THE DEATH SHIFT-Peter Elkind

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Jones breezed from one nursing job to the next. The case is intriguing elements a young, ambitious prosecuting da, a naive support of close associate of the Qu' serial killer, a public hospital administration that suspected criminal wrongdoing but failed to notify the police and was later accused of cover up. Elkind, who spares no one, notes with dismay that Jones could be eligible for parole as early as next year. The book that we're featuring this evening is The Death Shift,

with my special guest, journalist and author Peter Elkine. Welcome to the program, and thank you for greenness interview. Peter Elkind.

And I wrote a long magazine article for Texas Monthly and got offered a job and went to work as a journalist and never went to law school, and I now work at Fortune Magazine, going on to other stuff, but I went back as the case proceeded, as she was indicted, convicted, and covered her trials and wrote This book was published in nineteen eighty eight eighty nine, and first hardcover and then paperback, and it was in print for a number of years and then finally out of print,

and we've just recently republished it with Diversion Books as an ebook.

Tell us a little sure, Santonio.

city as well as the story of her family. And San Antonio's had a very were in a large poor population, largely Hispanic population, which relied extremely heavily on the charity hospital in town, which was first called Bear County Hospital

and then renamed Medical Center Hospital. It was moved from downtown where most of the impoverished population of the city lived near there, and then moved to the affluent suburbs to the north of towntown because the city was eager to see it become a more prestigious institution and attract paying patients. But nonetheless it remained the hospital of last resort where poor, poor residents in San Antonio went for their emergency care and for hospitalization.

a victim and also seeking attention throughout her life. But her dad was a very flamboyant man and sort of in and out of trouble himself over his lifetime, and then passed away and she was left with her mother, with whom she had a very contentious relationship.

And and while you're at it too, you also talk describe her her appearance, which is important I think in two and to her her self esteem and and basically some of the behavior that she has when she's young. So tell us a little bit about some of the characteristics behavior.

and remember the monkeys. As I recall, she told all kinds of tall tales which people were very persuaded of because she was very convincing, but was sort of desperate to get attention. And she did all sorts of things to put herself on the spotlight. And that was true of her as a child.

a tricky thing because little kid's veins are so tiny and it takes a lot of skill to uh to start the IVY without sticking the kid three and four and five times, which obviously is difficult with a whiggling child and crying child as well as especially kid who's very sick. So that became, you know, sort of her stocking trade a little bit early on in her nursing career that she could start an iv and and and stick a nurse, stick an ivy and a fly, as one person put it.

less training. And there's a kind of a bright line in the nursing world between the licensed nurses, the licensed vocational nurses, and the registered nurses. The registered nurses are typically regarded as a cut above because they've had more training, and they rank higher on the totem pole. And she had a chip on her shoulder for all sorts of reasons, and that was just one of them.

person that basically rears her kids. So let's go back and talk about her personality and how was she with her own children basically, and while she's becoming this nurse and seems to have found her little niche with this one year course this l VN. Before we start talking about her behavior at work, what was what was it like at home?

it was a difficult marriage. Her husband wasn't didn't hear much of a living, so she was she was helping bring home the bacon and they had a very stormy relationship and it didn't end very well.

He's kind of a wheeler dealer, and Janine loved to hang out with him, and she was she was really he was really the parent who she attached herself to. He loved his sense of drama, his bluntness amid sort of high profile, his h He's a very colorful character, and I think she really tried to model herself after

him in a lot of ways. Her mother, who was left at home to take care of the kids, she was less close to, and after her father died, she had a very on again, off again stormy relationship with her, even while her mother took care of Jeanne's two children while Jeanine was working very very long hours in the hospital. After she became a nurse.

