Doctors Who Kill

by Davis, Carol Anne; Davis, Carol Anne

  At his trial in Trenton, New Jersey, in June 2005, the prosecutor noted that Jonathan had at first tried to blame the death on his wife’s blackmailing lover. When that failed, he’d said that Michelle, looking drugged, had lunged at him with a stiletto and that she’d died whilst he was defending himself, adding that he’d thrown the shoe out of the window as he drove her body to the creek, but the shoe was never found.

  The defence said that Michelle could have died in her car and said that, if Dr Nyce had wanted to murder his wife, he could have used his medical knowledge to kill her in a way that would have gone undetected. He had adored her and been deeply hurt by her affair.

  The jury found him guilty of passion/provocation manslaughter and he was sentenced to five to ten years with a further eighteen months for tampering with the evidence.

  7 Dr John Cavaness

  Though outwardly a respected GP, Cavaness murdered throughout the 1970s and early ’80s, sometimes by accident whilst drink-driving, at other times deliberately for financial gain.

  Attacked on all sides

  John, who was always known by his middle name of Dale, was born on 15th October 1925 and endured an unhappy childhood in southern Illinois. His Calvinist mother believed in predestination, that a deity had chosen, before birth, which people would go to heaven and which to hell. Being wealthy was apparently a sign that you might have been chosen, so she dressed Dale in expensive – and somewhat effeminate – clothing. As a result, he got beaten up repeatedly at school.

  One day his father saw him being chased by a gang of pupils and told Dale that, if he didn’t fight back, he’d beat him again when he got home. Faced with violence from all sides, Dale began to retaliate and would eventually become such a remorseless streetfighter that he despised anyone weaker, anyone who showed fear or pain.

  Against his parents’ wishes, Dale married his high school sweetheart but the marriage failed when she fell in love with one of his friends; he was inconsolable. He escaped his home town to study Medicine in St Louis and fell in love with a beautiful nurse called Marian, who was religious like his parents but much more fun-loving and fashionable.

  Marian, who had lost her own mother to cancer when she was just thirteen, was devoted to Dale and, after he graduated, she gave up her work and friends to return to his impoverished rural home town, where women were expected to be content with doing the housework. Dale set up a thriving medical practice there and seemed desperate to show his critical mother, whom he hated, that he was a success.

  He became violent towards Marian on their first wedding anniversary in 1953 when they were on their third bottle of champagne and she said lightly that she hoped they wouldn’t have to live in Illinois for ever. Dale hit her so hard in the face that he knocked her to the floor. Unfortunately she forgave him for this assault, and the others which followed, and bore him four sons between 1954 and 1966.

  A cruel father

  Dale Cavaness proved to be as brutal a father as he was a husband and regularly beat his four children – Mark, Kevin, Patrick and Sean – with a paddle for supposed infractions. He beat them again if they cried, because he’d been raised to hate any sign of weakness. He was also emotionally abusive, telling them that they were stupid and worthless, that he wished they’d never been born. His assaults on Marian also increased, as invariably happens with domestic violence, and he blackened her eyes, fractured her arm and broke her thumb.

  Dale showed other signs of sociopathy, drinking and driving on a regular basis and speeding so recklessly that, on several occasions, he ended up in a ditch and had to buy a new car. He bought farm property and cattle for investment purposes but shot his prize bull dead when it proved difficult to handle. He was equally merciless whilst out shooting, indifferent to the suffering of the birds he wounded but didn’t kill outright.

  Dale borrowed heavily to invest in dubious get-rich-quick schemes and was visibly enraged when they failed to perform well or collapsed completely. He also alienated most of the nurses that he employed, as he would seduce them with honeyed words, take them to bed, then quickly lose interest, treating them thereafter as if they were the lowest form of animal life. But the locals loved him as he’d grown up in the same impoverished area and didn’t hassle his poorest patients when they couldn’t pay their bills. He possibly identified with their plight, as he’d been so broke during medical school that he’d frequently had to sell his own blood to survive.

