Inside a shocking case of Munchausen by proxy: How Hope Ybarra poisoned and bled her child to make her sick

For eight years, Hope Ybarra had bravely battled a rare and aggressive form of bone cancer… but all was not as it seemed.

The mom-of-three had gone through numerous, grueling treatments including a bout of radiation that caused her to lose twin girls in the sixth month of pregnancy.

She had lost her hearing after the cancer spread to her brain and lungs.

And she had valiantly juggled her own illness with being the primary carer for her sick five-year-old daughter, who suffered various health issues including cystic fibrosis and anemia.

Ybarra had shared her family’s heart-wrenching story through her online blog and played an active role in fundraisers, appearing on local TV in Texas and in news articles.

Then in 2009, in her early 30s, she learned there was nothing more that doctors could do.

She planned her funeral with her family, going with her mom to pick out a casket, and she and her husband sat down with their three young children and told them they would soon have to say goodbye to their mom.

Except it all turned out to be a lie.

Ybarra didn’t have cancer. She never did.

She had also never been pregnant with twin girls. She wasn’t deaf.

And, most shockingly, her young daughter didn’t have cystic fibrosis.

Over the coming months it would emerge that, as well as faking her own illness, she had faked her daughter’s too – and had actually deliberately made the little girl sick.

Hope had poisoned the five-year-old with pathogens stolen from the lab where she worked (after faking a PhD in chemistry), used salt to alter sweat tests to give the false impression she had cystic fibrosis, and drained blood out of the child so she appeared to have anemia.

Rather than this being a tragic story of a mother’s heroic plight against her own and her child’s health issues, this was a horrific story about a mother’s years-long abuse of her own child.

Munchausen by proxy, also known as medical child abuse or a factitious disorder, is a ‘rare form of abuse involving the persistent fabrication of physical or mental illness in a child by an adult,’ according to the American Academy of Pediatrics.

It involves a parent – in 96 percent of cases a mother – faking, exaggerating and even causing illness in their own child for the purpose of getting attention or some other benefit. It often results in the child receiving unnecessary, sometimes dangerous, medical care.

It’s an issue that now-retired Tarrant County investigator Mike Weber dedicated much of his law enforcement career to and which he and author Andrea Dunlop shine a spotlight on in their new book ‘The Mother Next Door: Medicine, Deception and Munchausen by Proxy,’ out on February 4.

Ybarra’s was the first medical child abuse case Weber ever worked on.

‘She seemed like a normal, everyday, next door neighbor mom,’ he tells DailyMail.com, of the first time he met her.

‘There was nothing that stood out about her at all in any type of criminal way. She presented very well, she was very smart, very articulate.’

He could see how she had managed to fool so many people.

‘She had the power of motherhood, she came from a good family, had a loving husband and a lot of people would see that. But I was not going to be manipulated by her,’ he says.

‘What struck me was just the amount of lying that Hope was able to do without anyone having any suspicions. And these lies went far beyond lies about the health of her child.’

It was not long after Ybarra’s apparent terminal diagnosis when her mom Susan received a call from her doctor saying they couldn’t find any records of her cancer and asking for information about her previous doctors.

Susan searched for the information but found nothing. She then logged into the family’s medical insurance and found there wasn’t a single record of her daughter ever having had cancer.

Ybarra’s web of lies began to fall apart.

When confronted by her mom, Ybarra admitted she’d spent the last eight years lying about having cancer, even shaving her head to fake chemotherapy treatment.

This bombshell revelation then led to questions about Ybarra’s daughter’s diagnosis.

Cystic fibrosis, a life-threatening genetic disorder which can cause breathing and digestion problems as well as high risk of infections, is diagnosed with a sweat test – which measures the amount of chloride in sweat. In those with the condition, the level is abnormally high.

‘It’s very easy to fake that test by placing salt on the skin,’ explains Weber.

With suspicions mounting, the five-year-old girl was brought in for a new test.

Child specialists stayed in the room the whole time and witnessed Ybarra trying to interfere with the test and trying to take her daughter into the bathroom alone with her, Weber explains.

She was prevented from doing so and the test came back negative, confirming that the child did not have cystic fibrosis after all.

Weber began digging further and the web of deception continued to balloon.

