Did The Doctor Kill The Doctor?

Produced by Deborah Grau

This episode was originally broadcast Oct. 25, 2008. It was updated on June 13, 2009.

Dr. Linda Goudey was found murdered in her car in October 1993. At the time, she had been dating Dr. Timothy Stryker, who quickly became a suspect in the case.

Depending on whom you believe, Stryker is either a calculating murderer, or an innocent man, desperately trying to clear his name.

To look at him today at age 56, you'd never know Stryker has spent 15 years dogged by such terrible suspicions. "It makes me sad, you know, that people could think this way about me," he tells correspondent Richard Schlesinger.

He built a successful endocrinology practice, and a family, in a quiet Boston suburb.

Stryker's wife of 14 years, Micael, says her husband has never shown signs of violence. "He's not a guy who loses it or somehow has an altered persona that shows up."

And, she'd probably know what to look for - she's a psychotherapist.

"He does present this very cool exterior…very flat, very unemotional, very in control," Schlesinger remarks. "Which makes you wonder what's going on behind the front, behind the façade? Do you think you know?"

"Yes, I absolutely know," Micael says. "I'm sure I know. I think it's very simple with him. I think he's just a very sincere, extremely gentle and even delicate person. He at all times looks to do good to the people around him."

That might be one reason he decided to become a doctor. "I just knew it from a very young age, that's what I wanted to do. It's my nature to want to help people."

It was one thing he had in common with Lin Goudey. By all accounts, she was driven - she earned top honors in high school, and eventually went to medical school while working as a medical technician. She was a successful OB/GYN, specializing in high-risk pregnancies.

Paula Dennett is a nutritionist who worked closely with Goudey. "She was new to the field, but you never thought she was just a rookie. You know, she knew what she was doing and I'd say she was one of the more respected physicians there in terms of if you're having a problem or a complex pregnancy, Dr. Goudey's the one to go to."

Lisa Zolot was one of Goudey's patients who noticed right away that there was something special about her. "Lynn was very good at sixth sense, knowing when things are wrong," she remembers.

On a routine visit, Goudey had a sense that Lisa's unborn baby was in danger. "She decided that I should have the C-section right away because something was wrong. And after she made the incision there was bleeding everywhere. She just had a sixth sense that something was wrong. And she was right. Without her, my daughter wouldn't be here," Lisa says.

From that day forward, Lisa and Lin became good friends. "We just clicked. We just clicked. It was just one-a those things. We just became friends. It was easy, you know."

Goudey made a lot of friends around the hospital, including Dr. Timothy Stryker. "We met over lunches at the hospital, and we started to share patients, because I would refer patients to her as a gynecologist," he says.

Before long, their work relationship did evolve into something more. "We would sit and read together at night, and do movies, and she gotten me into skiing during the winter. And then I got her into scuba diving in the Caribbean trips that we took together," he says.

And they also both practiced transcendental meditation, a method of relaxation that followers say focuses the mind.

"It was just a lovely way to see how they interacted with each other, you know, that they would have fun together," remembers Tim's sister Jean Stryker, who used to work for Lin. "They would often share the cooking responsibilities and the clean up. But I always saw them interacting very positively toward each other."

By 1993, four years after they started dating, things really seemed to be going well for the couple. Goudey and Stryker were both at the peak of their careers, and their relationship seemed steady.

They kept spending time together and had even planned a vacation together to the Caribbean for some scuba diving.

Stryker says she was looking forward to the trip. "She was actually the one that made the reservations for the trip. And it was her idea. She was very happy about it."

But Goudey never took the trip, because just weeks before they were to leave she had a dream. "In this dream she had this vision of being in a car, I think it was on the side of a mountain, and driving around. Then seeing a plane go crash into the side of the mountain, and she took this as some possible bad omen that perhaps, you know, we might have a plane crash," Stryker says.

Lisa says Lin wasn't going to go on the vacation after that dream. "She had thought that it wasn't a good idea, and that she was not gonna go."

But that's not what Stryker says: "She never said that she wasn't going."

Lin's dream, her plans and premonitions were about to become more important than anyone could have imagined.

No one should have been surprised when Lin Goudey and Tim Stryker became an item. They were both successful physicians, active, adventurous and with a lot in common. But after four years together, they were starting to drift apart. "I guess, towards the end of the relationship there may have been some stagnation because she was getting a little burned out from how hard she was working," he says.

But Goudey's friend Lisa said it wasn't just Lin's work that was burning her out: it was also Stryker, who Lisa says was controlling and self centered. "He was very rigid and very predictable in his lifestyle. He picked what time you ate, where you went, when you left, you know. He always controlled her totally. It was no changing him. It was that way or the highway."

