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Speaker 6: Radian, you are now listening to True Murder the most
Speaker 6: shocking killers in true crime history and the authors that
Speaker 6: have written about them. Gasey Bundy Dahmer, The Nightstalker VTK
Speaker 6: Every week another fascinating author talking about the most shocking
Speaker 6: and infamous killers in true crime history True Murder with
Speaker 6: your host, journalist and author Dan Zufanski, Good evening.
Speaker 7: It's hard to imagine that anyone in the healthcare industry
Speaker 7: could have murder on his or her mind, but some do.
Speaker 7: The nineteen cases in this book range across Europe, US
Speaker 7: and Australia, documenting horrifying and sinister betrayals of trust. From
Speaker 7: Harold Shipman, Britain's most worst serial killer who murdered over
Speaker 7: two hundred patients, to Roger Dean, the Sydney nurse who
Speaker 7: in twenty eleven set fire to the nursing home where
Speaker 7: he was working, killing eleven patients. These stories will make
Speaker 7: you wary and leave you shaking your head in horror.
Speaker 7: The book that we're featuring this evening is Angels of Death,
Speaker 7: disturbing real life cases of nurses and doctors that kill,
Speaker 7: with my special guest, journalist and author Emily Webb. Welcome
Speaker 7: back to the program, and thank you very very much
Speaker 7: for greeting this interview, Emily Webb, thanks.
Speaker 5: For having me, Dan, it's really exciting.
Speaker 7: Well, thank you, and Angels of Death some crazy stuff.
Speaker 7: Next time you're heading into a hospital or visiting somebody
Speaker 7: in the hospital. So this is really getting close to home,
Speaker 7: I think. In another I talked with Charles Graber. What's
Speaker 7: interesting about your book is that you talk about Charles Cullen.
Speaker 7: You call him Satan's Son, and the last episode of
Speaker 7: December was Charles Graber, and he wrote a book called
Speaker 7: The Good Nurse about Charles Cullen and very very interesting
Speaker 7: variant of the serial killer that we all have come
Speaker 7: to know. Again, it's a customary question, but of all
Speaker 7: the kinds of stories that you could handle in true crime,
Speaker 7: why did you want to do a book about these
Speaker 7: types of killers in Angels of Death.
Speaker 5: Well, it's funny. It wasn't something that I consciously set
Speaker 5: out to do, but when I first met with the
Speaker 5: publisher who has since published these books, I had an idea.
Speaker 5: They asked me for some ideas, and I was in
Speaker 5: the UK for quite a number of years and I'd
Speaker 5: always known about the serial or the serial killer. Beverly Ailett,
Speaker 5: who was a children's nurse and she is probably one
Speaker 5: of the most notorious women in England. She often featured
Speaker 5: in the newspapers and she had killed some children in
Speaker 5: the early nineteen nineties when she was a nurse. They
Speaker 5: think that she had Munchausen's by proxy. That she's now
Speaker 5: in a secure psychiatric facility, one of England's hospitals for
Speaker 5: the criminally insane, I guess. And I was thinking of
Speaker 5: her case, and then I thought, well, why don't I
Speaker 5: investigate whether there's enough cases for a book. And I
Speaker 5: was actually quite surprised to see there really was a
Speaker 5: lot of cases of healthcare serial killing. I think the
Speaker 5: term is doctors and nurses. I was thinking of nurses,
Speaker 5: and then I thought, well, I'll incorporate doctors and other
Speaker 5: related professionals.
Speaker 7: As well, all right, And you do have stories that
Speaker 7: spread from Europe, US, Australia and the US, and you
Speaker 7: do start off with Charles Colin, one of the more
Speaker 7: unknown killers, if that's the right term, like I said,
Speaker 7: was the subject of Charles Graver's book The Good Nurse
Speaker 7: In your next story in this and we're going to
Speaker 7: examine a few, just a few of the stories. But
Speaker 7: as soon as this. As soon as you open up
Speaker 7: this book, it's just chalk full of every single page
Speaker 7: really condensed stories of this new type of horror. In
Speaker 7: the second story that you have, you talk about Roger
Speaker 7: Dean from Sydney, so in Australia, he's thirty five years old,
Speaker 7: and his murder weapon is a little different, or his
Speaker 7: murder one of his murder weapons a little different. And
Speaker 7: we're talking about in twenty and eleven when he was
Speaker 7: finally noticed. So let's talk about Roger Dean from Sydney
Speaker 7: nursing home that he was working at.
Speaker 5: Yeah. Sure, seeing that certainly is one of the more
Speaker 5: shocking cases of recent years in Australia. Rogerdine was a nurse,
Speaker 5: and so over in Australia. I'm not sure what it's
Speaker 5: like in Canada or North America, but there's two different
Speaker 5: types of nurses. You've got a registered nurse so that
Speaker 5: requires a university degree now, and you've got an enrolled nurse,
Speaker 5: which a lot of enrolled nurses work at age care homes.
Speaker 5: But Roger Deine was a registered nurse so he could
Speaker 5: give out the I guess the more serious medications that
Speaker 5: have to be locked away. So he worked in a
Speaker 5: nursing home. He was actually studying to be a lawyer
Speaker 5: in his spare time, so he was looking to do
Speaker 5: a career change. But what Roger Deine did was he
Speaker 5: caused a fire that ended up completely ripping through this
Speaker 5: age care home in a Sydney suburb and a lot
Speaker 5: of people died. So whether or not he intended to
Speaker 5: do that, what happened once he ended up, you know,
Speaker 5: a math murderer.
Speaker 7: Now it's interesting his background too. He had worked ten
Speaker 7: years in facility you say he worked about ten years
Speaker 7: in facilities in New South Wales. He was originally born
Speaker 7: in Vietnam and he moved to Australia and then he
Speaker 7: was working at this nursing home. And then they have
Speaker 7: something called CCTV footage. So tell us what that is.
Speaker 7: I know it's a video footage, but tell us what
Speaker 7: CCTV footage because it's very crucial in at trial with
Speaker 7: Roger Deane.
Speaker 1: Sure.
Speaker 5: So CCTV footage is basically the facility security cameras that
Speaker 5: pick up movements within the facility and around the facility.
Speaker 5: So the CCTV footage was really crucial because what happened
Speaker 5: was Roger Deane set the fire out to distract from
Speaker 5: an investigation that was going to happen had started to
Speaker 5: happen about the theft of a certain type of drugs
Speaker 5: from opiate drugs and dome tablets, basically tablets that you
Speaker 5: painkillers but are highly addictive. So he was addicted to
Speaker 5: those drugs, He was using those drugs and he was
Speaker 5: stealing them from the locked cabinet in the nursing home,
Speaker 5: so it's obviously illegal. What happened was this had been detected,
Speaker 5: so at handover on the shift the day before the
Speaker 5: nursing home fire, it was mentioned at handover, which is
Speaker 5: where the nurse on one particular shift hands over the
Speaker 5: notes to the next nurses to let them know what's happening.
Speaker 5: So I've mentioned that this was detected and the police
Speaker 5: were coming. So the police came that night and had
Speaker 5: started to ask questions, but they got diverted on a
Speaker 5: different matter. It was a final family violence matter that
Speaker 5: was far more pressing at the time. So Roger Dean
Speaker 5: he knew he was in trouble. He knew he was
Speaker 5: going to get found out. If he was found out,
Speaker 5: that means the end of his nursing career. But also
Speaker 5: he would not be able to become a lawyer, and
Speaker 5: there was CCTV footage of showing him over previous times
Speaker 5: going in and out of that. I guess it was
Speaker 5: a locked room where you go to get the drugs,
Speaker 5: so that's where the CCTV comes in. So basically what
Speaker 5: happened is that he knew that he was going to
Speaker 5: get caught, and so he decided to light fire to
Speaker 5: divevote attension from that. So, I guess in a terrible
Speaker 5: way to put it, but to take the heat off
Speaker 5: himself and put a bit more focus on maybe, well
Speaker 5: why did this fire start? You know, what's happened, and
Speaker 5: so maybe his crime would go unnoticed. But it ended
Speaker 5: up a lot worse than he intended.
Speaker 7: Yes, certainly he knew that the CCTV cameras were everywhere,
Speaker 7: but there wasn't a called the A two wing, and
Speaker 7: there were a couple women both named Dorothy, sleeping there
Speaker 7: and another woman named Helen Perry. So tell us what
Speaker 7: Helen Perry said the dean, and tell us about this
Speaker 7: whole again. You bring us the reader right into this.
