Kathy Bush: Munchausen by Proxy Mom
By: Delani R. Bartlette
Tags: True Crime, Child Abuse, Mental Illness, Mothers, Crime

When Jennifer Bush was born in 1985, her mother, Kathy, called her “a dream come true.” Kathy and her husband, Craig, already had two boys, and Kathy was elated to finally have a daughter.

At first, she seemed perfectly happy and healthy. But before too long, she began seeing the pediatrician with one illness after another: respiratory problems, ear infections, diarrhea. Her health seemed to be declining, but doctors couldn’t find an underlying cause.

They determined she had a rare immune disorder, which required her to have an IV. Because Jennifer was so small, and her veins so tiny, she had to have the IV pump implanted permanently into her chest.

But that didn’t seem to help. Jennifer’s health kept declining — Kathy said she was now having seizures, severe abdominal pain, and couldn’t keep her food down. At 3, she was put on the anti-seizure drug Tegretol, which, in high doses, can itself cause seizures. By age 5, she had to have a feeding tube implanted into her stomach. At 7, she was diagnosed with a rare infection, polymicrobial sepsis.

Meanwhile, her mother, Kathy, quit her job — but not to stay home with her increasingly ill daughter. Quitting her job caused her to lose her medical insurance, at the same time that they were racking up hundreds of thousands of dollars in medical bills.

Instead, Kathy took a job as an office manager at Jennifer’s pediatrician’s office, where she would have complete access to Jennifer’s doctor — and her medical files.

To get help paying the medical bills, she reached out to various charities near their Coral Springs, Florida, home. The charities, and individual people, gave generously, and Jennifer — a beautiful, smiley little girl — soon became something of a local celebrity. She was featured on local TV and newspapers, rode in parades, and even got to meet the Florida Marlins baseball team.

Kathy became a devoted activist for healthcare reform. She and Jennifer even went to Washington, D.C., to meet with then-First Lady Hillary Rodham Clinton. Kathy frequently noted how she had to choose between groceries and medical bills, relying on charities and Medicaid for help.

At the same time, the family was taking resort vacations and buying a new motorcycle and sports car.

But in 1991, staff at the Coral Springs Medical Center, where Jennifer was a frequent patient, began seeing red flags: punctured or tampered IV lines, confusing and false statements about Jennifer’s symptoms and diagnoses, a constant push for more tests and procedures. They took their concerns to Dr. Eli Newberger.

After reviewing the staff’s concerns and Jennifer’s medical records, Newberger concluded that Kathy Bush might have Munchausen Syndrome by Proxy, or what’s now known as Factitious Disorder Imposed on Another. He believed this was the motivation behind what he believed were acts of medical abuse committed by Kathy on Jennifer. As a mandated reporter, he informed Child Protective Services of his concerns.

He also recommended that CSMC conduct their own investigation. However, the Bushes sued CSMC, so the hospital dropped their investigation.

Then in April 1995, an anonymous nurse at another hospital where Jennifer was a frequent patient contacted the child abuse hotline. She told them that she had observed some troubling things during Jennifer’s many stays there. She had seen Kathy tampering with Jennifer’s feeding tubes and IV lines, which would later malfunction. Jennifer would often have levels of drugs in her system that didn’t correspond with her prescribed dosages, along with drugs that she wasn’t prescribed. There were even times when her urine samples had clearly been switched with someone else’s.

The anonymous nurse also said she’d come to recognize a pattern with Jennifer: right before she was scheduled to be discharged, when she was happy and seemed to be recovering, the girl would suddenly suffer a seizure when nurses weren’t in the room. She’d go from being fine to pale, lethargic, and vomiting.

She also said Kathy treated her daughter as no more than a “prop” for the media — when she would be told that media were here to see Jennifer, she would make sure the girl was laying in bed (even if she had just been up and playing), with the maximum amount of tubes and wires, so she looked as sick as possible.

Most disturbingly, the nurse said that Kathy seemed to be almost “euphoric” when her daughter would have a medical crisis. The nurse said she feared for Jennifer’s life.

This time, the tip was forwarded to Florida state prosecutors. Both CPS and prosecutors opened an investigation that lasted a year.

Through that investigation, they found several medical professionals who either witnessed Kathy tampering with her daughter’s treatments, or saw things in the little girl’s chart that raised suspicions.

One incident in particular stood out to investigators. After Jennifer had been prescribed Tegretol for seizures, the level of the drug in her bloodstream began to spike into near-lethal territory. So the doctor who prescribed it put a hold on it — meaning it would not be given out from the pharmacy. Yet for three weeks afterwards, Jennifer’s Tegretol levels remained high, occasionally spiking to near-lethal levels again.

So on April 15, 1995, police arrested Kathy Bush and charged her with aggravated child abuse and Medicaid fraud.

Jennifer was taken from school that day and put in foster care. By this time, she had been hospitalized 200 times and undergone almost 40 surgeries — including having her gallbladder, appendix, and part of her intestines removed — as well as 1,819 non-surgical treatments. Yet soon after being taken out of her mother’s custody, Jennifer’s feeding tube was safely removed and her many illnesses and symptoms seemed to disappear.