fired after about eight months on the job. There was a performance review that said missus Jones tends to make judgments that she has neither the experience nor authority to make. So she was dismissed, and she later insisted that it was and this was sort of a pattern that you'd see that that developed. One that she would have trouble with her supervisors and her early jobs got fired, and two that she would blame it on everyone else. It was never her fault. She said she had a conflict

with a doctor. She said it was a lack of feeling on the physician's part toward a patient and I stood up for the patient and he didn't like it. They asked me to resign. In fact, the hospital records, personnel records which i'd seen, show that it was complaints

by a patient that led to her firing. And this again was the pattern that took place time and time again before she got to the County Hospital Medical Center hospital where all these terrible incidents occurred, that she would have problem, She would be insubordinate, and she would blame all her difficulties and someone else, saying that she was just sticking up for the doctors, or sticking up for the patient's excuse me, or that she was pointing out

that the doctors were incompetent or had made mistakes. She was always right, they were always wrong. There was never any questioned about it. She also had a very dramatic manner about her. There was another episode that she was written up in the hospital report which described that and this is reading from this, that miss Jones began crying in front of patient as she was reviewing the previous

evening's incident. This is an incident involving a patient and after Miss Jones left, patient noticed the nurse notified the nurse complaining of chest pain, nervousness, and high blood pressure. The doctor was notified drugs had to be ordered. Anyway, They conclude that she was insubordinate on professional and ushered her out and again she blamed it on others.

raised the question of whether she'd be interested in working at pediatrics, and she said yeah, and she went to work and they really didn't check her background at all. And given the nursing shortage, they were eager to hire nurses even if they've had some problems elsewhere, but it doesn't look like they really even investigated what had happened at the other places and why she'd been ushered out.

romantically or sexually involved with Jeanne Jones. There were friends, and nonetheless she identified him as the father in order to provide kind of a respectable cover for what was going on. It appears it's my understanding that in fact the father of her child was was her former husband that they'd gotten together and she gotten pregnant, but her mother didn't like the ex husband, so she Janine told a different story, told a lie about who the real father was.

San Antonio had a big poor population. It was largely Hispanic. It's a very sort of economically diverse city. It's got an affluent group and it's got a very large impoverished community, and they relied very heavily with the.

from the population that it was really serving. But it was all part of the effort to change the image of the place. And this place apart is in the hotale because they're so desperate to change the image of the image of the hospital in the community and have avoided any sort of hint of scandal.

difficult employee who bears extremely close observation. Well, when Janine got to the Bar County Hospital, none of that seemed they seem to pay no attention to that. And even though she did all sorts of things that should have gotten her fired there before any suspicion of her actually harming kids, they weren't paying that kind of attention to her. They didn't get rid of her.

you know, way beyond infractions murder. But what are the kind of infractions that that Janine Jones is known for.

And she basically who she basically who went for her sales job in terms of, uh, you know, how passionately she cared for the kids who were impressed with her, a sort of technical skill at starting an IV who didn't mind that she was you know, coarse, talked about sex the job, bad mouthed doctors, offered opinions about everything they found that kind of you know, fascinating and compelling,

and and and and went for it. And and pet Belco, the head nurse in the i c U, who's a critical figure kind of a bureaucratic administrator in the in the unit, became a Jeanine Jones fan. Thought she was a really good nurse and was very very protective of her and defended her time and time again, even when she she was insubordinate or engaged in incidents and was reported for doing all kinds of things that she shouldn't

have done. And one of the the reasons that Belco was, uh was protective of her was that Belco had an incident in her own earlier nursing career when she had been accused of of things and felt like she had been she had made a mistake, and she felt like she was wrongly maligned, wrongly blamed for the death of a child. So she would become very protective of her because she identified with her and had this experience herself.

So anyway, that's uh, that's a big factor as things moved forward, that she had hovering over her, protecting her. The head nurse in the unit, who was very dismissive of the growing suspicions about Jeanine Jones.

But these kids are all sick. They're not newborns, but they're kids who have left the hospital after being born and come back and they've got serious medical problems and require intensive care. So there's the pediac and pediatric intensive currying it. And this little boy, Chris Ogada, was barely a year old, had been in the hospital a lot after his birth. He had a bad heart defect, and then he came into the hospital with pneumonia and diarrhea,

developed hepatitis. He had a bad infection. And the parents who lived fairly far away, and San Antonio served indigen patients, families lived from quite a distance. They covered a big territory. The hogate Is in fact lived in a town called Saint Angel which was two hundred miles away, and they'd taken their son to Bear County Hospital because it was the best hospital within that anywhere around which they could afford, which they could send their kid to because it was

