Hey, Queen of the conn listeners, Jonathan Walton here with a brand new podcast for you to listen to.

It's called The Quarterback and the con Artist.

You thought the Irish Heiress was bad?

Who will get a load of this psychopath?

Here now is episode one.

This series deals with troubling topics including suicide, drug overdosing, and dependent adult abuse.

If you or someone you know is struggling with depression or suicidal thoughts, call her text nine to eighty eight right now and speak with a counselor for free.

Dearly beloved and honored guests, we are gathered here today to witness the coming.

Together with these TV.

It's ten am on December twenty second, twenty sixteen.

Fifty two year old Eric Kramer is standing with his forty three year old bride, Courtney Baird, about to get married.

Marriage is a sacred institution.

It's a tradition of partnership, of trust, and of dependence on one another.

The setting is just beautiful at the picturesque Santa Barbara Courthouse, a cavernous historic ninety year old building with Spanish Colonial Revival architecture, terra cotta tiled floors, Baroque old world murals on the walls, illuminated by gargantuan antique chandeliers.

Eric Kramer, do you take Courtney bar as your lovely wedded wife?

Will you honor and cherish her love, trust, and commit to her through joy and pain, sickness and health until death stayed part.

This is actually a civil ceremony, one of several civil ceremonies scheduled at the courthouse today, But this wedding is uniquely different from the rest.

Courtney Bear, do you take Eric Kramer as your lawfully wedded husband?

You're actually witnessing a top secret event.

No one in the groom's life knows this wedding is even taking place today because the groom, Eric Kramer, a retired NFL quarterback with millions of dollars in the bank, is suffering from a severe traumatic brain injury.

He's got the mental capacity of a six year old.

At this point, he should not have the ability to consent to getting married.

Yet here he is saying, I do.

By the power of a shid in me by the State of California, I now pronounce you husband and wife.

You may kiss the bride, but.

The bride in this case is a conniving con artist, and at this very moment, she's exploiting a gaping loophole in the criminal justice system.

Courtney was stealing from him.

Oh she was milk and I'm for every cent he had.

What do you think she was thinking this marriage would do for her?

This secret marriage was a way to keep taking his money.

It would give her immunity from any type of criminal prosecution because they're married.

What's his hers?

What's hers?

I'm Jonathan Walton and this is The Quarterback and the con Artist, Episode one.

She was a gold digger.

I'm not a football guy.

I don't think I've ever seen an entire football game from start to end.

It's November twenty twenty four.

I'm sitting at a table now in the Greater Los Angeles area home of retired NFL quarterback Eric Kramer, confessing my object ignorance and my lack of passion for the sport of football.

Like football holds no interest for me.

But I just finished reading Eric Kramer's book titled The Ultimate Comeback, and it blew my mind.

It starts out being about football, but then it turns into this insane, sweeping tale with crazy twists and turns not to mention the rise and fall of a sinister con woman who infiltrates Eric's life and steals hundreds of thousands of dollars from him.

And I just can't help but gush about the book now that I'm sitting in front of the Eric Kramer himself.

But your book, your story is just so compelling and so dramatic and gut wrenching, and it has a happy ending, right, It's inspiring, It has a hopeful ending.

Why write it?

What made you think you could or should or would?

Why did you?

It was something that I want.

I wanted to do initially for Griffin and Dylan, Eric's two sons.

The feedback I got from other people was unexpected.

How other people relate to what happened for me has happened to millions of others.

And I think that's what's become most gratifying is it's gone beyond what I even thought it would be.

Eric Kramer rises to fame in the early nineteen nineties as a celebrated quarterback.

He plays for the New Orleans Saints, the Atlanta Falcons, the Calgary Stampeders, the Detroit Lions, the Chicago Bears, and the San Diego Chargers.

But what's truly fascinating about Eric Kramer's career is growing up, it didn't really seem like he'd ever make it to the NFL.

We went to those little, tiny Catholic high schools Angenevi.

Who's high school OUP in Panorama City.

That's Chris German, one of Eric's childhood friends.

We would carpool together, we played on the same team.

You know, we were just high school buddies, you know, little knuckleheads rolling to school together.

And could you see back then that he was destined for the NFL?

Was that obvious?