Quickly, he learned Ybarra had also lied about having a PhD – a claim that had landed her a job at a chemistry lab and given her access to various drugs.

Recently, Ybarra’s employees had grown suspicious of her scientific experience as well as her behaviors in the workplace. They told police she had been caught ordering two pathogens no longer used by the lab and that there was no record of where they had then gone.

When the HR manager launched an investigation, she suddenly became violently ill. A test of her water bottle came back positive for one of those two missing pathogens, Pseudomonas aeruginosa.

Pseudomonas aeruginosa also happened to be a common bacteria found in those with cystic fibrosis.

Weber says he got a list of all nine pathogens Ybarra had access to at the lab and checked if any had been found in Ybarra’s daughter’s system.

He soon learned that the little girl had tested positive several times for Pseudomonas aeruginosa. Three of the other pathogens had also been found in her blood.

‘So I began to suspect that she was poisoning her child. I didn’t know how at the time,’ he says. (Ybarra later admitted she had added the pathogen to her daughter’s breathing treatments.)

Weber then uncovered evidence that the little girl’s anemia had been caused by Ybarra intentionally draining blood from her.

In one especially dangerous incident, this anemia diagnosis led to the little girl being given a treatment that prompted an allergic reaction, sending her into anaphylactic shock. Doctors intervened quickly and the five-year-old survived.

The challenge with cases like Ybarra’s is that there are no laws specific to this form of abuse anywhere in the US, explains Weber.

‘In my state [Texas], you go to the doctor and lie to get drugs for yourself – that’s a crime. But if you go to the doctor and lie to get drugs for your kid that’s not a crime,’ he says.

‘This type of child abuse is the easiest way to commit child abuse and get away with it.’

As well as a lack of specific laws, Weber says there is a huge knowledge gap for medical child abuse among various authorities including law enforcement, child protective services and the judicial system.

This is why Weber is pushing for the passage of a new state law, titled HB 1984, which would make it a crime to ‘misrepresent medical history to obtain unnecessary medical treatment for a child, elderly individual, or disabled individual’.

As it stands, Weber says ‘we have to shoehorn this into other laws’.

In Ybarra’s case, the blood draining and subsequent anaphylactic shock enabled authorities to charge the mom-of-three with serious bodily injury to a child.

She was arrested in October 2009 and ultimately pleaded guilty in exchange for a 10-year prison sentence. Her daughter made a full recovery.

Dunlop sees a lot of parallels between Ybarra’s case and her own personal experience with Munchausen by proxy.

She tells DailyMail.com that her older, now estranged, sister has been investigated twice by authorities for medical child abuse. She has never been criminally charged.

‘It blew my family apart,’ she says.

Back then, Dunlop said she was only really familiar with the term Munchausen by proxy through a couple of cultural references in the movie ‘The Sixth Sense’ and the Eminem song ‘Cleanin’ Out My Closet.’

‘We never knew anyone else who had gone through it so it was extremely isolating and traumatic,’ she says.

Since then, she has spent years researching Munchausen by proxy, raised awareness through her books and podcast, and created resources for affected families through her non-profit Munchausen Support.

Dunlop interviewed Ybarra for her podcast ‘Nobody Should Believe Me’ following her release from prison in 2019.

Ten years had passed since Ybarra’s abuse had been exposed but Dunlop says ‘the manipulation and deception was all still there’.

‘She said a lot of what sounded like the right thing. She said she was remorseful and she said she loved her children,’ Dunlop says.

‘And at the same time she was being deceptive in that interview. She was saying she couldn’t hear which I knew was not true – she’s not deaf. And she said she didn’t remember what she had done. She had this language like ‘well that’s what the doctor said I did so that must be what I did’ as though she wasn’t there when it was happening.’

Dunlop describes Ybarra as ‘a mastermind’ in child medical abuse and says she never saw any genuine remorse for the years of abuse she had inflicted on her daughter.

‘I think a lot of Hope’s pain was about how this has affected her,’ Dunlop says.

‘She is sad that her family don’t talk to her anymore. She’s sad that her life isn’t what it once was but in terms of genuine remorse, I don’t think it was that as I don’t think she genuinely acknowledged what she had done.’

