by Peter Elkind
Kathy Holland felt she had suffered enough.
On an afternoon in April, she slumped into the last chair left in her pediatric clinic, looked around the vacant office, and cried. Not long ago, the Fine Medical Center in Kerrville had seemed such a wonderful place to begin her career. Now, at the age of thirty-six, she was moving out, a step ahead of the sheriff and a few steps short of bankruptcy. The patients had stopped coming when the publicity hit, but the bills hadn’t, and there just wasn’t enough money to pay the landlord. Even now, he was hovering outside, watching the doctor and a handful of friends pack up her things.
In addition to the McClellans, Holland faced lawsuits from the parents of two other children, Misty Reichenau and Jacob Evans, who had stopped breathing in her office. Although she continued to live with Charleigh Appling, she and her husband had divorced on December 30. The threat of indictment still hung over Holland’s head. And the doctors at Sid Peterson—despite the letters from the medical school faculty—refused to restore her hospital privileges. “I’m tired, I’m so tired of all this,” said Holland, as she folded herself into Charleigh’s arms. The doctor’s eyes reddened and the tears began to flow again. “Now you see what she’s been reduced to,” Appling, the former air force pilot, told me, shaking his head. “She’s determined. She’d make a great prisoner of war.” Kathy and Charleigh had recently discovered a door to the clinic ajar. They instantly suspected that their tormentor, Ron Sutton, had hidden a listening device inside. “I don’t care what they say,” Charleigh went on. “They don’t deserve her.” Appling stared suspiciously up at the ceiling tile. “Hear that, Ronnie baby?”
The news that Holland had taken the Fifth Amendment before the Kerr County grand jury had led many in town to conclude that the pediatrician had plenty to hide. One day, Holland paid a visit to Joe Vinas and asked the surgeon what she could do to get back on the Sid Peterson staff. “I’m not going to vote for you,” Vinas told her bluntly. To clear her name in the community, he said, she would need to stop taking the Fifth—to tell all to the grand jury and let the chips fall where they may. Added Vinas: “When you say, ‘I refuse to answer that question,’ every doctor on the staff is going to say, ‘The bitch is guilty.’”
But Holland stood by the counsel of her attorney, Jack Leon. In February, Sam Millsap’s office had called the doctor to testify before the Bexar County grand jury. Leon advised Millsap’s deputies, as he had advised Ron Sutton, that Holland would say nothing without immunity from prosecution. Millsap had refused to make the deal, then briefed the press, producing a fresh run of damning headlines—KERRVILLE DOCTOR WILL PLEAD “FIFTH,” and PHYSICIAN SILENT IN INFANT DEATHS.
In the face of such a storm, a handful of families had stuck by Holland. The parents of Brandy Benites and Chris Parker brought their children back to the pediatrician, despite the emergencies the babies had suffered in her office. They believed that if something was done to their children, Dr. Holland had nothing to do with it. Another Kerrville mother wrote a letter to the editor published in the San Antonio Light, vouching for Holland’s skill as a physician as well as her personal integrity. But such people were the exception. In the little town of Kerrville, the lady doctor became a pariah.
Forced out of her clinic, Holland set up a makeshift office at the house on Nixon Lane where she had lived with Genene Jones. There, she struggled to keep her practice alive, seeing a patient or two a day. Without a receptionist—Gwen Grantner had quit in January—Holland spent much of her time dodging a barrage of bothersome phone calls, half from reporters, half from creditors. “Dr. Holland’s office,” the pediatrician said in a falsetto, after picking up her office phone one day while I was visiting. It was a woman demanding money, insistent on speaking to the doctor. Holland held her hand over the phone for forty-five seconds, then spoke into the receiver in a deeper, professional tone: “This is Dr. Holland.” Recognizing the deception, the caller became abusive. “No, I did not answer the phone,” insisted Holland. “I happen to have a secretary who sounds very much like me.” After more angry words, the doctor hung up the phone. “I have a right to do this,” Holland said defensively.
