by John Foxjohn
In any investigation there are two kinds of evidence: direct and circumstantial. TV has spent years creating misunderstandings about this. Far from being untrustworthy, “circumstantial evidence” can and usually is the most important evidence in a case. DNA, fingerprints, and other scientific evidence are all considered circumstantial evidence, and lead to the circumstances of the crime.
Say a suspect tells police he’s never been in a house where someone committed a murder, but his fingerprints are inside that house and on the murder weapon. This is powerful circumstantial evidence that would lead someone to draw an inference that the suspect was actually in that house and had held the murder weapon.
Direct evidence is eyewitness testimony, and law enforcement and prosecutors actually hold less value in this type of evidence. For example, in the same scenario as above, imagine a witness saw a man enter the house where a murder occurred, and then a little later leave it. However, this time there are no fingerprints from him in the house or on the murder weapon.
In the first scenario, if the case goes to trial, it will be almost impossible for the defense to explain how the suspect’s fingerprints got into a house he claims he’s never been in and equally difficult to offer any legitimate reason the suspect’s fingerprints are on that murder weapon.
In the second scenario, the witness saw the suspect enter and leave the house, but he never saw a crime committed, and in thousands of cases witnesses have turned out to be wrong about who or what they think they saw. Eyewitnesses are extremely susceptible to defense attorneys on cross-examinations. In many instances, witnesses can be made to look wrong or even incompetent, even when they aren’t. It’s a lot easier for a defense attorney to challenge a witness than it is to challenge forensic evidence.
So far in the DaVita case, Sergeant Steve Abbott and Corporal Mike Shurley had direct eyewitness testimony, but while they’d collected bloodlines and syringes that might produce some circumstantial evidence, at that point they didn’t even know what to do with it, and didn’t have a clue where to send it. None of the forensic labs in the United States were equipped to handle the tubing and needles and tell the investigators if what they had contained bleach.
All the two detectives really had at that point was the testimony of two elderly dialysis patients. Corporal Shurley believed the witnesses and was starting to become convinced of Saenz’s guilt of the two aggravated assaults. However, Sergeant Abbott hadn’t reached his aha point yet.
The detectives needed to talk to Kimberly Clark Saenz, and the sooner the better. They got her address from DaVita and found out that she lived way out deep in the piney woods of Angelina County at 2203 Green Sanders Road in a double-wide trailer that sat close to her parents’ house.
On this trip to Saenz’s house, the two detective supervisors began playing what Corporal Shurley termed “Devil’s Advocate.” He was usually the Devil. Although he now believed in Saenz’s guilt, he played the other hand. Whatever excuses Sergeant Abbott came up with, Corporal Shurley made him prove them with facts. This would go on for months and would be a key factor in revealing the investigation’s strong and weak points.
On the afternoon of April 29, the detectives, aware that DaVita had fired Saenz that day, found her at home. They told her that they needed to talk with her at the police station. Whenever possible, detectives always conduct interviews with suspects at the police station, which not only gives them the benefit of videotaping what happens inside that interrogation room but keeps the suspect from getting too comfortable. People’s words and actions sometimes come back to haunt them in those little interrogation rooms, and it helps to have it all on tape. The investigators didn’t know it at the time but they had a perfect suspect in Saenz—one who thought she could talk her way out of things.
Sergeant Abbott and Corporal Shurley emphasized that Saenz wasn’t under arrest, and even gave her the opportunity to drive her own vehicle to the station, but she decided to ride with them. She was very agreeable, and all she asked for was a couple of minutes to get her purse and arrange for someone to pick her daughter up from school.
Sergeant Abbott and Corporal Shurley went outside to wait for her in their car. No matter what the outcome of a case, there is never a perfect investigation. Every detective can look back and see things that they could have done better, or should have done differently. But if they are good, they don’t make the same mistakes again.
Sergeant Abbott on hindsight said he wished he’d handled this part differently. It was taking Saenz too long to make a phone call and get her purse. Corporal Shurley even commented, “What’s taking her so long?”
Sergeant Abbott and Corporal Shurley came to believe that Saenz took drugs while they were waiting in the car for her. They said that when they first approached her in Pollok, she was fine—coherent, alert, not a thing wrong with her demeanor. On the way to the station, they chatted and she even showed them a shortcut to get back to the main road that took them to Lufkin.
Corporal Shurley, the one who conducted the interview, said, “Everything was fine and then she took a nosedive.” They believe it took a while for whatever substance she’d ingested to take effect. These two veteran police supervisors had come into contact with hundreds of people who were intoxicated by alcohol and/or on drugs. They knew what they were seeing. Sergeant Abbott said, “The longer the interview went, the more rambling she became and she couldn’t maintain a coherent thought.” Because of Saenz’s obvious impairment, they were left with no choice but to terminate the interview. Corporal Shurley said the fact that she’d taken something to try to relax herself was a huge red flag for him—an indicator to him of her guilt. Innocent people seldom have to take drugs to relax themselves.
