by Peter Elkind
Cipriani said she had not.
“You don’t have any proof, then, do you?” said Sharp. There was no reason for her to tell the DA anything.
Cipriani had good reason to heed the lawyer’s advice. As a neonatology fellow, she was an employee of the UT medical school, dependent on good recommendations from the faculty with whom she worked. Provoking their ill will would jeopardize her future. But this lawyer had made her angry, with his insulting insistence that she had seen nothing wrong. The county hospital officials had angered her too, with their statements in the local papers that they were ignorant of any internal investigation of the pediatric ICU. When she received a call in early March from Sam Millsap’s office, Cipriani readily agreed to testify.
The doctor appeared before the grand jury late one afternoon, after the testimony of a nurse who had worked in the ICU. Terrified, Cheryl sobbed continuously as she told her story. When it was over, several female jurors embraced her. Grateful for Cipriani’s candor—particularly helpful at this early stage of their investigation—Millsap and Rothe pledged to defend the shaken doctor against retribution. Now she had to escape.
In what had become a weekly ritual, a pack of reporters and cameramen loitered outside, in hope of catching a glimpse of the grand jury’s latest witnesses. Like a quarterback directing his offense, Millsap laid a plan to keep Cipriani from having to face the press. He handed the pediatrician a bundle of papers and medical charts so she would look like a legal clerk. Then the grand jurors bunched around her like blockers, and Millsap led them out. While Millsap distracted the media by convening an impromptu press conference in the hallway, the grand jurors took Cipriani to a side door, where she raced down a fire escape and climbed into Nick Rothe’s waiting car.
The local headlines the next morning read: INFANT DEATH WITNESSES HIDE and DOCTOR, NURSE SMUGGLED IN TO TESTIFY. That day, Dr. Mangos summoned all the pediatrics residents to a special meeting at noon. When the two dozen or so doctors had gathered, Mangos introduced a pair of attorneys, one from the medical school, the other from the UT System headquarters in Austin. They were there to issue a warning. The lawyers told the pediatricians to be careful about what they said to the DA’s investigators and the grand jury. Irresponsible remarks could lead to lawsuits, they declared, and you could end up as a defendant. In fact, the lawsuits concerning the ICU would name not a single hospital resident; it was the hospital district and the medical school that had the most to fear. But the residents didn’t know that, and many were frightened by the admonition. They had all heard horror stories about groundless malpractice suits plaguing doctors for years; no one wanted that kind of problem at the outset of a career. If summoned by the DA, most of the residents concluded, they would probably have to talk. But anyone who volunteered information was issuing an invitation to trouble.
Marisol Montes didn’t agree. Months after the LVNs had been removed, it was Montes who had discovered the novel called The Sisterhood with Jones’s name on the inside. Now in her third and final year of residency, Montes saw no reason for any of the residents to fear a lawsuit; they hadn’t done anything wrong. Marisol remembered well her final month in the unit with Genene. It seemed as if babies were crashing all around her. If the LVN had deliberately harmed them, Montes wanted to see her punished. Only hours after listening to the lecture about the dangers of injudicious talk, Montes drove to a San Antonio coffee shop to meet with Sam Millsap and tell him what she knew.
For the DA and his men, the task of assembling a criminal case in San Antonio was proving even more difficult than they had feared. The patients in the pediatric ICU had been desperately ill; this made it tough to isolate what had killed them. Even if investigators could amass evidence that a child had been murdered, they faced the equally arduous assignment of proving to a jury that Jones had done it. Millsap’s men had to locate such an offense among an untold number of emergencies suffered by dozens of different children.
To bring order to the chaos, Millsap enlisted help from high-powered medical experts with the federal Centers for Disease Control in Atlanta. More accustomed to tracing outbreaks of meningitis and influenza, the CDC investigators would scrutinize hospital medical records, searching for statistical patterns in the suspected epidemic of murder. The CDC work would provide the big picture, an outline of what had happened and a correlation of individuals with deaths. But all that would merely provide a background for prosecution. To bring Genene Jones to trial, they still needed evidence in a specific case.