  Constantly in need of his next adrenalin charge, Dale Cavaness became more and more addicted to violence and to whisky. He kept bottles of spirits in his office, car and home and would turn up at his medical practice with a hangover, then take amphetamines to get him through the day. Increasingly desperate for cash to fund his habit and his failing investments, he illegally sold liquid morphine to a convicted felon and threatened to kill a witness if he told anyone.

  Two vehicular homicides

  On 8th April 1971, Dale was driving his truck whilst intoxicated when he crashed into a Plymouth car, virtually demolishing it. Donald McLaskey, aged twenty-nine, was thrown from the vehicle and died instantly whilst his young wife, Dorothy, was badly injured and spent several days in a coma. Their ten-month-old baby, Deidrea, died after being impaled on the outside mirror of the car.

  Dr Cavaness was arrested at the scene and was so drunk that he couldn’t sign his name. Two and a half hours later, a fellow doctor told him that a father and baby were dead and that the mother was fighting for her life, but Dale’s only response was a slurred ‘Everybody’s got to die sometime.’ Incredibly, he was let off with a fine as the authorities didn’t want to impose a prison sentence – something that would result in the doctor losing his licence to practise medicine.

  But Dale’s reckless behaviour was the last straw for the long-suffering Marian and, in August 1971, she left him and took all four of their sons with her, relocating to St Louis. Unfortunately, their oldest son, Mark, now a young adult, missed his former friends and returned to Illinois to work on one of his dad’s farms, living in a trailer nearby.

  Mark’s murder

  At Easter 1977, Mark asked his mother and brothers to come to southern Illinois to celebrate the holiday with him. But, when they arrived at Dale’s house as arranged, Mark wasn’t there. Marian asked her ex-husband what could have happened and Dale replied that he had a funny feeling that his son was dead. Telling him not to be ridiculous, several family members explored the area close to Mark’s trailer and discovered him lying in the grass. He had been shot through the heart with one of Dale’s shotguns, after which his corpse had been partially eaten by animals.

  Questioned by police, Dale said that he assumed the 22-year-old had committed suicide as his life showed little promise. He seemed indifferent to his oldest son’s death. Police discovered that he’d taken out an insurance policy on Mark only two months before, a policy that would now net him $40,000 – money he badly needed to pay his debts.

  Detectives were convinced that he’d killed his firstborn for the insurance money, but they couldn’t prove it, so Dale Cavaness was given the cash and promptly repaid his loans.

  Sean’s murder

  For the next seven years, Dale continued to cause mayhem, starting fights, getting arrested and smashing up his cell. Whenever he had contact with his surviving sons, he was verbally and sometimes physically abusive. He was also so insulting during his phone calls to Marian that she suffered from ongoing stress.

  Sean, his fourth child, was the most strongly affected by this maltreatment and was desperate to win his father’s love. He took to drink for a couple of years, but did well in an Alcoholics Anonymous centre, and his mood lifted further when he got a supportive girlfriend.

  Dale seemed pleased with his son’s progress and suggested he insure him – and his two other remaining brothers, Kevin and Patrick – for $100,000 each. He said that the policies would mature in a few years and provide funds for their future. He also took out another two policies on Sean with diff
erent companies, which were together worth another $40,000. Sean Cavaness was now worth much more dead than alive…

  On 12th December 1984, Dale drove for several hours until he reached Sean’s house in St Louis, only to find that his youngest son was out. Dale had told no one of his plan to visit. He drove slowly around the area and looked so suspicious that a housewife peeking out of the window wrote down his car registration number, thinking that he had burglary on his mind. She watched her neighbour, Sean, come into view, whereupon the man parked, left his vehicle and hugged the youth. The woman now recognised the driver as Sean’s father, Dr Dale Cavaness, whom she’d met with Sean once before.