the county hospital anyway. So the Gates had gone home because they couldn't stay there while their child was in the hospital for a long time, mister, they had to work and earn a living. And one day, Jeanine Jones calls Jeanine Jones, who was Christopher's nurse, and says he's gone. Credit by Christopher. He said he's gone to play with the angels and the family, which, of course heartbroke, and the parents gathered the clothes they wanted to bury their

baby in. The mom had crocheted a special blanket. They get in their car, they drive two hundred miles to San Antonio. They walk into the ICU to claim their child's body. And and they walked through the ICU and and Christopher is alive. He's sitting in the ICU bed. He's hooked up to machines. Everything was just as it

had been for months. And after they've been told they've gone to play with the angel, says Jeanine put it so, you know, they were shocked, and they asked for Jeanine, and Jeanine had gone home by then, so, uh, you know, this very strange episode took place. And and then Janine continues to uh time and time again as the nurses gather for their you know, nightly meetings between shifts, predicts that Christopher Hogate is going to die, says tonight's the night.

And then there's another episode, uh, when Jeanine had left Christopher Hoogate's bedrails down, and this baby who's who's got respirator tubing down his road and he's got arm restraints in a hard condition, rolls out of his bed and is hanging by these restraints because she left the bedrails down. Anyway, it's sort of time and time again. There were these nightmarish episodes and and finally Chris Agated dies of cardiac

arrest a week later, once again under Jeene Jones's care. Anyway, Uh I, if that weren't bad enough, you know Janine Jones, then is you know, mourning his body, wraps his wraps mourning his death, wraps the baby in a blanket, and holds the dead child, the corpse to her chest for an hour, rocking back and forth and wailing, waiting for the parents to write. So that's just one episode of

many involving Jeanine Jones and the care of kids. Bizarre and troubling to the least, But yet the parents thought Janine Jones was was a carry nurse and invect invited invited Jane Jones to tendest funeral.

the morgue. And there was one point one episode where family wanted to cradle the baby after the child had died and say goodbye, and she insisted the child had to go down to the bard immediately. And she basically grabbed the grabbed the child's body and ran down the hospital, ran down the hospital corder with the baby with a hospital with a family in pursuit, and and took the baby down to the morgue in this incredibly bizarre scene.

with his grandmother and Janine. Janine also had started to display a pattern where she was bringing her kids in for for medical treatment for problems, for an array of problems that when they were examined UH doctors couldn't couldn't identify, they didn't see what was wrong with the kids. But she seemed to relish having her children being treated in in UH by doctors and in hospital situations.

Munchausen syndrome is a situation where people enjoy being the center of attention in a medical situation and get excitement or attracted to having medical procedures done on them UH performed in them, and they appear at the hospital regularly with complaints of serious medical problems that doctors, after examining them can't can't identify, can't find so they come in with compliance, I have high fever. The doctors take their

temperature and they can't find any fever. And they actually sometimes induce high fever by you know, putting hot compresses on their bodies or or cause medical problems, induce medical symptoms artificially so that they'll be admitted to hospitals and

have procedures done on them. That's that's Munchhausen syndrome. There's also a sort of uh second aspect of this called Munchausen syndrome by proxy, where you uh cause medical problems on people that you're caring for, either your own children or or in the case of Jeanine Jones, patience and

again makes you the center of attention. Genie Jones herself presented in the hospital repeatedly with all sorts of medical problems that also to medical complaints that prompted the doctors who work with her in the hospital to send her for a psychiatric consult and a psychiatric console came back and said, you know, I see no evidence of this. I can't come to any other conclusion but that this is a psychosomatic that it's made up.

on this three to eleven on one nurse's shift. Now there are even people in this hospital stuff calling Janine's hours on duty the death shift. Isn't that correct?

the overnight shift. But when Jeanine Jones came on duty, they'd suddenly have a reversal, They have some sudden medical emergency, and then in too many cases, in a trumbling number of cases, they would suffer an arrest, which is an incredibly dramatic event when they require a crash card and where their heart stop beating, or where they're suffering a life threatening episode where everyone has to they call a

code and they and they have to resuscitate them. And this pattern was was quite significant in fact, later on, when this was eventually belatedly investigated by experts in the Centers for Disease Control who investigate epidemics, they basically explored this as a possible epidemic of what was going on in the ICU, and they found statistically that kids under Jeanine Jones's care were twenty five times as likely to suffer an arrest as they were under any other nurse,

and under her care there were ten times as likely to die on a shift when she worked. So there was a very dramatic pattern, and nobody had the statistics at that point, but there were nurses that noted the pattern, and they actually went to Pat Delco, went to the supervisors of the hospital and said, too many kids are dying under her. Something is going on. You need to investigate.

