Doctor’s Accusers Deny They’re Vengeful : Probe: Two former employees of deceased physician explain why they reported Orville J. Stone’s actions to the state medical board.

Two former employees of a dermatologist who accused him of faking cancer diagnoses denied Friday that they were ever vengeful or fired for shabby job performances as claimed by the doctor’s lawyer and family.

On Dec. 4, the day after the Medical Board of California informed Dr. Orville J. Stone that he was under investigation, the 61-year-old doctor walked across a freeway into the path of a big-rig truck and was killed. The coroner’s office this week ruled his death a suicide. His lawyer and family, however, contend that it was accidental.

They also contend that allegations of medical misconduct against Stone were concocted by disgruntled employees who had been fired. At the time of the firing, one of the employees said “she was going to get Dr. Stone,” Stone’s family attorney, Gary B. Ross, said Friday.

In an interview in Cypress, Vickey Pinkerton and Kay Lynn, two of five former employees who filed affidavits with the medical board last month, denied having a vendetta against Stone and disputed that they were fired because of poor performance.

Pinkerton, 38, said she quit her job as office manager in August after Stone, in a fit of temper, grabbed her and then struck her in the arm. Lynn, 41, said she and two other employees were laid off and were told that it was because Stone wanted a new staff to oversee his new office operation.

“We wanted to keep the investigation quiet; we would never have talked about it to anyone but the board investigators if (Stone’s family) had not told everybody that we were fired because we couldn’t do our work effectively,” Lynn said.

The investigation began last month when Pinkerton, Lynn and three other former employees contacted the medical board with their suspicion that Stone was faking skin cancer diagnoses to increase his fees.

The affidavits of the women outline the following allegations: Stone was hoarding cancerous tissue or moles in bottles, which he placed in a drawer in his office. Then, he made diagnoses of skin cancer in healthy patients, telling them it could be removed by a simple procedure. The doctor then switched the healthy skin tissue with the cancerous samples from the bottles and sent them to a lab for analysis. When the lab confirmed the diagnoses, Stone then removed the “cancer” from the patient.

Stone charged between $50 and $60 to remove a benign growth and between $150 and $300 to remove a cancerous growth, Pinkerton and Lynn said. The surgical procedures are identical.

The former employees said they became suspicious of Stone earlier this year when one of the nurses showed them a drawer full of bottles containing cancerous tissue in Stone’s private office. The bottles were marked by the doctor, and some of the markings were on stickers placed over other stickers, they said.

Steve Rhoten, the medical board investigator, this week declined to discuss what the former employees told him but said he believed that their claims were credible.

The question may never be answered, because the medical board probably will end the investigation now that Stone has died, Rhoten said.