A Doctor to Die For: The Sarah Harris Story (Studio TF1 America, Novus, Reel One Entertainment, Lifetime, 2026)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2026 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night (Saturday, October 3) my husband Charles and I watched a Lifetime movie called A Doctor to Die For: The Sarah Harris Story, based on a true-life murder case in Maryland near Washington, D.C. in the early 2020’s. The victim was a young woman named Sarah Harris (Siobhan Williams) and her killer was her doctor turned employer turned boyfriend, Dr. James Ryan (Luke Macfarlane, who’d previously played a hot stud turned killer in a 2023 Lifetime true-crime movie called Amish Stud: The Eli Weaver Story, which I reviewed for the moviemagg blog at https://moviemagg.blogspot.com/2023/10/amish-stud-eli-weaver-story-milojo.html). Dr. Ryan was a specialist in what’s called “oral and maxillofacial surgery” (the word “maxillofacial” has long confused me; the Cleveland Clinic Web site says it “refers to operations on your mouth, jaws, neck or face” and it’s a specialty within dentistry), and Sarah Harris was a woman in her early 20’s who was living with her mother Tina and older sister Rachel, went in to see Dr. Ryan to have her wisdom teeth removed. (Neither of the actresses playing Tina or Rachel are yet identified on imdb.com, more’s the pity because they’re the two strongest players in the film.) Director Siobhan Devine (I can remember when the first name “Siobhan” was so weird it was worth notice, but here’s a film in which both the director and the female lead are Siobhans) subtly hints that Dr. Ryan’s interest in Sarah is more than professional by having him stroke the side of her face. Dr. Ryan, who in real life was twice Sarah’s age and already had three children by a previous wife before their divorce, already has a woman assistant but decides he needs another one. He invites Sarah to apply despite her lack of any relevant experience, and within a week he’s taking her out on dates, inviting her to his home, and romancing her in every way he can. Mom Tina is put out by this, especially since Sarah already has an age-peer boyfriend named Sean (whom we don’t meet until the very end of the film, after Sarah is already dead), but it’s clear mom likes him a lot better than Sarah does and Sarah breaks up with him to be with Dr. Ryan.

Midway through the story Sarah enters and wins a “Miss Maryland Petite Pageant” beauty contest in 2020 (though according to an Arts & Entertainment article on the actual events surrounding the case, at https://www.aetv.com/articles/sarah-harris-james-ryan-dentist-drugs, that was also the year she met Dr. Ryan). Actually Dr. Ryan had been stalking her earlier; at 15 he’d regularly eaten at a local pizza restaurant where she was working as a server, and deliberately sat in her section whenever possible so she would wait on him. (This sounds an awful lot like Lolita and Humbert Humbert to me.) Within weeks of their getting involved, Sarah started confessing her mental issues to Dr. Ryan, notably anxiety and difficulty sleeping, and he began raiding his medical cabinet for controlled substances including diazepam, ketamine, and propofol. (I remember going in for surgery and being told that the anesthetic they would use on me would be propofol. I immediately thought, “Oh, shit; that’s the stuff that killed Michael Jackson.”) Dr. Ryan would feed her these substances not only orally but intravenously, and within months of her moving in with him their home looked like the scene of a wild drug party even though it was just the two of them. Mom Tina and sister Rachel, who had her own mental issues – Rachel’s boyfriend had killed himself in front of her – went to see Sarah and saw the condition of her home. They took her home despite her reluctance to go with them. Rachel also used her smartphone to take a video of the scene and various still pictures of all the drugs Dr. Ryan was giving Sarah, making sure that the labels identifying what they were were clearly in the shot. At one point Dr. Ryan invited all three Harrises to join him on a vacation in Florida, but Sarah was so far gone into the drugs Dr. Ryan had put her on she spent virtually all the vacation in her hotel room, mostly sleeping or whining about how she didn’t want to go out in the sun. There was another Harris child, son Chris, who’d moved to Montana and periodically contacted them by phone but declined their invitations for him to come visit them. (When I saw Chris I assumed at first that he was Rachel’s and Sarah’s father until the dialogue clarified their true relationship. The father’s name was Mark, but it’s not clear either from Barbara Marshall’s script or the A&E article cited above what had happened between him and Tina or whether they had divorced or he’d died.)

Unfortunately, Chris dies in Montana of a sudden heart attack and so Tina has the uncomfortable experience of having to bury one of her children even before Dr. Ryan’s antics with Sarah cause her to croak, too. Tina and Rachel manage to get Sarah out of Dr. Ryan’s clutches, get her off the drugs and nurse her back to health, but Dr. Ryan tricks her into returning to him by threatening to commit suicide if she doesn’t. It all ends on January 26, 2022, when Dr. Ryan calls 911 to report that his girlfriend Sarah Harris has had a drug overdose. Tina and Rachel go to Sarah’s home and insist to the police detective on the scene, Ian Iacovello, that Dr. Ryan was responsible for Sarah’s death. Iacovello initially blows it off by saying that he needs “proof” that Sarah’s death wasn’t just the accidental overdose of a long-time addict. While Rachel still has the photos of Dr. Ryan’s drugs on her phone, she and Tina realize they need more evidence and find it on Sarah’s old laptop, which Dr. Ryan had thrown in the trash. Tina and Rachel recover it and then have to guess Sarah’s password, which turns out to be “WINSTON2000” – Winston being a rather homely black dog Tina and Rachel had bought Sarah hoping that having a pet would help bring her back to normality. Rachel opens Sarah’s computer and prints out 200 pages of text messages between Sarah and Dr. Ryan that prove he was distributing drugs to her illegally. Iacovello carefully questions Rachel and Tina to make sure they didn’t break the law themselves in collecting the evidence against Dr. Ryan. They assure him that the first time they entered the home Sarah herself had let them in, and the second time (after the O.D.) they’d used a key Dr. Ryan had given them and grabbed the laptop from the trash outside the house. Accordingly the police arrest Dr. Ryan. For a moment I was expecting Barbara Marshall would have them make the arrest at Sarah’s funeral (where we finally get to meet Sean, the age-peer boyfriend Sarah dumped for Dr. Ryan) in classic Law and Order style, but instead they take Dr. Ryan into custody at his dental office, which is almost as embarrassing. He was charged under a rarely used legal statute called “depraved-heart homicide,” which meant that the prosecution didn’t have to prove that Dr. Ryan deliberately killed Sarah, just that he provided her with drugs that could have killed her and ultimately did. “We have to prove that he did it with reckless disregard for the value of her life,” prosecutor Jennifer Harrison told 48 Hours for their true-crime episode on the case. A Doctor to Die For: The Sarah Harris Story was a better-than-average Lifetime movie, but I missed any explanation for why the relationship between Dr. Ryan and Sarah lasted as long as it did. Why did Sarah stay with Dr. Ryan so long, and what did Dr. Ryan get out of a relationship with a woman whom he was literally drugging into a stupor? I kept wishing Barbara Marshall had attempted to explain those troublesome aspects of the case, and without those insights A Doctor to Die For was a powerful story but one that could have been better with more thought in the writing.