So tell us what happening is and why? Tell us about the significance of this discovery and what exactly happened.

from all the poorest and tissues in their body. And there's a there's a medical condition for a really sick infected kid which can cause this, and Jane would always blame it on that, but these kids didn't have those kinds. It's called disseminated dravasca coagulation or d i C. But these kids didn't didn't seem to have that kind of infection and they didn't show the signs of that really being the case, but they they'd have these bleeding episodes.

So there's one child named Orlando Santos who was sick and in the i c U. And Orlando Santos had this recurrence whenever Jeanine Jones was on duty of bleeding problems. And he wouldn't have these problems when other nurses were taking care of taking care of him, but he just had them when Jeanine was on duty and and he had come in with pneumonia to the hospital. U uh, he had been improving for a couple of days.

an I V to avoid clotting. But in this case, there was no reason for Rolando to have any substantial amotter of hepron. And and ultimately what UH doctors doctor Copeland did was because he suspected that that the baby was getting an excessive out of hepron, he ordered all hepron discontinued from Milando Santos. In fact, I ordered all the hepron removed from the room where the child is being treated. Anyway, despite all this, despite all this, Rolando

Santos starts bleeding again. And this happens when Jeanine Jones is on duty and she identifies the problem, which gets worse into the evening and he's having blood leaking out of his body. I described as being like a water balloon filled with needle holes. That blood is pouring out. And the doctor, who is desperate because this kid's about to die, he's going to he fell into a calma. They were about to lose him. His blood pressure was dropping.

So the doctor does something really dramatic. He gives Rolando Santos a drug called protamine sulfate, which is a drug he used to reverse the effects of hepron and protamine. This drug can harm a kid who hadn't gotten hepron.

But you know, this doctor was pretty convinced that something was going on, couldn't think of anything else to do, so he gives Lewando hantas a big, big dose of protamine through an IV and three actually three doses, and finally it stops the bleeding very abruptly, which was proof, absolute proof that he had gotten an overdose of hebron.

So at that point, doctor Coplan, believing that you know, somebody's deliberately giving Rolando Santos hepron, namely Jeanine Jones, he orders the baby transferred out of the ICU, even though he's really sick still, but just doesn't want him anywhere near Jeanine Jones and basically plays guards at the baby's at the baby's room so nothing further can happen. And you know, lo and and behold, five days later, this baby is well enough to go home.

investigators outside investigators. They want to keep it all quiet instead. Ultimately, after several rounds of discussions, they bring in an outside committee of experts secretly, and they say that the outside committee of medical experts is there to investigate the level of care in the ICU. These are doctors from hospital, very very esteemed hospital in Philadelphia, in Toronto and another

hospital to investigate the matter. And those doctors recognize that something is going on, but again don't feel like they have absolute proof. So what ends up happening is the hospital administrators, the medical school administrators decide they've got to get rid of Jeanine Jones. But they don't want to tell the police. They don't want to tell prosecutors, they

don't want to scandal or lawsuits. So what they do is they recommend and decide to upgrade the intensive curry in it to all registered nurses and get rid of all the licensed vocational nurses, including Jeanine Jones, under that pretext, So four or five nurses lose their jobs for no reason. Janine Jones is going to be removed, but all of them are sent off. Jeanine Jones isn't sent off with

warning to anybody who might hire. All of them are sent off, including Jeanine Jones, with good recommendations and explain that they that they're removed only because the ICU is being upgraded to a higher level of medical care with only registered nurses. So they've kept the whole thing secret, even though they the committee itself, as part of a confidential part of its report, identified Jeanine Jones.

specific accusations. You know, they're not in the business of investigating crime, and yet they refused to turn it over to those who were to look into whether something terrible was happening. Instead, they get rid of Jeane Jones, They wash their hands of her, and they send her off with a good recommendation where she and the tragedy is. She then goes off elsewhere, specifically to the hill country town of Curville in a rural pediatric clinic, and harms workhads and murders another one.

from Belcohen, was so despite everything. But tell us how a little bit about Kathleen Holland and her trusting nature and and what it is she sets out to do and happens when she meets Janine Jones.