  Unaware that he had been observed, Dale took Sean to a local bar and plied him with drink, despite knowing that Sean was on an anti-alcohol programme. When the 22-year-old was so drunk that he could hardly stand, he drove him to a lonely farm road next to a sealed-off contaminated area and made an excuse for them to leave the car. Dale, who had deliberately remained sober, held his gun an inch away from the back of Sean’s head and fired, the bullet exiting under the young man’s left eye. He fell to the ground and Dale shot him again, removed all forms of identification from the corpse then quickly drove home and attended a local pre-Christmas party. No one, including his live-in girlfriend, noticed anything different about him.

  Sean’s body was found the following day by a sheep farmer, one of the few people in weeks who had stopped by the dioxin-contaminated site. The youth was identified through his fingerprints; he had once been stopped by the police and had his prints taken for a misdemeanour, namely failing to yield to an emergency vehicle. Dale Cavaness was doubtlessly shocked as he hadn’t expected the body to be found for some time, leading to uncertainty about the time of death.

  Dale told the police that he hadn’t seen Sean for weeks – but when informed that a neighbour of Sean’s had identified him, he changed his story. He said that they’d gone for a drive together and that they’d been driving past the contaminated site when Sean said that he needed to get out and urinate. He added that Sean had taken him by surprise by suddenly turning Dale’s gun on himself and committing suicide. He knew that Marian would be upset if she thought that another of her sons had taken his own life so he, Dale, had fired a second shot to make it look like a homicide, then had wiped Sean’s fingerprints from the .357 Magnum and driven swiftly home.

  Detectives listened in growing disbelief to the doctor’s far-fetched tale. At one stage he used the name of Mark instead of Sean, and they realised that he saw his sons as indistinguishable from each other, that they were as disposable to him as the game birds that he loved to kill.

  Charged with Sean’s murder, he began a campaign to clear his name. Most of his impoverished patients backed him up, and dozens of them wrote letters to the local press saying that the doctor was being framed by big city detectives. In turn, detectives searched his office and found a two-pound sledgehammer, a ten-inch butcher’s knife and a cord knotted with a hangman’s noose.

  The ones that got away

  Gradually, the authorities realised that Dale had probably intended to continue his killing spree. His second son, Kevin, told police that he’d woken up one day to find the holiday caravan that his father had provided for him was full of gas, as all four of the gas rings on the cooker had mysteriously been turned on during the night. He knew that his father had a substantial life insurance policy out on him…

  However, determined to support their GP, the locals turned up in droves to champion Dale Cavaness at his trial, and, when they noticed that he’d lost a lot of weight, they blamed this on the stress of being framed for murder. In reality, fathers (and mothers) who kill are often heavy drinkers who lose weight in jail because they no longer have access to calorific alcohol.

  The prosecution built an irrefutable case against the sociopathic doctor who cared little for human life. His family described the numerous beatings they’d suffered at his hands, and a ballistics expert noted that Sean’s wounds weren’t consistent with suicide. However, by mistake, the jury were given the doctor’s polygraph results, despite the fact that these were inadmissible in Missouri. This legal error resulted in a mistrial, much to Dale’s delight.

  The second trial was held in St Louis in mid-November 1985. The jury heard about Dale Cavaness’s lethal drinking and driving, about the substantial debts he’d incurred over the years through his poor investments, many of which were still outstanding. His creditors were clamouring to be paid.

  In court, he showed no emotion as he looked at his son Sean’s autopsy photographs. He told them that Sean had been masochistic, that he enjoyed being abused by Dale and liked having something to complain about to his mother. He was equally dismissive of his ex-wife and remaining sons.

  The jury were out for less than three hours before returning with a verdict of guilty. At the penalty phase, they recommended that the sixty-year-old be put to death.

  A still-remorseless Dale Cavaness was transferred to the state penitentiary at Jefferson City to await his date with the gas chamber. On Death Row, he spent his time composing his autobiography, writing to his fan club and reading medical magazines, but psychologists would later speculate that he hated the prospect of being killed by the state as this would rob him of the control he had fought for all his life. Instead, he plotted to die on a day of his choosing and by his own hand.