Speaker 7: In terms of these two elderly women immobile, you said,
Speaker 7: both of them and another woman named Helen Perry, who
Speaker 7: was very conscious of what was going on. So tell
Speaker 7: us with him, knowing that the CTD the video cameras
Speaker 7: were not in the A two wing, what did he
Speaker 7: do and tell us about the two Dorothys and Helen Perry.
Speaker 5: Well, there was no ctch B in this wing, so
Speaker 5: he knew that there was not going to be any detection.
Speaker 5: And these two ladies, the two Dorothys, were in their beds,
Speaker 5: so asleep in their beds, and these women were immobile,
Speaker 5: so they weren't able to get in and out of
Speaker 5: their rooms or out of their beds without assistance. He
Speaker 5: set a fire in an occupied bed of the room.
Speaker 5: And it's quite horrifying because knowing that these women were
Speaker 5: I mobile, I mean, what else would he expect to
Speaker 5: happen then, you know, potentially killing them. So this fire
Speaker 5: triggered the fire alarm. So everything's you know, it's hectic,
Speaker 5: like what the footage that I've seen on the news
Speaker 5: at the time and the photo that just shows a
Speaker 5: complete confusion, all these elderly people just looking so shocked.
Speaker 5: You know, he's breathing up her artuses on and so
Speaker 5: Roger then pretended to try and you know, get these
Speaker 5: women out of the room. He heard their cries. Actually, sorry,
Speaker 5: a woman called Helen Perry had said to Roger Dean,
Speaker 5: I'm trying to get my remember the whole story here.
Speaker 5: He stopped to help her out, to leave her. So
Speaker 5: the two Dorothys were in their room. You know, they
Speaker 5: may have been asleep, they may have been screaming for help.
Speaker 5: Then he heard this lady Helen Perry calling for help,
Speaker 5: and she also really wanted him to try and help
Speaker 5: save the two Dorothys. The the fire had taken hold
Speaker 5: in that room and there really was no chance that
Speaker 5: they would have been able to get out by themselves.
Speaker 5: And he had told this lady Helen not to worry.
Speaker 5: People were on their way to help them. And they,
Speaker 5: you know, these women, you know, were not able to
Speaker 5: be saved. So this lady, missus Perry, Helen Perry, she survived,
Speaker 5: and she spoke to newspapers afterwards and had said that,
Speaker 5: you know, the scene of a war zone. There were
Speaker 5: people everywhere, and she was quite distressed that she tried
Speaker 5: to save her friends and they weren't able to be saved.
Speaker 5: And I think that went a long way to showing
Speaker 5: the intent behind Roger Dene's actions. Even though he may
Speaker 5: not have intended to harm that many people, it was
Speaker 5: quite calculating in what he did.
Speaker 7: Yeah, he sounds pretty guilty at this point. Never mind
Speaker 7: the rest of this story. Now, this is this is
Speaker 7: unbelievable story, really, and in that he tries three times
Speaker 7: to re enter this burning building that he's set a flame,
Speaker 7: and on the third time he said to he wanted
Speaker 7: to retrieve the drug record books. And so what happened,
Speaker 7: unbelievably the firefighters did what.
Speaker 5: Well, actually, I guess in the whole flurry of activity
Speaker 5: and the confusion, he was able to get into the
Speaker 5: room because the firefighters couldn't actually open the room themselves,
Speaker 5: so having difficulty for whatever reason. And Dean was he
Speaker 5: was hanging around, you know, persistently saying, look, I've got
Speaker 5: to get in there. I've got to get these books.
Speaker 5: We need them. Well he needed them because they were
Speaker 5: incriminating to himself. Why he wanted to get them. Then
Speaker 5: they actually asked Roger den if he could help them,
Speaker 5: you know, open the door, and he did and then
Speaker 5: removed the drug walls from the cabinet and he put
Speaker 5: it in a statuel that he had and he I
Speaker 5: guess they'd wanted him to stay around because he was
Speaker 5: a staff member, but he actually lived quite nearby, and
Speaker 5: he kept saying to them, I'm an asthmatic, I need
Speaker 5: my ventelin, I need to go home. Well, the reason
Speaker 5: he wanted to go home, according to the court documents,
Speaker 5: was that he wanted to destroy those drug books, get
Speaker 5: rid of them.
Speaker 7: So and.
Speaker 5: What happened was at the time of the publicity about it,
Speaker 5: as he was leaving to go to his home, there
Speaker 5: were camera crews everywhere. It was a massive story, and
Speaker 5: a news reporter stopped him on his way, and you know,
Speaker 5: as journalists do, we asked people if they can give us,
Speaker 5: you know, any idea of what's happened. We stopped people
Speaker 5: if they'd been involved, and he actually said to this reporter,
Speaker 5: you know, I'm Roger. I'm one of the nurses and
Speaker 5: there was a fire and I just quickly did what
Speaker 5: I can got everyone out and the smokey's just overwhelming,
Speaker 5: but you know, we've got a lot of people out,
Speaker 5: so that's the main thing. So for a while he
Speaker 5: was portrayed as, you know, someone who had helped, and
Speaker 5: that footage became quite disturbing. Later on as the real story.
Speaker 7: Unfolded again, what's fascinating element to this story is that
Speaker 7: how they get this information and if there was a loyalty.
Speaker 7: He's living with his ex boyfriend and so this man's
Speaker 7: name was Dean French. So he ran home trying to
Speaker 7: rip up these books and put them in a dumpster
Speaker 7: at the back of his ex boyfriend's business. And that's
Speaker 7: how they knew about this. And apparently there was a
Speaker 7: vig that showed that. Well, there was also a video
Speaker 7: that showed Dean entering the rooms, so that was a
Speaker 7: timeline fit for the fire what you were talking about
Speaker 7: at the at the trial. But tell us tell us
Speaker 7: a little bit more how Dean French got involved because
Speaker 7: apparently they weren't going to charge him, So how did
Speaker 7: how did it get to the point where he gave
Speaker 7: testimony against his person he was intimately involved with for
Speaker 7: a fair amount of time.
Speaker 5: It's going to have to rewind my brain, my brain
Speaker 5: a bit to remember that. Actually what I do know
Speaker 5: what I believe. I'm just I've got my book in
Speaker 5: front of me and I'm just trying to remember what
Speaker 5: actually happened. Actually, you might need to refresh my memory.
Speaker 5: I'm sorry, Dan, I'm having a complete blank. I do
Speaker 5: believe though, that he was involved in disposing helping dispose
Speaker 5: of the books and for his evidence on his ex lover,
Speaker 5: and they weren't together at the time. They were co
Speaker 5: habiting but not really in a committed relationship. I believe
Speaker 5: that the police were going to let him off, but
Speaker 5: you might have it more fresh in your memory because
Speaker 5: you've just read it.
Speaker 7: No, that's what I was getting at that he didn't
Speaker 7: just come forward that there was some involvement there, so
Speaker 7: that that's how he got to the point where he
Speaker 7: was actually testifying against his exual lover. Here with the
Speaker 7: interview too, was very interesting that at some point when
Speaker 7: he is interviewed, he starts talking about the reason why
Speaker 7: he did these set these fires, and so tell us
Speaker 7: about what you found in terms of his reasoning for
Speaker 7: these fires and who was to blame.
Speaker 5: So I just had a bit of cross cross sound there, Dan,
Speaker 5: So can you just repeat that question?
Speaker 7: I said basically that in an interview, is that it
Speaker 7: was interesting who he attributed or who he blamed for
Speaker 7: the fires themselves, and he spoke about who was to blame,
Speaker 7: and a little bit about that so tell us a
Speaker 7: little bit about who he blamed for these fires and
Speaker 7: how he spoke of his participation in those fires.
Speaker 5: Sure, well, the police found out fairly quickly on the
Speaker 5: day of the fire that he was responsible, So by
Speaker 5: that night they were pretty sure they knew who it was,
Speaker 5: just for various reasons, and they had the CCTV footage.
Speaker 5: And also there were two other nurses on judy that
Speaker 5: night that said that Roger Dean had told them to
Speaker 5: both take their breaks at exactly the same time, which
Speaker 5: is not protocol. So Roger Deane would have been, I
Speaker 5: guess the nurse in charge at that time because he
Speaker 5: was a more a registered nurse, and maybe the other
Speaker 5: nurses were enrolled nurses, so it would not be standard
Speaker 5: practice to say both of you go on your break.