Kathy Holland is setting up a private pediatric clinic after finishing her residency in a small town about sixty miles from San Antonio called Kerrville, a rural area which has mostly elderly population but a growing population of younger adults with kids. And she sets up a new pediatric practice there. And who does she designed to hire his her nurse, her office nurse, but Jeanine Jones. She just didn't buy into the the accusation surrounding her and brings her aboard as her office nurse.

but uh, in order to insert a breathing tube. And it's used routinely for surgery because you need in sort of breathing tube for for many medical many surgical procedures. But if you think about it, your you're you're complete, you're paralyzed, but you're completely conscious. You can't breathe for yourself, and and so you have to be in a situation where someone or a machine can breathe for you while you're being operated on or whatever's being done. So that

sucks on a coline. It's used rarely outside of an operating room setting, but Kathy Holland had it in her office and it becomes a critical element. And what happens next.

and her husband is read and they bring in. They first bring in her to see Kathy Holland, and of course Janine Joan is around, so tell us about that very first experience. He just comes in with a bad cold. But tell us what happens on that very first appearance in Kathy Holland's Sure.

Jeanine Jones takes her in the other room, and the next thing anyone knows is Jeanine Jones is saying, don't go to sleep, baby, Chelsea, wake up, and summons doctor Holland into the other room in the clinic and they find Chelsea limp on the examining table and Jeanine's putting an oxygen mask over her face, and she stopped breathing

and she's rushed immediately. They call a ambulance and she's rushed immediately to the hospital which is just a few miles away, and she's completely limp and it's totally unclear what happened. Chelsea stops and starts breathing again on her own after they breathe for her for a while. But as far as as mccollins are concerned, doctor Holland and Jeanine Jones have saved Chelsea's life. She had some sort

of emergency. They don't understand what happened, but she recovered from it, and the doctor and the nurse are heroes. And that's the first visit by Chelsea McClellan into doctor Holmes clinic.

going to administer them. She prepares the needles and she injects Chelsea in the thighs with the first shot, and suddenly Chelsea seems to have stop trouble breathing after the first injection is going in and Patty mclaum says, stop, do something. She's having another seizure. She's stopping breathing, and Janine says, no, no, it's okay and goes ahead and gives her the second shot in the thigh and by the time she pulls a syringe out, Chelsea stop breathing

completely again, so they call the ambulance. She's limp, she isn't breathing. They rush her to the hospital in Currville. She's still in bad shape. She's then they plan to transport her from Currville to San Antonio, and everyone sort of piles into a Karen Man of of ambulance cars on the way to for the for the the trip from Kerville to San Antonio to bring her to the

hospital there. And although Chelsea had gotten better, uh for a time, on the way there, she stops breathing again, and they pull over to a tiny hospital on the way try to resuscitate her, and and she does, and Chelsea passed away. Jeanine Jones is Jeanine Jones is with

her the whole time, and she's under Jeanine's care. And by the way, when she you know, they're paramedics in there too, and they comment on Jeanine's strange behavior that you know, Chelsea arrests and Jeans has pulled this son of a bitch over and says she's flat lined, and this whole emergency unfolds, and Chelsea does at the age

of fifteen months. But the bigger gamesoun sorry, go ahead, go ahead, I was going to tell you just so, the bigger picture is, you know, Chelsea had two episodes in a period of a couple of weeks, but literally, what's going on in Doctor Holland's office is in the period of a month, eight kids walking there with typical office problems. They have colds or sniffles or need shots or I mean, these are not kids going into an emergent,

to an emergency room or to a ICU. These are kids going into a doctor's piatric clinic for routine stuff. And eight kids have nine separate episodes where they stop breathing and are rushed to the hospital in Kerrville, which you know, typically we'll see one or two emergency kid emergencies in a year, that's in a life threading basis. And here they're having eight, uh you know, eight kids who stop breathing in a month from a single doctor's office.