  On 17th November 1986, he waited until the other inmates were asleep then looped an electrical extension cord around his neck and tied it around the bars of the door. By raising his feet off the ground, he was able to slowly strangle himself to death. It was a painful demise that required courage and staying power, but Dale Cavaness had been raised to withstand pain.

  It is also believed that he left a suicide note proclaiming his innocence in an attempt to cause as much mayhem and confusion as possible, and most likely hoped that his family would feel guilty for testifying against him.

  8 Sinedu Tadesse

  The enormous pressure brought about by moving from her native Ethiopia to America caused this already damaged medical student to have a breakdown, with fatal consequences for her room-mate.

  Feeling alienated

  Sinedu was born in 1974 to Atsede and Tadesse Zelleke in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia. Her mother was a nurse in a government hospital and her father was a headmaster. She would later describe them as shy and lonely, and say that they acted as if emotions didn’t exist.

  Sinedu had two sisters and two brothers but found it difficult to bond with others, even her relatives. Sensitive but outwardly composed, she took refuge in academic work at her Catholic school. She sat alone on school trips and felt lonely and unpopular but didn’t know how to connect.

  When she was seven, her father was sent to prison for two years for ostensibly having rebel sympathies, whereupon the family became increasingly impoverished and her mother became depressed and angry. Later, Sinedu would describe these years as ‘empty’ and ‘hellish’. As there was a great deal of tribal violence in Ethiopia, she lived in a culture of mistrust and hate.

  As a teenager, Sinedu was averagely attractive but very plainly dressed, refusing to wear shorts during gym class as she thought that this was immodest. Many Ethiopian women walk with their eyes downcast and don’t draw attention to themselves but Sinedu took this to extremes and found it almost impossible to speak in company.

  She won a scholarship to the best secondary school in her region but was amongst wealthy children and this increased her sense of isolation. Many of them were Westernised but Sinedu remained a traditionalist, who her guidance teacher described as ‘incapable of individual expression’. The shy young student kept hoping that, if she could win a place at Harvard and become a doctor, she would find some self-confidence.

  Sinedu achieved her goal (an impressive feat as only 14% of Harvard applications are accepted), moved to the States and at first lived with her cousins, who had emigrated to America many years previously. However, she wasn’t
close to them and preferred to confide in her diary. She also recorded her problems onto a cassette recorder, played it back and tried to think of solutions. She wished that she had a friend that she could go out to lunch with or with whom she could share a shopping trip. Psychiatrists would later speculate that she was suffering from Avoidant Personality Disorder, which may have cumulated in a violent manic episode.

  In her freshman year, Sinedu moved into one of Harvard’s student houses and shared a room with a girl called Anna. They weren’t close but Sinedu assumed that the arrangement would continue the following year. Instead, Anna told her that she was moving in with someone else, leaving Sinedu feeling rejected and alone. Another premed student of the same age, a girl called Trang Phuong Ho who was in one of her science classes, offered to room with her instead.

  The new room-mate

  Trang was a happy, well-adjusted pre-med student from Vietnam who had lots of friends and was enjoying her studies. She was kind to Sinedu, as she was to everyone, and sometimes they ate together at an Ethiopian restaurant, but Sinedu saw it as a special friendship, writing in her diary that she would make Trang ‘the queen of her life’. She was consequently hurt and enraged when her room-mate continued to socialise with other students, helped to run the Harvard Vietnamese Students’ Association and spent time with family members. Sinedu spent hours crying in their room when Trang was out and sometimes deliberately failed to pass on Trang’s phone messages.

  Sinedu had planned to return to Ethiopia after qualifying as a doctor – she specifically wanted to be a dermatologist, perhaps because her Ethiopian home was close to a leper colony and she wanted to help local people – but now she struggled with some of her studies and was no longer top of the class as she had been at home. She found it difficult to write essays that required a personal opinion as she had spent most of her school days learning by rote. She often borrowed Trang’s notes from science class but refused to lend her own.