DOCTOR DIVIDED - Columbus Dispatch, The (OH) - March 11, 2001 - page 01A
March 11, 2001 | Columbus Dispatch, The (OH) | Dennis Fiely Dispatch Accent Reporter | Pag e 01A

She was a doctor who had appeared nude in Playboy, frequented nightclubs and married a heavy-metal rock star.

Those who knew Joanna Demas described her variously as competent and careless, compassionate and self-centered, carefree and troubled.

A paragon of paradox, the rock 'n' roll-loving internist embraced life and, at 39, died as Jimi Hendrix did: choking on her vomit from a drug overdose.

Husband Pete Way, bassist for the British head-banger band UFO, returned Dec. 26 from England to discover his wife's body on the bathroom floor in their East Side apartment. She had been dead at least 24 hours.

"This is my worst nightmare," Way said recently. "I am absolutely devastated."

Found on their bed was an open Bible, reflecting Demas' recent interest. She had been writing a book about Christianity, excerpts from which Carol Demas posted in a Web-site memorial to her sister: God knew we would all eventually belong to him.

News of the physician's death reverberated through the two disparate worlds she'd inhabited: the city's medical and rock communities.

"I had nine or 10 calls about her," said Robert Viduya, the police detective who investigated the death. "She must have been very popular."

A recently completed autopsy showed that Demas had enough drugs in her 5-foot-3, 110-pound body to kill several people her size.

She had ingested more than two times the lethal amount of cocaine; more than five times the lethal dose of Elavil, an antidepressant; and six times the lethal level of Inderal, a beta blocker used to treat anxiety and hypertension.

The drug mixture and levels imply suicide, two Columbus physicians say. Yet given that Demas left no suicide note and had no history of suicide attempts, Franklin County Coroner Brad Lewis ruled the death accidental.

Asked how a physician could mistakenly overdose on two prescription drugs, Lewis said, "The cocaine may have clouded her judgment."

The mystery surrounding Demas' death mirrors the enigma of her life. In the 2 1/2 months since she died, interviews with family, friends, patients and colleagues underscored the dichotomy that defined her.

Contradictory testimonies about her medical practice, marriage, finances, beliefs and state of mind suggest a woman who ultimately couldn't resolve her internal conflicts.

Many who loved her remain pained and puzzled, struggling to comprehend how a bright, beautiful, charismatic woman with seemingly unlimited potential could have met such a tragic end.

Carol Demas, who'd grown apart from her sister over time, was stunned.

"Never in my wildest dreams would I have thought something like this could happen to her," she said.

Yet others had seen some disturbing signs.

"I was surprised, but then I wasn't," said artist Roger Williams, who passed his former neighbor last year while on a bicycle ride. "She looked like a shadow of herself . . . It spooked me. She was very thin and pale, like a walking dead person."

D.R. Goff, a photographer who last worked with Demas in 1998, also had noticed a fateful change.

"It seemed like she was headed that way," Goff said. "She was on some kind of a downward spiral."

ROCK AND ROLL HIGH SCHOOL
You are brilliant like your father, but remember that you have the heart of an artist.

Those words -- spoken by Joanna Demas' mother shortly before she died in 1987 -- resonated with Demas, said Kathy Consoliver, a friend and former neighbor.

The duality of Demas' life, in fact, likely began in childhood.

She was born in Chicago on Aug. 1, 1961, the oldest of three children of Theodore and Lily Demas. Her mother was an opera singer; her father, a physician.

"My father wanted all three of his children to be physicians," Carol Demas said from her home in Gainesville, Fla.

Only Joanna realized his dream.

Even when she was young, the contrasts in her makeup were evident.

"She was a very wild teen-ager," Carol Demas wrote on the Web-site memorial. "She got into all sorts of trouble."

Still, the future looked promising.

