How the discovery of a hidden camera revealed a doctor’s dark secrets
A seemingly perfect family life unraveled after the disturbing revelation.
ByDoc Louallen
Single mom’s life takes dark turn in new season of ‘Betrayal’ docPodcast host Andrea Gunning discusses the newest season of the hit true crime docuseries on Hulu, “Betrayal: Under His Eye.”
A Pennsylvania single mother’s marriage to a charming doctor took a dark turn after the discovery of a hidden camera destroyed the life she thought they had been building. The case became even more horrifying when he was accused of plotting to silence a key witness.
Justin Rutherford is in prison after pleading guilty to sexually abusing his stepson and another minor, while also being convicted in a separate murder-for-hire plot. His medical license was revoked after his conviction.
He was sentenced to 26 years and 10 months to 70 years, with 12 years of special probation for charges including rape of a child and invasion of privacy in February 2024, along with a charge of “rape of an unconscious victim.” He later received an additional concurrent sentence of five to 10 years for attempting to arrange the murder of his stepson from prison.
ABC News Studios’ “Betrayal: Under His Eye,” a three-part series, is streaming in its entirety on Disney+ and Hulu from Tuesday, Sept. 2.
The case gained national attention when actor Anthony Edwards, known for his roles in “ER” and “Top Gun,” met Rutherford’s stepson Tyler VanScyoc through the “1 in 6” organization, which supports male survivors of sexual abuse.
“More kids are going to get hurt and stay silent like I did when people don’t share,” Edwards told ABC News. “From a lot of survivors in the world that I’ve met, they’re saying ‘Tell Tyler thanks.'”
The investigation began in summer 2021 when a teenage friend of VanScyoc discovered a hidden camera disguised as a phone charger in the Rutherford family’s bathroom. The friend took the camera home and showed his mother, who contacted police.
“There were thousands of images of people showering, using the bathroom, changing in and out of clothing,” Chief Jeffrey Smith of the Amity Township Police Department told ABC News.
VanScyoc told one of his aunts that his stepfather had been sexually molesting him since he was 11.
“If I didn’t do what he wanted, he’d get very angry,” he told ABC News.
During the investigation, one of VanScyoc’s friends revealed Rutherford had sexually assaulted him during a sleepover while the friend was under the influence of alcohol. This disclosure ultimately led VanScyoc to come forward about his own years of abuse.
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While he was under investigation, Rutherford fled to Europe for several weeks but was apprehended when he returned through Dulles International Airport in Virginia. While in jail awaiting trial, he attempted to orchestrate VanScyoc’s murder through letters to a close family friend, police said.
“The person was to wait in our driveway and, when Tyler got off work, they were to kill him painlessly. And then he wanted him either buried in a forest or burned in a barrel,” Stacey Rutherford, Tyler’s mother, told ABC News.
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The case shook the family, who had thought of Rutherford as an upstanding husband and father.
“We lived the American dream and he destroyed it,” Stacey Rutherford said. The family had to leave their dream home and rebuild their lives after the revelations.
The judge issued the maximum sentence and barred him from any contact with his two young children with Stacey.
“The second they said you’ll never see your kids or talk to your kids again, his body language was different. His face drooped,” VanScyoc recalled.
Since then, VanScyoc — who is now 20 — has gotten engaged and started working toward becoming a personal trainer.
“Just because we’re men, it doesn’t mean we’re weak,” he said. “We’re still strong. It doesn’t mean we’re not a man.”
MORE: ‘Betrayal: A Father’s Secret’ documents the dark truth that shatters a family
The case highlighted the prevalence of male sexual abuse, with Edwards noting that, on average, men wait between 40 and 50 years before disclosing childhood abuse. VanScyoc spoke out at age 16, decades earlier than most male survivors.
“As a community, it is shocking for people to believe that a doctor, a stepfather, a person who we pour our trust in, could do these types of things,” Berks County Supervising Attorney Meg McCallum told ABC News.
The Shocking True Story Behind Netflix’s The Perfect Neighbor
by
Staff Writer
The Perfect Neighbor, out on Netflix on Oct. 17, is a documentary about a white Florida woman who shot and killed her neighbor, a Black mother of four in 2023, pieced together using footage from police body cameras.
