Warning: Graphic content, readers’ discretion advised. This story contains a recollection of crime and can be triggering to some readers discretion advised.
When 25-year-old model Sarah Harris was found dead in her home, it looked like a tragic overdose. But the truth was far darker. Dr. James Ryan — her boyfriend, employer, and a respected oral surgeon — had secretly controlled every part of her downfall. the shocking story of a trusted doctor who turned his girlfriend into a patient… then a victim.
late january , 2022 maryland
the monggomery county DP received the kind of tragic phone call any operator dreads.
a man devastated at the prospect of losing his girlfriend….
this was the voice of Dr .james ryan.
calling frantically for help- he’d found his girlfriend sarah harris unresponsive on the floor of the home they shared.
in an instant ,their picture perfect life together was in pieces james said he thought she’d overdosed and he should know…
he was a medical professional, an oral surgeon.
but even he couldn’t save her.
when the first responders arrived , they pronounced sarah dead at the scene.
the room was filled with paraphernelia,used needles, syringes and bottles of elicit substances.
it really did appear to be what james said it was…
a tragic overdos.
but his relationship with sarah was not quite what it seemed…
a prominent dentist and an aspiring model,respectively, the couple should have been the envy of everyone around them .
but the cracks were beginning to show …..
family suspicions, a trail of text messages , and a relationship that began on uneven footing.
how had beautiful sarah harris’s life gone so so wrong?
and what role had her boyfriend played in it ?
sarah and james lived in montgomery county,maryland ,just 45 minutes drive from washington DC.
its location makes it a place with a lot of opportunity,perfect for a person like sarah,who was 25. i t violent crime rate was also much lower than maryland’s as a whole.
raised just lillte further north in suburban clarksburg, she was used to living in a safe environment, and her family couldn’t have predicted that her move would result in a fatal tragedy.
no ,moving in with her boyfriend james was supposed to be a fairy tale.
he was 48 and represented stability and success .his dental practice was thriving, and she was able to live -rent -free in his house.
free to focus on her modeling …
…and their relationship together. but all this on january 26th,2022 would come crashing down.
the first responders arrived at about 7 .a.m. following jame’s frantic 911 call they brought all the necessary medical equipment with them, including narcan .
in case sarah could be saved,but it was too late.
he said he found her like this on the couch that morning as he was getting ready to go to work.
while james was sleeping upstairs,he said his girlfriend had overdosed in the living room.
this would be devastating for anyone,but especially for a medical professional who probably believed he could have saved her.if only he’d woken up in time…
it was little wonder he seemed in such distress . he also said that this had happened before…but in the past he’d managed to save her life.
he suggested that this was a habit with sarah.
the picture james painted was of a deeply unhappy young women,trapped in a cycle of drug use that was bound to end in tragedy one day.
he tried to prevent this, he said , but she couldn’t be helped.
to the cops then, this initially seemed like it could be cut and dry.
james was just the grieving boyfriend lleft to pick up the pieces of his girlfriend’s destructive habit
but just 20 minutes later, sarah’s mom,tina, arrived on the scene.
she made a beline for james. she started kicking him and hitting him,and she wouldn’t stop until one of the cops dragged her away.
she was distraught, as any mother would be but her outburst of emotion had a target .it was clear she didn’t trust james and that she blamed him in some way for her daughter’s death .
he’d been in the house overnight after all and if he’d woken up just a little bit earlier, he could have saved sarah.
but was there more to her mother’s fury than irrational grief?
to understand, we’ll have to dive deeper in their relationship itself.
sarah harris was born on december 5th ,1996 in clarksburg,maryland. she had two older sisters, victoria and rachel,and an older brother,christopher.
the family was tight- knit.sarah did well in school , particularly in languages. she learned german , spanish,russian ,and american sign language .
she was a creative kid,interesting in traveling and photography.
this translated into her passion for modeling as she grew up.in 2020 ,she won miss maryland petit pageant , at 24, she could have felt on top of the world but she had her problems ,too.
when she was around 14, she started to have depressive episodes. to deal with them , she experimented with drugs the way a lot of young people do.
it didn’t seem that serious, and though she carried her depression with her into adulthood, she seemed to be doing better.
