ANGELS OF DEATH: THE FEMALE NURSES

The Malignant Hero

Every parent's worst nightmare is entrusting his or her child into the care of a person who intends it harm.� Few people would ever suspect that someone who enters the healing profession and swears on the nurse's oath would rather see children die than be healthy.� It took a lengthy investigation, breaking through walls of professional denial, and the near-destruction of a doctor's career before the truth about this malicious caregiver was discovered.

In 1982, Dr. Kathleen Holland opened a pediatrics clinic in Kerrville, Texas.� Needing help, she hired a licensed vocational nurse named Genene Ann Jones, who had recently resigned from the Bexar County Medical Center Hospital.� Many parents were happy to have this clinic available, but during a period of two months that first summer, seven different children succumbed to seizures while in Holland's office.� She transferred them by ambulance for treatment at Sid Peterson Hospital, never thinking the seizures were suspicious.� However, from the sheer numbers of children afflicted, the hospital staff thought something odd must be going on.�

They questioned Holland and she assured everyone that she was at a total loss as to why these children were suffering at her clinic.� At least they'd all recovered.� But then one of them, 15-month-old Chelsea McClellan, died while en route from the clinic to the hospital.� Dr. Holland was devastated, as were Chelsea's parents.� The child had not even been very ill.

Genene Jones 1968

Soon afterward, Genene Jones assured Dr. Holland that she had found a bottle of succinylcholine, a powerful muscle relaxant, that had been reported missing three weeks earlier.� Holland saw that the cap was missing and the rubber top punctured with needle marks, so she dismissed Jones from her employ.� She was later to learn that the near-full bottle had been filled with saline.� In other words, someone had been using this dangerous drug, which paralyzed people into a sort of hell on earth: they lay inert but aware and unable to get anyone's attention.

In February 1983, a grand jury was convened to look into 47 suspicious deaths of children at Bexar County Medical Center Hospital that had occurred over a period of four years---the time when Genene Jones had been a nurse there.� A second grand jury organized hearings on the children from Holland's clinic.� The body of Chelsea McClellan was exhumed and her tissues tested; her death appeared to have been caused by an injection of the muscle relaxant.� Jones was questioned by both grand juries, and, along with Holland, was named by Chelsea's parents in a wrongful death suit.

The grand jury indicted Jones on two counts of murder, and several charges of injury to six other children.� The various facilities where she had worked were appalled.