryan, said that because the well-respected oral surgeon did not initially fit the profile investigators might have expected in a drug case, initial doubts were understandable.
“He was a doctor who was very well respected in this community,” McCarthy said. “He was well known. Several of the police officers that investigated the case, he had been their doctor.
“So you’ve got a respected guy. You also have the fact that the young woman who loses her life in this case is literally half his age.”
McCarthy said the investigation revealed that Ryan had known of Sarah before their relationship began, having seen her in the neighborhood years earlier.
Sarah had been a beauty queen, but by the time she died, McCarthy said, “that beauty had been taken from her.”
“She literally was wasting away in his house as he supplied her with drugs,” he said.
Sarah’s family had seen that deterioration firsthand. The sudden death of her older brother Christopher from a heart attack on January 8 2022 affected her immeasurably.
McCarthy described Rachel as the “guardian angel” of the case, saying she and her mom Tina repeatedly visited Ryan’s home and witnessed Sarah’s condition which helped inform investigators of what had really happened.
When she was found dead in the apartment which was littered with drug paraphernalia – her mom said during the trial she saw “hundreds of medical bottles” in the home in Claksburg – she weighed just 83lbs.
“She was even in the middle of the summer covered up because she had needle marks in her arms,” McCarthy revealed. “She was covering any signs or tracks of the bruising or the needle marks as a result of the drugs that were being administered to her by Ryan.”
In October and again in December 2021, Rachel and Tina confronted Ryan.
“They said, ‘look, stop doing this. You’re killing her,’” McCarthy said. “’We can see what’s happening.’ She’s not herself. She’s kind of like a zombie. She doesn’t leave the house. She’s wasting away before their eyes.”
“He created an addict,” McCarthy continued. “She had survived one overdose and then after she died, he began to lie about what was happening.
“He attempted to ruin her reputation, telling people she was a depressed addict who had stolen things from his office.”
Ryan said he would stop. The texts, however, told investigators something very different. McCarthy said they were so compelling that they immediately changed the way prosecutors viewed the case.
“The betrayal is there, the manipulation is there,” he said. “This poor girl didn’t ask for these drugs at any point in time. This was from the get-go, his idea.
“And she became addicted. The true reality of the horror she lived through became clear.”
Investigators also found evidence that Ryan was obtaining drugs through his medical practice.
McCarthy said he had opened a second office in Washington DC, where he did not see patients but received drug shipments, which could then be brought back to Sarah.
Ryan initially told authorities that Sarah had been struggling with drugs and that he suspected she had overdosed.
But the text messages provided prosecutors with a different narrative.
For Iacoviello, they were particularly powerful because they were not a reconstruction made after Sarah’s death – it was the couple communicating in real time.
Rachel had given investigators the head start they needed.
“The faster you can get things, you can then slow down and do the work to bring it to prosecution,” Iacoviello said.
“People always ask me why he did it. I wish he had talked but I can only go on what they presented as a defense, where he thought he was helping her. I’ll never get it.”
McCarthy also rejected the idea that the first detective simply mishandled the scene.
Source : https://www.the-sun.com/news/17090157/true-story-sarah-harris-james-ryan-murder/