No?

He was good.

He was a good athlete, definitely had the drive, you know, and he was a good quarterback, but pro caliber not so much.

At the time.

And what changed, obviously his perseverance and his drive and his vision and the people he surrounded him with.

I mean, you meet that guy, you know, he's he's got a drive, just putting his nose to the grindstone and going for it, and he's stuck with it, and you know, he made it find it.

Eric Kramer is living proof that it doesn't really matter what kind of hand your delt in life, you can still end up winning the whole game.

I worked hard at it.

I physically train all the time, I watched a ton of film.

I was naturally very tight, like non flexible, so then I stretched and I was naturally very slow, so then I got faster just because I ran.

I was everything physically you wouldn't want to be, but then decided to be something different.

I don't know anything about football, but I've read a lot about you, and I've read a lot about what other players and coaches have said about you publicly in the press.

I get the impression you weren't the fastest player, you weren't the strongest player, you weren't the best performing player, but you were the smartest player.

You treated that football field like a chessboard, and you planned your moves, and you studied harder than anyone else.

Is that a fair assessment?

Is that how you see yourself?

Am I wrong?

Am I crazy?

I think that is right.

I don't think you're wrong, and I don't think you're crazy.

Other than being the most obviously talented physically or otherwise person, there are other ways to do the job and get it done.

Because a lot of this, I don't care what sport it is you're playing, or whatever it is you're doing in life.

It's not always filled with success.

The process of getting better is filled with falling down and then hopefully getting back up and finding ways to get back up only do it better next time.

We always struggled with talent, I mean the talent in that division.

It was Brett Farb and Reggie White and Barry Sanders.

That's former NFL coach Dave Wantstad.

He hand picks Eric Kramer.

Eric checked all the boxes that we were looking for.

To be starting quarterback for the Chicago Bears in nineteen ninety four, and Eric goes on to win some big games while playing for the Bears, especially against the venerated Dallas Cowboys.

I remember being in that locker room and winning that game on national TV and just looking at the players, and I remember specifically Eric, obviously because he was a quarterback, saying we're going places.

We're going to make some noise this year.

And Eric credits part of his success as an NFL quarterback to doctor Kevin Wildenhaus and the visualization technique he showed Eric how to utilize to dial in his game.

He taught me about this sort of deep breathing and meditation and sort of guided imagery where you could put yourself somewhere in a relaxed state before you ever got there, and you could start imagining what would happen, whether it be during a game or not during a game, and kind of sees the world as it's going to happen before it happens, and then it can happen.

So while the fans are screaming and coaches are barking orders, Eric gets quiet, goes inside himself and maps out what to do next.

It was the calmest I'd ever been while things were happening.

So Kevin Wilbinhouse, he was the glove that all the other fingers finally fit into.

Add to that, Eric Kramer has a drive and a determination that goes far beyond most other athletes.

For instance, in nineteen ninety, when he gets dumped by his agent after being cut from the team he was playing for at the time, the Calgary Stampeders, Eric's future looks bleak and his prospects are nonexistent.

No agent wants to sign him, and it really looks like his career in the NFL is over.

But instead of quit football and giving up agents be damned.

Eric actually picks up the phone himself and makes calls to all twenty eight teams in the NFL, offering them his services as quarterback.

I would call the main number and you know, asks to speak to their I don't know, scouting department.

Whoever answered the phone was like, sure, we'll connect you with that.

You know, no one ever picked up, or if they did, they're like, okay, thanks.

There was kind of my last ditch effort.

Really, and all those teams pretty much ignore Eric Kramer.

You can hardly blame them.

That's just not how the NFL works.

You can't randomly call up a team and tell them you're available and expect them to hire you.

And yet, out of the twenty eight phone calls Eric makes.

The Lions were the one team that called me back, and.

In nineteen ninety one, Eric becomes starting quarterback for the Detroit Lion.

I mean it was just serendipitous, I guess, you know.

I mean, it's just somehow meant to be.

I don't know too many guys have called their way onto a team.

Another really fascinating moment in Eric's NFL career happens when he's playing for the Chicago Bears.

It was I don't know, game four or five or something in nineteen ninety four, and I come out of that game with a separated shoulder, right shoulder.