but a beauty pageant can be mentally trying for anyone,even those who don’t have existing problems. did it mess with her self-esteem, even thoug she won?
it’s hard to be sure, what we do know is that it was only later that year that she met Dr james ryan.james was born april 27th 1973, he was very well educated
having received scientific and medcal degrees from stonybrook university,northeastern new york university,and harvard.
he’d started out in cardiovascular technology, but in the early 2000s, he discovered the passion that would steer the rest of his life , dentistry.
in january 2016, aftter a multi -deade successful career , he started his own oral surgery business.
it was this business that sarah walked into in october 2020,looking to have her wisdom teeth taken out.
james was the only practitioner at his business,so he performed the surgery.it was hardly the most romantic meeting of all time.
a few weeks later , sarah wnet back to james because she thought she had a possible infection.he had a look at her teeth and senther on her way,never thinking she’d hear from him again.
but a short while after that , she received a text from a number she didn’t have saved.it was from james.
he said he had a position open at the surgery for a surgical technical.
now that sheäd won the beauty pageant, she was still deciding what she wanted to do with her life and she needed a job.
this seemed like the perfect opportunity. he didn’t ask for her resume,just told her to come in for a working interview. she did, and he hired her almost on the spot.
sarah went from patient to employee in just the space of the month, it seemed almost too good to be true,but she was soon turn into a girlfriend as well.
james was 47 at this point. he’d been married before,was divorced and had three adult children , as well as a baby with another women he was currently seeing a the time.
but he was deeply attracted to sarah.
had he hired her on this pretext, or had his feelings developed organically as they worked together?
either way , that christmas he gifted her a diamond necklace, a clear signifier of his intentions.
sarah’s mom , tina ,sensed trouble in the air.she tried to warn sarah off going out with james.
but sarah agreed to have dinner with him in january 2021.
he was an accomplished professional with multiple degrees, a stable income and a seemingly generous personality.
all these things, were attractive despite the age difference.
he leased a new car for her and took her on various vacations , soon enough she moved into his house.
sarah seemed deeply in love with him. she left a voicemail for an ex of hers waxing lyically about james.
james seemed to want her family to like him, too .
he spent time complimenting her mom and hired her sister rachel to be the practice manager at his dental surgery buisness.
things were going great for the couple. that is ,if you didn’t look to closely…
that summer, when sarah and james been seing each other for nearly 6 months, sarah went to several events with her family.
they noticed that she was always wearing long sleeves, even in the hot weather of maryland summer,like she didn’t want anyone to see her arms.
she’d also lost some weight.what was she hiding?
had she gone back to her teenage drug use? after all , long sleeves are a common method IV drug users can use to cover their track marks.
sarah was also struggling mentally at this point. she’d gone toa psychiatrist who diagnosed her with bipolar disorder and things got worse as 2021 progressed.
on october 28th , her mom and her sister rachel went to her and jame’s house to check on her welfare they found her high and the room full of drug paraphernalia,including used syringes, salinge bags,bloody clothing and empty drug bottles.
this bright young woman had fallen into asprial of drugs use while living with he medically trained boyfriend right under his nose.
Tina was horified at the scene and at the state of her daughter.
she insisted that sarah move out of jame’s house and come back home where her family could take care of her.she wanted to call the authorities,but sarah wouldn’t let her.
and a few days later,james came knocking. sarah went back with him ,but her troubles weren’t over.
DECEMBER 2021
there was a similar incident that december. rachel again came to the house to check on her little sister and found the same scene of drugrelated chaos.
the bottles of drugs, included ketamin …
propofol…
and midazolam.
these were drugs that were stocked and used at jame’s medical practice,where both rachel and sarah worked.
the kind that only can be obtained clinically.
it was these same drugs ,as well as a bottle of diazepam that were found on the scene of sarah’s final fatal overdos.
james said she’d stolen them from the surgery.
the cause of her death was ruled ketamne and diazepam intoxication.
and so her death seemed to be the last tragedy in ongoing downward spiral.
