Doctors Who Kill

by Davis, Carol Anne; Davis, Carol Anne

  The teenager had a high IQ and, by sixteen, was taking a pre-med course at college. With her high energy and pretty features, she went on lots of dates but her boyfriends always ended the relationship, finding that she was unstable and violent. Enraged at their rejection, she would vandalise their houses or their cars.

  Suicidal

  In 1986 Kristen met Glen Gilbert and, in 1988, she married him. But, during an argument a month after the honeymoon, she attacked him with a knife. At other times she turned the violence inwards and attempted suicide. Glen was initially very much in love with her but found that she was constantly dissatisfied, buying clothes and household goods that she couldn’t afford and evidencing an almost pathological need to show off, even claiming that she was from a wealthy family.

  Unexpected deaths

  The following year, Kristen graduated and began working as a registered nurse at the Veteran Affairs Medical Center (abbreviated to VAMC) in Massachusetts. She was so well read on medical affairs and drug use that other nurses often went to her for advice.

  However, everyone was surprised early in 1990 when one of Kristen’s patients died; this started a pattern of unexpected cardiac arrests and her colleagues began to jokingly call Kristen the ‘Angel of Death’. It took an alert clerical worker to spot that Kristen had three times the death rate of any other nurse in the VAMC. The clerical worker confided her fears in a supervisor but was told to go away and stop making false accusations.

  That same year, Kristen gave birth to a son, but, two months later, returned to work, doing the 4 p.m.-to-midnight shift. One day, when everything was quiet, she reported that she’d answered the phone and that a voice had warned there was a bomb in the hospital. Everyone had to be evacuated until police searched the building. Kristen was in the midst of the drama and seemed enlivened and excited by it.

  On another occasion, Kristen informed her startled co-workers that she’d found a suspicious-looking package in a hospital cupboard, a box with a swastika drawn on the front. Kristen told her supervisor that it probably contained a bomb – but the bomb squad found that it was merely a wrapped-up box of tissues. Still, it added excitement to an otherwise humdrum day.

  Even more alarmingly, the Gilberts’ pets always died mysteriously. Kristen would later say that she’d taken one dog to the vets to be put down, but this turned out not to be true.

  In November 1993, the couple had a second son and their already shaky marriage deteriorated further, so that, by 1994, Kristen was telling her colleagues that she wanted a divorce. By 1995, she’d lost weight, was dressing more sexily and began to flirt with James Perrault, the hospital’s young security guard. In the autumn of that year they became lovers, having sex in his car.

  Shortly after this, Glen became very sick. He was taken to hospital and found to have very low potassium levels, almost unheard of in a man of his age.

  On 21st August 1995, the medical team at VAMC stabilised veteran Stanley Jagodowski. Shortly afterwards, Kristen was seen entering his room with a syringe, but she soon hurried out, leaving the Korean veteran shouting that his arm hurt. A few minutes later, he went into cardiac arrest. He was resuscitated and put on a life support machine but died without regaining consciousness. On 1st December, Kristen left her husband and children and moved into her own apartment, a move that made it easier for her to see her lover. At work, her patients continued to die. A 35-year-old schizophrenic was admitted suffering from flu but suddenly went into a fatal cardiac arrest, and an army veteran almost died in suspicious circumstances. Meanwhile, someone had been using phials of epinephrine, an overdose of which can prove lethal to a healthy heart.

  Sometimes one of Kristen’s patients would die unexpectedly, allowing her to leave work early to be with her boyfriend, James Perrault. When phoning the relatives to report the death, she was frequently callous, reporting ‘your husband has passed away’ then abruptly hanging up. (Harold Shipman was equally callous towards the newly bereaved.)

  Once when she injected a patient, he began to scream that his arm was burning and managed to attract the attention of other medics. They saved him after he went into cardiac arrest. When he regained consciousness, he told them that his chest had begun to feel heavy after Nurse Kristen Gilbert injected something into his IV line.

  An investigation

  The police were called in and special agents began investigating. In time, they suspected her of forty murders. They exhumed Stanley Jagodowski’s body and found abnormally high levels of epinephrine. They also exhumed the body of another patient, Ed Skwira, and found a similarly lethal dose. Two of her other patients, Henry Hudon and Kenny Cutting, had also died of excessive epinephrine. At Kristen’s apartment, they found epinephrine, which she explained away by saying that she was allergic to bee stings – but her medical notes showed that she was only allergic to penicillin. Later, she became so violent towards James (who now wanted nothing more to do with her) and her ex-husband that she was admitted to a psychiatric hospital. When she was released, she broke into James’s home and he had her arrested and took out a restraining order against her. Sometime later she claimed that she’d taken a massive overdose of aspirin and was again admitted for psychiatric evaluation, staff finding her manipulative and untruthful. She took a third overdose in August 1996, but survived.

