Love Lay Dying

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Speaker 1 Love can be so unpredictable, gentle, caring, or a passionate fire out of control, scorching what it touches, consuming the lives of the lovers. Pull back for more.

Speaker 1 Such was the romance and its fate at the heart of our story. A story you'll hear in part through a raw and shocking tape.
Come and love me, I love you, Cool.

Speaker 1 Which captures the most private of moments.

Speaker 2 You and the most beautiful legs in the world.

Speaker 1 Look at you.

Speaker 1 Look

Speaker 1 A long weekend that ends in death. Come here.

Speaker 3 They loved each other as much as they seemed to hate each other or as much as they loved to argue.

Speaker 1 Tara is talking about the toxic love affair which had consumed her sister, the head-turning Lisa Buchanan, 35 years old. They had grown up together, Lisa the younger of the two, in Dayton, Ohio.

Speaker 3 One of the memories I have of her is she was always wanting to fight for the underdog and fight for the people that she cared about.

Speaker 1 Lisa married, had a daughter named Jesse, but wanted more. She began modeling and often for Cincinnati photographer Gary Kessler.
Lisa was great.

Speaker 1 She was very vivacious and bubbly and full of life and had big plans. Lisa wanted to write movies and star in movies and she created a script.

Speaker 2 Lisa just had a lot of hopes for the future.

Speaker 1 And so she divorced her husband and left Jesse with her ex while she set out to conquer Hollywood.

Speaker 1 After enduring a succession of odd jobs and rejections, Lisa headed for the center of another kind of fame. She went to Nashville.

Speaker 1 And that's where Lisa was in January of 2000. Odd that a woman so young, so lovely, would be attracted by a plastic surgeon's ad for a free consultation.

Speaker 2 She was very vivacious. She was alive.
She had a great sense of humor.

Speaker 1 This is the doctor. His name is Chris Coolis.

Speaker 1 Coolis was, to all appearances, quite a catch. He'd breezed through medical school in Nashville, set up a very successful practice there.

Speaker 1 Though his first encounter with Lisa was professional, It certainly didn't stay that way for long. What'd she say about him?

Speaker 3 She met this great guy, of course, and he was a doctor, and she was happy.

Speaker 1 And the money?

Speaker 1 Well, that was no small thing to Lisa.

Speaker 1 Lisa was always looking for someone who could further her career.

Speaker 1 But as anybody close to her could see, Lisa was truly in love, or certainly seemed to be.

Speaker 3 I think Chris could absolutely be very charming. He absolutely could.
He was very knowledgeable, very intelligent.

Speaker 1 A very handsome couple. He moved her into a lovely Nashville home where they soon discovered that they were nitro and glycerin went together.

Speaker 3 It became pretty normal from that point on for there to be fighting and then a gift and fighting and making up.

Speaker 1 There was that time, Tara remembers, when she and her mother took Lisa away for a few days of girl time and the phone never stopped ringing.

Speaker 3 I finally just grabbed the phone and told him that he was ruining my vacation and he had to leave. He had to stop calling.

Speaker 1 Of course, Lisa was constantly checking up on him, too.

Speaker 3 She called him, he called her. And I think that over time, it became a two-way street.

Speaker 1 According to her sister, there was good reason for Lisa to keep tabs on her boyfriend.

Speaker 3 I absolutely remember instances when Lisa would find emails or she would find ads that Chris had put online on dating sites.

Speaker 3 She knew that he wasn't faithful and yet somehow she still was drawn to him.

Speaker 1 By the summer of 2005, Coolis had moved to Chicago. Lisa was embarking on a career as a children's bookwriter and puppeteer.

Speaker 1 Since her return from Hollywood, she had been sharing custody of her daughter with her ex.

Speaker 1 Now, Lisa took Jesse back and the two moved to Franklin, a charming old town outside of Nashville. Your chemical attraction to each other was really the only thing that you had at that point.

Speaker 1 That was part of it.

Speaker 2 And there are still remnants of a relationship where we cared about each other.

Speaker 1 It was the 4th of July weekend, 2005, when it happened. Lisa complained of a headache.
Chris flew down from Chicago to spend the weekend.