It was a pathetic sight, this hounded woman reduced to lying to strangers. Nine months earlier, Kerrville had been the setting of her dreams; now it had become her prison. Many wondered why Holland didn’t just pack up and leave town. But the doctor was stubbornly determined to ride this thing out—as determined as she had once been to give a San Antonio nurse another chance. That was her mistake, Holland told her friends. She had been naive to trust Genene—naive and stupid. Now she was paying the price.
Ron Sutton’s grand jury had spent much time debating whether stupidity and naïveté were Kathy Holland’s only crimes. After all, Chelsea McClellan was not the only child who had suffered in Holland’s office. There had been nine separate incidents, involving eight different children—in a span of thirty-one days! And according to several Kerrville doctors who had testified before the grand jury, Holland had staunchly defended her nurse until the end. Even now—although Sutton did not know it—Holland was expressing doubt that Genene Jones had done anything to harm her patients. “To this day, I don’t know,” Holland told me, as the DA pondered her fate. “I don’t know in the way that God would know. They were eight different cases medically. There was not anything in any way resembling a pattern.” Would Holland be a criminal defendant or a prosecution witness? Ron Sutton still wasn’t sure.
The DA had no such doubts about Kathy Holland’s former nurse. Even without the pediatrician’s testimony, he felt ready to indict Genene Jones by March. Sutton had held back at the urging of Sam Millsap, who wanted more time to build a criminal case of his own. But he wasn’t happy about waiting. For six months, he had been parading witnesses before the grand jury: doctors and nurses, hospital administrators and technicians, paramedics and parents. Although his evidence against the nurse remained circumstantial, Sutton figured it was as good as it would get. This was a case, reasoned the DA, where the smoke would convince a jury that there had to have been a fire. Even if he hadn’t been able to catch Genene holding the matches, the nurse was the only one who had been at the scene of every blaze. Sutton knew it was a risky strategy; a skillful defense attorney could poke holes in that kind of evidence. But Sutton also knew he had the critical factor of emotion on his side. It would take more than a few doubts to prompt twelve upstanding citizens to turn a baby-killer loose. Sutton was itching to go to trial, to do battle with this evil woman before the world. Genene Jones’s conviction would represent his greatest triumph—a victory that would make everyone forget the unavenged Brady triple murder.
Sutton had reconciled himself to the limitations of his evidence, when he learned about the revelations of Cathy Ferguson. Her statement to Millsap’s investigators was astonishing; it represented an eyewitness account of unauthorized injections in Holland’s office—the critical missing link between Genene Jones and the deadly drug. So why was Art Brogley, Millsap’s gumshoe, so unenthusiastic? Sutton dispatched a Texas Ranger to San Angelo to subpoena the young woman to appear before his grand jury.
On March 30, Brogley and his boss, Nick Rothe, drove up from San Antonio. Amid an air of much expectation, Ferguson began her testimony by defending Genene Jones; she portrayed the burly nurse as a benevolent surrogate mother. Sutton’s heart sank with every word. He reminded Ferguson of her written statement to Brogley, filled with detailed allegations that Jones had deliberately harmed children. Was she saying all that wasn’t true? Pressed by the DA, Cathy reaffirmed her original remarks. Yet she incongruously saw no problem entrusting Jones with the care of her own baby—even after Travis’s recent unexplained emergency in San Angelo. For five hours, Cathy Ferguson offered such maddeningly problematic testimony. One moment, she would swear by tantalizing new information, such as her account of unauthorized injections. The next moment, she would present details of a child’s emergency that were discernibly untrue. Ferguson claimed she
had seen Genene committing horrible acts, but Cathy’s observations seemed to have had no effect on her personal opinion of the nurse. Hoping to drive a wedge between the two women, Rothe informed Ferguson that Genene had testified she was retarded. Sutton offered to move Ferguson to Kerrville, to find her a job and a place to live. But Cathy just wasn’t interested. When the grand jury session ended, she returned to the trailer home in San Angelo and resumed living with Genene Jones. Ferguson, concluded Sutton, would not make an acceptable witness.