Speaker 5: But he did that so he could go and do
Speaker 5: what he did, which was light the fire. So he
Speaker 5: was arrested and in the recorded interview with detectives he
Speaker 5: seemed to be calm and he seemed to give them
Speaker 5: pretty frank answers. But he actually told the police that
Speaker 5: he felt like Satan had possessed him and was telling
Speaker 5: him what to do. He you know, I'm not sure
Speaker 5: if the police believed him at that point or not,
Speaker 5: if they thought maybe that was a way he was
Speaker 5: trying to get them to think that he was mentally unwell.
Speaker 5: I mean, he was a drug addict. He was addicted
Speaker 5: to the opiates that he was stealing. But he said
Speaker 5: to them that he thought that Satan told him that
Speaker 5: it's the right thing to do, and he took her
Speaker 5: to the police. I know you won't believe it, but
Speaker 5: that's what happened.
Speaker 7: Now he was sentenced life no parole. But what's interesting
Speaker 7: is that you have in twenty fourteen as a coronial,
Speaker 7: a coronial inquest into the fires, and they found that
Speaker 7: there was questionable work history, substance abuse, and his references
Speaker 7: were not checked and he had that's right, really unnecessary
Speaker 7: access to drugs at that nursery home. Now in you
Speaker 7: include just in the same chapter nineteen seventy six case
Speaker 7: in Chicago with Denise Watson, and she was charged with
Speaker 7: a similar arson and murder of twenty three if she
Speaker 7: admitted to sixty nine counts, but she was the murder
Speaker 7: of twenty three. Tell us just a little bit about
Speaker 7: that and why you included that case of Denise Watson
Speaker 7: from Chicago.
Speaker 5: Yeah, definitely. I actually I literally stumbled across his case
Speaker 5: when I was researching nursing home fliers and the thing
Speaker 5: I do love about writing and researching through crime as
Speaker 5: you just come across all these different things. And I
Speaker 5: included it because I thought it was interesting in terms of,
Speaker 5: you know, are the cases that related to people who
Speaker 5: did these kind of crimes. But I was quite amazed
Speaker 5: with this case because so Denise. Denise was a twenty
Speaker 5: one year old nurse assistant and housekeeper, so I'm guessing
Speaker 5: she probably wasn't really doing too much nursing duties, more
Speaker 5: looking after people, maybe feeding them. And she worked in
Speaker 5: this nursing home in Chicago, and she started a fire
Speaker 5: that killed twenty three people, and she admitted that she
Speaker 5: did it. That she dropped a match into a pile
Speaker 5: of clothes that was in a patient like a little locker,
Speaker 5: like a little cupboard that they having in the hospital.
Speaker 5: And at the time, you know, all the residents were frail,
Speaker 5: they weren't able to move around properly. And there were
Speaker 5: a number of residents to her in the nursing home
Speaker 5: chapel at the time celebrating mass and they were obviously
Speaker 5: if you can imagine the scene and the fact that
Speaker 5: most deaths from fires come from smokinghalation, it would have
Speaker 5: been absolute chaos. So these people were really struggling to evacuate,
Speaker 5: and most of the deaths from that nursing home flyer
Speaker 5: came from shock and smoking relation. And also back in
Speaker 5: the seventies, they probably weren't as great health and safety measures.
Speaker 5: It didn't have a sprinkler system, so that was something
Speaker 5: that was highlighted after this incident. But what was interesting
Speaker 5: is once the police started to look into this incident,
Speaker 5: they found that this Denise Watson actually had a bit
Speaker 5: of a history of pyromania. In fact, one officer in
Speaker 5: a newspaper Artiquai found said she had a bad history
Speaker 5: of pyromania, and she actually had been one of the
Speaker 5: flymen who was involved as an art and investigator recognized
Speaker 5: her name and he'd actually had dealings with her before
Speaker 5: she had there'd been a fire at the house where
Speaker 5: she lived in which was declared art and by investigators.
Speaker 5: That was three years before, in nineteen seventy three, and
Speaker 5: then in nineteen seventy four there are actually three small
Speaker 5: fires in her apartment that they believed were started by
Speaker 5: now Polish remover, so she had a bit of a
Speaker 5: history of doing things. And actually, interestingly, this the nursing
Speaker 5: home fire that she started in Chicago in nineteen seventy
Speaker 5: six is still the worst, one of the worst ever fires.
Speaker 5: It's actually documented in if you look up history of
Speaker 5: Chicago that will come up. And it was the most
Speaker 5: counts of murder that were ever charged to a single person.
Speaker 5: So the sixty nine counts of murder, and the reason
Speaker 5: why I wondered, well, why they're sixty nine counts of
Speaker 5: murder it there's twenty three people who died. How they
Speaker 5: did it was apparently they made three different charges of
Speaker 5: murder for each individual's death. I can't remember it on
Speaker 5: the top of my head why that was so. Basically,
Speaker 5: the investigators were sure that they had it in the bag.
Speaker 5: This was going to be an open and shut kind
Speaker 5: of case. However, However, obviously, and you know this from
Speaker 5: all your years of interviewing through prime authors and writing,
Speaker 5: come down to the way police interrogate someone. You know,
Speaker 5: the manner in which they do it. So even if
Speaker 5: someone is guilty, if a police officer doesn't interrogate properly
Speaker 5: or follow the processes that case can be thrown out
Speaker 5: of court, and so basically her lawyer thought that he would,
Speaker 5: you know, bring His strategy was to discredit her confession,
Speaker 5: and he claimed that because she was so mentally, you know,
Speaker 5: she was mentally fragile, she was tired. He said that
Speaker 5: she would have been prepared to confess anything to get
Speaker 5: out of the interrogation room. And so basically the charges
Speaker 5: were thrown out based on that. They felt that she
Speaker 5: was pressured into her confession. So she was in court
Speaker 5: in nineteen seventy seven, in November, and she it's quite
Speaker 5: interesting that the lawyer said that she she's a nice
Speaker 5: girl and she was innocent of all the charges. Now
Speaker 5: could a nice girl do something like that? But basically
Speaker 5: she collapsed in court when she heard that the charges
Speaker 5: were thrown out of court. So I tried to find
Speaker 5: out more about what happened to her and whether or
Speaker 5: not she lit anymore fires. I couldn't get that far,
Speaker 5: but she walked free. So I found that really intriguing
Speaker 5: and disturbing, and that's why I included it. As a reader,
Speaker 5: I like to have those kind of things in books.
Speaker 5: So now I'm writing to crime. I always like to
Speaker 5: infew some of the cases with other cases that may
Speaker 5: be related, even if they're not from the same country.
Speaker 7: What I found most fascinating about this and just touched
Speaker 7: on it because we only have so many stories you
Speaker 7: can cram in a book, and you've done an admirable
Speaker 7: job putting nineteen cases in this was that the public defender,
Speaker 7: she just had a public defender. She didn't have any
Speaker 7: special lawyer, and he was They were not very confident
Speaker 7: in her being able to beat this charge at all whatsoever,
Speaker 7: especially when he had her testify. So it's very interesting
Speaker 7: and again it would be again that's a whole other book,
Speaker 7: just having how on earth a dur could, how she
Speaker 7: could be effective testifying, how the jury could pay.
Speaker 5: It makes you wonder how he portrayed her because he
Speaker 5: knew he knew that, well, she's going to get found guilty.
Speaker 5: But when he started to change his thinking and his
Speaker 5: strategy was when he found out that she had had
Speaker 5: hours of interrogation by police. So that's I guess when
Speaker 5: he thought, well, let's try and discredit the confession. Yeah,
Speaker 5: you wonder. I always find it interesting, you know, when
Speaker 5: you see films or read about things where people are
Speaker 5: told how they should present themselves on the standard. For
Speaker 5: some reason, I'm thinking of the Admiral Books Small Sacrifices
Speaker 5: with Diane down. I remember the Chartley movie with Sarah
Speaker 5: Fawcett and how she had so she's quite a hard living,
Speaker 5: you know, kind of woman. And on the stand, you know,
Speaker 5: they get them to wear quite demure clothes and come
Speaker 5: across a certain Why oh it's doing that really interesting
Speaker 5: mm hmm.
Speaker 7: Yeah, well absolutely, because it's so rare when you do
Speaker 7: have a defendant take the stand. We had a case
Speaker 7: in this city where a guy who had been a
Speaker 7: form former government official accused of murdering his wife with
Speaker 7: incredible amount of circumstantial evidence. Certainly enough in an American well,
Speaker 7: I'd say in America court you'd have a different outcome.