Speaker 1 On the morning of July 4th, he was in the kitchen getting breakfast. when Lisa called him to the bedroom.

Speaker 2 I sat down next to her and I put my hand next to her or hit her cheek. I said, honey, what's wrong? And she just stopped all of a sudden.

Speaker 1 Stopped?

Speaker 2 Her eyes became fixed. You could tell that she was

Speaker 2 something was wrong and she rolled back, her lips turned. I realized she wasn't breathing.
My God. And I slapped her.

Speaker 2 Maybe not the best medical thing to do, but I mean, you know, honey, what's wrong? She wouldn't respond. I felt for a pulse.
Lisa was not breathing.

Speaker 1 He called 911.

Speaker 1 Paramedics did what they could on the way to the hospital. ER doctors struggled for almost an hour.
They could do nothing. Lisa died.
A young, apparently healthy woman, now lying on a slab.

Speaker 2 I kept asking that question of the ER doctor, why?

Speaker 1 I don't get it.

Speaker 1 Well, soon that question, why?

Speaker 1 was contagious. Nobody got it.

Speaker 1 A detective came snooping around and very quickly decided that Chris Coolis was giving answers that did not add up.

Speaker 5 The things that were found at the apartment were strange. His information was strange.

Speaker 5 The facts of the matter were strange. Everything about it was very odd.

Speaker 5 It raised a lot of red flags with us as investigators.

Speaker 1 Bad news has a way of barging into life uninvited.

Speaker 3 I was about

Speaker 3 10 minutes down the road when my cell phone rang.

Speaker 3 And it was my mom, and she was crying. She was saying that Lisa was gone.

Speaker 1 35 and healthy and suddenly dead. Why?

Speaker 1 Before long, ER doctors found a clue. Six evenly spaced injection punctures in a hard place to reach, the doctors told Detective Eric Anderson.

Speaker 5 They were in the pubic area in the groin, parallel with the femoral artery, and they appeared fresh.

Speaker 1 Nobody had to tell the detective what that meant. IV drug use.

Speaker 1 She was a mother, clean-cut.

Speaker 3 There was never any indication that Lisa was addicted to drugs.

Speaker 1 Besides, Chris Kulis, her plastic surgeon boyfriend, told the hospital, insisted actually, that Lisa had not used drugs.

Speaker 2 Specifically, what I told the ER doctor, they asked me was, what medication was she taking? I told them, hydrocodone and Xanax.

Speaker 1 Lisa had used the painkiller hydrocodone for relief from her migraines and Xanax to counter anxiety. Neither one would have killed her.

Speaker 1 So why did the autopsy point to the startling fact that, yes, Lisa's death was related to IV drugs?

Speaker 1 Something didn't add up, especially when paramedics reported what they'd noticed at Lisa's apartment.

Speaker 5 The syringes in the sink, the large number of medical samples.

Speaker 1 Something was going on there.

Speaker 5 There was more to the story than we were getting on the front end.

Speaker 1 For one thing, there was something Koulis had said to police back in the ER.

Speaker 5 He basically said,

Speaker 5 I've been down this road before. We found out

Speaker 5 digging into their past. This was not something out of the blue for him.
This was not something out of the the blue for

Speaker 5 Lisa to be involved in.

Speaker 1 It was three years earlier, May of 2002, when police were called to a Kentucky hospital where Lisa had been rushed for a severe infection brought on by IV drug use.

Speaker 1 Deputy Bobby Pate was called in to investigate. Her mother told us that her boyfriend, Odieter, shot her up a bunch of shots, was telling us about sores and stuff all over her body, and that

Speaker 1 this is things that he did to her that was wrong and that we needed to do something about to get him get him off the street.

Speaker 1 It would turn out that Lisa had gotten hooked on injecting the painkiller Demberol, a habit police discovered that she'd been introduced to by her doctor boyfriend Chris Koolis.

Speaker 1 It was in one of their hot romantic periods. They went on a two-month drug spree.
She was telling us the main reason he kept her drugged up because it kept her nice and naked.

Speaker 1 Coolis had decided to kick his habit and had left for rehab far away in Arizona. Lisa stayed behind.
The next day, she was rushed to the hospital with a severe infection caused by her drug injections.