And Eric is in tremendous pain as a right handed quarterback, having a separated right shoulder means he can no longer throw a football like at all.

But Eric hires this magical guru herbalist, guy who reportedly helps NFL great Joe Montana Antenna beat Chaste.

He throws on the right.

Oh what a thrill.

How's that bred heal his throwing arm after he was badly injured.

So Eric flies this herbalist out to Chicago and he sets up shop in Eric's kitchen.

He's got all kinds of weird potions and powders and ingredients that he's mixing up and it smells like the stench of death.

He's over the stove eventually cooking something in there.

I don't know.

He tells me there's deer tendon and there's other kind of stuff in here, and I was like, I didn't think twice about it.

I'm like, all right, great, and he's like, here, drink this.

The herbalist hands Eric a cup of this death smelling swill, this deer tendon djure, and Eric gulps it down because he's desperate to get his throwing arm back at this point, and he'll try anything lo and behold.

A couple hours later, Eric's shoulder actually feels fine.

The pain is gone.

I'm out in the backyard out throwing to him, and it was feeling really good, literally throwing passes in the backyard with a separated shoulder that now doesn't hurt.

So there was some time there that like, I be okay, this is actually gonna work.

I can go practice tomorrow.

So Eric goes to bed that night feeling great.

But the next morning he wakes up and kneels at the altar of the porcelain God and barfs his guts out.

I throw everything up and I couldn't feel worse like sick.

And Eric's shoulder pain is back with a vengeance.

So so apparently it wasn't as magical as it may have seen it first, my shoulder whatever a little glimmer of hope I had, thinking I could play with this thing.

I could.

Eric Kramer endures a lot of stops and starts like that, and a lot of highs and lows during his storied thirteen year professional football career.

Though it's not until he's recovering from a traumatic brain injury that a tall, blonde con artist she was a goalbigger named Courtney Baird.

Well, first of I don't call off Courtney to me.

Her name is Corny sinks her hooks into a severely brain damaged Eric Kramer.

We're just looking for him to get better, get better, get better.

Do your treatment go in He was being treated every day, five days a week.

We would not think that anybody would be coming in here and trying to steal from him.

That would just be cruel.

But to understand how a devious con woman can gain access and control of a mentally infirmed Eric Kramer, you have to understand the root cause of Eric's brain injury and the clear and present danger of playing professional football.

This morning a devastating blow to the NFL.

Ninety nine percent of deceased players' brains examined in a new study showed signs of CTE, a degenerative brain disease linked to repeated hits to the head.

This is much more common in football players than we previously anticipated.

CTE or chronic traumatic encephalopathy, is a brain disease that causes depression, anxiety, mood changes, memory loss, erratic behavior, and a host of other neurological disorders.

There's been a number of football players that have committed suicide right that have had these brain injuries, and it's been ascribed to this repeated head trauma.

In his line of work, I'm.

A head and neck surgeon, a maxillofacial trauma surgeon in Northridge, California.

Doctor Mark Kerner sees brain injury every single day.

CTE is neurotrauma, brain trauma that's from repeated injury to the head, so repeated blows to the head, and it was first described in football players by a pathologist.

The theory is is from repeated blows to the head as football players get it causes this prolonged and profound brain damage that was initially very difficult to diagnose but now can be seen on autopsy.

So it has some very characteristic findings on pathology correlated with their pre death behavior.

And I'm a big, huge football fan.

I watch it every weekend.

When you see these guys hit the turf with their helmet, you know that's a blow too, And even though they don't have quote unquote a concussion, I mean they hit their heads pretty hard on this turf or even on the grass, and you just like I always cringe when I see that.

So it's not only just a blow to the head, but it's these swipes, it's these hitting the ground hard, it's all these things.

And I think the helmets have improved dramatically.

Even though it doesn't reduce the severity of these injuries to zero, we still see a lot of players get concussions.

And I've seen the imaging of the head getting hit and just the brain just slashes around.

It's like a car accident in your head.

Yeah, So exactly what's happening is the brain's encased in a pretty tight cavity, and just like you said, as it gets it goes hits from side to side, you get shearing of neurons, and that sharing trauma not only probably kills off some neurons, but creates sort of micro scarring in the brain in different areas of the brain, which results in the symptoms and the memory loss and maybe even the depression and some of the other psychiatric type diseases that comes with that, and the behavioral changes and impulse control that football players who have been known to suffer from have, and I think the NFL is trying to deal with it.