Speaker 7: But in Canada anyway, he had to take the stand,
Speaker 7: and he took the stand for three days or so
Speaker 7: or four days and withstood the cross examination. But it
Speaker 7: was interesting when you heard snippets of how he was
Speaker 7: at court and how he conducted himself on the stand,
Speaker 7: and then how the jury interprets that testimony and he
Speaker 7: was acquitted. So very interesting when that very rare thing
Speaker 7: happens when I defended in a murder case takes a
Speaker 7: stand because it's certainly not much of a strategy. It's
Speaker 7: usually a last ditch effort. Now another Yeah, No, one
Speaker 7: of the more incredible cases again happens very early in
Speaker 7: your book. I mean, if you're really trying for a
Speaker 7: dramatic opening to a book, you really have it with
Speaker 7: these stories here of Catherine Wood and Gwen Graham in
Speaker 7: Grand Rapids, Michigan. Going a little bit back when nineteen
Speaker 7: eighty eight, and these are two nurses' aides. And what
Speaker 7: you did to you included studies about serial killers where
Speaker 7: just a little bit of statistics where you say women
Speaker 7: partners usually if they're partners in crime murder, usually target adults.
Speaker 7: And then they said if it was a lone killer,
Speaker 7: you said, if it was a lone killer, they would
Speaker 7: target family members, typically with poison. Now, Wood and Graham
Speaker 7: are you know, DeFi categorization. And they met in nineteen
Speaker 7: eighty six in Walker, Michigan outside of Grand Rapids. So
Speaker 7: tell us a little bit about Catherine Wood and Gwen
Speaker 7: Graham and their relationship. Tell us a little bit how
Speaker 7: that started, a little bit about their relationship.
Speaker 5: Yeah, this case when I read about this, I was,
Speaker 5: so this is one out of the box. Really, it's
Speaker 5: definitely rare to have a female duo who kill in tandem,
Speaker 5: I guess is what you call it, because usually it's
Speaker 5: a male. If a female's involved, it's going to be
Speaker 5: with a male, and often they say that the woman's
Speaker 5: dominated by the male. So in this case, these women
Speaker 5: were they met through working at a nursing home. Again,
Speaker 5: so a big theme in this book that I found
Speaker 5: with healthcare serial killers. So obviously there's a hospital setting
Speaker 5: that provides they're victims, but also the elderly are extremely
Speaker 5: vulnerable to these kind of killers. That's certainly the what
Speaker 5: came out of all the research I did. So these
Speaker 5: women they paired up, they met at this nursing home,
Speaker 5: and it was actually described by some investigators as a
Speaker 5: hotbed of lesbian affairs at one point. So Katherine Woods
Speaker 5: had been had been, had been married and had children.
Speaker 5: She had married young and had children young, though only
Speaker 5: in their mid twenties, I think when the defenses happened.
Speaker 5: And Gwen Graham was also working at the nursing home,
Speaker 5: and she was you know, openly gay and was in
Speaker 5: a relationship with someone else, but they partnered up together
Speaker 5: and got romantically involved. You know, Kathie had separated from
Speaker 5: her husband and she got you know, she'd been at
Speaker 5: home with her her children, raising a family, and didn't
Speaker 5: really have oliver skills because she left home, left school early.
Speaker 5: So she got a job at this nursing home and
Speaker 5: worked her way out to I guess a position of
Speaker 5: some responsibility as a supervisor. So they got together. They
Speaker 5: made friends, you know, just out to the lunch room,
Speaker 5: talking around the hospital, the nursing home, and they hooked
Speaker 5: up together and they moved in together. It was quite
Speaker 5: a torrid romance, I guess, and you know, they were
Speaker 5: very I don't know how do I put it. They
Speaker 5: definitely had a pretty intense relationship I guess sexually and emotionally,
Speaker 5: and it was quite volatile. So they got together, and
Speaker 5: there were a number of residents who died between a
Speaker 5: certain period of time in nineteen eighty seven, So between
Speaker 5: a period of time of January and April nineteen eighty seven,
Speaker 5: there had been a number of deaths at the home.
Speaker 5: But because these people elderly had Alzheimer's, often the death
Speaker 5: aren't really questioned. So think, well, it's just it's just
Speaker 5: old age. But Kathy had mentioned something to her ex husband,
Speaker 5: whose name was ken Wood, and he had gone to
Speaker 5: the police a year after that, in the October of
Speaker 5: nineteen eighty eight, and he said that his ex wife, Kathy,
Speaker 5: had come to him and said she was living in
Speaker 5: fear of Gwen Graham, who was her lover at the time.
Speaker 5: Then they'd split up, that was still in contact. So
Speaker 5: Kathy had told her husband that the pair of them
Speaker 5: had committed these murders soon after she split up. So
Speaker 5: their period of relationship wasn't that long, it was maybe
Speaker 5: five or six months. But during that time they had
Speaker 5: teamed up together and they were killing people, you know,
Speaker 5: allegedly five people. And so ken probably thought that his
Speaker 5: wife was telling outrageous tales and he said to her, look,
Speaker 5: I won't tell anyone, because he didn't want the mother
Speaker 5: of his child to get in trouble. Basically, it came
Speaker 5: out that the police. He went to the police because
Speaker 5: he thought, well, I really need to need to let
Speaker 5: them know. And then an investigation happened at this nursing
Speaker 5: home which was called Alpine Manor, and it resulted in
Speaker 5: the arrest of Casi and Gwen. But what happened then
Speaker 5: was that Cassie. To this day, I don't really know who,
Speaker 5: if Cathy or Gwen, was the dominant or the passive
Speaker 5: person in the killings. There's a very comprehensive book that
Speaker 5: was written by an author called Lao Cafel. I don't
Speaker 5: know if I'm pronouncing that right, but he's a fairly
Speaker 5: well known true crime or thane. It was called Forever
Speaker 5: in Five Days and it was published in the nineties.
Speaker 5: It's the definitive account of that crime. But basically Cassie
Speaker 5: ended up saying that she was pressured by Gwen to
Speaker 5: kill these women, and some of the methods were really
Speaker 5: quite horrifying when you think of it, for elderly people
Speaker 5: who are infirm and can't fight back. They put like
Speaker 5: face washers on their faces so they would suffocate and
Speaker 5: things like that. And it was what came out of
Speaker 5: some of the investigation was that it was almost like
Speaker 5: a game to these women, and that they had intended
Speaker 5: each victim was chosen based on the letter of their
Speaker 5: first name, and they wanted to spell out murder. That
Speaker 5: was never proven, but certainly it was quite a sensational
Speaker 5: sensational claim both of them.
Speaker 7: It's interesting too that just a motivation for Catherine to
Speaker 7: come forward to her ex and tell her about this
Speaker 7: information and say that she was in fear of Graham,
Speaker 7: and then talked about all the murders and talked again
Speaker 7: about taking their initials and spelling out the word murder.
Speaker 7: She also talked about that they had to think they
Speaker 7: would have a term to say do them in terms
Speaker 7: of who they were going to kill. And they had
Speaker 7: a trophy shelf. Again, this wasn't proven because they never
Speaker 7: found any of this. That she had said that they
Speaker 7: had jewelry and even false teeth that they were saving
Speaker 7: in the t on their trophy shelf, and that they
Speaker 7: had this again very very adventurous sex life with bondage
Speaker 7: and auto affixiation and audio affixia and holding a gun
Speaker 7: to their private parts, and so it was very Again,
Speaker 7: the media loved this, didn't they in terms of taking care.
Speaker 5: It was just a totally sensational, sensational trial. It seemed
Speaker 5: to me from what I read of it and research
Speaker 5: that apparently Kathy was very bright, even though she didn't
Speaker 5: finish school, she was actually quite an intelligent woman, quite
Speaker 5: many pulieve. So it seems to me that she possibly
Speaker 5: you know, created this, this whole scenario so she could
Speaker 5: take pe office and blame her lover, who was apparently,
Speaker 5: you know, not not as intelligent, was a bit more
Speaker 5: seen as thuggish, I guess in terms of the more
Speaker 5: I guess a grective partner in the relationship on the surface,
Speaker 5: But it does seem like Kathy engineered it so she
Speaker 5: would get the sympathy and also be able to work
Speaker 5: with the police to lay all the blame on Gwendolen Graham,
Speaker 5: who is never going to be eligible for parole ever,
Speaker 5: Kathy Woods. Kathy Wood has been eligible for parole since
Speaker 5: about two thousand and five, but she it keeps getting
Speaker 5: knocked back. She can be released well in twenty twenty one,
Speaker 5: so she still will have some life to live when
Speaker 5: she gets released.
Speaker 7: You say in the book that would insist it again,
Speaker 7: very interesting, that would insisted Catherine would insisted on a polygraph.