The job of finding it fell to the DA’s investigators, who were interviewing everyone who knew anything about the problems in the ICU. The prosecutors dreamed of finding an eyewitness—a person who had seen Genene inject a patient with a drug that had clearly caused the child’s death. They called their quest for such an account “the search for the smoking syringe.”
The hospital’s administrators had provided the DA with a private office in the building’s basement. Art Brogley often operated from there, studying Medical Center Hospital as he would any other crime scene. Day after day, Brogley prowled the hallways, sucking information from doctors, nurses, clerks, and secretaries. In the process, he tapped into the secrets of the institution. He learned which doctors were having affairs, about hacks hired because of connections, about mistresses placed on the payroll. He especially came to know the large cast of characters who had played out the tragedy in the pediatric ICU. He interviewed those who had opposed Genene Jones and fought to have something done, such as Suzanna Maldonado and Pat Alberti. He met those who had backed her, such as Pat Belko and Virginia Mousseau. Despite the events in Kerrville, the nursing administrators stood by Genene even now. Mousseau openly lamented that Jones had been singled out for such abuse.
Brogley also met Jim Robotham, by then a deeply bitter man. Robotham saw himself as a modern-day Cassandra, damned for his warnings and damned when they came true. He recalled his April 1982 letter to Mousseau, urging that Jones’s problems be documented in her record so that she would be “judiciously supervised at any future place of employment.” Mousseau, of course, had ignored him—just as Kathy Holland had ignored his advice against hiring the LVN. Now a child was dead in Kerrville. The hospital had refused to fire Jones for fear that she might file a lawsuit. Now they were indeed facing litigation, but instead of wrongful termination, the claim would be wrongful death.
Robotham had arrived in San Antonio riding the fast track. His rude firing from the ICU had already tarnished his image; the scandal that was unfolding threatened to derail his career. Only two years earlier, Johns Hopkins had eagerly recruited Robotham to rejoin its faculty. His recent inquiry about doing so had gone unanswered for months. Most of Robotham’s colleagues viewed the DA as the enemy. To Robotham, those who ran the medical school and the hospital constituted a far greater threat. They had ousted him, yet allowed those who protected Genene Jones to remain. Now they were blaming everything on poor management of the ICU. Certain that the potentates would continue to make him the scapegoat, Robotham retained attorneys and began making noises about filing a lawsuit of his own. For a time, he contemplated leaving medicine entirely. Finally, an offer from Johns Hopkins came through. Robotham resigned his post as associate professor of pediatrics and laid plans to head east in July. After hearing that their former medical director had decided to leave, the nurses in the pediatric ICU presented J.R. with a farewell plaque. “To Dr. James Robotham,” it read. “With sincere gratitude for your guidance and inspiration from the pediatric ICU nurses of Medical Center Hospital.”
When Brogley had been assigned to work the baby-deaths case, he told his boss the investigation would take a year, maybe two. As the winter gave way to spring, the DA came to believe him. After four months of investigation, Brogley and the others were convinced that Genene Jones was a murderer. But they had nothing approaching proof; they had discovered no smoking syringe. This meant that they would have to piece together a case the hard way—snippet by snippet, with circumst
antial evidence.
The track record of such prosecutions was not encouraging. At the Toronto hospital where Dr. Conn worked, a nurse had been indicted on circumstantial evidence in a similar case; the charges had been dismissed before they ever reached a jury. Millsap’s investigators had taken dozens of written statements and paraded countless witnesses before the grand jury. They had gathered more than a ton of subpoenaed documents. Yet even now, many months of work remained. The investigators had only recently begun to target the most promising cases for prosecution.