That left only physical evidence to tie Genene Jones to the drug. Two days before Cathy Ferguson’s testimony, Sutton had learned of a new test that might do what he had believed impossible—find succinylcholine in embalmed body tissue. The test had been developed around the globe by an eminent Swedish physician named Bo Holmstedt; he claimed to have developed a procedure to detect even minute quantities of the drug in embalmed human tissue. Sutton and Joe Davis flew to Philadelphia, where they met with Dr. Fredric Rieders, who had worked with Dr. Holmstedt. Rieders and Holmstedt agreed to run the tests, which would cost more than $10,000. But to conduct their evaluation, they would need samples of the victim’s tissue from the sites where she had been injected. The test would require the exhumation of the body of Chelsea McClellan.
They began digging at 8 A.M. on Saturday, May 7, at the Garden of Memories Cemetery. Chelsea’s grave lay in space 20, lot 2, in the Babyland section. Ron Sutton, hoping to keep it all quiet, had waited until after business hours Friday to have a judge sign the papers authorizing the exhumation. The McClellans had given their approval but didn’t want to know when it was taking place. Somehow the reporters had found out anyway. They were already there, hovering about the fringes of the cemetery; Sutton had obtained a court order to keep anyone from coming closer. A three-sided tent shielded the gravesite. Thirteen men stood inside the canvas, Ron Sutton, Joe Davis, and Nick Rothe among them. A Kerrville police detective snapped pictures of the proceedings for later use as evidence. Vincent DiMaio, the chief medical examiner from San Antonio, would take the tissue samples from Chelsea’s remains. Dr. Rieders, who had arrived two days earlier from Philadelphia, would carry them to Dr. Holmstedt’s laboratory in Stockholm.
Chelsea’s coffin lay only three feet underground. The workers unearthed it at 8:35 A.M. They set the tiny white fiberglass casket on the grass beside her grave, then broke its seal and lifted the top. The corpse lay beneath a knit blanket of pink, yellow, and green. The blanket was removed, and Dr. DiMaio got his first look at the body. Chelsea wore a pink dress, white socks, white panties, and a disposable diaper. A pink ribbon was in her hair, and a tiny star-shaped earring in each lobe. Around her neck was a metal chain with a heart-shaped pendant hanging from it. Remarkably well preserved after eight months in the ground, looking like a fragile china doll, the child’s body rested beside her favorite toy, a yellow rubber duck.
During fifteen years as a coroner, Vincent DiMaio had performed almost four thousand autopsies, witnessing every grisly permutation of man’s inhumanity to man. But the sight of Chelsea McClellan in her coffin left him shaken. This wasn’t some sleazeball who had gotten it in the local beer hall; this was a child, an innocent, snuffed out before her time.
The corpse was removed from the casket and placed on an oblong table set up nearby. DiMaio had arrived for the exhumation dressed in a tie, a vest, and suit pants. Donning a long green smock and pink rubber gloves, he sliced open Chelsea’s clothes with a steel scalpel, exposing the Y-shaped chest incision made at the time of her autopsy. DiMaio opened the abdominal cavity and cut samples from the kidneys, liver, gallbladder, and urinary bladder. After removing each piece of tissue, he handed it to Dr. Rieders, who placed the sample in a plastic jar and labeled it carefully. DiMaio next inspected Chelsea’s thighs—the site of the injections that had preceded her death—for needle tracks. None were visible, but DiMaio wasn’t surprised; modern needles were so fine that it was often impossible to find marks. DiMaio cut into the front of each of Chelsea’s thighs, handing sections of muscle to Rieders. After marking the samples, the Philadelphia doctor placed them in a Styrofoam cooler filled with dry ice. The outside of the cooler read: “Welcome to Miller Time.” DiMaio was finished. Employees of the Kerrville Funeral Home re-dressed Chelsea’s remains, then placed them in a fresh casket with her blanket and rubber duck. They sealed the coffin, placed it in Chelsea’s grave, and buried it. Everything was done by 9:45 A.M.
