The “1 in 6” Sacrifices of Scottdale’s Dr. Stephen Averson

In Arizona’s modern history, the rich often become richer. With wealth comes vanity, and vanity creates its own dark energy. For such folks, the wonders of modern medicine have stayed the hand of wrinkles and sagging. But a few, especially in the mid-1980s in posh Scottsdale, found themselves the unwitting source material for a mad plastic surgeon determined to use their conceit to access what he believed was another reality.

In the 1980s, Arizona’s Scottsdale was a bubbling community of wealth and privilege, with Shea Boulevard acting as an informal red line between the white and wealthy of the north and the working class and Hispanics of the south. At 92nd Street and Shea sat the medical offices of Dr. Stephen Averson of the Scottsdale Shea Medical Center, a hospital safely ensconced on the eastern edge of the prosperous town.

By the end of 1986, Dr. Averson would be dead — burned to death in a house fire blamed on smoking in bed. And that might have been that, with a simple, overworked professional dying an accidental death, had not Dr. Averson been implicated in the deaths of some 24 patients during his two-year stint at the Scottsdale Shea Medical Center.

Stranger still, years after that bizarre case had been officially shut, a video tape recording surfaced of Dr. Averson speaking to a…