It's just it's just mind boggling. I mean, it's only at the very end of this that doctor Holland becomes concerned and rights and and and and seems and after she's confronted with this pattern by the hospital and the doctors at the hospital and acknowledgism, begins to consider whether something is going on in her office.

often spending the night on the construction site. So doctor Holland is during this period, so she's close to a clinic has rented or purchased, I've forgotten which a house in Currville where she's allowing Jeanine to stay, and Janine is staying there, and another nurse who is very close to Janine in San Antonio, part of her circle, named Debbie sultan Thus, who's working at the hospital, is staying

there as well. And doctor Holland stays there. So in the community of Currville, which is a very conservative place, you know, there's all the sort of rumors that there's a sort of den of lesbians there. There's no indication that that's what was going on, but but they do

have a very close relationship and assortment of ways. You know, they they're spending time at at night together, you know, messing around with the Ouiji boards, and you know, have a very close personal relationship in addition the professional one, which you know certainly contributes, you'd think to doctor Holland being as blind as she was to what was going on.

an these theologists. Uh so tell us about some of the people that verge that that that gather together to be become suspicious before we get to the prosecution.

are extremely suspicious of what's going on. They're examining the kids as they the last few kids as they come into the emergency room to wonder, you know, to to see what's going on, to see what try to figure out what's happening here with these kids who stop breathing in a pediatric clinic and are being rushed into the emergency room. And at one point, as an anesthesiologist, they make a point of an anesthesiologist are there, uh to

watch what's happening. And the anesthesiologist who deals with sexual colin all the time, watches one of the babies. I believe it was Misty Uh coming starting to move after being paralyzed previously and not breathing, and her she has kind of jerk emotions and it occurs to him because he's seen this many times. This is what a kid looks like when they're coming out from under the effects

of sexual coling. He's an anesthesiologist. He deals with that drug all the time, and he reports back to the dean of the medical community, an older doctor I believe he's in the seventies at that point, named doctor Packard, and they smell a rat and they get together and they and they bring in doctor Holland and they say, what do you think is going on? They ask her questions and they ask her do you have suximal coling

in your office? And she says, yes, I do. I use it to in debate if I have an emergency and I need to intubate a kid to put a breathing tube, and I have it there to make it possible to put the breathing tube down, to keep the kid from struggling against the tube. After this all happens this inquiry, the doctors have decided decide afterwards to suspend

doctor Holland's privileges. Doctor Holland goes back to a clinic and she checks her little bottle as stuck on the coline and Janine had previously said it had been lost, but then said she'd found it and ordered more of it. And she inspects the bottle and the bottle is full, but then she looks at the top of the bottle and it's got syringe holes on the top, so something strange is going on. It later gets tested, it turns out that it was diluted. It was five to six

saline solution. So someone presumedly Jeanine Jones, clearly Jeanine Jones, had used the drug when it never should have been used, never was authorized to be used or ordered by the doctor, and then to make it appear as though it had never been used, she filled it with saline solution, so that that said. Doctor Holland sees that and and uh

and freaks out confronts Jeanine Jones. All sorts of strange things happened then, including Janine through making a half hearted suicide attempt to sort of dramatically announcing that she's leaving, leaving what appears to be a suicide note in assisting she's she's she's take an overdose of drugs, although it appears she didn't really take anything that would potentially kill her.

And uh, and doctor Hollin's privileges are suspended. They're treating no more children, and an investigation has finally begun in Kerrville. And by the way, all this time, the people the doctor san Antonio are learning, uh that there's bad stuff going on involving Kathy Holland and Jeanine Jones and Kerrville,

and still they don't come forward. In fact, they have a committee meeting where they're hearing about this and they're said that if asked about it, they should all maintain a judicious silence instead of telling the authorities about what's going on. So at this point, yeah, so at this point, at this point, the investigation finally begins, after all these kids are hurt, after some you know, kids are killed, you know, all this pain continues for so long.

it's problematic always is that prosecution is not that easy as well, because we're talking about circumstantial evidence, and you also talk about that the babysitter comes forward and looks like it's very promising to testify that she actually witnessed Jannine Jones administer these lethal doses of drugs, and then they realize that she's a very very poor witness. Yes.