JANUARY 8 2022.
early that same month on january 8th
her older brother christopher who was 38, had died of a heart attack.
perhaps this hbad been the last straw for an already fragile sarah.
that was how james presented it anyway.
but the fact of sara’s mother fury remained .why had she reacted like that?
what role had james really played in his beloved girlfriend’s death?
that same summer ,when sarah had been noticed wearing only long sleeves ,she and jame seemed to be fighting a lot.
on a trip to florida,she said to her mom,” i hate him ,i don’t want him to be here i wanna go home”
she was much younger then james,but the pressures of a still new relationship can get to anyone,but it set off alarm bells in her mom’s head.
on another trip to key west, james apparently got drunk and confessed to sarah’s mom that he’d first noticed sarah when she was only 14,playing at the park with her friends.
at that time, she’d worked at a local toy store,so he’d taken his own kids in there just so he could see her. he did the samewhen she started working at a resturant.
this was undeniably obsessive behavior.it suggested that james had been nurturing an unfatuation with sarah for many years , and now that he had her, she seemed to be wasting away.
so the horrible possibility arose that she’d started using drugs and finally overdosed to escape a controlling,obsessive relationship.
this wasn’t necessarily enough to charge him with murder ,however, no matterhow awful it might have been.
for those first few weeks after sarah’s death james walked free, operating on clients at his practice. seeing his kids from his previous marriage.
but sarah’s family wouldn’t stand for this. rachel . in particular, who’d always been protective of her younger sister, was hard at work to uncover the truth of what had happened..
after sarah’s death,rachel was able to access her social media accounts.what she found there was chilling,and she began to create a dossier of her sister’s text conversations with james
between march 2021 and january 2022, where james had portrayed himself as an innocent bystander in sarah’s drug use.
helpless in the face of her addiction, these messages told an entirely different story…
on the early days of their relationship, she was struggling with anxiety and having trouble sleeping.
james offered her a quick solution. he said ” i can give you an injection ,the anxiety will be completely gone in 6 seconds.”
he was the one who’d instigated her drug use. he’d suggested it.and furthermore, he procured thematerials to sustain it.
june 12 ,2021.
on june 12th, 2021 for example ,she asked him to bring IV bags , tape,and gauze.
they’d apparently just had an argument.she said “get a tape and gauze.”
and ” why were we even fighting?
james replied ,”no idea. tired and bad dreams.” and apologized .
he said” i love you so much.” she returned ,” love you. drive safe”.
alongside ,”can you get regular 20 gauges needles?”
her drug use was clearly deeply intertwined in their relationship itself.
they traded affections alngsde requests for drug paraphernalia and it wasn’t only sarah who was using.
on september 7th, he texted her” i’m trying not to do so much and taper her to nothing hard in this stupid area.”
his employees at his dental practice had previously complained to rachel ,who managed it ,that they suspected james was using drugs at work .
they’d once found him asleep in his office and had been unable to wake him up. he only became responsive when they used ammonia smelling salts, so he was trying to slow down his use of substances.
perhaps for the sake of his professional life. but being a professional,it was him sarah looked to for support.
and he wasn’t trying to help her quit.no , instead he was encouraging her to use more and more substances.
DECEMBER 13 ,2021
on december 13th, just over a month before her death,he asked her how she was feeling . she said “i’m feeling really tired.” he replied”i bet. you didn’t sleep well last night.” she said ” yeah , i don’t know what to do.”.
james of course had a solution ready at hand .he told her,” take three diazepam and one and a half Xanax,empty stomach”
eat a grapefruit juice or grapefruit.it makes the meds way more potent.
smoke a bowl if it doesn’t help in an hour.dont drink to much water after themeds . it will diulte them.
two days later ,she mesaged a friend of hers asking for cocaine,she told him she’d overdosed the other night on ketamin.
she said,” i needed CPR for 5 minutes.it was very scary.i’ve learned a serious lesson. i don’t want to die.i just want peace again.”
but 5 days later, james texted her 5 cc and you can push it.
he’d explicitly told the police that he’d ben the one to give her CPR when she overdosed in the past and here he was encouraging her to take more and more substances.
he was nearly twice her age,her employer, and had financial power over her and he owned their house and leased her car ,as a medical professional, he was licensed to order and administer controlled substances.
he had access to all the drugs inhis surgery and he gave them to sarah frequently even it seemed as she was sleeping.