Stryker says Goudey's friends and family have been making up things about him ever since she died. Asked if he's a flexible man, Stryker says, "I have to flexible to be available when a patient has chest pain, or to be available when somebody's traumatized."

What about in his personal life?

"I have to be flexible with my kids, with my wife, and you know, so again, this is a story they tried to tell," he says.

Whatever the cause, Goudey's friends believed she was getting ready to break up, even as she and Stryker were getting ready to go on that Caribbean vacation.

"She was fed up, I think, probably the rigid schedule and just, it was getting old. And she just couldn't handle it anymore," Lisa says.

Less than two weeks before that planned scuba vacation, the one Goudey had a premonition about, witnesses say they heard the couple arguing about whether to go on the trip. Colleagues remember Goudey was not herself later that evening. Her hair was messed up, she seemed upset, and one person saw her slamming medical charts around and stomping down this hospital hallway.

It was Sept. 30, 1993, the last time anyone has reported seeing her alive

"She was goin' Friday to get a massage. And on Saturday, she was goin' to her reunion. But she never made it," Lisa remembers.

Goudey was supposed to be out of town for the weekend, so her absence didn't worry anyone for a few days. "I didn't really start to get concerned until Saturday night, because, you know, she would go a day without calling me. But, you know, to go two days without calling me didn't feel right," Stryker remembers.

And then, four days after she had last been seen at the hospital, Stryker got a phone call. Goudey had been found.

She was found facedown, wrapped in a blanket in the back of her car, parked in a remote corner of the hospital parking lot.

Lisa went to the scene and bumped into Stryker; he had his own theory about what happened. "I never will forget him coming over the hill, Tim. Gave this big hug and told me I didn't really know Lin, and that it was suicide, and she probably took her own life. I couldn't even respond to that, I was so upset at that point," she remembers.

But Stryker says Goudey had struggled with depression and talked about suicide. Just a few months before her body was found, he says Lin left him a note that said "I want to be dead."

But it took the medical examiner, Dr. Stanton Kessler, just moments to determine this was no suicide. "When I saw her in the back seat of the car, literally tucked in a very tightly wedged space, I said, 'Nobody can do that to themselves. Can't even move their arms,'" he explains.

The location of the car, so far away from the hospital entrance told investigators something as well. "It just was out of character for her. She never would have parked there. You know, it was sort of away from everything," Lisa says.

There was no apparent sign of sexual assault. Her purse and its contents were still in the car. Kessler also thought it was odd that her shoes were so neatly placed on the floor by the front seat and she was barefoot. "The foot was clean. And it had rained and there's grease, grease marks, and dirt," Kessler says.

Asked what he thinks that proves, Kessler says, "Well, it tells me that, I think, somebody murdered her somewhere, probably somewhere else, and placed her in there as an afterthought."

And when Dr. Kessler did the autopsy, he discovered it was a particularly violent homicide. "She was grabbed by the neck…and strangled, suffocated."

The attack was so brutal, that Dr. Kessler found injuries at 24 separate places on her body.

"When she died, initially I was stunned. But, then after that for me it was just sadness," Stryker says.

He may have been stunned, he may have been sad, but police were still eager to talk to Stryker immediately after they discovered the body of his girlfriend. "I was actually called in to speak with a detective right there on the spot. And he asked me, you know, 'Who do you think could have killed her?'" he remembers.

It didn't take long at all for police to start focusing on the man they thought did it: Tim Stryker.

"The cause of death being manual strangulation in combination with a lot of other factors and evidence that we've developed led us to believe and continues to led us to believe that Linda knew her killer," says District Attorney Gerry Leone.

Leone says detectives quickly learned about the problems the couple was having, even that argument witnesses reported about the scuba trip. "The relationship had been described as sometimes rocky, sometimes volatile," Leone says.

"In plain English, was he violent to her?" Schlesinger asks.

"Oh, I don't wanna characterize Timothy Stryker in that way. What we know to be true is that Dr. Stryker and Dr. Goudey, during the course of their relationship, had some physical confrontations. And at times it resulted in some injury to Linda."

Stryker says he and Goudey had the kind of problems many couples have. "There was a time she got very angry in my kitchen because I called her a pea brain. I used the word pea brain and she had a temper tantrum. There was a cup of peas, and a cup of potatoes, and cup of corn, and a cup of this. She was, just picking up can after can of stuff, and just throwing these at the walls, at my paintings. So, that was what led to that incident, where I grabbed her, to pull her away from picking up the next thing to hurl at the wall. And that's when she fell down and hit the floor, and that's when she bruised her ribs," he says.