Speaker 1 Still, as Lisa recovered, Koulis had reached out, sending her a letter saying it was all his fault. An effort, he said, to help her retain rights to her daughter.

Speaker 1 Even so, police encouraged Lisa to press charges against Chris since he'd provided the drugs and injected them into her bloodstream.

Speaker 1 And then, a lawyer representing Lisa contacted the authorities, a lawyer paid for by Koolis. Her lawyer called me and told us that she had no longer wanted anything to do with the Koolis case.

Speaker 1 No one was surprised to discover that Koolis and Lisa were back together again. I think he got his mitts back on her and started controlling her again.

Speaker 3 He absolutely did everything he could to convince Lisa. that if she testified against him, that she was going to go to jail or that she would lose Jesse.

Speaker 1 So several weeks later, Lisa checked into the same rehab Koulis had been to, and he paid for that too.

Speaker 3 Chris could threaten you and then offer to save you all in one breath.

Speaker 1 Chris did not escape the incident unscathed, however. He was convicted of unlawfully supplying Lisa with drugs in Kentucky.

Speaker 1 Three years later, at the time of Lisa's death in July 2005, he was still on probation.

Speaker 1 That incident was enough enough to send the police back to Lisa's apartment, where they found the bedroom had been a very busy place that weekend.

Speaker 5 Various sexual paraphernalia and devices that seemed odd, to say the least.

Speaker 1 Investigators found a staggering number of prescription medications for everything from migraines to depression and then needles, syringes.

Speaker 5 That we found syringes in a trash bag in a bathroom closet.

Speaker 1 That's not As if they've been hidden away?

Speaker 5 Absolutely, as if they've been hidden away.

Speaker 1 And even more disturbing, why were some of the syringes filled with a potent and highly addictive mixture?

Speaker 5 Those were found to contain the suspect material, the compound that had the oxycodone that was the proximate cause of her death.

Speaker 1 Oxycodone. A notoriously addictive painkiller much stronger than the hydrocodone Lisa used for migraines.
Oxycodone was legally accessible to very few people beyond medical professionals.

Speaker 1 The oxycodone in Lisa's apartment had been ground up and mixed with a saline solution so it could be injected into that hard-to-reach spot on Lisa's groin.

Speaker 5 Is it possible that someone could inject themselves in the femoral artery in the groin? Certainly it's possible. Is it probable? Not very probable.

Speaker 1 What did that say to you as you investigated?

Speaker 5 It said to me that someone else did it to her.

Speaker 1 Most likely who?

Speaker 5 Most likely the last person to see her alive.

Speaker 1 The doctor. Yes.

Speaker 1 Had Koulis administered dangerous drugs to Lisa? In Tennessee, that would make him liable for her death. Or maybe Lisa did it herself without Koulis' help or even his knowledge.

Speaker 1 There seemed to be no way to prove anything.

Speaker 1 That is, until one last discovery in Lisa's apartment. A videotape of Chris and Lisa shot the weekend of her death.

Speaker 1 And what was on that tape was not only pornographic and shocking, it was damning too.

Speaker 5 What we're seeing is her demise on videotape.

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Speaker 1 What's your reaction when you saw it?

Speaker 5 It was certainly not what I expected. It was a little much.

Speaker 1 A little much?

Speaker 1 The two-hour videotape in Lisa Buchanan's apartment was not for the faint of heart. A glimpse through a forbidden window into the wild sex life of an outwardly wholesome young couple.

Speaker 2 I told her the gorge should be movies. We're kind of kidding.
And she asked me, would you like to film this?

Speaker 2 And I agreed to it.

Speaker 1 I like it.

Speaker 2 This videotape, it was a one-time thing, was a new thing for us.

Speaker 1 Give me a kiss to the camera. What remained was the record of a lurid weekend of sex.
But a few telling things did happen that were crucial to the case, handed over to the prosecutor, Kim Helper.

Speaker 3 On three occasions in the video, you can see Lisa Buchanan holding gauze. to the groin area.
And on one of those occasions,

Speaker 3 Chris Kulis is saying, put pressure on it, which I think is a very clear indication that he knew exactly what

Speaker 3 had happened and was involved in it.