Speaker 7: And of course when Graham denied everything, what did the judge,
Speaker 7: how did the judge feel about well, what did the
Speaker 7: judge say about Catherine woods participation in this That's again
Speaker 7: was very interesting to me. Well, in terms of her
Speaker 7: guilt as opposed.
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Speaker 7: Who Gwen's guilt that he was more? Was he more
Speaker 7: in the idea that he would believe her rendition of
Speaker 7: the event?
Speaker 5: Well, I know that he did describe them both as parasites.
Speaker 5: That was interesting, said they sped off each other. It
Speaker 5: was some sort of sick relationship, you know, where there's
Speaker 5: almost the worst combination of people that can get together,
Speaker 5: a bit like Fred and Rose West. You know, they
Speaker 5: do these awful crimes. I think I'm just trying to remember.
Speaker 5: He did praise in a way Kathy would for her
Speaker 5: part in bringing the crimes to the attention of the authorities.
Speaker 5: He actually said to them. Without you, I'm sure this
Speaker 5: matter would never have been cleared up. And he was
Speaker 5: convinced that she showed remorse, and he said, you're a follower,
Speaker 5: not a leader. But definitely in my mind from what
Speaker 5: I read, and I know from reading things that laud
Speaker 5: Corfeel wrote after doing his lengthy investigation, and he really
Speaker 5: did lot of stuff into this case that he believed
Speaker 5: that Kathy was not innocent as she was portrayed. So
Speaker 5: I found that interesting that in a few cases, actually
Speaker 5: I've written about, the judges seem to almost be fooled
Speaker 5: by the defendants, and I think in this case it
Speaker 5: sounds like Kathy was portraying herself as a victim. He
Speaker 5: was forced into doing these things by a lover.
Speaker 7: Yes, it's interesting. Louis Calfield, he was on the program
Speaker 7: with his very very shocking book, Host of Secrets, and
Speaker 7: he's the author of Forever in five Days And then
Speaker 7: you say it was based on a poem too, that
Speaker 7: again about the relationship between the two women, You'll be
Speaker 7: Mine forever and five das so and Law was adamant
Speaker 7: that Wood was the mastermind behind all this.
Speaker 5: So yeah, definitely, yeah, yeah, he thought that Kathy would
Speaker 5: for whatever reason, she took her dislike of seeing her
Speaker 5: anger and she took it out on patience and also
Speaker 5: ended up, you know, ultimately punishing her lover who they
Speaker 5: had split up, and Gwendolen Graham had moved on and
Speaker 5: actually moved to Texas with a new girlfriend. So I
Speaker 5: think during the investigations, the police found out there was
Speaker 5: a lot of, you know, just a hotbed of a
Speaker 5: lot of stuff that nursing home, a lot of you know,
Speaker 5: stuff between the workers and gossip and grudges, so that
Speaker 5: they think that was what fed into it a bit too.
Speaker 7: Yeah, it seems plausible to me that explanation as well,
Speaker 7: that she was so intensely jealous that she would have,
Speaker 7: you know, I wanted certain and wanted attention upon herself too.
Speaker 7: Very bizarre behavior, but yeah, very suspicious. Her motivations for
Speaker 7: coming forward and then yea for her to be depicted
Speaker 7: of anything other than just as guilty was surprised to me. Yeah,
Speaker 7: now you have what you claim is the America's worst
Speaker 7: angel of death nurse serial Killers nineteen ninety four, with
Speaker 7: potassium chloride being the instrument of death. And this is
Speaker 7: in Clinton, Indiana, and you have Orville Lynn Majors as
Speaker 7: or as known by his friends Lynn and a Reger.
Speaker 7: So tell us this is back in nineteen eighty four,
Speaker 7: and you talk about the story where he has a
Speaker 7: certain amount of credentials. He's working, somebody tips off his
Speaker 7: employer and they realize that he's got forged documents and
Speaker 7: he's fired. And that's nineteen eighty four. But in nineteen
Speaker 7: eighty nine he's working as a practical nurse. And so
Speaker 7: tell us how that happens, and tell us about this Vermilion,
Speaker 7: this hospital in Vermilion, and tell us a little bit
Speaker 7: about this story with Orville Linn Majors.
Speaker 5: Yeah, this book, I founded that probably they were all
Speaker 5: awful and quite strange in their own way. That I
Speaker 5: found awful in Majors to be one of the strangest
Speaker 5: cases I researched. So all with Majors as were known.
Speaker 5: He works in nursing homes. He yeah, he's seemingly quite
Speaker 5: good at his job, and he works in the ICU.
Speaker 5: And he likes to work alone, which is another scene
Speaker 5: with these killers. They often read in our chips and
Speaker 5: they often like to work alone. So I understand all reason.
Speaker 5: So they can go and go on with whatever they're doing.
Speaker 5: And when there was an investigation into some deaths at
Speaker 5: the hospital he was working at, they actually discovered that
Speaker 5: there was a death in the ICU for the shift
Speaker 5: that he was on every every twenty three hours that
Speaker 5: he was working, and when he wasn't on his shift,
Speaker 5: that then stretched out to a patient died every day
Speaker 5: by one hundred hours. So there was a really big
Speaker 5: discrepancy of time there. So he started his nursing career
Speaker 5: in nineteen eighty four and he was working at a
Speaker 5: hospital in Missouri. I had to get my head around
Speaker 5: a lot of these county it's how it's how it
Speaker 5: is in America. There are different counties within states and stuff.
Speaker 5: He was working and it was found that he didn't
Speaker 5: he didn't have proper a proper documentation to work in
Speaker 5: a role as a respiratory therapist. I think he was.
Speaker 5: We don't have those in Australia. It's some sort of
Speaker 5: health age job. But then by nunteen eighty nine he's
Speaker 5: got his qualifications as a licensed practice walman. So my
Speaker 5: standard of that is a bit like an enrolled there.
Speaker 5: She can do a certain amount of things that can't
Speaker 5: do quite as much as a registered nurse, and he
Speaker 5: was away from away for a while. He's got a
Speaker 5: lot of warnings about it. And he also on his document,
Speaker 5: like his record, it actually has been labeled not for
Speaker 5: rehire by the administration of one of the hospitals that
Speaker 5: he'd work at. He worked out and that was after
Speaker 5: he left in nineteen ninety one, but amazingly two years
Speaker 5: later he was rehired again. And this is another scene.
Speaker 5: Throughout all the cases, often it was slopping, really slopping
Speaker 5: procedures in hospitals that let these things happen. They didn't
Speaker 5: check things, people went informed to certain things. So how
Speaker 5: he was brought to brought to the attention of the
Speaker 5: futility that he was working at, was that someone had
Speaker 5: sent them a londonuth later to the Indianna's Department of Health,
Speaker 5: and they were forwarded to a local newspaper and the
Speaker 5: letter actually said do you want one of your loved
Speaker 5: ones to be a patient in that hospital with the
Speaker 5: death and you're working. We need to stop this nurse
Speaker 5: and I hope you will help us. And it basically
Speaker 5: also mentioned that Majors had you know, he had had
Speaker 5: a history of being suspended and that this person was
Speaker 5: concerned that the hospital was going to cover up the
Speaker 5: deaths so they didn't look so bad. But that is
Speaker 5: how it all started playing out. So that was in
Speaker 5: nineteen early nineteen ninety five she was suspended and then
Speaker 5: his nursing license was suspended, and also the supervisor he had.
Speaker 5: The nurse supervisor, her name was a lady called Dawn Strek,
Speaker 5: and she had done her own in house investigation. She
Speaker 5: just noticed there was a lot of death and she
Speaker 5: thought she'd have a look at what was happening, and
Speaker 5: she discovered that while looking at staff time cards that
Speaker 5: between a period of two years from nineteen ninety three
Speaker 5: to ninety ninety five, in majors, he was on duty
Speaker 5: for one hundred and thirty of one hundred and forty
Speaker 5: seven deaths in the ICU, and of the years prior
Speaker 5: to nineteen ninety three and started, there had only been
Speaker 5: thirty one patients who have died. So that's another thing
Speaker 5: that you'll find when people read this book, you'll discover
Speaker 5: it often one staff member is always consistently present when
Speaker 5: a lot of people die. So that's what that's what
Speaker 5: I found concerned in as well. So it seems like
Speaker 5: the people who are trying to get the attention to
Speaker 5: hospital administration about things they almost get they get bobbed off,
Speaker 5: But that's an expression intend that they get. They get dismissed,
Speaker 5: and people don't want to know about it, and they
Speaker 5: almost marginalize themselves because of their concerns. And that's what
Speaker 5: happened to be Lady drawn too. It was interesting that.
