Early 2009 was a difficult time for the Fort Worth, Texas-based Ybarra family.
Hope Ybarra, a mother of three, had been fighting a rare form of bone cancer for eight years.
Now, the cancer had reappeared after two remissions, and this time, she told her family, it would be fatal.
Making this worse was that her youngest, 5-year-old Sophia, had been sick almost since birth with cystic fibrosis, generating a 15,000-page medical file.
After hearing the news of Hope’s remission, Sophia put her arms around her. “I’m going to miss you, Mommy,” she said.
But according to Andrea Dunlop and Mike Weber’s new book, “The Mother Next Door: Medicine, Deception, and Munchausen by Proxy” (St. Martin’s Press, out Feb. 4), none of this was true.
Ybarra wasn’t dying.
She had never had cancer.
And Sophia, who had spent her life being subjected to medical procedures including a surgically implanted feeding tube, had also never actually been sick.
The form of abuse that causes a parent to subject her child to years of unnecessary medical intrusions is known as Munchausen syndrome by proxy.
Dunlop, who hosts a podcast about the condition called “Nobody Should Believe Me,” emphasizes that Munchausen syndrome by proxy is defined by deliberate deception and “are not cases of someone who is simply anxious or even having outright delusions about illnesses.”
In 2001, Ybarra, then a mother of two, was six months pregnant with twins when she told her husband, Fabian, that she had cancer.
“Hope faced an agonizing decision,” Dunlop writes of the story Ybarra shared.
“Her treatment could put the babies at risk, but if she forwent it, they could all die. She went ahead with the radiation, and two weeks in, she was hit by another blow. She had lost the pregnancy.”
Her family was devastated.
“[Her sister] Robin remembers seeing ultrasound pictures of the twin girls, whom they had already named Alexandria and Alexia,” Dunlop writes. “Robin would go on to name her son Alexander in memory of the lost little girls.”
Sophia was born in March 2004 four months premature, and was diagnosed with cystic fibrosis soon after. For five years, the family’s life was dominated by concerns for both Sophia’s sickness and the possibility that Hope’s cancer would return.
Eventually, Ybarra moved with Sophia to Birmingham, Ala., after Sophia’s pulmonologist relocated there, necessitating regular 10-hour drives back and forth for treatment.
Ybarra’s parents, Susan and Paul, raised almost $100,000 for the family, including donations from many of their friends and clients.
By April 2009, when Ybarra was supposedly dying, she was moved to the hospital to receive palliative care.
But when Sophia’s oncologist called Susan for information on Ybarra’s care team, the grieving mother couldn’t find anything.
Ybarra’s lie was exposed. For her family, it was as if the fabric of reality had split apart.
“One minute your child is dying,” Paul told Dunlop. “Now your child’s a really confusing character.”
Ybarra was transferred to the hospital’s psych ward and diagnosed with major depressive disorder and Munchausen syndrome.
Susan and Paul had to return the money they had raised, and sharing the story destroyed their lives.
Paul was asked to leave his job for 25 years. The couple lost their home and their marriage fell apart, though they did eventually reconcile. (Susan died in 2019.)
But also, the family was forced to ask what else Ybarra might have lied about — like if the pregnancy she lost had even been real.
Susan checked the urn that supposedly contained the twins’ ashes. It was empty. Alexandra and Alexia had never existed. Robin had named her son after a lie. Now doubly devastated, the family knew they needed one more potentially heartbreaking answer.
The Ybarras brought Sophia in for the test that determines whether a child has cystic fibrosis. It came back negative.
“For almost any parent in the world, the news that their child didn’t have a terminal illness would have brought tears of relief,” writes Dunlop. “But upon hearing the test results, Hope broke down in tears for a very different reason. She’d been caught.”
Over the course of an hours-long interview turned interrogation, Weber, who Dunlop describes as “the only detective in the United States who has made this a focused area of expertise,” got Ybarra to admit to putting a pathogen in the cup that was used to test Sophia’s saliva, among other misdeeds.
Ybarra was arrested in October 2009. A $25,000 bond was set, but no one would pay it. One year later, she accepted a plea bargain of 10 years in prison, and Dunlop writes that “she served every day of her ten-year sentence.”
The three children, now grown, have had no contact with Ybarra since her arrest. Fabian visited her in prison just once, to ask what happened to their once sizable savings account. But Ybarra said she didn’t remember.
“To this day, her favorite line is, I don’t remember,” Fabian told Dunlop.
“She’s still the victim,” Fabian said. “She will always be the victim.”