  Chaos

  Kristen Gilbert continued to cause chaos, making numerous hang-up and heavy-breathing calls to James and vandalising his car. Every nurse who had spoken to the investigators also found their property damaged. Equally damning, someone – disguising their voice with a Talkgirl toy that changes the tone – made phone calls to her former workplace claiming that another bomb had been left. Detectives investigated and found that Kristen had bought a Talkgirl the previous day, yet she seemed unable to recognise the gravity of her situation, telling a friend that someday this would make a good film.

  She was charged with making the phone calls, pleaded not guilty and was ordered to be electronically tagged. She also had to live at her parents’ house and was prohibited from going out.

  Bomb threats trial

  As her trial for making the bomb threats neared, Kristen was subject to an in-depth psychological evaluation, which determined that she suffered from Narcissistic Personality Disorder, Obsessive Compulsive Personality Traits and Antisocial Personality Disorder. Psychiatrists noted that she made light of all of her problems and even denied her documented suicidal acts.

  The jury listened to the tape that had been played down the hospital telephone line, deliberated and found her guilty. Kristen was sentenced to fifteen months and sent to a federal prison in Connecticut.

  Murder trial

  On 20th November 2000, Kristen’s trial began. (As in almost all cases of multiple murder, the defendant was only tried for a few representative cases.) She pleaded not guilty to all of the charges. The defence said that she was a good wife and mother whose marriage had broken down under the strain of doing shift work. They tried to put the blame on some of her colleagues who were using recreational drugs.

  The prosecution, however, produced numerous witnesses who had seen the registered nurse acting strangely. A nurse took the stand and described seeing Kristen entering a patient’s room with a syringe when he had not been scheduled to receive any medication. Another nurse had seen a patient scream ‘She did it!’ and point at Kristen as he collapsed. Kristen had also exhibited a level of Munchausen’s syndrome and had been treated for twenty-two injuries during her years at work. Kristen’s ex-husband and ex-boyfriend both took the stand to say that she had confessed to them whilst the investigation was underway.

  On 14th March 2001, the jury found Kristen guilty of the first-degree murder of three veterans, namely Ed Skwira, Kenny Cutting and Henry Hudon. She was found guilty of the second-degree murder of veteran Stanley Jagodowski and found guilty of the attempted murder of veterans Angelo Vella and Thomas Callahan. The jury acquitted her of the death of Francis Marier. (First-degree murder is an
intentional killing by deliberate and premeditated action, whereas second-degree murder is a homicide committed whilst perpetrating a felony.) She sobbed as they read out their verdict. The judge subsequently sentenced her to four consecutive life terms. Two months later she began serving out her life sentence in a women’s prison in Fort Worth, Texas.

  Kristen appealed, but withdrew this when the US Supreme Court ruled that prosecutors could pursue the death penalty. She now spends her days reading and quilting and proclaiming her innocence.

  14 Robert Diaz

  This nurse claimed that he had psychic powers that told him, who would die next on his ward – in reality, he was killing the patients himself.

  Early hell

  Robert Diaz was born in Indiana in 1938, one of sixteen children. The family was desperately poor and Robert suffered from several serious illnesses throughout his difficult childhood. It’s possible that the time he spent in hospital awakened in him the desire to become a doctor, and he told everyone that he’d become a medic when he grew up. But his illnesses resulted in him missing out on study time and, after a total of only ten years of schooling, the teenager dropped out and took a job in the same car factory as several of his relatives.

  At eighteen, in a bid to get away, he joined the Marine Corps, but he went AWOL and was later discharged; his exciting new life was over. Crestfallen, he returned to Indiana and resumed his factory job.

  Over time, Robert became enamoured of the supernatural, convinced that he could tap into the energies of so-called demons and that they would grant him the power and happiness he could not find in his everyday life. He also believed in reincarnation, Egyptian sorcery and psychic powers.

  Robert married in 1961 and fathered five children. He continued to be a weak thinker, convinced that, if he stared at the family cat for long enough, he would establish a psychic link with her and could control her mind. (In reality, cats find being stared at very threatening so he doubtless unsettled the poor animal.) No one was surprised when he and his wife got divorced in 1972.

  Robert now took stock of his life and decided to train as a vocational nurse, getting good grades. After he graduated, he insisted that his friends and relatives call him Dr Diaz. He retained his delusions of grandeur and interest in the occult, telling anyone who would listen that he had been a member of the Egyptian royal family in a previous life.

  The new nurse

  Quietly spoken and bespectacled, Robert found it easy to obtain employment and was soon nursing part-time in two Los Angeles hospitals, namely the Community Hospital of the Valleys in Perris, California, and San Gorgonio Pass Memorial Hospital in Banning. However, shortly after his arrival in March 1981, the death toll at the Community Hospital began to rise.

  His behaviour also caused concern, as he sometimes told the other nurses that a healthy-looking patient was going to die, claiming that he could read the person’s aura. Chillingly, he was never wrong.

  In April, an anonymous female caller contacted the coroner of San Bernardino County in Los Angeles and said that nineteen mysterious deaths had occurred in the Perris hospital. The coroner reported this to the police and they, in turn, contacted the hospital. The latter confirmed that eleven patients had died suddenly and all had exhibited an unusually high level of blood acidity. Many of their files had disappeared from the intensive care unit and suspicion fell on one of their newest nurses, Robert Diaz, who had access to the files and who had predicted the deaths at times when the patients were stable or even on the road to recovery. Moreover, another sudden death had occurred at the memorial hospital, where he also worked part-time.