At Columbia High School in Lake City, Fla., Joanna Demas was a straight-A student and National Merit Scholar. She breezed through the University of Florida, where she majored in chemistry as an undergraduate, and the University of Miami Medical School, which she'd entered at age 20.

All the while, her sister said, Demas "continued to party hard while maintaining admirable grades." She met Mark Arnold while both were serving residencies at Miami's Jackson Memorial Hospital. The couple married in Miami in 1986 and moved to Columbus, where Arnold had accepted a fellowship at Ohio State University.

Demas joined a medical group at Mount Carmel East Hospital.

Arnold remembers his ex-wife as "an excellent diagnostician . . . caring and compassionate."

In 1989, Demas left the hospital to join Dr. Jerry Smucker in opening Grant Internists, a primary care practice dedicated to diagnosis and treatment of disease. The two operated the Downtown office, near Grant Medical Center, for three years. Smucker, too, praised Demas' work.

"Her outside interests never interfered with her practice of medicine," he said. "She was a good doctor."

Harley Greene, a Downtown pharmacist who filled many prescriptions written by Demas, said patients "adored her."

Like a hospice worker, Demas devoted herself to the care of Herb Rogers, a good friend of Greene's. After Rogers died of complications from AIDS in 1993, she helped administer his estate.

"That's how close they became," Greene said.

In marrying Arnold, Carol Demas recalled, her sister was seeking a more traditional lifestyle.

"She wanted to be a good wife, to iron his shirts and (darn) his socks."

But her brush with convention concluded in 1991, when their five-year marriage ended in dissolution.

"We were totally different people," said Arnold, who remains a surgeon at Ohio State University Medical Center and is remarried. "She started taking singing lessons, hanging with this rock group and having an affair with a band member who was married and had two kids."

He said Demas had confided in him shortly after their break-up that she was taking lithium, a drug prescribed for manic-depression, but he "never found her to be that way."

"She was guided by a different spirit than most of us and lived her life accordingly."

'DR. JOANNA'
At ease in the doctor's office, Demas also felt at home in a nightclub. Through 1996, she was a regular at Alrosa Villa, Newport Music Hall and other Columbus concert venues.

"A tremendous amount of people knew her," said Rick Cautela, manager of Alrosa Villa on the North Side. "People surrounded her."

Among Demas' many friends and acquaintances were members of local and national bands.
"She was definitely interested in being around rock stars," said Pete Seaman, assistant general manager of Newport Music Hall, across High Street from OSU. "She liked the 'hair' bands . . . Skid Row, UFO and Aerosmith."

Seaman, who knew Demas as "Dr. Joanna," said she sometimes treated ill musicians.
"It was great to have her on-site," he said. "These guys get sick all the time. They're on the road, and they don't have a family doctor."

In 1992, a year after her dissolution, Demas stirred controversy when she became the first physician to pose nude in Playboy.

"We got calls on it," said Lauren Lubow, an attorney and case-control officer for the Ohio Medical Board. "It disturbed people tremendously."

In an interview with The Dispatch in June 1992, Demas explained her decision: "I see my patients nude all the time. Why should I be freaked out by nudity?"

She said she viewed the photos as an opportunity to express herself and send a message.

"I want women to think they can be professional and sexual at the same time. Too many professional women have had to suppress their femininity."

Among the unsettled was Demas' partner at Grant Internists.

"That was the reason I left the practice," Smucker said. "I'm quite conservative; we were on opposite ends of the spectrum."

Both Smucker and Arnold said medicine was not her first love.

"She was interested in being a musician and an actress," Arnold said. "She was very interested in Marilyn Monroe. She had a lot of books on her and all of her movies."

The Playboy experience, some friends and acquaintances said, brightened the stars in Demas' eyes and seemed to spark an obsession with her appearance.

In 1994, she followed up on a desire to become a "veejay" by hiring a Columbus production company to help her record audition tapes for MTV.

But the company's owner said Demas refused to pay for the tapes, complaining that her nose looked too big.

