Daily News from New York, New York • 42

42 Sunday, November 6, 2016 DAILY NEWS NYDailyNews.com In twisted bid for revenge against former supervisors at Creighton University, Anthony Garcia (above) killed four people (below from left): Shirlee Sherman, Mary Brumback, Roger Brumback and Thomas Turner. BY DAVID J. KRAJICEK NEW YORK DAILY NEWS Dr. William Turner walked into a nightmare when he arrived home from his medical school job in Omaha on March 13,2008. He first found the body of his family's house cleaner, Shirlee Sherman, 57.

After a frantic search, he found the body of his son, Thomas, 11, in the dining room. Sherman and the boy had been stabbed ad nauseam. As an exclamation point, the killer punctured their carotid arteries with knives left protruding from their necks, sadistically staging the blood-sopped scene to induce maximum horror for whomever found the bodies. "I was just flabbergasted at what I was seeing," Turner, a pathology professor at Creigh-ton University, later said. The Turners lived amid affluence, but there was no sign the killer was motivated by lucre.

Nothing was missing: The only thing he took was two lives. Turner and his wife, Dr. Claire Baker, could not fathom who would wish to cause them such heartbreak. Stumped cops became convinced the case was a one-off. An FBI profiler corroborated the anomaly theory, suggesting the killer was a transient psychopath who targeted the Turner home for reasons unknown.

Unsolved five years later, the case gained new relevance on Mother's Day 2013. Roger and Mary Brumback, newly retired and preparing to move east, were found dead in their Omaha home. They had been stabbed on the right side of the neck, like Sherman and young Turner. Roger Brumback also was shot, apparently while answering the doorbell. Not only was the knife -work identical, but Roger Brumback was a colleague of Turner in Creighton's pathology department.

The FBI reclassified the case under its numerical coding as a 306 a serial killing and declared "a strong possibility that these homicides were committed by the same subject." Then came a third thunderbolt: On that same Mother's Day, someone had attempted a break-in at the Omaha home of Dr. Chhanda Bewtra, another Creighton pathologist. She wasn't home, and the intruder was spooked by an alarm. Creighton's pathology team pored over records to identify staffers and students who might harbor such unhinged animosity. And up popped a name a wrathful young doctor who had a Creighton pathology residency years before.

It did not go well. Anthony Garcia, a native of Los Angeles and Utah med school graduate, got a second chance in Nebraska after wash ing out of a hospital residency in upstate Utica for screaming at colleagues. After six months at Creighton, Garcia got a withering review in December 2000 from Bewtra, who judged him shiftless and "very passive aggressive." "Dr. Garcia showed marked lack of initiative and interest," she wrote. "He took no responsibility for his cases.

His forensics used to extract damning address-search evidence from Garcia's phone. And a Terre Haute stripper found the courtroom spotlight, testifying that "Dr. Tony," a tip-rail regular, tried to romance her in 2012. "I told him he's too good for me, that I like bad boys," Cecilia Hoffman said. "He said, Actually I've killed people before' He said it was an old woman and a young boy." Jurors on Oct.

26 convicted Garcia of four first-degree murders. His upcoming sentencing is a cliff-hanger: If Nebraska voters reinstate capital punishment at the polls on Tuesday, the revenge killer could face retribution in kind. Fifteen years after Garcia stomped away from Creighton, his stain lingers there. "As bad a resident as he was," Dr. Bewtra told the Omaha World-Herald, "there were no clues he was capable of this." everyone assumed he moved on.

But the Creighton termination on his record undermined his attempts to earn a medical license. Police began amassing evidence that Garcia had returned to Omaha to exact revenge after losing jobs in Shreveport, in 2008 and Terre Haute, in 2013. An SUV with Louisiana tags was seen near the Turner home at the hour of the 2008 killings. And a rich vein of data placed Gar cia in Omaha in May 2013, including credit card charges at a restaurant there and a motel nearby in Iowa. Investigators found that Gar-cia's iPhone and computer had been used to find the addresses of Brumback and Bewtra.

Records showed he purchased a Smith Wesson 9 mm. pistol in Indiana in March 2013. Brumback was shot with a gun of that caliber, and a clip from the same Smith Wesson model was found near the body. Garcia was arrested on July 15, 2013, and charged with the four murders. A saliva swab added physical evidence: His DNA matched that extracted from a door handle at the Bewtra home.

Police found notes that Garcia made during the second murder excursion that read like a mad man's diary, whipsaw-ing from the mundane to the unthinkable: "Brush Teeth. Floss. Oil Change. Call in Sick Into the fight we go. We live.

We die." He was deemed sane enough for trial, which commenced this fall. Seated at the defense table, Garcia seemed to be in another world. He donned headphones and slept through much of the proceedings. An Omaha detective gave authoritative testimony about knowledge of basic histo (pathology) is very poor." Garcia responded with a tirade, threatening to sue Bewtra. He was placed on probation, then fired in June 2001.

Drs. Turner, Brumback and Bewtra each played roles in the dismissal. Garcia moved away and.