Speaker 7: Sorry go ahead, no, you go ahead.
Speaker 5: I wasn't going to say.
Speaker 7: It was interesting too is that they had some eyewitness
Speaker 7: testimony too with against against majors, in that there was
Speaker 7: a witness that said he had a syringe in the
Speaker 7: room right before you know that this person went into
Speaker 7: the cardiac arrest. And that really that the again not
Speaker 7: much of not really a slam dunk trial. That really
Speaker 7: came down to battle of the experts, and the cardiologist
Speaker 7: gave testimony that that was that he said it was
Speaker 7: consistent that the illnesses were consistent with potassium chloride, and
Speaker 7: so that's how he ended up with ninety nine, well
Speaker 7: three hundred and sixty years, sixty years for each, sixty
Speaker 7: years for each crime, sixty sixty times six three hundred
Speaker 7: and sixty years for majors. So with this potassium chloride
Speaker 7: now major is also interesting part of the story. Some
Speaker 7: of these stories, do you think, well, of course, there
Speaker 7: he goes, he's gone, that's it. But he has he
Speaker 7: thinks a pretty good shot in an appeal. So we
Speaker 7: were talking about some of the reasons why he thought
Speaker 7: he should be able to get another trial. So tell
Speaker 7: us a little bit about the jurors drinking beer and
Speaker 7: his appeal.
Speaker 5: This is quite strange, I found. So in twodoven and
Speaker 5: two his legal team launched an appeal. And the basis
Speaker 5: of that appeal wasn't that you know he was wrongly
Speaker 5: didn't do the clientcy. He basically alleged that the jury
Speaker 5: members had acted in appropriately during the nineteen ninety nine trial.
Speaker 5: So in the appeal documents he mentioned hems like one
Speaker 5: juror was seen to make an inappropriate facial expression at
Speaker 5: a defense attorney, and that he also wanted a new
Speaker 5: trouble to said jurors to drunk during lunch rates at
Speaker 5: the trial, and they drunk during deliberations, and the deliberations
Speaker 5: went for three days. And he also had a beat
Speaker 5: about the fact that he thought jurors were socializing as
Speaker 5: members of the state policeive picnic that had been organized
Speaker 5: by the Clay County Sheriff, just to give listeners a
Speaker 5: bit of a bit of an idea. This was a
Speaker 5: massive trial in Stay. He had a huge amount of publicity.
Speaker 5: It was very hard for them to find a jury
Speaker 5: that wouldn't have heard of the case. And it was
Speaker 5: a very length It was a very lengthy process. So
Speaker 5: they were I guess that in County sheriff, they was
Speaker 5: just trying to look after the juris because they knew
Speaker 5: that they were, you know, in for a pretty pretty arduous,
Speaker 5: arduous time during this trial. But that his appeals to
Speaker 5: flowing out, you know, the judge up held his convictions
Speaker 5: and and said that the Clay County Sheriff, you know,
Speaker 5: was a very experienced j officer. He was well rest
Speaker 5: on the appropriate DURI jeury, the way that jury should
Speaker 5: be treated, and there was no real cause the majors appeal.
Speaker 5: It is just very I found them very stranger to
Speaker 5: launch an appeal MM wasted time, tax, base money.
Speaker 7: The good aspect of it, if it is one bright
Speaker 7: aspect of it, is that since that case they did
Speaker 7: they did, it did spark some cases to pardon me
Speaker 7: some changes and the way they have access to potassium
Speaker 7: chloride after that has been restricted, right, So there has
Speaker 7: been some changes in so the ability to be able
Speaker 7: to get this what's end up being a killer, killer
Speaker 7: drug has been restricted somewhat.
Speaker 5: That's right. So with Indiana, I believe, and it's probably
Speaker 5: the training other states what the majors is able to
Speaker 5: do with somehow get access to undihloated potassium chloride, which
Speaker 5: be fraved a lot stronger and a lot more lethal
Speaker 5: than when it's pre mixed. He was able to get
Speaker 5: his hands on vias with that and then I'm assuming,
Speaker 5: you know, in injected or filled the theory and straight
Speaker 5: from the bottom, I'm not really very medical. Finally enough,
Speaker 5: my husband's in there and my mother's in there, so
Speaker 5: I've got I've got a bit of an interest in
Speaker 5: that that I personally, you know, I'm very cool or
Speaker 5: so medical matters. But what had changed now is that
Speaker 5: all all potassi employed things are pre mixed in hospital
Speaker 5: pharmacies and it's no longer freely available to ward stuff.
Speaker 5: So you couldn't just go up to the friegeon go
Speaker 5: and get it out. It's now logged. And then certain
Speaker 5: people have access to it, and they do believe. The
Speaker 5: prosecutors who worked on this case believed that this case
Speaker 5: actually probably pretty bit of a bit of wind up
Speaker 5: a lot of other hospital administrators around America. They're tightened
Speaker 5: up their practices.
Speaker 7: Sure, why not that death is bad for business? That
Speaker 7: would think? Now, as this book progresses, and you know,
Speaker 7: there's again we've only touched on a few of these stories,
Speaker 7: but the last story we're going to just touch on.
Speaker 7: And again I wanted to give examples of just the
Speaker 7: range of stories here, but really it just escalates through
Speaker 7: the whole book in terms of the depravity and the
Speaker 7: shocking nature of some of these killers. And again, you
Speaker 7: just do a great job of having those little bits
Speaker 7: of information where you know, an eyewitness sees somebody again
Speaker 7: being killed and really then ends up being in court testifying.
Speaker 7: Some of these people are nurses, fellow nurses that go
Speaker 7: to authorities like in this case, and the authorities tell them, listen,
Speaker 7: mind your own business. And there's a few cases of
Speaker 7: that where people report and are told listen, you know
Speaker 7: it's being taken care of, or listen, why don't you
Speaker 7: just mind your own business? So one of the more
Speaker 7: dramatic cases. In this book is a nurse from Texas
Speaker 7: named Janine Jones, and she suspected of fifty deaths. Again,
Speaker 7: I'd say we're ramping up the horror here. She's suspected
Speaker 7: of fifty deaths of children, ends up being just talking
Speaker 7: about one particular sweet child, Chelsea McClellan. So tell us
Speaker 7: about Janine Jones. And this is in nineteen ninety eight,
Speaker 7: so the late nineties. So tell us a little bit
Speaker 7: about her. And then this Suzanne Maltonado, who's the one
Speaker 7: that ends up making a list of these suspicious deaths.
Speaker 7: So tell us a little bit about Janine Jones in
Speaker 7: Texas and in this Fair County Medical Center.
Speaker 5: Sure, say, this is really a really interesting heist because
Speaker 5: Jane john is in jaile. She's now all that and
Speaker 5: in not quite help by. She actually is eligible to
Speaker 5: be released in twenty eighteen, which is unbelievable, but she
Speaker 5: actually will be able to She became a nurse in
Speaker 5: nineteen seventy seven and she started working at this Bear
Speaker 5: County Medical Center hospital in San Antonio, Texas. She was
Speaker 5: a very straight shooting, bossy, bossy woman. She had aspirations
Speaker 5: above her station. So she almost wanted to be in charge,
Speaker 5: and she would split around, always involved in drama. She
Speaker 5: was someone that very much people otherliked or they didn't like.
Speaker 5: Some doctors and nurses thought she was very confident, she
Speaker 5: was so dedicated to her patients, but there were other
Speaker 5: people who thought that she was just a trouble maker.
Speaker 5: She was disruptive, and she was an attention seeker, and
Speaker 5: she actually many people who worked with her. And what
Speaker 5: came out during her trial was that she always sought
Speaker 5: out the sickest children to talk after was very invested
Speaker 5: in being involved in this drama with the families of
Speaker 5: these poor little sick babies, and that she acted really
Speaker 5: like she ran the ran the pediatric units in that hospital,
Speaker 5: and there was always something had to work the three
Speaker 5: pm to eleven PM shift, and it was actually named
Speaker 5: the death shift. Peter Elkins in nineteen early nineteen eighties
Speaker 5: wrote a really excellent long form feature article for the
Speaker 5: Texas Monthly about this case, and then it became a book.
