Licensed to Kill? Michael McKee and the Broken System That Let Him Operate
Hidden Killers With Tony Brueski | True Crime News & Commentary
True Crime Today
3.3 • 906 Ratings
🗓️ 26 January 2026
⏱️ 24 minutes
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Summary
Michael McKee is charged with murdering his ex-wife Monique Tepe and her husband Spencer Tepe in their Columbus, Ohio home on December 30, 2025. But here's what should disturb you even more than the alleged crime itself: for eleven days after those killings, McKee was still employed as a vascular surgeon at an Illinois hospital. Credentialed. On staff. Working.
How did he get that license in the first place? A malpractice attorney in Nevada had been trying to serve McKee for two years. The addresses McKee's surgical group provided didn't exist. His Nevada medical license had expired. And yet Illinois granted him credentials in 2024.
This isn't just a McKee problem. This is a system problem. The National Practitioner Data Bank was created by Congress in 1986 specifically to stop doctors from hopping state lines to escape their past. But the public can't access it. And a USA Today investigation found that thirteen state medical boards didn't perform a single NPDB search in an entire year.
Over 500 doctors disciplined in one state are practicing elsewhere with clean records. More than 250 who surrendered their licenses were able to practice in new states - a third with zero limitations. They call it "passing the trash" in education, and there's federal law against it for teachers. For doctors? Nothing.
Tonight we examine the systemic failures that allowed Michael McKee to get licensed - and how many doctors just like him might be operating on patients right now.
#MichaelMcKee #MoniqueTepe #SpencerTepe #HiddenKillers #TrueCrime #MedicalMalpractice #StateMedicalBoard #PatientSafety #DoctorDiscipline #PassingTheTrash
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | is Hidden Killers with Tony Bruske. |
| 0:02.7 | Here now, Tony Bruske. |
| 0:06.4 | There's a lot of questions in this case, |
| 0:10.0 | the case against Michael McKee for the death of Spencer and Monique Tapie. |
| 0:20.6 | And with so many cases that we cover here, |
| 0:25.0 | you end up discovering other aspects of the accused life |
| 0:32.3 | that raise a lot of questions. |
| 0:36.6 | They raise a lot of questions not only about what they're doing, |
| 0:40.1 | but what they're allowed to do or were allowed to do |
| 0:43.1 | leading up to said tragedy, allegedly. |
| 0:48.5 | We saw it in the Devil's Den case that we covered last year here, |
| 0:53.7 | where we broke a lot of that information |
| 0:55.2 | on this program about the school system, about the education system and passing the trash. |
| 1:03.8 | If you're unfamiliar with that, that was teachers. |
| 1:06.7 | You have not good records, disciplinary records at one school in one district or complaints in one school and one district that never get quite fully addressed or litigated. |
| 1:22.9 | And it's just kind of like, okay, you're going to move on. |
| 1:26.2 | We're going to move on. |
| 1:27.4 | Everybody's happy over here. We're not going to move on, we're going to move on, everybody's |
| 1:27.9 | happy over here, we're not going to press charges, we're just going to get rid of this person, |
| 1:31.9 | and then they go get a job somewhere else in another district that knows nothing about what happened |
| 1:36.4 | prior, and there's no way to really trace it. Well, surprise, surprise, the same sort of thing |
| 1:40.8 | can happen in medicine, too. And we might be on the edge of something here. |
... |
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