In the early weeks of the investigation, the DA’s frequent comments on the case had fed an atmosphere of public expectation. “It’s like a snowball rolling downhill,” Millsap had declared on the last day of February in 1983. “Every time it tumbles over, it’s bigger than it was before.” The DA reveled in the excitement he had generated. As the case dragged on, he came to realize that it was a double-edged sword. When a deputy DA publicly compared the baby-deaths investigation to the serial child murders in Atlanta, county commissioners attacked Millsap’s staff for trying the case in the press. Oblivious of its own role in spreading hysteria, the San Antonio News joined in the carping. DA SHOULD CURB DAMAGING TALK, an editorial was headlined. “Medical Center Hospital is a referral center for critical cases,” the paper intoned. “It is irresponsible for officials to frighten those in need of its life-supporting services by spreading vague talk of mass murders.” Only a few weeks later, the same paper reported that Millsap was considering exhumations of children who had died in the ICU. At that point, in fact, the DA was contemplating no such thing. But the News’s lurid front-page headline raised the specter of unearthing entire cemeteries:
Tissue drug tests ordered for 122
TOT PROBE MAY DIG UP DEAD BABIES
Certain city fathers thought Millsap had unearthed enough. A few months into his probe, a pair of prominent San Antonio businessmen paid a visit to the DA’s office. One man was a banker who served on an important city board, the other a high-profile developer. Millsap numbered both among his most important campaign supporters; they had made sizable contributions to his election and raised more money from their friends. It soon became apparent that they constituted a delegation from the city’s business community. Their message: Back off. “Nothing you do is going to bring these babies back,” Millsap’s visitors told him. Pursuing the case, they warned, would exact both a civic and a personal price. The scandal was tarnishing the medical school and the county hospital and jeopardizing the future development of the entire South Texas Medical Center. It could cost the city thousands of jobs. Moreover, it was certain to make plenty of powerful people mad. If you don’t end this soon, they warned Millsap, you’ll wreck your political career. The DA politely thanked his visitors for their advice. “I’m glad it’s you who came to me,” he said, “because you’re my friends and would never suggest I do anything improper.”
After weeks of quietly taking their lumps, Medical Center Hospital and the UT medical school had also begun firing back. Now when reporters phoned for comment, spokesman Jeff Duffield didn’t just pledge that the hospital would cooperate with the DA; he declared that the charges under investigation would prove groundless. Speaking off the record to reporters, the hospital spokesman added that the inquiry was a waste of time.
The outcome of the internal inquiries by Conn and Mangos was fueling a sense of contempt. Those who had presided over the probes felt certain: If they could not find proof, neither would the DA. Each week without indictments emboldened their public statements. From Toronto, Dr. Conn told a reporter that the pediatric ICU had experienced nothing more than “growing pains.” In April, a Philadelphia paper quoted a “top hospital official” as saying that nothing would come of Millsap’s investigation. “There never will be an indictment,” the unnamed source declared. “The evidence simply does not bear it out.” In early May, Dr. McFee expressed skepticism that any child had died as a result of Jones’s actions. “If they’re sick enough to be in the pediatric ICU,” McFee told me, “they’re fucking sick enough to die.”
In the midst of the storm swirling about Medical Center Hospital, the man at the top remained silent. Jeff Duffield had implored B. H. Corum to speak freely—to let the public know the hospital felt it had nothing to hide. But Corum’s initial encounter with reporters had been a fiasco. Confronted after the story broke, Corum had denied the existence of any internal investigation. Duffield had been left to correct his boss’s statements. A newspaper story noting the duplicity had sent Corum into a rage. Since then, he had refused to say anything to the press.
Always moody, Corum under fire had become almost inaccessible. He had delegated his deputy, Guest, to deal with the DA’s investigators, just as he had delegated Guest to monitor the ICU’s problems back in November 1981. Absorbed in his dream of boosting the hospital’s image, Corum had been flying high before all this happened. He had orchestrated the hospital’s name change, launched the “New Horizons” PR campaign, and spent much of his time hobnobbing with the rich and powerful, campaigning for their support. The ugly headlines had burst the bubble. A man accused of presiding over baby murders was hardly fit company on the social circuit. Now the administrator spent most of his day holed up in his office, looking wounded.
Many at the hospital and the medical school had come to regard Kerrville as the cause of all their problems. If Jones had not continued her shenanigans up there, they reasoned, no one would ever have cared about San Antonio. From Kerrville as well, they believed, would come their salvation. The newspapers said Jones was supposed to have used succinylcholine. Everyone knew the drug was untraceable. The Kerrville DA soon would realize he could never convict anyone. Then Millsap would have no choice but to reach the same conclusion. It was just a matter of time. This whole business would blow over.