It's why they have the new trauma specialists on the sidelines.

And you know, it's basically from having repeated concussions, but.

The symptoms of CTE are many and they can really wreak havoc in a person's life.

It's akin to like a personality disorder, and it's like we're one second everything's fine, and then the next it's it's not.

It's like turbulent in that way.

That's twenty six year old Dylan Kramer, Eric's son.

My dad was my hero growing up, and I wanted to be just like him.

I always looked up to him to the way that he went about doing things that you know, he would set a goal and then stick to it with a high level of discipline.

You really do look a lot like your dad, Yeah, a lot.

You got you got the Eric Kramer face, Yeah, I get that a lot.

What's it like being the son of an NFL quarterback?

You know, it's definitely an excuse to get picked first in whatever sport they thought.

You're Eric Kramer's kid, you must be good yeah, and they pick.

Yeah.

So, like a year or two before high school, I kind of gave up football and picked up lacrosse.

And I was really happy I did that at the time because I was tired of dealing with all the expectations and stuff to be good at football and whatnot.

Wow, you know, I never thought of that.

Yeah, yeah, I guess they do expect you because you're like this big guy, you look like Eric Kramer.

You must be a good quarterback, or you must be good at football, right right, exactly.

So that's a lot of pressure.

Yeah, oh yeah, Well that doesn't make it clear.

My dad never put pressure on me to play football or anything like that.

I think he experienced that from his family growing up, and he didn't want that for his kids.

So he did a great job of not doing that.

Like you were free to pursue anything, anyone, anything you want to be.

He supported you anything.

For a little bit there, I wanted to be a pilot, so on my birthdays he got me a flying lesson.

Like a pilot, like an airline pilot, or like a jet fighter in the military in the US Air Force.

Like somehow, some way, we had gotten to go to a legitimate flight simulator at some military base, but that was almost autistic in a sense, like I knew every plane that was around, I knew like all their specifications, all like everything like that.

So I was really into it, and he very much fostered that.

Dylan is just ten years old at that point, but as the years pass, he notices drastic changes in his dad's personality.

Do you blame CTE for what happened to your dad?

Yeah?

Yeah, yeah, in a huge ass and I think it's the biggest factor.

Can say, you can totally say huge ass dude in a huge ass way.

In a huge ass way, that is easily the biggest factor in my opinion.

Yeah, because I think that affected his ability to connect with people like his family, his son, both sons, you know, and that was kind of a hard thing for me to sort of grasp.

I definitely think he is the biggest contributor by far.

I don't think that he was aware of what was going on, I genuinely don't.

I think he was trying an absolute artist to figure it out, like going to a bunch of different doctors and professional help and all that sort of stuff, and you know, obviously nothing really works.

And.

Yeah, I think he is a huge reason for that for sure.

And it was during the height of his NFL career that Eric Kramer starts becoming sort of a different person.

Listen, head trauma is a hell of a thing, and in Eric's life, violent hits to the head start young.

Looking back, it's hard to even calculate just how many times Eric is either hit in the head by another player or how many times his head actually hits the ground during a.

Tackle without having to go back and do all the resource.

I would say five hundred wouldn't seem like a lot.

Well, you're also talking during practices as well.

That's on a Jurgen.

She went to high school with Eric and she's known him and watched him play since they were both teenagers.

How many days of practice did you get in youth football, high school and stuff, but in college too during practices because you're trying, everyone's trying to make the team, so you're going to try extra hard, harder, and you're going to hit that ground.

And that's why I always kept saying, it wasn't the little concussions, it's that hits that when he fell to the ground, your neck hitting the ground, your neck head hit the ground.

I don't care if you have that helmet or not.

I would say it's well over two three thousand.

Three thousand hits to the head over a person's lifetime is inordinately damaging.

Not to mention, there's all kinds of ways for you heading to hit.

It could be slammed on the ground, it could be a helmet to helmet with somebody else.

It could be someone's nee to your head who's trying to jump over you but don't quite get over you.