Speaker 5: And that's that's a really really good reading. If people
Speaker 5: can then want to know more. I've given a list
Speaker 5: of books that I recommend people read at the back
Speaker 5: of it. Still more incepts about the cases. So every
Speaker 5: time pretty Mum Jim work, she waked the shift and
Speaker 5: we had colloquially known as shift amongst the hospital staff
Speaker 5: because there was always an increase in the number of
Speaker 5: medical emergencies during that shift. There were babies who went
Speaker 5: into kadiak arrests. They had said agues and they came
Speaker 5: close to death able to So Jeanine would don alert
Speaker 5: people of these babies being sick and then may be revised,
Speaker 5: but many of them actually died. To thrive on the drama,
Speaker 5: she was very over dramatic. She was often found in
Speaker 5: the morgue. She won't to take the babies down to
Speaker 5: the morgue and she'd be saying goodbye to them and
Speaker 5: cuddling them, and her behavior actually aroused a lot of
Speaker 5: suspicions among coworkers. Basically, they thought that she was harming
Speaker 5: these babies. They really thought that, and you imagine that
Speaker 5: these nurses have these kind of suspicions. They're probably based
Speaker 5: on some sort of fact, and they thought that she
Speaker 5: was creating these medical emergencies so she could be the
Speaker 5: big shots and be a hero and be admired from
Speaker 5: the families. So there was this nurse. She was alreadis,
Speaker 5: so she was higher out higher trage than Jeanine. A
Speaker 5: name was his Anna mal Meldonardo, and so she began
Speaker 5: making a list of all the babies who were dying
Speaker 5: during that in eighty one or nineteen eighty two. She
Speaker 5: was a new nurse, so she was callef he hadn't
Speaker 5: been working for that long, and she worked the shift
Speaker 5: immediately after Junine Jones, from eleven PM to seven am,
Speaker 5: and she just began to wonder why all these babies
Speaker 5: on the shift that Jeanine Jones were, Why are they
Speaker 5: getting sicker, Why are they dying? Why aren't they getting better?
Speaker 5: And she actually took her concerns to their supervisor, called
Speaker 5: Pat Belco, but she was told in no uncertain terms,
Speaker 5: because she was a young nurse, they probably thought, oh,
Speaker 5: she's a bit keen. She was advised to stop playing
Speaker 5: amateur sleuth and leave it alone. Don't even we don't
Speaker 5: want to hear you, you know, talking about this anymore.
Speaker 5: But then eventually people were not able to ignore the
Speaker 5: fact that there were so many baby deaths and medical
Speaker 5: emergencies in the ICU, and they had stop investigating themselves,
Speaker 5: and the in house lawyers advised the doctors that they
Speaker 5: really needed to get rid of get rid of Jeannine Jones,
Speaker 5: because she seemed to be the wait thinks so no
Speaker 5: talk really is actually having a charge with anything. But
Speaker 5: they're like, you need to get her out of the
Speaker 5: hospital because these these things are not good for our statistics.
Speaker 5: They're not good for we don't want people question anythings.
Speaker 5: So that's another common theme about what happens in these cases.
Speaker 5: Often the hospital administration. It's almost like stuff in the
Speaker 5: Catholic church. You know, they just brush it under the carpet,
Speaker 5: remove the problem, but don't really do anything about.
Speaker 7: It, which interesting too. And I was going to ask
Speaker 7: the question, but you brought up the issue was that
Speaker 7: when they did their own internal investigation after telling this
Speaker 7: other Maltonado, you know, be quiet, they said, you know,
Speaker 7: these incidents could be considered coincidental, but they might be
Speaker 7: considered negligence, meaning they could be construed as we don't
Speaker 7: necessarily know them to be murdered. They could be coincidences,
Speaker 7: but we might possibly be on the hook here. So
Speaker 7: I thought that would be very very cold and calculating.
Speaker 7: And the story that that involves this too. The testimony
Speaker 7: of this woman of the only of the one child
Speaker 7: that she was convicted of and and if I may,
Speaker 7: I'll just I'll just one of the more dramatic parts
Speaker 7: of the Yeah, she's in she's at the hospital, and
Speaker 7: then she's at doctor Holland and this kid comes in
Speaker 7: with just a bad cold basically, and so the woman
Speaker 7: says at her suggestions, you know, she says, Janine says, well,
Speaker 7: I'll take the child so you can have a little
Speaker 7: bit of privacy to be with the mother. And then
Speaker 7: the kid has a seizure and then remarkably, the mother
Speaker 7: believes that that Janine had something to do with helping
Speaker 7: the child. Not only did the doctor save the child.
Speaker 7: So take it from there in terms of this incredible
Speaker 7: turn of events two or three times where she's still
Speaker 7: trusted despite this, at least for the reader, this obvious horror.
Speaker 5: Yeah. So this little girl, Chelsea McClellan, who is the
Speaker 5: little girl that Jeanine Jones was convicted of murdering. She
Speaker 5: was fifteen months old. And so by this stage Janine
Speaker 5: Jones had gone on to work, she left the hospital,
Speaker 5: she'd left of her own accord from that hospital, and
Speaker 5: she gone on to work with a doctor who was
Speaker 5: setting up a pediatric clinic, and in fact, this doctor
Speaker 5: had been worn by some people not to employ Jeanine
Speaker 5: Jones because of the cloud over her head, but she
Speaker 5: did so. Janine was working in this hospital and little
Speaker 5: Chelsea McClellan this was her regular clinic and it was
Speaker 5: the first time that the family had ever gone to
Speaker 5: this clinic and she basically experienced a seizure and stopped breathing.
Speaker 5: So Chelsea was rushed to hospital. She recovered that the
Speaker 5: doctors were baffled as to why she was sick. But
Speaker 5: the mother, Pettie McClellan, she was really grateful to this
Speaker 5: doctor Holland and Janine Jones because she was convinced that
Speaker 5: they saved her daughter's life. So the woman who actually
Speaker 5: caused this, the mother was like, thank you so much
Speaker 5: for helping my daughter. So it didn't finally out for
Speaker 5: Dinder to missus McLellan from using the doctor surgery again.
Speaker 5: So less than a month later, after this little girl
Speaker 5: had spent a week in hospital with you know, seizures
Speaker 5: that were we now know induced by Janine Jones giving
Speaker 5: her an injection of something, Janine Jones said to the mother, well,
Speaker 5: why don't we update the little girls in the nizations
Speaker 5: or shots as they refer to them, And she did that.
Speaker 5: So the mother was actually holding her little girl and
Speaker 5: the little girl was facing her mother. I mean other
Speaker 5: experience is taking my own children for their indianizations. It's
Speaker 5: horrible but very important. But almost immediately as an injection
Speaker 5: went into the little girl's thies that Jeanine Jones gave
Speaker 5: this thought, the little girl had trouble breathing. She was
Speaker 5: struggling to breathe, and this, to me is just the
Speaker 5: most horrifying thing. The little girl was struggling to cry
Speaker 5: and apparently, according to Pettie mcleollan, the mother, her little
Speaker 5: girl was trying to say Mama and couldn't say it.
Speaker 5: And I just found that absolutely heart wrenching. It was
Speaker 5: so horrible. So the mother could see what was happening
Speaker 5: right in front of her eyes. But during all this,
Speaker 5: Jeanine Jones actually gave it another injection and that's when
Speaker 5: she stopped breathing. And so immediately Jeanine Jones goes into
Speaker 5: drama mode. Right, We've got to get to the doctor,
Speaker 5: and little Chelsea died. But the reason why this case
Speaker 5: has come back into the news because I saw some
Speaker 5: television interviews on YouTube with Pattie McClellan is speaking recently
Speaker 5: because of Janine Jones possibly could get parole. She was
Speaker 5: recounting what she saw that day, and she said that
Speaker 5: it was almost like Jeanine Jones was on a high,
Speaker 5: like she was excited by the drama when she was
Speaker 5: yelling that her little girl wasn't breathing, and she found
Speaker 5: that quite horrifying. So the reason why Jeanine Jones quite
Speaker 5: possibly can get parole is that there was at the
Speaker 5: time of her imprisonment, there was a Texas law to
Speaker 5: ease overcrowding in prisons. If you behaved, I guess you
Speaker 5: could get a reduction. In your sense, it was to
Speaker 5: eat a crowding. So Jeanine Jones actually is eligible for
Speaker 5: release in twenty eighteen. But there is a very active
Speaker 5: group at the moment trying to work to find evidence
Speaker 5: of other cases so they can stop that happening. They're
Speaker 5: literally they think hundreds of people, their children may have
Speaker 5: been killed by Jeanine Jones, and they believe that she
Speaker 5: was killed by Jeanine Jones. But for whatever reason, some
Speaker 5: were told to sign confidential reality agreements at the hospital.
Speaker 5: Maybe they will paid money for their loss. Some of
Speaker 5: them are prevented from talking, but the legal authorities are
Speaker 5: certainly really working with the families to try and find
Speaker 5: other evidence that Janine Jones killed children back then.