Twenty-Four
I first met Genene Jones on May 5, 1983, while she inhabited the purgatory of an unindicted criminal suspect. We talked in San Angelo, in the two-bedroom mobile home she shared with three adults, three children, two cats, and a cocker spaniel named Sprout. Debbie Sultenfuss’s trailer had once housed a pair of finches as well, but their bamboo bird cage now sat empty. One of Genene’s cats had eaten them.
Genene greeted me with a smile and took her place at one end of a Herculon-upholstered sofa in the living room. She sat like a female Buddha, with each foot tucked under a thigh. Opposite Genene, a small sign atop a cabinet read:
ALWAYS TELL THE TRUTH
NO MATTER WHO IT HURTS
She said she lived by that wisdom. “I’m not a good liar,” she explained. “You tell one lie, and you’ve got to tell ten more to get out of it.”
Genene Jones was thirty-three years old. At five feet four, she carried about twenty or thirty pounds more than she needed, even after losing weight since becoming front-page news. Her short, red-brown hair was neat that day, her makeup modest and careful. She wore purple slacks and a flowered blouse, with a gold chain around her neck. She had dressed for our meeting as though for a Saturday-night date.
In the middle of the couch, clutching Genene’s hand, was the newest inhabitant of the trailer: Garron Ray Turk, a pale, doughy, blond-haired nurse’s aide. Garron was a nineteen-year-old high school senior and Genene’s new husband. They had married on April 24 in San Angelo, six weeks after meeting at the Park Plaza Nursing Home, where Genene had trained him. Garron, who spoke in a whine, had little to say during the evening. He sat beside Genene, pecked her on the lips from time to time, and fetched more iced tea and cigarettes. At the far end of the sofa was Debbie Sultenfuss. In her press conference in San Antonio, Genene had gone to the trouble of publicly denying that she and Debbie were lesbians. This evening, she pounced on that subject with an angry wave at her new spouse. “Ask my husband if I’m a les,” she said. “It’s nothing but trash.”
Until late into the evening, Genene led me through her story—about her life, about her patients, and about the terrible suspicions
that swirled around her. She sucked on a chain of low-tar cigarettes and gulped down several mugs of iced tea while we talked. “I’m sick and tired of being crucified alive and having people think I’m a baby-killer,” said Genene, explaining why she was ignoring her lawyer’s instructions not to talk about her case. “I haven’t killed a damn soul.” She said all the publicity had forced her to quit her job at the local nursing home; she was being made a scapegoat because she was abrasive. “My mouth got me into this,” Genene said with a grin. “And my mouth’s going to get me out of it.”
In six hours of conversation, Genene Jones was alternately friendly and defiant, sincere and threatening. She had an answer for every question, a response for every charge. When she heard that others had contradicted her account of the past few years, she leapt to the attack: They were liars, “full of shit,” politically motivated, “a real turd”; she was right, they were wrong. She was quick to slip nasty tidbits about her accusers into the conversation—the RN who had an affair with a married doctor, the parents who made love in a hospital room as nurses walked in and out.
Genene spoke about the sick children she had treated, many of them now dead. She confessed that she sometimes got too close to her patients—as though they were members of her family, like her own two young children. “I’m a very feeling person. You can’t help but fall in love with those kids.” That was why this was all so incredible. She was devoted to the kids; nothing upset her more than the death of a child. “I always cry when babies die,” said Genene. “You can almost explain away an adult death. When you look at an adult die, at least you can say they’ve had a full life. When a baby dies, they’ve been cheated. They’ve been cheated out of a hell of a lot.”
During a brief sojourn from the couch, Genene scooped up a sleepy infant from his crib: tiny Travis Ferguson. Travis had bounced back without complication from his sudden episode of breathing problems. “This is my grandson,” Genene announced cheerily, while cradling the baby in her arms. I asked why she identified herself as Cathy Ferguson’s mother. As far as she was concerned, Genene responded, she was Cathy’s mother. Jones complained that Ron Sutton had tried to manipulate the young mother. “He offered to set her up in a very comfortable apartment, pay all her bills, and take care of her and that baby, if she would sign a statement that she saw us or heard us talking about giving medications to kids that would hurt them.” Ferguson, in fact, had signed such a statement—before even meeting the Kerr County DA.