One thing that was especially telling was that Dunlop offered to connect Ybarra with professionals who could provide her with treatment. Ybarra never took her up on the offer.

Though shocking, Ybarra’s case is far from unique.

Weber has worked on at least 30 cases of medical child abuse in his law enforcement career in Texas and says it is far more common than people realize. Between 2019 and the end of 2024, Tarrant County arrested 12 suspects on suspicion of this type of abuse.

And, he explains, there is a pattern among cases. The abuser is almost always the mother, the perpetrator often fakes an illness in themselves as well as their child, and the child is described as having ailments that are typically difficult to medically test for, meaning medical professionals have to rely more heavily on parents’ accounts of their child’s symptoms.

‘You think you’ve seen all the weirdness with the Ybarra case then once you get into these cases you see a pattern and you see that there’s no limit to what these offenders will do to get their child diagnosed with something,’ Weber says.

But there’s one big question that constantly lingers over cases like Ybarra’s: Why? What motive would a mother have for pretending their child was ill – especially to such an extent that they would actually intentionally make their child sick?

‘To know why you’d have to trust the offender’s explanation,’ Weber says.

‘And several of these offenders have said that they are pathological liars. So the why is the mystery. Is it money? Is it something just intrinsic? Pretty much every case I’ve had there has been an attention-seeking element to the case and there’s also been a money motivator like fundraising. But what also comes with fundraising? People saying “Oh, you’re such a good mom.”’

He adds: ‘With Hope, I really believe she gets an intrinsic thrill out of fooling people, especially people she perceives as smarter than herself. That’s my personal belief on her motivation.’

Dunlop says ‘it does seem that lying is the point’ in some cases: ‘Lying is the weapon of choice and it’s the work in and of itself.’

Both Weber and Dunlop say that there is a lot of misinformation about medical child abuse, which often reduces the abuser’s actions to a product of mental illness.

Munchausen by proxy offenders are not delusional and they are not hypochondriacs, according to Munchausen Support: ‘This abuse is characterized by intentional deception, and perpetrators have a profound lack of empathy for their victims.’

‘Mu understanding of it has evolved a lot,’ says Dunlop.

‘While there is often a psychiatric disorder there, this is not someone who is suffering from delusions. It is premeditated and it’s a form of abuse. They know what they’re doing. It’s not something where people are not culpable for their actions.’

Weber says: ‘Every expert will agree this is first and foremost child abuse. They know what they’re doing is wrong.’

But, despite what professionals have found, society views medical child abuse in a different light to other forms of child abuse such as sexual abuse, he says.

‘I think that speaks to the power of motherhood. We as a society do not want to believe a mother could do this to a child,’ Weber says.

‘We don’t say dad sexually assaulted a girl because of his [mental health]. We don’t say that because we’ve learned that, yes there may be a psychological disorder there, but, first and foremost, this person committed a crime and consciously made the decision to do this.’

Despite the difference in perception, Weber says he has seen a lot of similarities between child sexual abusers and child medical abusers in the cases he has worked – from the grooming of the victim to the offender’s public image and their behaviors when they get caught.

‘They present no differently than any other child abuser when they’re in a police interview,’ he says.

‘They lie at first… then you might get some admission… You never get the full story from them… because they know what they’ve done is wrong so they try to hide it. And that is every medical abuse interview I’ve ever done and every child sexual assault interview I’ve ever done.’

He continues: ‘There’s a lot of commonalities with sexual abuse. There’s the same level of deception. And you also see the same grooming by the offender as [the child] gets older. In this abuse, they’re taught the only way to get love from their mother is to become sicker. It makes cases with teenagers a lot more difficult as they’ve been told their whole life they’re sick so they believe they’re sick and it’s their mother telling them this so why would they doubt it. They have no baseline for health, they don’t know what “well” is so of course they believe their parent who has been with them their entire life over doctors or police.’

Also adds: ‘Child sexual abuse doesn’t happen in public either. They often present very well in public and then they’re very different behind closed doors.’

Weber says it’s time to start seeing medical child abuse for what it really is – and make authorities and society more aware of this type of abuser.

‘I always tell investigators about these offenders: “If they tell you the sky is blue, you go outside and you look up,”’ he says.

‘As they will literally lie about anything.’