The interview lasted fifty minutes, and by the time they walked her out to her waiting ride, Saenz didn’t know who or where she was. Unfortunately, it was the last chance they got to talk to her.
However, this is exactly the reason detectives want to record what goes on in the interview rooms. Saenz’s deterioration was obvious for all to see. She was lucid at the beginning of the interview, although very talkative. Then later her words began to slur and sentences began to run-on to each other. While the interrogation went on, her cell phone began to ring, and it continued to ring throughout. She received at least twenty calls during the fifty-minute interview. At the end, she didn’t seem to know what to do with the phone—turn it off, answer it, or just take it out and see who was calling.
Despite having to end the interview after fifty minutes, it was hardly a total loss. The first rule of interviewing a suspect is that if the person is talking, shut up and let her talk. A talkative guilty suspect will usually say things she shouldn’t if she’s just given the uninterrupted opportunity to talk, and Kim Saenz talked quite a bit.
Many young detectives are too eager and not patient enough to sit and listen, but Corporal Shurley and Sergeant Abbott sat back like the veteran police officers they were and simply let Saenz stick her foot in her mouth. One of the things she said in the interview was that she’d used a 10cc syringe to measure the bleach for the bleach pail. She said when she used a syringe, she’d pour the bleach into a cup then fill the syringe. She told them that the reason she’d done that was because with all the monitors watching at the clinic, she wanted to make sure that she measured it perfectly.
This surprised the investigators, who’d already been told by DaVita that this was something that was never done. So why, if Saenz wanted to make sure she was doing everything correctly, would she use a method to measure bleach that was not taught by DaVita and was, in fact, taboo?
Even more alarming was that, since the weapon used to injure the two patients was bleach, Saenz had just put a smoking syringe in her own hand.
She rambled on about things like loving her job, which they later heard from other sources was just the opposite, and without provocation, she even volunteered the fact that
she had not used a computer to research bleach in dialysis lines or anything like that. That got the detectives’ attention quickly, because it was that very morning that Kevin Saenz had told them about the Internet searches on bleach poisoning he had found on Kim’s computer.
There were still other things in that interview that caught their attention. Saenz stated positively that two employees had to verify the testing of the dialysis machines when they were tested for bleach, and they always did. She had her opportunity to say right then that they didn’t always do this, a position her defense attorney later tried to take, but of course, she didn’t think that far ahead at the time. Another thing she told them that came back to bite her was that there weren’t any measuring cups at the clinic that day—that the clinic was often out of supplies. Sergeant Abbott and Corporal Shurley knew this last statement was just plain false; everyone else they’d spoken to had said there was always an abundance of measuring cups on hand, and besides that, they’d been at the clinic the day before and knew DaVita had them on hand.
Saenz also informed them that she was taking a prescription drug for depression and had been on it for six weeks.
As she rambled on, she said other odd things—for example, that she thought the problems the patients at DaVita were having had to do with blood pressure.
It really left them scratching their heads when she couldn’t remember the last day she worked, or the patients she’d treated, even though it had been the day before.
After Saenz left the station, both detectives now strongly suspected that she was guilty of two aggravated assaults. But both detectives were determined, despite their suspicions, to keep an open mind. They also realized they would have to dot their i’s and cross their t’s on this one, sensing that it was going to turn into a high-profile case.
Not that they had any idea, at that moment, just how big it would become.
For now, they focused on the great deal of work ahead of them. Besides the two witnesses they interviewed, they also interviewed all 130 DaVita patients to see if anyone else had seen Saenz, or anyone else for that matter, doing anything they shouldn’t. But the hardest part of what they had to do was take care of the evidence they’d collected at DaVita. Besides the bloodlines that DaVita had stored in their evidence freezer, the detectives also took every vial of the clinic’s heparin, a drug that helps prevent blood from clotting. Sergeant Abbott wanted to leave no stone unturned, as the old cliché goes. He didn’t want a defense attorney to come back later and blame him for not collecting it, or to blame the heparin itself for the problems. That left those thirty sharps containers they had collected. The biohazard people only came around to DaVita every so often to empty the containers, and when Sergeant Abbott collected all of them on the night of April 28, they hadn’t been emptied in a while. Most of the approximately thirty containers were at least half full, and Sergeant Abbott believed that they would need to test all the syringes.
Because of the sheer volume of needles the crime scene techs had to test and the equipment they had to wear to protect themselves from the jumble of uncapped dirty needles—they knew that some patients at DaVita had the AIDS virus—the process took days. The techs used small test strips, the kind most people use to test pools or spas. Sergeant Abbott’s decision to test all those syringes no matter how long it took became the single most important part of the investigation.
One person Sergeant Abbott rightfully deflected credit to was Christy Pate, a crime scene tech who took part in testing the syringes. Pate was an attractive woman with blond hair and blue eyes, and born and raised in Lufkin. She’d graduated from Lufkin High School in 1990 and started work at LPD when she was nineteen years old. As a crime scene tech, her main jobs were to collect and maintain evidence, and maintain the custody of evidence—a vital role in an investigation. In April 2008, she’d worked for the police department for almost nine years.
