It was August 26 2011 when Brittany Phillips used a laptop to access an online true crime forum called Dreamin’ Demon.
She wound up finding a post about Emily McDonald, a 23-year-old mom from Austin who, four months earlier, had been sentenced to 20 years in prison for poisoning her daughter by smearing human feces on her IV catheter.
Two minutes after landing on this disturbing story, she embarked on a chilling research project, googling queries including ‘poop in feeding tube,’ ‘poop in IV line’ and ‘pee in veins.’
The alarming internet searches were ultimately traced back to the wifi at Cook Children’s Medical Center in Fort Worth, Texas, where – at that exact moment in time – Phillips was playing the doting mom, sitting by her sick three-year-old daughter Alyssa’s bedside.
While the toddler lay in a hospital bed suffering from apparent dehydration, her mom was plotting out her next sickening plan to poison her.
Hours later, Alyssa would develop a rare and extremely dangerous blood infection caused by her mom placing feces into her IV or feeding tube – an infection that, without the rapid intervention of doctors at the hospital, could have led to the little girl suffering heart failure, a stroke, and even death.
Alyssa was being abused.
For the past three years, Phillips had been intentionally making her healthy daughter sick.
She had systematically starved the little girl and forced her to eat through a feeding tube. Alyssa had never needed the tube, but Phillips tricked doctors into giving her the unnecessary surgery.
Then, in a move to make her daughter sicker as she lay in hospital, Phillips had copied the depraved tactics of another mom and poisoned the little girl with deadly bacteria including E.Coli by placing feces in her IV or feeding tube.
Theirs is a horrific, twisted tale of Munchausen syndrome by proxy, also known as medical child abuse or a factitious disorder, where a caretaker fakes, exaggerates and even causes illness in their own child for the purpose of getting attention or some other benefit.
It’s a tale in which the abuser’s desperate craving for attention from an online community of moms ultimately helped prove her guilt, and one where chilling questions still linger to this day about the mysterious, sudden death of her own mother.
Mike Weber, a now-retired Tarrant County investigator who was working on Phillips’ case, tells the Daily Mail her actions were straight out of the medical child abuse ‘playbook.’
‘They all go online and find things that are hard to medically test for, meaning doctors have to rely on the parent for the child’s symptoms and medical history to know how to treat them,’ he says.
‘I used to think these abusers all shared the same playbook for this. Then I realized how easy it is to do.’
Weber dedicated much of his law enforcement career to medical child abuse cases and now presents his experience nationally to police, Child Protective Services (CPS) and medical and other authorities.
He is shining a spotlight on this rare form of child abuse and the Phillips case in his new book, The Mother Next Door: Medicine, Deception and Munchausen by Proxy, with co-author Andrea Dunlop.
This story started to unravel at a family party, when Bill and Laura Waybourn first noticed something disturbing about the way Phillips, their distant relative, was treating her young daughter.
Phillips had recently moved with Alyssa back to Fort Worth from Illinois so that she could care for her own mother, Melinda, who had chronic pulmonary disease, arthritis, kidney failure and diabetes.
At the party, the Waybourns noticed Alyssa was wearing leg restraints but was able to run around the home without any issue.
The young girl wasn’t allowed to eat – Phillips warned anyone who would listen that she would choke if she ate by mouth. Yet, when her mom’s back was turned, they saw Alyssa sneaking food and devouring it. Not only was she chowing down without issue, but she consumed with such fervor that it looked like she hadn’t eaten in a long time.
‘We witnessed her eat a piece of cake and she didn’t choke at all. She appeared to be very hungry,’ Bill Waybourn, a Tarrant County sheriff, tells the Daily Mail.
At the time, Waybourn says he wasn’t familiar with Munchausen syndrome by proxy. But his wife, a CPS worker, was.
‘She was suspicious. She got a close-up look at Alyssa and felt like something wasn’t right,’ he says.
‘But nobody had any idea what was really going on behind the scenes, which was actually torturous.’
In August 2011, just a few weeks after that family party, Phillips took Alyssa to Cook’s hospital, saying she had dehydration.
That was just the latest of countless hospital visits Alyssa had undergone by the time she was three. She had spent much of her life in hospitals, and was worryingly underweight and short for her age.
Despite concerned friends and family filing several reports to CPS over the years, it was this visit that set off alarm bells with hospital staff.