DECEMBER 20 ,2021
on december 20th , he said , “if you wake up , i just went change after i gave you ketamine just now”.
he was letting her know ,he’d injected her while she was sleeping. this didn’t seem out of the ordinary for the couple.
it was a perverse expression of trust.she trusted him to look after her. she started out as his patient and really she’d never stopped being his patient.
looking to him for medical advice and for supplies to feed a growing need.
this need was destroying her life.
at the time of her wisdom tooth surgery when she first met james,she weighed 120 lb. by the time of her death, she weighed only 83 lb.
the police had released the crime scene and let james go free , believing his word as medical professional that she’d overdosed on her own.
and he’d done everything he could to help.
FEBRUARY 2022
but rachel knew better, a month after her sister’s death, she delivered her binder full of evidence to the cops.
this binder included a text exchange from the day before sarah died.
sarah asked ,”is it possible to bring home ketamine when you come home?”
jame’s response, despite all her struggles with substances and multiple occasions of overdose, was nothing more than “yes, i will bring some home”
this wasn’t just some coincidentce. this was an active role james had played in sarah’s tragic death. and in march ,2 months after her overdose,his crimes would catch up with him.
Dr james ryan was taken into custody as he was going to his practice he has been charged with second -degree murder and related crimes.
they were specifically charging him with depraved heart murder.
this is a subcategory of second -degree murder that doesn’t require the prosecution to prove that the killer intended to kill their victim.
only that they knew that death was possible, even a probable result of their actions , and they carried out those actions anyway.
james didn’t necessarily want to kill sarah, but as a licensed medical professional he knew that overdose and death were extremely likely.
if she continued to take drugs like ketamine the way she had been and he kept on giving them to her anyway.
he pleaded not guilty.In august 2023,his case went to trial.
the prosecution’s arguments that james was an abusive,controlling partner who created sarah’s addiction to make her dependent on him.
versus the defense’s position that sarah had become addicted on her own and had been stealing the drugs from work herself.
meanwhile , the defense pointed to a text message sarah had sent james a few months before she died. she said ” i’ve lost my will to live.”
they also tried to introduce a facebook post she’d made about her brother’s death.
saying ,” never goodbye.I’ll see you soon, big bro”
the judge ruled that this was prejuditial, so the jury was not allowed to see it.
but the suggestion that her death had been suicide had practical evidential problems.
the drug bottles, according to forensic experts,were too far from her body to have been self- administered.
there had to have been another person there, helping her inject them
that person had been james.
james did not testify. his team tried to portray him as a loving boyfriend who’d only tried to help, using his medical expertise to keep sarah hydrated
and saying that if he provided her with drugs,it was only so she wouldn’t go out and buy something potentially dangerous on the street.
but the jury did not agree.
montgomery county oral surgeon is found guilty of murdering his girlfriend who died from an overdose last year .
50 year old james ryan from clarkburg faces up to 55 years in prison for the death of sarah harris.
jurors found him guilty of second -degree,depraved heart murder and involuntary manslaughter.
sarah’s family was relieved beyond words ,even as it was a hollow victory.
a depraved heart murder is a difficult thing to prove, and it doesn’t necessarily carry the same severity bof a sentence as other kinds of murder.
they spoke at jame’s sentencing trial to put a across the sheer depth of victim impact.
rachel said,”he’s a predator,he is a wold in sheep’s clothing.
sarah’s mom ,begged the judge to imprison him .
james made his own statement.apologizing for what he’d done.
his defense team highlighted his own mental health struggles and extensive drug use as a potential mitigating factors for his sentence.
but the fact remained. he was a murderer and his sentence reflected that.
along side the time he received for the other counts , james ryan was sentenced to a total of 45 years in prison.
he’s likely to be eligible for parole in 20 years.
and in the meantime ,he’s appealing his conviction.
days after he wascharged ,the dental board allowed him to turn in his license rather than forcibly revoking or suspending it.
he also had the option to petition to reapply for it 2 years later.
this was just a further insult to sarah’s family, who recognized that it was because of his authority as a dental professional that he’d been able to destroy sarah’s life so thoroughly.
they’re now fighting to change the lawas around dental oversight to make it stricter and to prevent this sort of tragedy from ever happening again.