There was only one time I was ever knocked out, and that was in high school playing safety, and my helmet while playing safety hit someone else on offense and I got knocked out.

So if you would have asked me ten years ago how many concussions you had, I said one.

But knowing what we know now and what constitutes a concussion, I would say many more than that.

And the cumulative effect of all those concussions and all that brain trauma sneaks up on Eric Kramer one day.

His brain just stops working right, and suddenly, for the first time in his life, depression hits him hard, seemingly out of nowhere.

Depression.

When it seizes you, it by definition dry you inward.

It does the opposite of what you would think.

It kind of takes your whole perspective of this era of view of your life and it shrinks it down into the size of a key hole.

And then sometimes there's not much light in there.

Now.

Eric Kramer has always been a fighter.

He's always persevered through tough times, and he's always found victory on the other side.

Remember, this is a guy who after his team and his agent dump him and he has every reason in the world to wallow and self defeat and pity.

He gets up, dusts himself off, and makes personal phone calls to twenty eight different teams and actually gets picked up by one of them.

So Eric Kramer has a documented history of pushing through hard times.

But in nineteen ninety four, when he's playing for the Chicago Bears, something changes in Rik Kramer's brain.

I kind of lost this sense of I don't know purpose is the right word.

At this point.

Eric has sustained thousands of hits to the head over the years, playing football in high school and college, then playing for the New Orleans Saints, the Atlanta Falcons, the Calgary Stampeders, the Detroit Lions, and now playing for the Chicago Bears.

It's a tough hill to climb, and now the whole world's watching.

If you're told to walk across a line, right, you can do that, no problem.

But now you put that line up five hundred feet in the air and it's still the same line, but the consequence is all different if you misstep.

Eric had a bad game playing for the Bears against the Green Bay Packers, and he blamed himself for everything that went wrong in that game, and suddenly, through the lens of depression, that loss eclipses everything else in his world, and his outlook on life changes in that instant and things get really really dark.

I all of a sudden felt like, okay, here I was scrapping, scratching and clawing just to even be here.

Well, now I am here, and now I'm not even holding up my end of the bargain, and so coming in every day was just strange in that way, and it was hard for me to walk around with much confidence, knowing that I was brought in here to do something that I'm now no longer doing, and even one I was doing it, I wasn't doing it all that well, and so I think that's when it first sort of struck me as that feeling of anxiousness, you know, like, h do I have to look people in the eye to day?

And then eventually that led to me not even want to get out of bed.

And that's the first experience I'd ever had with feeling that way.

But it doesn't go away.

So it's not like, oh, it's here today and then I'll sleep it off.

He'll be gone tomorrow.

No, No, it's here for day and then another, and then another in a week, and then another week.

Maybe it's here for good and this is how I'm going to go to the rest of my life.

That's the first time I'd ever experienced anything like that, And so it was hard.

It was just it was hard to be anywhere.

It was hard to be anywhere that wasn't bad.

Even bed didn't feel good, eating didn't feel good.

Nothing, no conversation.

It's not like somebody could say, hey, Eric, here's something to think about.

This will make you feel better.

Nope, I didn't have me.

That was back in nineteen ninety four.

Eric would start battling depression on and off for the next twenty years, sometimes through counseling and medication, Eric's depression gets better and everything seems to be going okay.

But a series of unforeseen tragic events pushes Eric Kramer to the brink, and he finds himself sitting in a motel room the good night in with a loaded gun pointing to his head.

The thought of him taking his life didn't even never even cross my mind.

When Eric Kramer pulls the trigger that day back in August of twenty fifteen, the bullet explodes out of that gun, rips through his skull, and comes out the other end.

There's blood everywhere, on the wall, on the bed, on the nightstand.

There are chunks of flesh and bones strown all over.

Parts of Eric Kramer's head are literally blown off.

But here's the thing.

Eric shockingly survives, and that actually creates a unique opportunity for a crafty con woman to insert herself into Eric's life and rob him blind.

There's eighty pictures or so of her at the ATM machine in a two month time.

Span with his ATM card.

His ATM card.

To check out the next episode, just search the Quarterback and the con Artist anywhere you get your podcasts and subscribe and click play.

Episode two is streaming right now.

Thanks for listening.