There's very strong, circumstantial evidence, there's an incredibly troubling pattern, but it's hard to prove one single murder on her. To prove that she, you know, there's a smoking gun basically where smoke and syringe as they came to call it. In Currville, it was difficult too, because again, you still have the pattern. I mean, it's it's an improbable, impossible pattern, but you don't have proof that she injected the drug, or at least we didn't think we could get that.

So the investigation proceeds on two tracks. When when it's finally revealed that the stuff had been going on in San Antonio, there's a there's a big city prosecutor who's conducting a big investigation of what's happening in the county hospital in San Antonio, and there's a rural prosecutor named Ron Sutton who's conducting investigation of what happened in Cerrville. They're on parallel tracks. They're cooperating with each other, really

struggling to come up with a case. And in San Antonio, despite sifting to an enormous amount of information and conveniing

ad ran jury in Kerrville. They are trying to trying to find out whether there's a way to prove that sexual coaling was was used that change to use sexal m colin, and they the drug had long been thought to be the perfect murder weapon for doctors, and just recently, not long before they suddenly discovered the doctor the prosecutor around Sutton discovered that there was a new test that had been pioneered in Sweden to detect the presence of

sex and m coline and embalmed body tissue. So once he discovered this, he got a permission in a court order and had Chelsea mccllin's body xhoomed and took tissue samples with the help of medical experts in the US, had them packed an ice and had them frozen and sent off for testing by this doctor in Sweden. Very claimed steam doctor and lo and behold, it comes back positive for the presence of sexal coline from the tissue taken from Chelsea McClellan's legs where she got those baby

shots from Jeanine Jones. And that was the critical piece of evidence that kind of nailed the case and legend Jennie Jones's murder, indictment and ultimately her conviction.

And so when it first broke that she was even under suspicion of this, that there were and there was an investigation of of deaths in the county hospital, it was front page news, front page news in New York Times and the US, the country and and overseas some and and it remained a big story through her trial. When I wrote my book we published editions in uh in England, and I think we had one other international edition,

but it was a in there. There's a TV movie made, there was a It's been featured on a number of true crime series, documentary series. It's a story that's, you know, that's gotten a lot of attention for good reason, which is because it's so compelling, and and and and because

it's about more than just a crazy nurse. I mean, as horrible as what Janeane Jones did, but to me made the story really worthy of a book was the bigger picture of the medical officials who had made all this possible honestly, who had failed a stopp her, who had not done the right thing, who had made terrible mistakes that let her go to Kerrville and harm more

kids and murder Chelsea McLellan. You know, the tale of a sort of insight into the medical bureaucracy, how it failed to operate properly and protect kids who you know, whose business it was to protect.

no good to come of that. And it was also partly because by that time, and by the way, this was hotly debated within his staff, there was no There were recommendations by a prosecutor who was kind of a line guy on the case saying we should do this, and the chief investigator in the case said we should do this, and ultimately he decided not to do it. And part of the reason was that as sort of wink wink deal the UH, some of the prosecutors in the office had one of the prosecutors in the office.

A senior man, one of milstap's top deputies, had made clear to the hospital administrator that he needed to cut everybody loose, who had to fire everybody who had been involved in this and whose hands were unclean and lo and behold after you know. That message was delivered not

long after. This senior prosecutor was vacationing in Mexico. As I recalled, Gus got a message on vacation that all the top officials who had been involved in protecting Janeine John's or who had not not responded the way they should,

had either resigned or been fired. And this, uh, they they have and the need to do this was communicated with the new hospital administrator, John Guest, and uh, this prosecutor had said said to him, he said, you need to do this, he said, you know, he said, sometimes a man's going to do what a man's got to do. And this the deputy DA was in Mexico and I got a messag from his office and said, I don't know what this means. The message was, I don't know

what this means, but all these people got fired. And you got this message from John Guests saying a man's got to day, what a man's got to do?

any hint of a problem going forward. But I don't know explicitly what they did to uh to restrict access to medications. I mean, the reality is doctors and nurses are dealing with very powerful drugs, They're dealing with very sick kids. They are in a position to make a difference between life and death. And you know, the vast majority of the time they're helping kids, they're trying to save kids desperately. That's what they've dedicated their lives to doing.

