Addicted To Love

A Plastic Surgeon's Risky Affair With A Patient Turns Deadly

(CBS)  Things got so bad, that Koulis' parents intervened and came to take him to rehab. Lesa stayed behind.

Lesa's mother Peggy says she will never forget the condition in which she found her daughter. "It was the most horrific sight I'd ever seen in my life," Peggy says. "Bottles, syringes, blood on the floor. They had her on a mattress on the floor of the basement. She was completely incoherent."

Peggy says she and a friend quickly scooped up some of the drugs, and rushed Lesa to the hospital.

Bobby Pate of the Boone County sheriff's office was assigned to investigate. "She was injected in both hands, in the arms, the groin area and in the feet. They were infected, and her hands and feet were probably about twice the size as normal," Pate says.

Pate met with Lesa at the hospital and says she accused Koulis of injecting her against her will. "There were times where he chased her around the room to get her a shot when she didn’t want one," Pate says. "And that he called her a hypochondriac cause she was complaining about the infections and sores and stuff and he shot her up some more."

At Koulis' trial, Helper confronts the doctor about the earlier Kentucky incident.

"She was in pretty bad shape when you left, is that true?" Helper asks.

"No ma'am. She was walking, talking, lucid," Koulis replies. "We had breakfast. She said goodbye to me at the door. I didn’t just leave her in the basement and leave. That's a mischaracterization."

Maybe so, but Kentucky authorities arrested him anyway on several serious charges, including drug trafficking.

Lesa gave authorities a handwritten letter she'd received from Koulis after he entered rehab. In it, he takes the full blame for getting her hooked on pain killers: supplying them, injecting her, and admitting she had no prior history of drug abuse before they met. But it wasn't enough to convict him.

Lesa's family believes he scared her out of testifying against him. They said he convinced her she was also in trouble and could lose custody of her daughter.

"Christ just absolutely convinced her she could lose Jesse and that the police were lying to her and the D.A. was lying to her and no matter what she believed him. I think the fear was so real," Tara says.

Koulis denies he made any threats, but Lesa stopped cooperating. The case against him collapsed. Koulis ended up pleading guilty to just one of the 20 drug charges and was given probation, no prison time. And within a short time he was back to practicing medicine again.

"What happened in 2002, that was horrific. We went to hell and back. She did and I did," he says.

But despite that hell, Lesa could not let go of Koulis. For her family, it was difficult to accept. "You just don't understand why, why she was listening to him," Tara says.

With jurors listening intently, Koulis accepts blame for introducing Lesa to illegal drug use. "I don't know what I was thinking. That was wrong. I shouldn't have done it. I shouldn't have done it to me, and I certainly sure as hell not have done it to her," he says in court. "I was responsible. I felt responsible."