Speaker 1 If he supplied the drugs, if he injected her, he committed a very serious crime in Tennessee.

Speaker 3 If the person dies

Speaker 3 because you gave them bad drugs or because you injected them unlawfully with the drugs, then if a jury finds you're guilty of second-degree murder.

Speaker 1 And given the drug misadventure in Kentucky that nearly killed Lisa three years earlier, it seemed to the prosecutor there was a pattern to this.

Speaker 3 So when you're looking at the case, you're saying, wait a second, it happened once before, it's now happened again. And Lisa Buchanan has died.

Speaker 1 So Chris Coulis became, in the eyes of police, a murder suspect. But Koulis insisted he had nothing to do with Lisa's drug death or with any drugs for that matter.

Speaker 1 He'd been clean since rehab three years earlier.

Speaker 2 I was enrolled in a voluntary advocacy program, a five-year advocacy program, and that program required that I take between three and four random urine tests a month.

Speaker 1 Out on bail, the doctor tried to return to his medical practice and wife in Chicago. Devastated, not by the investigation, he said, but by the loss of the woman he loved.

Speaker 2 I recorded on a microset recorder her voice off her telephone greeting.

Speaker 1 Why?

Speaker 2 A memory of her trying to hold on to her, trying to hold on to something about her.

Speaker 1 While he grieved, he steadfastly denied any responsibility for her drug use or her death.

Speaker 2 It's sad. It's horrible.
But I was appalled that Amy held responsible for her actions.

Speaker 1 Police searched Kulis' Chicago apartment. There they found lots of medical samples and small syringes.
A typical discovery in a busy doctor's home, perhaps.

Speaker 1 But they also discovered the very same kind of large syringes that have been used to shoot up the dissolved oxycodone pills.

Speaker 5 I think it just reinforced our theory that he was directly involved with her death.

Speaker 1 Yet it was just a theory. Police could find no identifiable fingerprints on the actual syringe that delivered Lisa's last injection.
Even so, Koulis remained to the crosshairs.

Speaker 1 He found himself explaining the couple's drug addiction back in 2002 when Lisa had her first brush with death. Ashamed, he'd been the one to start shooting up with Demerol.

Speaker 1 But Lisa, he said, was a willing participant along for the ride.

Speaker 2 She asked me what it was. I told her what it was.
She said, what it made you feel like? I told her. She says, I want some also.

Speaker 1 At first, Kulis says he gave her the shots. But then...

Speaker 2 She learned how to do it herself. And then she was very adept.

Speaker 1 Fearful of losing her daughter if her addiction was exposed.

Speaker 2 He says Lisa had refused to go to rehab as he had done, but he insists he did not abandon her i contacted her mother and a friend of hers and i told them i think they need to come over and be with lisa because lisa was refusing to go to rehab and she needed someone around her lisa's family said that's a lie

Speaker 1 but on one thing they all agree was that relationship volatile you bet why would you want to build a relationship with a

Speaker 1 A woman who you know is really not very good for you, nor you probably for her, since you seem to set each other off.

Speaker 2 You're probably right. We probably were not compatible with.
There's things I saw in her

Speaker 2 beneath a veneer that was good and that was creative and that was wonderful.

Speaker 1 But Lisa, said Coolis, was troubled by hidden demons. For a time, a couple of years after the Kentucky incident, Lisa and her daughter moved into Koulis' place in Chicago.
But soon afterwards...

Speaker 2 I found Lisa in the master bedroom and she was trying to inject herself. And I asked, what the hell are you doing? I was furious.

Speaker 1 Had she told you before that she was no longer using?

Speaker 1 Yes.

Speaker 2 I mean, I just worked so hard to rebuild my life.

Speaker 1 Koolis claims he was astounded that she was injecting her own concoction of oxycodone and solution. You didn't introduce her to those chests? Oh, no.

Speaker 2 This was her own new idea.

Speaker 1 How did she find the syringes and the needles?

Speaker 2 Those are available. Those are available online.

Speaker 1 Koolis says the price for their steamy affair is becoming too costly.

Speaker 2 I made a a mistake in 2002.

Speaker 2 Everything thereafter was an attempt to get back to it, to prove myself that I was not doing that again and that I could be trusted to be a physician and rebuild my life.

