SHOCKING STORIES - Angels of Death

Angels of Death: The Female Nurses

BY Katherine Ramsland

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.

Problems Ignored

Yet anyone who knew Jones was not altogether surprised. She could be inordinately aggressive, had betrayed many friends, and often resorted to lies to manipulate others. While she'd wanted children all her life, the two she had she'd left in the care of her adoptive mother.

Some believe that it was the accidental death of her 14-year-old brother that had worked on her when she was young; others that it was her adoptive father's death from cancer. It may have been that she was ungainly, unattractive, and desperately needy, and had learned how to get attention by lying. At any rate, she was reportedly voracious in her desire for the spotlight and for sexual liaisons, even if it cost her friends. She had married young and was immediately unfaithful.

Jones had reserved her special ardor for doctors, seeing them as mysterious and powerful. She wanted to get near them, so she eventually left her job as a beautician and trained for a year to become a vocational nurse. It looked like she would do very well, although she was not altogether happy about being on the bottom of the medical totem pole.

After only eight months after her first job, she was fired, in part because she made judgments in areas where she had no authority, and in part because she mistreated a patient, who subsequently complained. She didn't last long in her next job, but soon she was hired in the intensive care section of the pediatric unit of Bexar County Medical Center Hospital. It was here that she would leave her mark, and co-workers saw right away that Jones was unusual.

The first child she picked up had a fatal intestinal condition, and when he died shortly thereafter, she went berserk. She brought a stool into the cubicle where the body lay and sat staring at it.

It became clear to associates that Jones liked to feel needed and would often spend long hours on the ward, insisting it was important to a patient. However, she skipped classes on the proper handling of drugs and made several medication errors. While there were sufficient grounds for dismissal several times over, the head nurse protected her, which gave Jones a feeling of invincibility. She never liked to admit to any mistakes, and now she had someone in power to back her up. She tried to bully new nurses into looking to her for help.

Death Shift

By 1981, a year before she was finally stopped, Jones demanded to be put in charge of the sickest patients. That placed her close to those that died more often. She seemed to thrive on the excitement of an emergency, and even on grief when a child didn't make it. She always wanted to take the corpse to the morgue.

It became clear to everyone that children were dying in this unit from problems that shouldn't have been fatal. The need for resuscitation suddenly seemed constant — but only when Jones was around. Those in the most critical condition were all under her care. One child had a seizure three days in a row, but only on her shift. "They're going to start thinking I'm the Death Nurse," Jones quipped one day. In fact, some of the staff called her duty hours the Death Shift.

Then a baby named Jose Antonio Flores, six-months-old, went into cardiac arrest while in Jones's care. He was revived, but went into arrest again the next day during her shift and died from bleeding, the cause of which was unknown. While treating the father for a heart attack, she allowed the brother to carry the corpse. Then she grabbed it and ran down the hospital corridors with the dead baby in her arms. No one could figure out what her behavior meant, but blood testing on the corpse indicated an overdose of a drug called Heparin, an anticoagulant. No one had ordered it.

Another disturbing mystery.

Then Rolando Santos, being treated for pneumonia, was having seizures, cardiac arrest, and extensive unexplained bleeding. All of his troubles developed or intensified on Jones's shift. Finally one doctor stepped forward and told the hospital staff that she was killing children. They needed to do an investigation. Yet the nurses continued to protect their own, especially those in charge. Since the hospital did not want bad publicity, they accepted whatever the head nurses said.

Another child was sent to the pediatrics unit to recover from open-heart surgery. At first, he progressed well, but on Jones's shift, he became lethargic. Then his condition deteriorated and he soon died. In view of others, Jones grabbed a syringe and squirted fluid over the child in the sign of a cross, and then repeated it on herself.

Finally, three months after the initial suspicions, a committee was formed to look into the problem. They decided to replace the LVNs with RNs on the unit, and Jones promptly resigned. To their mind, that took care of the problem.

Death Spree Ends

All it did was let her know she could get away with medical abuse, and she moved on to the Kerrville clinic. Despite the risk of exposure in such a small place to inject children to the point of seizure, she didn't stop.

Although Dr. Holland was warned in veiled tones not to hire Genene Jones, she went ahead and did it, viewing Jones as a victim of the male-dominated patriarchy but a competent nurse. She had no idea that by teaming up with this woman, she was about to kill her own career, her marriage, and one of her young charges.

While awaiting trial, Jones told someone, "I always cry when babies die. You can almost explain away an adult death. When you look at an adult die, you can say they've had a full life. When a baby dies, they've been cheated."

Prosecutors presented Jones as having a hero complex: She needed to take the children to the edge of death and then bring them back so that she could be acclaimed their savior. One of her former colleagues reported that she wanted to get more sick children into the intensive care unit. "They're out there," she supposedly said. "All you have to do is find them."

Yet her actions may actually have been inspired by a more mundane motive: She liked the excitement and the attention it brought her. The children couldn't tell on her; they were at her mercy. So she was free to recreate emergencies over and over.

In a statistical report presented at the second trial, an investigator stated that children were 25% more likely to have a cardiac arrest when Jones was in charge, and 10% more likely to die. A psychiatric exam failed to give her the testimony she would need for an insanity defense.

Bexar County Court

On February 15, Jones was convicted of murder. Later that year, she was found guilty of injuring another child by injection. The two sentences totaled 159 years, but she's eligible for parole after 20.

Although she was suspected in the deaths of other children, the staff at the Bexar County Medical Center Hospital shredded numerous records, thus destroying potential evidence. Most of those personnel who had protected her resigned, and the hospital settled a legal suit brought by the McClellans.

Despite that, Chelsea's mother will never forget something she witnessed shortly after her baby was buried. Going to the cemetery, she spotted Genene Jones kneeling at the foot of Chelsea's grave, sobbing and wailing the child's name. Confronted, Jones walked away without a word, but took with her a bow from Chelsea's grave.

As bizarre as it is to imagine a nurse putting babies at risk to the point of death, it may be easier to explain than the next strange story.