Speaker 7: The other part of the story that's we just left
Speaker 7: out is that after again like this obvious murder attempt
Speaker 7: here less than a month later, update her vaccination shots
Speaker 7: or right in front of the mother, she injects her
Speaker 7: then gives her another injection. Incredibly horrific. An ambulance is
Speaker 7: called this is you can't write fiction. This fantastic.
Speaker 5: I forgot to mention this part of.
Speaker 7: It's so crazy to get tell us about what happens
Speaker 7: in the ambulance.
Speaker 5: Okay, so I was incorrected before when I said so
Speaker 5: they got the little girl's breathing stable, you know, as
Speaker 5: they grabbed her from the mother to try and revive her,
Speaker 5: she'd stabilized to be it. The ambulance arrives, so they're
Speaker 5: taking her to hospital, but Janine Jones insists that she'll
Speaker 5: write in the ambulance ambulance to the little girl and
Speaker 5: the mother followed in her car. But during that ambulance,
Speaker 5: right Jeanine Jones. I believe, well, they know, gave the
Speaker 5: little girl another injection of the drug that she used
Speaker 5: to kill them, which was a muscle relaxant, and the
Speaker 5: little girl died in the ambulance, which is completely tragic
Speaker 5: because it's just horrifying. I found this Jeanne Jane Jones's
Speaker 5: case probably one of the worst I think that I'd
Speaker 5: written about in it's like a compulsion to kill almost
Speaker 5: you just can't believe it, really, and you're right, you
Speaker 5: can't even make this stuff up.
Speaker 7: Yeah, this is its thread out of the old Twilight
Speaker 7: Zone episodes where they, you know, okay, one time she
Speaker 7: gets close, Okay, they don't believe it, so then the
Speaker 7: next time she's again. But yet she's in the ambulance
Speaker 7: at the end. So that's really like there's something out
Speaker 7: of Twilight's on it. No one notices, no one realizes,
Speaker 7: I shouldn't say no one realized, is that this beast.
Speaker 7: It's just the capacity to kill this kid right in
Speaker 7: front of her mother, And.
Speaker 5: Yet say they manipulate, you know, the way they manipulate
Speaker 5: their victims to be caring, and the poor victim think, well,
Speaker 5: she's obviously really dedicated she's a great nurse. She really
Speaker 5: cares about my child. You know, they're manipulated, so that
Speaker 5: would be even worse.
Speaker 7: Yeah, this is this is I get again. I guess
Speaker 7: keeping in with the the profile of a serial killer,
Speaker 7: where they'll they'll pick upon the vulnerable to be their victims.
Speaker 7: These people do exactly the same, whether it be a child,
Speaker 7: a sick child, a child a visiting a hospital, an
Speaker 7: elderly patient in a nursery home. Ladies are old ladies
Speaker 7: that are immobile, and they're setting fires to distract from
Speaker 7: the the opiates that you're stealing. These hospitals are just
Speaker 7: trying to cover their own investors and their own you know,
Speaker 7: getting advice from their lawyer, which really has nothing to
Speaker 7: do with the victims that could be mounting. They have
Speaker 7: some of these rates of death well where they have
Speaker 7: some of these suspected nurses and doctors on shift that
Speaker 7: could defy any other kind of explanation. And you've included
Speaker 7: at all in this incredible Angels of Death. You've got
Speaker 7: a chapter on Harold Shipman and Michael Swangle. This is
Speaker 7: a really comprehensive scary next time you want to go
Speaker 7: to the hospital type book. I congratulate you on this.
Speaker 5: Thanks for featuring it. It was something I was really
Speaker 5: interested in it and the more I researched, the more
Speaker 5: I discovered. And it's actually quite frightening how easy it
Speaker 5: was for some of a lot of these people to
Speaker 5: kill unnoticed for a long time, and because of I
Speaker 5: guess behind the respectability of the profession. But also it's
Speaker 5: good tonight as well. This is definitely not the norm.
Speaker 5: I don't want to DEMONI really hard working nurses and doctors,
Speaker 5: but certainly that there are you can't dispute it. There
Speaker 5: are cases of healthcare professionals who do to do kill people.
Speaker 7: It's very interesting that the system itself seems to not
Speaker 7: have much of a safeguard for these rogue type nurses
Speaker 7: and doctors, these killers, in terms of once one institution
Speaker 7: recognizes that there's something amiss, that they wouldn't ethically pass
Speaker 7: on that information to another hospital or the situation is
Speaker 7: so dire in terms of these people being needed, that
Speaker 7: it sets up this incredible situation where you don't really
Speaker 7: check out credentials. To me, that's the most amazing part.
Speaker 1: Of this book.
Speaker 5: I think that's right. I think when I was reading
Speaker 5: and writing about Charles Cullen. Certainly he was able to
Speaker 5: move between a lot of hospitality left or was told
Speaker 5: to lead, but people weren't checking references. I think that's
Speaker 5: another thing. It calls to question about the pressures that
Speaker 5: health facilities and healthcare professionals are under. Is it because
Speaker 5: they're so overworked, or that they don't properly check people,
Speaker 5: or is it hard to get to get nurses to
Speaker 5: work in certain areas. It just seems that there were many,
Speaker 5: many times, particularly with Charles Cullen, Howld Chipman, things like that,
Speaker 5: where they could have been caught and they weren't, and
Speaker 5: it just kind of kept going on. I mean, eventually
Speaker 5: they were caught, but in between they were able to
Speaker 5: kill a lot more people.
Speaker 7: Now in this book you have cases from all over
Speaker 7: the world, and one of the cases we didn't get
Speaker 7: to talk about but has included in your book. Another
Speaker 7: fascinating duel of killers is this Leans Death Angels from
Speaker 7: Austria on This is like late nineteen eighties eating. What
Speaker 7: I was going to ask is that in your research
Speaker 7: did you find that this is a again, it's not
Speaker 7: a unique phenomena unique to America, but was it more
Speaker 7: prevalent in America or is it just in terms of
Speaker 7: your research? Could you conclusively say that this is just
Speaker 7: an issue that occurs everywhere.
Speaker 5: Well, I think there were more American cases, definitely, but
Speaker 5: it happened in Europe. There were other cases actually I
Speaker 5: could have written about, but I just you know what
Speaker 5: it's like, working to a deadline. There's only so much
Speaker 5: you can do that. I read off cases in Latin America.
Speaker 5: I know there's one at the moment, there's a nurse
Speaker 5: in Italy who's on trial or has been charged with murders.
Speaker 5: It certainly did seem to be more prevalent in America,
Speaker 5: but there was actually quite a few cases in Britain
Speaker 5: and in Europe. Australia not so much. And there are
Speaker 5: some cases, but because they are not they're under appeal
Speaker 5: or they're currently being dealt with in court, I obviously
Speaker 5: couldn't write about them. As we discussed last time I
Speaker 5: spake to you, the laws in Australia around what you
Speaker 5: can and can't report A very strict no. It's not
Speaker 5: like America where you basically can interview anyone and you know,
Speaker 5: anyone can speculate about what they think they are really
Speaker 5: really strict rules about court reporting, so yeah, that I
Speaker 5: couldn't write about those, but certainly I think Britain, Britain
Speaker 5: probably and America that was the most prevalent, although were
Speaker 5: the most kind of cases.
Speaker 7: Well, I want to just again thank you for this book.
Speaker 7: Angels of Death are fascinating, the collections of stories that
Speaker 7: will scare you half to death anyway reading about this,
Speaker 7: and so I want to thank you very much. It's
Speaker 7: a very interesting new phenomena thing think I'm almost new,
Speaker 7: but a more recent phenomena again, another variant of the
Speaker 7: serial killer. And again, like very many of the other
Speaker 7: serial killers, they blend into society so that they are
Speaker 7: just the person next door, the caregiver, the neighbor, the
Speaker 7: sweet nurse or the caring doctor. So it's even more
Speaker 7: horrifying when you think about that.
Speaker 5: I think so definitely that I think that is the
Speaker 5: shock value of it, that they seem to be so
Speaker 5: normal and respected.
Speaker 7: Yes, well, thank you very much Emily for coming on
Speaker 7: and talking us from Melbourne, Australia. Thank you very much
Speaker 7: for this and I hope to talk to you again soon.
Speaker 7: I know you're a very prolific writer, so I'm sure
Speaker 7: We'll be talking to you again soon with another spine
Speaker 7: tingling collection of true crime stories. So thank you very
Speaker 7: much for this, Emily, and you have a great evening.
Speaker 5: Thanks Jan good night, good night.