Goudey never filed a complaint and Stryker says she was the aggressor and that he was just protecting his property. "I was never in any way verbally, physically abusive to her. And I would like for people to talk to my wife, or talk to the girlfriend that I had from 15 years ago, before I started going out with Lin; that has never been me."

Stryker's wife, Micael, was eager to talk: she says she's never been afraid of her husband, and that he's never hit her.

But it took a lot of anger for somebody to do what was done to Goudey, strangling her and stuffing her body in the back seat of her car.

Nothing police found at the crime scene pointed directly to Stryker. It was more what they didn't find: Lin's tote bag, which witnesses saw her carrying when she left the hospital, wasn't in the car; neither was the jacket she was last seen wearing, or the briefcase which some said she never left behind.

Police couldn't find anything, until they visited Stryker. "I cooperated with them by giving them the briefcase that was in my house," he says.

He not only had the briefcase, he also had the tote bag and a jacket he says was his, but was the same color and style as the one witnesses saw Goudey wearing. "I gave them that jacket to facilitate them looking for her jacket, so they knew what they were supposed to be looking for. I was trying to help them. And, they looked at it for blood stains and all that kind of stuff, and obviously that wasn't there," he says.

Stryker was helping police just as he said he was - but he was helping them confirm their suspicions of him. And he didn't help himself any when just one week after the murder he went on that Caribbean vacation alone. He was down there on the day of Goudey's memorial service.

"It actually became an opportunity to actually have some time away and for me to sit in a quiet space and start to deal with the emotions that I had to kind of shut down right after her death, you know. In retrospect I wish I hadn't gone, even though at the time it was therapeutic for me to do that," he explains.

Stryker's sister, Jean, agrees that it was a bad idea. "He did mainly because my mother told him to. Yeah, my mother told him to go on vacation because he was talking with her, you know, about all of the harassment he was getting. She's like, 'Tim, you need to just go on this vacation.' 'Cause I thought it was not such a great idea."

Asked why she thought it wasn't a good idea, Stryker says, "Well, people were already, you know, knockin' on his door. I mean, here's this good looking, sexy, you know, doctor and, you know, it's very exciting to think that he could possibly have done this. And they were making a lot of it, right? "

"It didn't look good," she adds.

And when Stryker got back from the Caribbean, police were eager to talk to him again. "And they told me that everything about my story was checking out okay. And they just wanted to do a little polygraph, so that they could rule me out as a suspect," he remembers.

According to transcripts of the lie detector session, the polygraph examiner asked Stryker: "Do you know why I have asked you here?" Stryker replied: "The boyfriend is usually the number one suspect."

Later Stryker was asked: "Did you cause the death of Lin Goudey?" And Stryker replied: "No." And when he was asked "Do you think she was murdered?" Stryker said "It's easier to accept suicide."

Police told Stryker the results of the polygraph in their words "clearly indicated he was involved." That's when Stryker said he didn't want to continue cooperating.

Police say Stryker incriminated himself further after the polygraph test when he told them "I just put a noose around my neck, I can see my world crumbling."

"Did you say after the lie detector test, 'I just put the noose around my neck?'" Schlesinger asks.

"No, I would never say something like that. It would have been more like, 'I think you guys are trying to put a noose around my neck,' because my feeling at the time was that these people were trying to badger me," Stryker says.

Soon after Stryker got an attorney, the investigation into the murder stalled. The polygraph test was inadmissible evidence and the police didn't have much else against him. Stryker wasn't charged, but he wasn't cleared either. Far from it - for more than a decade, he remained the prime suspect, despite his consistent denials.

He says he didn't kill Goudey, nor knows who the killer was. "And, if I did, I wouldn't be in this situation."

The police investigation might have been stalled, but Goudey's family would not be stopped. They believed Stryker was getting away with murder, and proving it was now up to them.

In the 1990's, when he was a young assistant district attorney, Gerry Leone worked this case before it went cold.

"How do you solve a case with no witnesses, no physical evidence, no DNA, none of the tools you like?" Schlesinger asks.

"This is and always was a circumstantial case. But we build circumstantial cases all of the time, you take your time," Leone says.

But after three years' time, nobody had been brought to justice. So, Goudey's family stepped in, and did the only thing they could: in 1996, Goudey's mother Marguerite Rafuse filed a wrongful death suit against Tim Stryker.

