Chapter 1: What happened to Dr. Autumn Klein after leaving work?
She said that things were getting really bad. There was no fear of anything like what happened. I don't know if something snapped. I was shocked and I couldn't say anything.
A doctor comes home, but not for long. I think my wife is having a stroke. An hour later, she was back at the hospital she'd just left. She had this blank stare in her eyes. Three days later, she was dead.
I said, she's my child. I gave birth to her. I want to know what happened to her. At first, it was just a medical mystery.
I'm seeing a healthy white female that for all intents and purposes should be alive. To them, this was out of this world.
Chapter 2: How did the emergency team respond to Autumn's critical condition?
Just couldn't make any sense out of it. But it soon became a murder mystery.
She said, are you sitting down?
Because once they finally discovered what killed her, the next question was who. If he couldn't have her, no one was going to have her.
I still haven't made sense of it. I still haven't made sense of it.
I'm Lester Holt, and this is Dateline. Here's Dennis Murphy with Lethal Weapon. The emergency room trauma team was losing her. She'd been wheeled in glassy-eyed and gasping for breath.
Her heart stopped, and they had to restart her heart.
And within minutes, machines were doing the breathing and blood circulation for 41-year-old Autumn Klein, wife, mother, medical doctor, a rising star in the field of women's neurology, a star whose light was dimming even as they tried desperately to keep her going. These are doctors who are treating trauma patients every day. This one had totally puzzled them.
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Chapter 3: What were the initial medical assessments of Autumn's condition?
The woman failing in the ER, Dr. Klein, was in many ways what modern Pittsburgh was all about. The gleaming downtown towers didn't need to worry anymore about grimy soot from the steel mill smokestacks along the river. The steel industry here had mostly died by the early 80s and moved overseas.
Universities, technology, medicine, and finance, that was the foundation of the new Pittsburgh they called the Renaissance. And Robert Ferrante and his wife, Dr. Autumn Klein, relocated from Boston, were just the kind of Renaissance minds the city was hoping to attract. Autumn's colleague, Dr. Karen Roos.
She said that she loved Pittsburgh. She loved her patients. The people of Pittsburgh were wonderful, and she was so happy to be there.
Autumn had always intended to be a caregiver. Her cousin, closest sisters, Sharon King, remembers that even as a little girl, she administered playtime TLC.
We had a doctor's office, and our patients were our stuffed animals.
And Dr. Autumn Klein was holding clinic hours.
She was the doctor.
It was an interest that took root early for Autumn and never left.
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Chapter 4: What led to the discovery of Autumn's cause of death?
Always a top-of-her-class student in the Baltimore area. She later got her undergraduate degree in neuroscience from Amherst.
Helping people was the main thing. She was just so smart, so intelligent, so thoughtful, and so caring.
You and your husband must have been very, very proud of her.
We were.
Lois Klein, Autumn's mom.
We knew that she was putting her mind on her studies and we were giving her the best education we could possibly give her and she was taking advantage of it.
Med school was a certainty. Autumn announced she was heading to Boston. Her mother worried the city's crime rate was too high.
She said, I'm going to Boston University Medical School. And I said, no, you're not. And she said, yes, I am. And I said, no, you're not.
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Chapter 5: How did Autumn's husband react to her situation?
And she said, yes, I am. And she went to Boston University Medical School. She had a mind of her own.
In medical school, Autumn developed a romantic thing for a research colleague and he for her. Robert Ferranti, Bob to his friends, held a Ph.D. in neuroscience and was hunting for cures to devastating brain illnesses like Lou Gehrig's and Huntington's diseases. He was also more than 20 years her senior, divorced with two grown kids.
I simply told her that that was a little bit too old for her. I didn't think that that was the right age.
But two days before graduation from med school, a determined Autumn, wasting no time, was walking down the aisle with her much older bridegroom. And what was your impression of him, Sharon?
Nice guy, a charming guy, a bit heady, you know.