That day, Phillips repeatedly tried to stop Alyssa from eating, claiming she would choke, despite medical staff observing otherwise. She was aggressive and rude, and she piled blankets on her daughter then claimed she had a fever. She appeared to paint Alyssa’s mouth blue and then claimed she was alarmingly cold.
Then, Phillips suddenly demanded blood tests on her daughter.
Those blood tests then revealed the life-threatening infection that doctors determined had to have been caused by the three-year-old being poisoned.
Fearing Phillips was abusing her child, Alyssa was moved to a room with a surveillance camera.
When she spotted it, Phillips was furious – but mysteriously, under the watchful eye of a camera, Alyssa rapidly began to get better.
Alyssa was taken out of Phillips’ care and an investigation was launched. After a brief stint in foster care, the Waybourns took the little girl into their home – later adopting her.
No one could believe quite how remarkable Alyssa’s sudden recovery was as soon as she was free from her mom’s clutches.
‘Alyssa had been emaciated. She was starving,’ Waybourn recalls. ‘Then she began to flourish.’
In no time at all, the three-year-old was running around like any other kid her age.
The leg restraints she had been forced to wear for so long were gone, as was the feeding tube that had been inserted into her stomach.
She was healthily putting on weight, no longer painfully thin.
‘We saw tremendous improvements immediately,’ Waybourn adds. ‘She started eating by mouth everything in sight. The doctors were blown away by how well she was doing.
‘They had been lied to – and by a very good liar.’
Over time, the Waybourns noticed trauma manifesting in Alyssa’s behavior.
‘She was really protective of her food. If she had a plate of food and got down from the table for a minute and came back and the plate was gone, she would be extremely upset,’ Waybourn recalls.
‘She also had a funny gait where she would walk on her toes. We had to coach her out of doing that, to walk on her whole foot.’
Alyssa’s reaction to medical staff and treatments was also telling.
‘If you took her to a doctor or a pediatrician – even for something small like an earache – she would just totally freeze up,’ he says. ‘Those were all things we saw in the beginning. That went on for a long time.’
Waybourn says a ‘big fear’ for him and Laura was that Phillips would try to regain custody of Alyssa.
In the early days, she had been allowed visits, during which she continued to try to harm her daughter.
Waybourn recalls one time when Phillips gave Alyssa some new toys, and then the little girl suddenly developed an awful rash.
‘We believe she put something on the toys,’ he says.
After that, Phillips was barred from further contact with her daughter.
Alyssa later confided in the Waybourns, telling them her mom used to pull her feeding tube out and put it back in again.
‘She would torture her like that for no reason,’ Waybourn says.
‘Alyssa also remembers her mother coaching her to act like she was choking in the doctor’s office.’
When the case finally landed on Weber’s desk, he had already investigated other instances of medical child abuse and was fast becoming an expert.
Through his investigation, Weber soon learned how the internet and social media had provided both the means and reward for Phillips to commit her crimes.
She used it to easily research medical conditions, and then again to gain the attention she craved through online communities.
Weber found pages upon pages of Phillips’ online research into the illnesses and symptoms she then tried to manufacture in Alyssa.
He also found she had joined an online community of moms where she constantly documented Alyssa’s medical history. Other moms in the group told Weber about Phillips’ habit of one-upmanship when it came to their children’s illnesses.
‘The internet makes it very easy to commit these types of crimes these days,’ Weber explains.
‘Back in the ’90s, usually offenders would be someone with a connection to the medical field as they need to have some knowledge of health issues to be able to fake them and actually cause illnesses in their child.
‘But now, it’s only a Google search away… And it not only gives you the ability to commit the crime, but it has now put the reward at your fingertips through social media and the attention you can get from there – people telling you, “You’re a savior mom, a heroic mom”.’
But, it was that same online footprint that ultimately exposed her prolific abuse and led to her downfall.
‘Her laptop was a goldmine,’ Weber says.
The investigator was able to compare Alyssa’s medical records to the version of the illnesses Phillips was documenting online.
One of the most disturbing inconsistencies was that there was no record of a medical professional ever fitting Alyssa with a feeding tube through her nose – a separate tube from the one doctors placed in her stomach.
Weber says the tube had mysteriously appeared when Alyssa and Phillips were going to a family event.