"She was the most bizarre woman I ever met -- obsessed with every facet of her looks," he said. "I don't want my business associated with her name in any way."

Demas continued to pose for what Goff described as "babe photography." As part of G. Gordon Liddy's 1996 "Stacked and Packed" calendar, Goff shot a portrait of her in which she wore skintight, low-cut black leather and cradled a rifle. The women who posed for these types of calendars used their own weapons.

With creams and laser procedures, he said, "she was always working on her face."

INDEPENDENT CONTRACTOR

After parting ways with Smucker at Grant, Demas practiced at what then was Park Medical Center until early 1996. She also saw patients in her Olde Towne East home at 870 Franklin Ave. for pain management, nutritional counseling and cosmetic procedures.

Later that year, Demas left to study cosmetic surgery in Europe, then returned to Columbus to specialize in cosmetic surgery in offices at home, Downtown and in Upper Arlington.

The practice eliminated a reliance on insurance reimbursements, which had become a source of increasing frustration, said Eric Parmater, a Short North landlord and longtime friend.

"She got sick of the paperwork," Parmater said. "That's why she got into the cosmetic thing."

Freed from the constraints of hospital affiliations, Demas often saw patients on short notice for little or no fee, sometimes chatting with them for hours.

"Once I saw her at midnight for a mole," one longtime patient said. "It was wonderful to be able to see a doctor after 5 p.m. . . Sometimes I had to insist that she take my money."

Demas was not certified by the American Board of Plastic Surgery, nor, according to plastic surgeons in Columbus, did she attend professional meetings or continuing-education programs.

Her new specialty generated new problems.

Two malpractice suits since 1998 accused her of negligence. The plaintiffs eventually dropped the suits, but attorneys considered it highly unusual that Demas did not carry malpractice insurance.

Williams, the artist and former neighbor, stopped referring friends to Demas.

"I got back too many complaints," he said.

A Columbus plastic surgeon, who spoke on the condition of anonymity, said at least 10 patients within the past four years visited her after they'd been treated by Demas.

"Let's just say they wanted second opinions," the surgeon said.

Demas was not only a practitioner but also a patient.

She underwent nose jobs and chemical peels from others and sometimes performed laser procedures on herself, friends said.

While self-treatment is legal, it might violate appropriate standards of care and could jeopardize a physician's license, said the Ohio Medical Board's Lubow.

"That's the kind of thing the board would look at."

In-home practices, Lubow added, also are rare and a cause for concern

HER IDEAL MAN

The doctor and the rocker met in August 1995 at a UFO concert in Newport Music Hall. They wed the next summer, fulfilling Demas' dream of marrying a rock star.

"If the guys she was attracted to in high school were any indication," Carol Demas said, "Pete was the embodiment of everything she wanted in a man."

Way's band had hit its apex in Europe, Japan and the United States from the late 1970s through the early '80s, and in 1992 he had been on a short list to replace bassist Bill Wyman in the Rolling Stones. UFO, which disbanded and re-formed several times since 1983, continues to tour.

After marrying Demas, Way settled in Columbus, moving into his wife's Queen Anne-style home.

She was the fourth wife for Way, who acknowledges a fondness for alcohol and women.

By many accounts, Demas changed significantly while with Way.

"Everybody noticed a big difference in her," said veterinarian Jack Timmons, a friend who cared for the couple's Pomeranian dog, Princess, who often wore a hoop or diamond-looking stud in her pierced ear.

Neighbor Kathy Webb, a registered nurse, said Demas stopped visiting clubs, sometimes staying at home for days.

"For the last couple of years, it was like she didn't exist," Webb said. "She literally became a hermit."
Some sensed marital disharmony.

Goff said he often listened to Demas "whining about Pete," and Williams said she frequently complained about her husband's vices.

"I think my womanizing and gambling bothered her. . . ," Way acknowledged. "She knew I was a rock musician, not a priest."