Egghead?
Yeah.
Nerdy?
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Chapter 6: What evidence suggested foul play in Autumn's death?
Yeah. And she kind of was, and she kind of wasn't, you know.
The couple made a home just outside Boston. In a few years, a baby girl arrived into their hectic lives. Autumn took it in stride.
A 2 a.m. diaper change is nothing for her. She's, you know, I mean, a 2 a.m. call from the hospital, you have to come in to take care of this patient. You know, she's used to that.
The new mother was becoming a sought-after specialist in neurological ailments in women. Because of her expertise, she was interviewed for an educational video distributed by the Discovery Channel.
Women with epilepsy really need to be started on a seizure medication in advance of pregnancy.
But Autumn was growing frustrated with Boston, and professionally, she felt as though she'd crested there. That's when Pittsburgh loomed into view.
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Chapter 7: What were the key arguments presented during the trial?
In 2011, the University of Pittsburgh and its renowned Sister Medical Center offered an ideal career move. For Bob, a new research lab. For Autumn, a chance to head her own department.
Autumn was not just a rising star, she was a shooting star. She was nationally recognized as a leader in her field at a very young age.
But still something was gnawing at her, a kind of emotional vacuum. She wanted to have another child. By now in her early 40s, she was taking fertility treatments, hormone injections, but nothing was happening. Was it really eating away at her? That she wasn't getting pregnant? Time was going by.
Yes. And, you know, just speaking from experience, fertility treatments are the loneliest place a woman will ever go.
Looking back, her mom Lois recognized some worrisome signs, changes in her daughter.
I kind of saw that she wasn't herself too much anymore, that she was kind of a little, what do you call it, kind of a little down maybe here and there.
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Chapter 8: What was the final verdict in the case against Robert Ferrante?
Then, in early 2013, the couple tried a new approach to the baby problem. A fertility doctor thought the bodybuilding supplement known as creatine just might help Autumn get pregnant. As it turned out, her husband Bob had been using the stuff in his research. So on April 17th, Autumn Klein seemed ready to give creatine a try. She texted her husband that day, I ovulate tomorrow.
He answered, perfect timing, creatine, smiley face. These are hospital security camera pictures that show Autumn throughout the day and leaving work late that night. Ten minutes later, she was home. And minutes after that, her husband, Bob Verante, was on the phone to 911. His wife slumped on the kitchen floor, gasping for breath. The dispatcher asked the husband what he was seeing.
I think my wife is having a stroke. Paramedic Steve Mason and his partner arrived at the Ferrante home to find a woman in very bad shape.
She was lying on her back on the kitchen floor. Her eyes were open and she was unresponsive.
An hour after walking home from the medical center where she worked, Dr. Autumn Klein, seen here in hospital surveillance footage, was back as a gravely ill patient in its emergency room. And whatever was happening to her was a medical mystery to the team trying to keep her alive. Then they saw the blood, so neon red, so out of their experience.
When we come back, Autumn is surrounded by some of the best doctors in the country. But no doctor can work miracles. To them, this was out of this world. Just couldn't make any sense out of it. Maybe someone else could. Dr. Autumn Klein had been rushed by ambulance to the ER of the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center after slumping to the kitchen floor of her home.
We thought that there was definitely a possibility of a stroke, and we knew that she was in critical condition.
Now the trauma team surrounding her was trying desperately to keep her vital signs going. Alan Jennings, at the time a reporter with NBC's Pittsburgh affiliate WPXI, covered the story. He recounted what doctors later said about that night. She had this blank stare in her eyes, barely a pulse. And they didn't know what had happened to her? No, they didn't. Autumn was struggling to breathe.
And then in comes the ventilator. The ventilator, the machines are now taking over. The machines taking over to keep her alive until they could determine what in the world was going on. At some point, Alan, did they realize that this is one of their own? This is that brilliant young doctor that works in the Women's Neurology Unit? They did at one point.
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