There are no talking heads, just two year’s worth of recordings of police interacting with the shooter, 60-year-old Susan Lorincz—who frequently made complaints about local kids being loud while playing in a vacant lot near her Ocala, Fla., home—as well as body cam footage of interviews with her neighbors. In 2024, Lorincz was found guilty of manslaughter with a firearm and is now serving a 25-year prison sentence.
Here’s how a community dispute escalated into a deadly tragedy.
A “fearful” neighbor
Lorincz repeatedly called police to report loud neighborhood kids who she said were “trespassing,” constantly screaming at her, telling her to shut up, and threatening to kill her. Lorincz would tell police that she was being attacked, “fearing for her life.” In the film, viewers will see recordings she would take of the kids playing so that she could show them to police. The movie’s title The Perfect Neighbor comes from a comment Lorincz made to the police, “I’m like the perfect neighbor.”
The footage reveals that officers repeatedly responded to Lorincz’s calls with skepticism because she was the only resident with these complaints. The children were not technically playing on Lorincz’s property; they were playing in her next door neighbor’s yard. That neighbor encouraged them to come over and taught the kids how to play football. Lorincz had her landlord put a “no trespassing” sign on her lawn to divide the area between her property and the neighbor’s yard.
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Neighbors claimed Lorincz would scream profanities at their children and were disturbed to learn that she was recording them.
The children told the police that they were only playing hide and seek in the lot and that Lorincz would harass them, calling them slurs and swinging an umbrella or a gun at them.
One time, the kids said she even threw roller skates at them, though Lorincz says she was returning a pair of skates left on her lawn. They say Lorincz accused them of trying to steal her truck. “We’re 11!” one of the children is heard saying in the doc. They nicknamed Lorincz a “Karen,” slang for angry middle-aged white women who can be racist in their complaints.
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From phone calls to a tragedy
The film centers around an incident on June 2, 2023, when Lorincz claimed that boys were trespassing on her property, and when she told them to go away, they said they were going to get their mom. Lorincz called police, and a dispatcher said officers would be there shortly.
Then Lorincz claims she was inside her home when Ajike Owens, a McDonald’s manager who lived in her neighborhood, showed up and started banging on her door. So she took a gun and shot through the door, not realizing Owens’ son was standing right next to her. “I thought she was going to kill me,” Lorincz told police, repeatedly insisting that it was not a purposeful, premeditated act. When police gave her an opportunity to write an apology letter after being questioned, she took them up on the offer, apologizing to the children and explaining that she “acted out of fear,” afraid their mom was going to kill her.
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Florida’s “Stand Your Ground” laws do permit deadly force if there is a presumption of fear. Homicides involving white shooters and Black victims are more likely to be ruled justifiable than those involving Black shooters and white victims. Most famously, the law led to the 2013 acquittal of a white man named George Zimmerman, who shot unarmed Black 17-year-old Trayvon Martin.
However, in footage of police questioning Lorincz, detectives say they don’t understand why she took out a gun a mere two minutes after a 911 dispatcher said police were on their way to the scene. As one of them put it, “the decisions you make are not reasonable.” During the 2024 sentencing, the presiding judge argued that Lorincz acted more out of anger than fear.
The doc features snippets of national TV coverage of the case. The Rev. Al Sharpton even gave the eulogy at Owens’ funeral, commending her actions and speaking directly to her children: “If she allowed people to degrade you, you’d grow up with a feeling that you were something that could be degraded.”
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The takeaway from The Perfect Neighbor
“If we don’t bear witness to crimes like this, if we turn away, if we don’t shine a light on them, they will continue in the dark,” director Geeta Gandbhir tells TIME.
By scouring two years of police body cam footage, Gandbhir hoped to turn a tool intended to protect police into a tool that exposes their faults.
Gandbhir, whose family was close to Owens, wonders why the police didn’t bring in a social worker or other type of mediator to diffuse the situation.
And she thinks that police should have taken action against Lorincz earlier, based on the weapons in her house and the numerous calls to emergency services for non-emergencies.
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“The police don’t have to come in guns blazing and beating people to still have failed the community,” she argues. “If you can pick up a gun to solve a trivial dispute with your neighbor, what else are you capable of?”
Correction, Oct. 20
The original version of this story misstated who gave the eulogy at Ajike Owens’ funeral. It was just Al Sharpton, not Sharpton and Susan Lorincz.