And he apparently felt stuck.

"Pete didn't want to be in Columbus," said drummer Scott Phillips, who, along with guitarist Walt James, backed Way last year on his first solo album, Amphetamine.

"If you want to be involved in music and art, this is not the place to be. Pete is definitely a world traveler."

Music and medicine proved an odd combination in the couple's home.

While Way and his band rehearsed in the basement, Demas saw patients on the main floor.

"It got to be humorous at times," Phillips said. "She'd have patients in there, and we would be playing incredibly loud. It wasn't doctor's office music; it was rock 'n' roll."

Way said he and his wife had overcome any difficulties and were doing well.

"We had reached the point where it all worked. We were very happy."

WORRISOME QUESTIONS
In the last two years of Demas' life, problems seemed to mount.

While continuing to see patients in her home, she spent a month in late 1998 working for a home health service.

"She just didn't like to work," said a co-worker, a paramedic. "She would disappear for two days at a time."

Shortly after Demas left, the co-worker said, he received a call from an Ohio Medical Board investigator inquiring about her prescription-writing practices.

The board, which licenses doctors in Ohio, refused to confirm or deny an investigation.

Last March, an agent with the U.S Drug Enforcement Agency visited Greene's Professional Pharmacy, 497 E. Town St., to review "her prescription-writing patterns for her patients," Greene said.

The flow of people to and from the Demas-Way home led some neighbors to suspect illegal drug activity.

"They had some very unsavory-looking people going in and out of there," Williams said. "Some of us were uptight about it."

A curious Webb cruised the couple's street at night.

"People came there in groups, and some of them waited in the car," she said. "They'd be in the house for 15 minutes, then leave."

Other behavior reinforced their suspicions.

Williams said he had visited the home at least three times when Demas and Way were watching Sid and Nancy, a grim 1986 film about the mutual destruction of two co-dependent junkies -former Sex Pistol bassist Sid Vicious and his girlfriend, Nancy Spungen.

"They were obsessed with that movie," Williams said.

FINAL CONVERSATIONS

Beginning in 1994, creditors initiated four court actions against Demas to collect back taxes and other debts. The most significant resulted in a $69,000 lien placed on her house in 1999 by a medical-equipment company.

Webb said she'd heard that the couple was having financial problems, but Way scoffed at the notion.

A will has not been found, and her estate, opened March 1 in Franklin County Probate Court, has yet to list her assets.

The lien on the house was settled before Demas sold her home in August for $250,000, double what she'd paid a decade earlier.

From Olde Towne East, she and Way moved to an apartment not far away at 805 E. Broad St. They had yet to settle in when they left for a November concert tour of Europe with UFO, Way's band.

Before the trip, Demas sold the house and quit her most recent job -- at the Department of Veterans Affairs clinic on Taylor Avenue -- with the intention of moving to Florida with Way after the new year.

They had planned to spend Christmas together in Columbus, but when visa problems delayed Way, Demas came home without him.

The holiday season was in full swing when Parmater, the Short North landlord, visited his old friend in her apartment the night of Dec. 22.

"We just sat there and chatted," he said. "She seemed very, very happy."

Nina Masseria, another friend and the real-estate agent who sold her house, had seen Demas earlier that day.

"She was a little sad that Pete wasn't with her, but she seemed absolutely fine," she said.

Both said she was excited about moving to Florida, where Way would continue his musical career and she could be closer to her father in Lake City and her sister.

"The last time I talked to her, she seemed excited about going South and getting into the warm weather," Masseria said.

When Way called his wife Christmas Eve morning, he expected to be home that night.

"The last thing that I told her was that I should be at the airport," he said.

That conversation would be their last.

Flight delays prevented Way from reaching their apartment until the day after Christmas.

"Had I been home," he said, "this probably would not have happened."

When are we going to join God? Demas wrote in her book about Christianity.
Not if, but when.