Speaker 1 He says he gave her an ultimatum.

Speaker 2 You can stay with me and I'll get you help or you're out of here.

Speaker 2 Choose.

Speaker 2 She left the next day.

Speaker 2 She left the next day and she went.

Speaker 1 to Tennessee.

Speaker 1 Yet several months later, once again, the long-distance romance rekindled. Koolis maintains he never again saw or knew of Lisa's drug use, but there were signs on a visit a month before her death.

Speaker 2 I told her family she had marks on her and that she was clearly using IV drugs again.

Speaker 1 That was a conversation Lisa's family says never happened.

Speaker 2 I also understand that her family had a very hard time accepting the fact that Lisa was an active IV drug addict.

Speaker 1 To hear Chris Koulis tell it, Lisa's death that July 4th weekend was the sad but self-inflicted result of a terrible secret.

Speaker 2 She basically told me that she's going to do it. That's what she wants to do.

Speaker 1 The state of Tennessee was not so sure, which is why in the 13th of September 2007, Dr.

Speaker 1 Chris Kulis went on trial in lovely old Franklin, Tennessee, charged with second-degree murder in the death of Lisa Buchanan.

Speaker 1 A trial which would hold a mirror up to a twisted passion.

Speaker 4 Who was responsible?

Speaker 1 The answer would hinge on a scandalous video that would be hard to watch.

Speaker 1 Positive

Speaker 1 to close up.

Speaker 1 And even harder to ignore.

Speaker 1 The courthouse in Franklin, Tennessee is normally a rather sleepy place.

Speaker 6 So prosecutors want to make the case

Speaker 1 for this.

Speaker 1 Well, the place was abuzz with media. We are live in Franklin tonight.
The beautiful woman, the handsome plastic surgeon accused of supplying and injecting the shock that triggered her death.

Speaker 3 This defendant unlawfully distributed a Scheduled II drug, Oxycodone.

Speaker 3 And that drug caused Lisa Buchanan's death.

Speaker 1 Thank you.

Speaker 1 The defense was just as adamant that Lisa's death, while tragic, was not the good doctor's fault.

Speaker 4 There's no direct evidence that Chris Koulis

Speaker 4 distributed any drugs to Lisa Buchanan on the 4th of July that caused her to die. There's no circumstantial evidence that he did so.

Speaker 1 He's not guilty. Thank you.

Speaker 1 The figure of Chris Coulis seemed rather unimposing, flanked there in the courtroom by his his attorneys.

Speaker 1 But the prosecutors wanted jurors to see another side of Koulis, the doctor who controlled Lisa, in part by providing ways to keep her youthful good looks.

Speaker 1 She and a good friend had both benefited from his efforts.

Speaker 3 Did he give both you and Lisa injections of Botox? Yes.

Speaker 1 At the same time, said her family, he also played on Lisa's insecurities.

Speaker 3 He just went straight across the circle of all of us and just went right up to her and started pointing at her forehead. He's like, oh my gosh, I got to fix those lines.

Speaker 3 Those lines are showing up again. And just took every,

Speaker 3 all the laughter right out of her face. Chris used money to dangle a carrot.
You know, I'll help you do this. I'll help you do that.

Speaker 1 Yes, Coolis had shown concern for his beautiful girlfriend, but the prosecutor suggested, as she lay fighting for her life, he wasn't concerned enough to tell ER doctors the truth.

Speaker 3 Did Mr. Koolis tell you whether or not he observed any kind of IV drug paraphernalia or anything in the apartment?

Speaker 1 No, when we discussed IV drug use, he said he thought she was clean and that there was nothing in the house to perform those acts with.

Speaker 3 16, same thing. That's a little bit of a black bag and then some more needles.

Speaker 1 Of course, there had been. Jurors saw photos of the copious store of needles and syringes found lying in full view in Lisa's apartment.
So if Coolis was lying about that, what else was he lying about?

Speaker 3 Your Honor, at this point I would ask to publish that photo to the jury, please.

Speaker 1 What about those symmetrical needle tracks?

Speaker 3 Did you have an opinion as to whether or not those marks were reflective of self-injection?