  Detectives spoke to the nurse’s colleagues and some admitted seeing him carry out unauthorised injections. This gave police the opening they needed to search Robert’s home, where they found morphine, the heart drug lidocaine (his murder weapon of choice) and syringes pre-filled with the drug. These syringes were marked as containing 2% of lidocaine, whereas tests showed that they contained 20% – enough to bring on cardiac arrest. Robert said that he’d mistakenly brought the syringes home in his shirt pocket but he couldn’t explain why they’d been tampered with. The authorities now began the unpleasant process of exhuming and autopsying his patients.

  Arrested

  In November 1981, Robert Diaz was arrested and charged with twelve murders, and responded by issuing a legal suit claiming defamation of character, which was dismissed by the court. He said that doctors hadn’t responded promptly to medical emergencies and that was why so many patients died. All that he’d done, he claimed, was take over the doctor’s duties on occasion to try and save a patient’s life.

  His ex-wife initially backed him up but, when she saw the evidence against him, she accepted the likelihood of his guilt. There had been less than one death per month at the Perris hospital in the year before Diaz joined the staff, yet, during his three-and-a-half weeks of employment, there had been seventeen deaths, fourteen of which were under the new nurse’s direct care.

  Diaz opted for a bench trial rather than face a jury of his peers. The prosecution alleged that the murders had made him feel powerful, more like the surgeon or doctor that he desperately wanted to be, but this was supposition as Diaz refused to admit his guilt so couldn’t talk about the motive behind the deaths. The defence failed to find a single character witness for the nurse, who, in March 1984, was found guilty of all twelve murders. His legal team asked the judge to spare his life but he was sentenced to death. Now in his seventies, Robert remains on Death Row at San Quentin and – given how seldom state executions are actually carried out in the prison – will most likely die of natural causes in due course.

  PART THREE

  MEDICS IN THE MEDIA

  Some doctors who kill receive comparatively little media attention, perhaps only generating local news interest for the murder of a spouse or child. But the following killers were very much in the spotlight, partly because of the number of their alleged victims, and partly because they targeted vulnerable groups such as children and the elderly, causing a public outcry. Although most of these killers looked uncomfortable whilst facing reporters, Orville Lynn Majors actually courted the TV networks in a bid to proclaim his innocence.

  15 Dr Harold Shipman

  Harold Frederick Shipman, an outwardly mild-looking family man, would go on to become Britain’s most prolific known healthcare killer.

  A sad childhood

  Harold was born on the 14th January 1946 to Vera and Harold Shipman, who lived on a council estate in Nottingham. His mother was a housewife, his father a lorry driver. They soon decided that it would be easier to refer to their first son by his middle name, and this was invariably shortened to Freddie and, later, Fred. The couple already had a seven-year-old daughter and, four years after Fred’s birth, went on to have another son.

  The family lived in a council house but Vera wanted more for her children and soon pinned her hopes on Fred, the shyest and most sensitive of her children, but he was left-handed and struggled to learn to write, as teachers in those days tried to force such children to use their right hand.

  Vera didn’t like him playing in the street with the other local boys, so, in the evenings, he stayed at home with her or went out running on his own. He showed prowess on the sports field and enjoyed going to football matches with his father, but was equally happy spending time on his own.

  His mother told him repeatedly that he was special and encouraged him to study hard and, by dint of hard work rather than academic aptitude, he made it to the local grammar school. Sixty per cent of the boys there were from similar working-class backgrounds so he didn’t feel like an outsider, though he was never particularly sociable.

  Sadly, by Fred’s mid-teens, Vera was suffering from lung cancer and soon her only relief was when the GP arrived and administered an injection of morphine. Fred cared for her every evening when he came home from school. He watched, distraught, as she grew thinner and weaker, finally taking permanently to her bed.
On the evening of Friday, 21st June 1963, her pain again dulled by opiates, she died. Seventeen-year-old Fred was so distressed that he went out in the rain and ran for hours, essentially self-medicating by creating a runner’s high. By now he had decided that he wanted to be a GP.

  Shipman went to Leeds University to study Medicine and met a teenager called Primrose on the bus. She was on her way to college, where she was studying Art and Design. Primrose had grown up in a repressive Methodist household and wasn’t allowed to go to the cinema or the youth club. Instead, her life revolved around Sunday school and church. She and Fred began dating and, within months, she was pregnant. That same year, in November 1966, they married and, the following February became parents of a baby girl.

  Shipman had just turned twenty-one yet had to support a seventeen-year-old wife and newborn child and continue his studies, all on a modest student grant. To cope, he began to take larger and larger doses of pethidine, a painkiller with morphine-like qualities, which he had first tried when taking part in a medical trial. It would have prevented the tension headaches, stomach pains and general weariness that many medical students experience as they study long into the night.