In addition to the jars he had filled during the exhumation, Rieders had taken samples from the tissues at Severance & Associates, the San Antonio pathology firm that had performed the autopsy on Chelsea. Now he picked up his beer cooler filled with body parts for the ride back to the San Antonio airport. Arriving in Philadelphia at 10 P.M., the toxicologist drove to his laboratory in suburban Willow Grove and placed his specimens in a locked freezer. In another week, Rieders would take the tissues to Dr. Holmstedt’s laboratory in Stockholm, so very far from Kerrville, Texas. Soon they would all know whether it was succinylcholine that had sent little Chelsea to her grave.
Twenty-Three
Cheryl Cipriani was frightened. The newspapers were full of horrible stories about Genene Jones, and the young pediatrician had known the nurse well. Cipriani thought back to when they had met, early in her residency at Medical Center Hospital. Cheryl, a short, soft-spoken woman, had liked Genene at first; unlike some of the nurses, she seemed to care a lot about her work. Then Cipriani had caught Jones telling lies about her patients.
On one occasion, the nurse had insisted that a child’s blood sugar was dangerously low; she handed the doctor a filled syringe and told her to push it. Wary, Cipriani had run a sugar test on the patient herself; the child’s blood sugar was normal. On another night, Cipriani had raced to the ICU after Genene sounded the alarm in the residents’ call room. When the doctor arrived, Genene explained that her patient was having trouble breathing. But Cipriani had checked, and the child was fine. Early the next morning, a new shift of nurses had found the baby’s heart beating too quickly. Cheryl discovered his respirator pushing air into his lungs dangerously fast, even though it had been set properly before Genene came on duty.
Cipriani, of course, had informed Dr. Robotham about the incidents—and about several others as they occurred. Robotham told her that they suspected Genene was giving children drugs to make them arrest. He advised her to double-check what Genene did and to order drug tests when a child began to bleed or crash for no apparent reason. Cipriani exploded. In addition to taking care of these sick children, they were supposed to play policeman? Why was this nurse still there? Robotham calmed the resident down, told her that nursing wouldn’t move Genene out, that they were trying to come up with evidence to get her fired. So Cheryl had continued working with Genene, as the hospital investigations dragged on. One day, they were in a room together, taping down a patient’s IV line, when Jones turned on Cipriani, her eyes burning with malevolence. “Dr. Robotham thinks he’s going to get me,” Genene muttered darkly. “But he’s not going to get me. Nobody can. I’m keeping records on you all. I’ve got a little black book. Nobody can touch me.” It had seemed that way, thought Cheryl. All the LVNs had been ousted, though everyone knew it was just Genene who was the problem. Remaining at the medical school after residency for a fellowship in the care of newborns, Cipriani had always retained a measure of doubt about what had happened in the ICU. When she heard about Kerrville, she instantly felt certain: Genene had tried to murder children.
After the story hit the papers, Cheryl went to the pediatrics chairman, Dr. Mangos, to ask what she should say about what she knew. Mangos sent her to an attorney: Thomas H. Sharp, Jr., a partner at the downtown San Antonio law firm of Groce, Locke & Hebdon. The medical school had retained Sharp to defend against lawsuits resulting from events in the ICU. A specialist in such work, Sharp was smart, aggressive, and tough; he had a wide reputation as the best man in town to have on your side if you were a doctor and had screwed up.
When Cipriani sat down with the lawyer, sat down and told him all the terrible things that had happened, Sharp grew cold.
“What you need in an investigation is proof,” he informed the doctor. “Did you ever see her inject anything bad?”