Speaker 1 I felt that those marks were placed by someone who knew the anatomy of the area.

Speaker 1 Someone, the state inferred, like a doctor. The state also tried to tie the oxycodone and some of the syringes to coolis.
Witnesses testified that oxycodone was difficult to obtain.

Speaker 3 Can you tell the jury what the level of difficulty would be for someone who was trying to buy oxycodone online?

Speaker 1 It is pretty difficult because most people that are looking for that type of drug know that DEA monitors that drug or the sale of it. So it is fairly difficult.
I said there's my bailout.

Speaker 2 Your bail looks perfect.

Speaker 1 So how did Lisa get it?

Speaker 1 Koolis, of course, the state suggested.

Speaker 1 The state argued that Lisa's body had been so ravaged by drug abuse that oxycodone supplied and ejected by Koolis pushed her over the edge.

Speaker 1 The medical examiner testified about the pre-existing damage to Lisa's lungs caused by injecting those crushed-up pills, but that long-term usage, he said in court, would not have been what killed Lisa that day.

Speaker 1 Would have been the oxycodone that triggered her death. The oxycodone, which the state claimed, was supplied and delivered by Chris Koolis.

Speaker 3 So we're clear. Is it your determination based on your experience that the cause of death in this case, that but for the injection of the oxycodone, Lisa Buchanan would not have died? That's correct.

Speaker 3 Your Honor, do you think the

Speaker 3 would be better viewed with the lights off?

Speaker 1 Probably so, yeah.

Speaker 1 The case rested on who had provided that injection.

Speaker 1 As the courtroom sat in hushed silence, the state then showed the steamy sex tape, hoping it would provide enough of a clue.

Speaker 1 The most important moment was the one captured after Lisa Buchanan had received what may have been her last injection. Koolis is right there with her.

Speaker 5 In number 219, You see Miss Buchanan with her hand upon the gauze on her left groin area and the defendant positioned above her

Speaker 5 looking downward.

Speaker 1 There could be no doubt that the prosecutor Koulis knew what she was doing.

Speaker 1 But was it he who supplied the drug? He who injected it moments before that scene was recorded?

Speaker 1 Soon Chris Koulis would tell the jury for himself just what role he had played. in the final moments of a love affair that had spiraled fatally out of control.

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Speaker 1 Lisa Buchanan and Chris Koulis had been willing partners in an emotionally charged affair. The state claimed Koulis had been the one who was toxic, causing the death of lovely Lisa Buchanan.

Speaker 1 You love me? Yes, I do.

Speaker 5 Perfect.

Speaker 1 But of course, there was another side to that story. Oh my god.
Was Lisa really a victim?

Speaker 1 Good answer.

Speaker 1 Then I'm getting straight up your nose.

Speaker 9 This case is about

Speaker 1 sex,

Speaker 1 drugs, and murder.

Speaker 9 And a fellow with an MD at the end of his name.

Speaker 9 She used him for money and services.

Speaker 1 And he used her for sex.

Speaker 4 The fair exchange, ladies and gentlemen.

Speaker 4 A fair exchange.

Speaker 1 On cross-examination, the defense pressed one of Lisa's best friends about a remark Lisa had made.

Speaker 1 What did you mean by Chris's coming into town? It's time to pay the rent.

Speaker 3 She said it, I didn't, so.

Speaker 1 You have no idea what she's talking about.

Speaker 3 I would say that she was making a joke about having sex.

Speaker 1 Lisa's reliance on coolis for money was well known, but her IV drug use was a carefully guarded secret kept from family and friends.

Speaker 1 The defense insisted a stunning woman like Lisa did not need coolis to help her get drugged.

Speaker 4 Look, she's a gorgeous woman. It's no problem at all to go into a bar and get as much of that stuff as you want.

Speaker 1 As for the evidence, the defense called it all smoke and mirrors, purely circumstantial. There was nothing concrete at all, said the defense, to link Coolis to the drugs or the injections.

Speaker 1 In fact, his fingerprints were not to be found anywhere on the syringes in question. My findings were the examination revealed the press failed to reveal the presence of identifiable prints.

Speaker 2 Look at you.