The suit charged Stryker "willfully, wantonly and maliciously killed Goudey by strangling her." It was a scathing accusation, against a man who has never been criminally charged with Goudey's murder

"If I think about what I would do if my daughter died, you know, and if I suspected that somebody else may have killed her then I could see how I would have an agenda, you know, to try to bring somebody to justice or something like that. But they obviously are blaming the wrong person," he says.

It's a civil case, not a criminal case, so it's easier to win, but Goudey's family still wanted the DA's file containing all the evidence against Stryker. And that turned into a long, drawn out, legal tug of war. The DA's office considered this an open case and refused to turn over the file.

The family wanted to prove their case - the prosecutors wanted to protect theirs. It went back and forth for nearly ten years, but Goudey's family and their attorney Michael Altman kept up the pressure to get Stryker in front of a jury.

"Our feeling was you do it, or we'll do it. And it should not be 'nobody does it,'" Altman says.

And finally in 2006, 13 years after the murder, Goudey's family won the fight. A court ordered the district attorney to turn over the criminal file. Armed with that, the Rafuses were ready to do what prosecutors could not - confront Stryker in a court of law.

Altman says Stryker and Goudey often argued, argued more violently than Stryker says, and argued the last day she was alive. "They were seen arguing in the corridor that evening. There was something that went awry. He lost control. He was a control freak. He killed her," Altman charges.

Stryker had to face his accusers from the witness stand. "I never screamed at her, I never cursed at her. I never expressed anger in any way," he said in court.

Altman, finally got a chance to confront Stryker with the one question he'd waited thirteen years to ask.

"On October 1, did you get angry enough to want to strangle her?" he asks.

"No sir," Stryker replies.

Asked if he killed Goudey, Stryker also replies with a "no sir."

Stryker's wife, Micael sat in court and listened as Goudey's family laid out the case against her husband. "Once the closing arguments took place and Altman spoke and wove this amazing fantasy of who this imaginary killer is … I really thought if I was a jury hearing this, this would be very compelling," Micael says.

"And so I just burst out. It was just unbelievably painful to listen to," she adds.

Stryker has always said he didn't even see Goudey the night she was killed. But Altman brought in the briefcase, the tote bag and that jacket.

"Where were they? He had them. The jacket wasn't found in the car. The Premarin bag wasn't found [in] the car. They were found in his apartment," Altman pointed out.

He called them his three silent witnesses that prove Goudey was at Stryker's apartment the night she was killed. "The only way they could have gotten there. She was carrying them," Altman claimed.

Stryker says, while they were dating, Goudey often left her belongings at his home. But she left behind some other damaging evidence at her home: revealing notes about her fights with Stryker.

Altman says they are written in Goudey's voice. She described a fight where she was injured. "Up angry. Forget it. Storms out. Threw pearls. Flips me into railing. Back and foot injury. Shaking, chills, swollen foot," Altman read.

Altman says the note proves Stryker could be violent; but Stryker says Goudey was injured when they were practicing a dance step.

Stryker's attorney, Martin Leppo, says the case against his client isn't just weak, he argues there is no case. "Where is one person, one scintilla of evidence, just one person who heard one noise of a fight in that house, of a person screaming?" Leppo says.

Leppo asked the jurors to use common sense and to ask themselves one question. "Has the plaintiff proved their case that Lin Goudey was there that night and that Tim Stryker caused her death?"

It took nearly 13 years to get this case to a civil court trial, but it took only a day and a half for the jury to reach a verdict. The jury believed Stryker killed Lin Goudey and in an extraordinary move, ordered him to pay Lin's family $15 million.

It's not a criminal conviction, but for Lin's mother and brother, it is one critical victory in their fight to put Stryker behind bars.

Nobody was surprised that Stryker said he would appeal. But everyone was surprised when nine months later when he and his lawyer announced they had found a brand new witness who could make this a brand new case.

"What he was swearing to was that on the night of September 30th of 1993, he saw someone in that Saab with Linda Goudey who looked nothing like Stryker," Leone said.

Stryker was suddenly facing the possibility of losing everything: his home, his money, and his reputation.

After a civil court found him responsible for the death of Goudey, he was ordered to pay her family $15 million. But that could all change, and quickly, because Stryker says from out of the blue came a phone call, from a man, who according to Stryker was in the parking lot the night Goudey was killed.

"He called me, you know, on the phone at my office. And apparently he had seen all this publicity. And he realized, when he saw my face on the screen, that I wasn't the person that he saw with Lin Goudey that night," Stryker says.

Craig Pizzano was 18 at the time of the murder, and Stryker says he told him one heck of a story: "He told me that he had been out drinking that night. Picked up a girl. Took her over to this parking lot, over at the hospital."