The case of a in the episode of a nurse who's who's harming kids is just so mind boggling because it's exactly the opposite of what they're there to do and what they've dedicated Nurses and doctors dedicate their lives to do. Most of them are are doing everything they can to preserve lives, not end it. And and so uh, you know, the kids, those kids are so vulnerable, and

they're they're incredibly vulnerable. Someone who's you know, who's got access to drugs, who's responsible for their medical care, and is trying to do the opposite of what they're supposed to do. Now what, it's something, it's something, it's it's just it's just something you can't regulate away. You have to, you know, supervise people like this stop from immediately. If there's any concern about that happening, investigate it. You know, you can't you can't set up a structure, you can't

restrict use of drugs. I you know completely. You have to track it and see if something's been used in properly, but it's it's hard to set procedures to keep it from happening.

best friend, you know, she loved the babies. She it was the doctors who had made mistakes, and she went down just offered a litany of errors. If this doctor did this to this kid, this doctor did that, this doctor was incompetent, that doctor was having an affair with somebody. I mean, it's all manner of ad hominem, very specific attacks on everyone else, blaming them for what had happened, and accepting the responsibility at all for anything she had done.

When I interviewed her, she offered her account of events, and we went and I spent four hours with her in a trailer home in St. Angelo, Texas. I declined her offers of food and drink while I was there, didn't care to have anything from her. But I went

through in great detail. Actually I think I was there for six hours, but I went through in great detail, case by case, what happened, and she offered her story about various things in time, and again she said with absolute conviction, as I said, right to tail, in account of what had taken place, which was contradicted by facts and testimony, but facts that were documented and ambulance reports and medical records, you know, sort of absolutely knowable, objective

information that proved she was lying about things. But she said it with you know, if you if you didn't know better, if you hadn't done the research, you know, what she said seemed very persuasive. She seems so certain

of herself and so caring about the kids. But if you had done research, as I had talk to people, you not only had their testimony about what happened, which was completely at odds with hers, but you had reports and specific details from documents that made clear she was lying about things, and that would have been withering in cross examination, would have destroyed her. So ultimately I think the result was the same if she had if she had taken the stand.

of murder. In San Antonio, they convicted her. She was convicted in one in their first trial of murder of Chelsea McClellan and received a sentence of ninety nine years

from murder. And then in San Antonio, she was charged in the case of Verlando Santos, the baby who had those heparin episodes, repeated hepron episodes but had recovered ultimately when the doctor moved him safely away from Jeanine Jones, and that injury to a child conviction got her another sentence of sixty years, so she gets one hundred and fifty nine years total, but the two sentences were to run concurrently, and in addition, there were Texas mandatory parole

statutes in place that had to do with prison overcrowding. And the bottom line in all of this is that even though she's been denied parole I think more than a dozen times, she's now facing mandatory parole to received mandatory parole in twenty eighteen, in early twenty eighteen, and you know, again she's been convicted of one murder, she's suspected and believed responsible for multiple murders, and thus been an outcry that this she would be one of the first,

if not the first, serial killer released on parole. And in any case, you know, whether she is or isn't, that she should remain behind bars for all the rest of her life. So there has been an active campaign, really a crusade from led by parents and also by the victim rights coordinator in the City of Houston to try to bring pressure to bear to possibly bring another murder case against her and get another conviction that would

keep her behind bars forever. That's going to be extremely difficult to do, I think ultimately probably impossible, but they don't want to see her released for understandable reasons. But nonetheless they're trying to do it. They've they've started a petition drive, they started a website, and they put they're putting pressure on prosecutors to try to see if they can bring another charge against her in San Antonio for murder.

When you read about Janine Jones saying, oh, I'll take care of the child, or you just leave the room. You won't want to see this, and meanwhile she's you know, very ghoulish. I mean, it's very I don't know a parent's worst nightmare. You know, it's understatement, but it's very You've really captured that essence of the horror of Janine Jones, this lovable, trusted woman that couldn't be trusted at all

with their little kids' lives. And we're talking kids four months and maybe some of them sickly, some of them, you know, but for the most part, again the kids that should have lived in so very, very incredibly tragic stories. So I want to applaud you for being able to capture that in this book, The Death Shift. It's been very fascinating. Now for those people that might want to read about some of your other work, or do you do Facebook or you have a website? How my people contact you?