Speaker 1 But even more crucial was the medical testimony because defense experts blamed Lisa's death on her own habits, her long-term drug use, not on that one last shot of oxycodone. Just to be clear, Doctor,

Speaker 1 in your cause-of-death scenario, does the controlled substance oxycodone play any part in Ms. Buchanan's death?

Speaker 2 It does not.

Speaker 1 But what jurors wanted to hear was what really happened that last weekend from the only living person who knew.

Speaker 2 I loved Lisa. I believe she loved me.

Speaker 2 It wasn't a perfect relationship, but

Speaker 7 I wanted to be with her.

Speaker 1 Koolis admitted he came down to Franklin for a party weekend with Lisa, well equipped with needles and syringes.

Speaker 1 But he told the jury the ones he brought were for a very different purpose.

Speaker 10 What was the point of it? What was the purpose of it?

Speaker 2 It's It's a great thing to talk about in open court. It's for rectal dysfunction.

Speaker 1 It wasn't until partway through the weekend, claimed Coolis, that he discovered she was still using.

Speaker 2 I walked in, and Lisa was on the toilet seat,

Speaker 2 put her back, and she was preparing to inject.

Speaker 2 Tell me what you said.

Speaker 1 What you said, not her.

Speaker 1 I told her, do you have to do that?

Speaker 2 I thought we're having a great time.

Speaker 2 We're having a great time together. Why do you have to do that? Turn this way, baby.

Speaker 1 He claimed he urged her to stop, claimed they argued about it.

Speaker 2 The gist was had to do with the fact that it was her house, as opposed to August of 04. And if I don't want to be there, I don't have to.

Speaker 2 And the gist was also that,

Speaker 2 you know, just because I couldn't do it doesn't mean she can't do it.

Speaker 1 This one here, we were just wanting to highlight the area to focus in on.

Speaker 1 And as for the incriminating scene in the video, in fact, the tape would never show any of the actual injections nor who delivered them.

Speaker 1 Coolis insisted he wasn't the one who injected Lisa, but rather it was trying to minimize any damage caused by the shot she'd given herself.

Speaker 2 At that point, what am I supposed to do? I mean, she's already, she's injected it.

Speaker 1 Hold pressure, so it won't bleed.

Speaker 1 And she did.

Speaker 1 He admitted he knew that just by being there while she was using, was putting at risk everything he was working to rebuild after his own rehab.

Speaker 10 Now, Dr. Coolis,

Speaker 4 why didn't you just leave?

Speaker 2 A side effect of an idiot?

Speaker 1 What?

Speaker 2 A side effect of an idiot? Because I loved her and I wanted to be with her. I wanted to be with her.
I should have left, should have stopped her. I didn't.
I wanted to be with her. So I stayed.

Speaker 1 Some daddies, you look gorgeous. You look so stunning.

Speaker 1 But if he had nothing to do with Lisa's drug use that weekend, Why lie to the ER staff trying to save her?

Speaker 2 I didn't stop her, and just being around it

Speaker 2 in my mind made me guilty of something and in my mind made me that I'd be violated probation and I'd go to jail.

Speaker 2 Lose my license, something.

Speaker 3 So I

Speaker 2 told him that she didn't inject that day, which was true, but I did not tell him that she didn't inject the day before, which I should have.

Speaker 1 All this as the woman he claimed to love lay dying.

Speaker 9 So Chris Coulis

Speaker 4 was thinking about Chris Coulis.

Speaker 1 Is that right?

Speaker 6 Yes, I was.

Speaker 1 Was Chris Coulis just a man whose only crime was putting his own self-interest above those of his lover?

Speaker 1 Hardly, claimed the prosecutor in her closing.

Speaker 3 I would submit to you that the proof really shows that this defendant liked Lisa Buchanan nice and naked. And he came down for a weekend of sex.

Speaker 3 And when she wasn't feeling well, he got out his little black bag and injected her with drugs. And Lisa Buchanan died at the hands of this defendant.

Speaker 1 Thank you.

Speaker 1 The trial is a search for the truth. But the defense insisted Coulis was guilty of nothing but a checkered history and poor judgment.

Speaker 9 And what he did was disgraceful

Speaker 1 and wrong.