Pizzano said when he arrived at the hospital parking lot around 1 a.m. there was only one other car there: Lin Goudey's Saab.

"He happened to pull up next to their car. And things started to get hot and heavy between him and this girl he picked up. And he walked over to their car to actually ask for a condom, and he saw them engaged in sexual activity," Stryker says.

According to a deposition obtained by 48 Hours, Pizzano said he got a good look at who was inside when he knocked on the car window to ask for a condom.

Stryker says Pizzano described the man "over six foot tall, over 200 pounds. You know, a big man with blonde hair."

In other words, Pizzano said, the man looked nothing at all like Stryker.

"It's a wacky story, to put it politely," Schlesinger points out.

"Yes. No, and that's why I asked him a number of questions at the time, to see if I could verify his story. And he also seemed to have information that clearly he wouldn't have had if just from reading the newspapers," Stryker replies.

Pizzano's story was just the break Stryker had been hoping for, and it was a break for District Attorney Gerry Leone. "When someone comes forward for the first time 15 years after an incident, which was as very public as this one was, and provides what, on the face, would be significant information," Leone says. "Which relates to a homicide, if true, caused us to look at this in a very meaningful way."

As soon as he could, Stryker asked for a new trial in an attempt to clear his name and get out from under the crushing $15 million court order.

Stryker says he had never met Pizzano before, nor given him any money. "I have not given Craig Pizzano any money or anything else that would in any way encourage him to come forward."

Asked if he was involved with him coming forward at all, Stryker says, "In no way."

And that is an outright, bold-faced lie according to prosecutors. In fact, they say Pizzano was never in the parking lot that night and never saw Goudey or a tall blond man, even though he said he did in a sworn affidavit. So now there's a whole new chapter in this case.

"The affidavit was an utter and complete lie. It's a story. It's a story that was created by Tim Stryker," Leone says.

Leone says investigators began pulling apart Pizzano's statement soon after they read it, and discovered cell phone records that showed the two men had started talking months earlier.

When prosecutors confronted Pizzano, he admitted he lied. He refused to talk to 48 Hours, but told Leone Stryker put him up to it. Pizzano got immunity from prosecution, but Stryker was not so lucky. He was arrested and hauled into court.

He was charged with perjury. It's not murder, but it is a felony, and he could get more than 20 years if convicted. And this time it wasn't civil court - it was criminal court.

Stryker plead not guilty.

Leone says Stryker made up the story and recruited Pizzano through a middleman, one of his patients named Richard Chambers.

Chambers was also arrested, and at a pre-trial hearing, Leone laid out the details of an elaborate scheme. "Chambers continuously met and talked with Pizzano. During these meetings, he would show him maps and diagrams, which would show how he supposedly went from a bar, drinking, the night of September 30th, the parking lot," Leone said.

What would Pizzano and Chambers get in return?

"The initial promise is that Chambers and Pizzano will receive several thousands of dollars. However, that comes with a pretty tight caveat, and that is Stryker tells them, 'You'll get your money, but only when I'm out from under the civil judgment, because my money is tied up in the civil judgment and the civil suit,'" Leone says.

Leone charges Pizzano and Chambers also got prescription pain pills and anti-depressants in return for their help. "Pizzano has provided those drugs to authorities, and the lot numbers on those drugs are tracked from a salesman to the pharmaceutical company to Dr. Timothy Stryker," Leone says.

Stryker says the DA threatened Pizzano with a lengthy prison sentence to get him to change his story. Leone denies that and says Pizzano volunteered to tell him what prosecutors now believe is the truth.

Asked how he knows when the guy is lying, Leone says, "Well, Craig, ultimately Craig will swear to tell the truth, and he'll tell the truth. But, he'll also in swearing to tell the truth tell the fact that he lied as well."

But Pizzano never took the stand. On April 16, 2009, Timothy Stryker pleaded guilty to multiple counts of perjury and was sentenced to four years in prison. For the Rafuse family, justice for Lin Goudey's death could now be within reach.

"We are hopeful that Dr. Stryker will spend the rest of his life in jail, not just four years, and that an indictment for homicide will be forthcoming some time in the future," Altman says.

Whatever happens to him, Stryker will face the future without the one person who stood by him and believed in him. Michal, his wife of 14 years, has filed for divorce.

"This plea today by Tim Stryker may close a chapter, but the book remains open in this case and I will continue to handle the homicide investigation personally," says Leone.

Leone made a promise to Goudey's family 16 years ago when he was the young assistant DA: he promised he would get the person who killed her. He still stands by that promise.