A chilling theory emerged for Weber: ‘She placed it in Alyssa herself. We were never able to prove it but I believe she did.’
One thing he did find evidence of, through Phillips’ internet history, was that she was responsible for causing the potentially deadly blood infection in August 2011.
And, during his investigation into her abuse of Alyssa, Weber came across something else unexpected – and potentially even more disturbing – indicating quite how far Phillips would go.
One day, a mom named Heather who was part of Phillips’ online community had shared a post about her own mother being sick.
Mere hours later, Heather told investigators she received a frantic phone call from Phillips saying that her own mom Melinda was having a cardiac event and she thought she was dying.
While on the phone, Phillips claimed she was doing CPR and that an ambulance was on its way.
Heather told Weber she found it bizarre that in the middle of what was supposedly a matter of life and death, Phillips was on the phone with her, regaling the drama.
During the call, Phillips also made a chilling comment that stuck with Heather: She said that if her mom died, her brothers would blame her.
That night, Melinda died.
Weber says he learned Melinda’s family had been concerned as soon as Phillips said she was moving to Texas to care for her.
Then, in the months she had been in Phillips’ care, Melinda’s health rapidly deteriorated and she had complained to her other children about living in squalor.
When their matriarch died, Phillips’ family instantly feared the unthinkable.
‘There was definitely suspicion that she had killed her mom,’ Weber says.
Adding to his fear were clues that Phillips had been giving Melinda’s much-needed insulin to little Alyssa.
When Weber learned about this bizarre set of circumstances and that no autopsy was carried out on Melinda’s body, he urged the medical examiner’s office to review the case and exhume her corpse.
‘They said no. They wouldn’t even look at it,’ he says. ‘I had my suspicions but I didn’t have the probable cause to do anything about it.’
The Daily Mail has contacted the Tarrant County Medical Examiner’s Office for comment.
Phillips never faced any charges in connection to her mom’s death. But, she was hit with charges for abusing little Alyssa.
Alyssa was seven years old when she took the stand and testified against her abusive mother at a 2015 trial.
Clutching a soft toy, the little girl lifted her shirt to show jurors the scars she still bore on her stomach from the unnecessary feeding tube surgery.
Waybourn says it was a very difficult decision to put the little girl on the witness stand.
‘We had a lot of conversations around that. We wanted to be protective of her but at the same time we wanted the truth to be told,’ he says.
In the end, his and Laura’s fears were unfounded as Waybourn says something ‘quite amazing’ happened when Alyssa entered the courtroom and took the stand: She didn’t recognize the woman staring at her from the defense table.
‘It had been almost five years since she had seen her mother. And we just think God masked her eyes so she didn’t have to go through that,’ Waybourn says.
‘And 10 years later, Alyssa is very proud of herself for testifying, so I think it was a great idea, in retrospect.’
But despite the testimony straight from the mouth of the young victim, the jury was hung 11-1 and a mistrial was declared.
Soon after, in exchange for a five-year prison sentence, Phillips pleaded guilty to serious bodily injury to a child.
To Weber, it was a positive outcome – something he says is rare in medical child abuse cases due to a lack of knowledge among CPS, law enforcement and the wider judicial system.
Waybourn speaks of the pride he has for his adopted daughter, now 17.
‘She has thrived and thrived, and I know she will continue to do so,’ he says proudly.
‘She’s a great student. She loves to sing, she’s great at martial arts.’
Despite her young age, Alyssa is even fighting to protect other children – hoping to prevent others from going through what she did.
As it currently stands, there is no specific crime for medical child abuse in Texas, so police have to use other criminal charges.
Weber and the Waybourns have been pushing to address this with a change dubbed Alyssa’s Law.
In 2022, Alyssa testified before state lawmakers about her own harrowing experience, and Waybourn says she is prepared to do it again to help others.
‘Alyssa is not a victim,’ Waybourn says. ‘She is a thriving little woman and I couldn’t be more proud of her.’
In April 2022, a couple of years after she was released from prison, Phillips was found dead from an apparent overdose. Waybourn will never forget Alyssa’s reaction when he and Laura told her.
‘She was a little bit teary eyed at first,’ he says. ‘[But it was clear that] the burden had been lifted off her. The fear that Brittany would show back up in her life and hurt her was gone.
‘She wanted some time alone in her room. Then she came back out and she announced: “I’m free, I’m free at last”.’