Speaker 9 And it's a shame because the testimony is that he's a good doctor.

Speaker 9 But when it came to that woman, he was nuts.

Speaker 9 And when it came to him, so was she.

Speaker 1 And the evidence does not show that he gave the pill. There's no proof he brought him or he injected her with the pill.
There's no proof he did it.

Speaker 1 And because of that, you just got to find him not guilty.

Speaker 1 Thank you.

Speaker 1 Lisa was, or should have been, in the prime of life, but it was lost for her, for her family, forever.

Speaker 1 Now her family waited to see if someone would finally pay the price.

Speaker 1 Lisa Buchanan's family sat uneasy through the Chris Kulis trial. They listened in quiet rage to the doctor's testimony.

Speaker 3 It matters that he lied about Lisa.

Speaker 3 It matters that he is willing to sacrifice her memory after everything else that he's put my family through.

Speaker 1 Without concrete physical evidence, the state's case had been difficult to prove.

Speaker 3 I believe that the state had a very strong, circumstantial case. Would I have loved to have a photo of him holding a needle? Absolutely.

Speaker 1 But ironically,

Speaker 3 the videotape was always off

Speaker 3 during the injections.

Speaker 4 There was no way that a rational jury would convict this man of murder. I was concerned that they might convict him of reckless homicide.
They might fall back on that.

Speaker 1 The state had charged Koulis on several counts.

Speaker 1 While a conviction of second-degree murder murder carried a sentence of 25 years, a guilty verdict on a lesser count of criminally negligent homicide could mean less than a year in jail.

Speaker 3 It's not even about justice. It's about

Speaker 3 finding a reason.

Speaker 1 The jury remained out less than a single day before they returned with their verdict.

Speaker 1 As to count one of the indictment on the charge of second-degree murder, what say you?

Speaker 2 Not guilty.

Speaker 1 As to count two of the indictment on the charge of reckless homicide, what say you?

Speaker 2 Not guilty.

Speaker 1 As to the charge of criminally negligent homicide, what say you? Guilty.

Speaker 1 Very well. Kulis had been convicted of the least severe of the homicide charges.
The more serious ones were rejected.

Speaker 1 Lisa's 16-year-old daughter, Jessica, was inconsolable.

Speaker 1 For the family, it was simply stunning. It felt like a defeat.

Speaker 3 It was

Speaker 3 like every emotion of losing Lisa again.

Speaker 3 But this time,

Speaker 3 it felt like the world was watching.

Speaker 1 For Koulis, the verdict was almost a reprieve.

Speaker 2 And when they said not guilty, it was a huge sense of relief. When they said guilty, the notion of homicide, I didn't agree with it, but I understood how they came to that.

Speaker 4 So what's your biggest mistake here?

Speaker 2 Perhaps that I stayed. I felt it was my responsibility to stick around with her.

Speaker 2 That eventually

Speaker 2 she'd come around and she'd stop and we'd get her help. Or we'd part, but at least I wasn't not going to ban her in that situation.

Speaker 1 Dr. Chris Coulis would ultimately be sentenced to two years in state prison.
But he was allowed to remain free pending an appeal. He lost the right to practice in Kentucky or Tennessee.

Speaker 1 And in March of 2010, he died.

Speaker 1 It was ruled an accident, bronchial pneumonia, and opiate intoxication, a drug overdose.

Speaker 1 And since his appeal was ongoing at the time of his death, Chris Cullis's conviction was dismissed.

Speaker 1 Once, on the outside, they had seemed the perfect couple, the lovely blonde and the successful doctor. But as every plastic surgeon knows, appearances can be deceiving.

Speaker 1 Death has a way of outing secrets no one would want to be remembered for.

Speaker 1 And so now, Lisa's family tends to more positive ways of honoring a life that mattered to them.

Speaker 1 What do you want people to think about your sister?

Speaker 3 More than the fact that she ever posed for a picture, that she ever did any acting or ever did any singing or any writing,

Speaker 3 she was a mother and she was a sister and she was a daughter

Speaker 3 and that

Speaker 3 is

Speaker 3 where she truly shined in her life.

Speaker 3 She had had people that loved her,

Speaker 3 and she had family that she loved.

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