Pate was also one of the crime scene techs who had responded to the call to collect evidence at DaVita on the evening of April 28. Later, after she was told what was going on, her initial impression was what they were saying wasn’t right—somehow they were missing something. It was just too outlandish to believe that a health care provider would inject her patients with bleach.
They’d collected all the sharps containers the night of April 28, a Monday. That night they stored them in the evidence room and Pate got a glimpse at the list of patients who’d died at DaVita, but they didn’t begin to test the syringes until the next day. Because Saenz had told them she used a 10cc syringe to measure bleach, they were only checking the 10cc syringes. By Friday night, they had made their way through all of these syringes in the sharps containers, and had found a couple that tested positive for bleach.
That Friday, May 2, exactly one week after Ms. Opal Few died, and almost the same hour, Christy Pate returned to the evidence room by herself to recheck the sharps containers. For some reason she wasn’t satisfied with what they’d done and wanted to go over it again. Pate said later that it must have been a sign.
On this morning, Pate picked up one of the containers and opened it. She could only stare. Right on top was a syringe with a patient’s name on it—a name that flashed in Pate’s memory. The detectives had been given a list of all the patients who had died of cardiac arrest while hooked up to the machines, and she recognized this name. Pate knew this syringe hadn’t been tested, because it wasn’t a 10cc syringe but a 3ml one. The 3ml syringes were way too small to use to measure bleach, and were only used at DaVita for small doses of a certain drug.
The patient’s name on that syringe was Ms. Opal Few. With trembling hands Pate picked it up and tested it. What she discovered literally took her breath away. The test strip was positive for bleach. She grabbed the phone to call her boss, Sergeant Abbott. They now had a murder investigation on their hands.
CHAPTER 10
SIGNS OF VIOLENCE
The evening of April 28, 2008, the same day the two witnesses had accused her of injecting bleach into patients, a DaVita employee called Kimberly Saenz at home to tell her about the meeting that was to take place with all DaVita employees the next morning. Later, Saenz’s friend and coworker Werlan Guillory called as well. He specifically asked her if she was coming to the meeting. She told him no. She was going to the Expo Center for her daughter’s school field day. Guillory told her that they would fire her if she didn’t show up.
The next morning, after the meeting at DaVita, which Saenz didn’t show up for, and before she met with the police later that day, Guillory drove to the Expo Center to talk to Saenz and got a huge surprise. She was crying, her eyes were swollen, and her hair was disheveled. Besides that, she acted like she didn’t recognize him even though he’d worked with her for almost eight months. When he asked her what was wrong, she told him she was having trouble with her husband and he’d accused her of hurting the patients.
When Saenz left the Expo Center, she returned home and received another call from DaVita, but this one was to tell her that she was fired. Saenz had accomplished one thing at DaVita—she’d worked there for eight months, longer than any of her other nursing jobs. However, her problems were far from over. That very afternoon, she’d had an interview with the Lufkin detectives that hadn’t gone well at all.
Then around eight thirty that night, Bradley Baker, a Lufkin police officer, was called to a Tulane Drive address in Lufkin because of a dispute. When he arrived, he found Kim Saenz banging on the door of the house. The officer issued a criminal trespass warning, but since she appeared to be under the influence of something—her eyes were glassy and she was having trouble answering questions—he arrested her for public intoxication. Saenz spent the night in jail and was released on a $500 bond on April 30, 2008.
Kim Saenz had had trouble with depression for a long time, and according to her husband, when she went to work at DaVita, she not only was under a psychiatrist’s care, she was also addicte
d to prescription drugs. He said that by that point in time, she was buying prescription drugs over the Internet, doctor hopping to get medications, and even stealing his medication.
During the time she worked for DaVita, Saenz’s depression had worsened. She and her husband were having problems, and as before, it was highly likely that financial troubles were contributing to their marital strife. Prescription drugs on the Internet and at pharmacies aren’t cheap, and neither are doctors who prescribe them. Besides that, she also had two children, who weren’t cheap either.
When she got out of jail on April 30, Saenz came home to find that the problems with her husband had magnified. A week after Kevin Saenz had met with Corporal Shurley, he repeated his statements under oath. On May 6, in front of a county court at law judge, Kevin swore in an affidavit, “My wife is addicted to drugs and unable to function. She is violent at times and unable to drive a vehicle safely.” He went on to say, “My wife has been charged with public intoxication. I believe she is a danger to our daughter and to herself and should not be permitted to have possession or custody of our child at this time.”
The judge issued a temporary restraining order against Kimberly Saenz—the second one her husband had taken out against her. In that order, the judge listed thirty-two separate restraints. In many cases the wording of restraints in a protective order are standard, but one protective order does not fit all. The judge compiles the specific restraints to the cause of action that brought it before his court. In this case, the judge personalized the restraints by using Kevin’s name. According to the order, Kimberly Saenz was:
−Restrained from communicating with Kevin in person, by telephone, or in writing in a vulgar, profane, obscene, or indecent language or in a coarse or profane manner.
