by Peter Elkind
Ron Sutton’s disclosure that he had found a scientific test for succinylcholine was much on Genene’s mind; Chelsea McClellan’s exhumation was to take place two days later. “You can get any idiot for $10,000 to say the [drug is] in there,” she said. “Ron Sutton sits on his ass and spends all this money just so he can crucify me—just so he can become governor.”
“Somebody needs to investigate Mr. Sutton,” Debbie piped in. “And I mean down-dirty investigation.”
“He’s going to put my ass in jail,” predicted Genene. “He wants nothing but publicity—dragging the baby-killer to jail.” But it wouldn’t happen like that, she insisted. “I’ve got it all prearranged.” The nurse had a vision of her own arrest, choreographed as carefully as a scene from a play. When the time came, no one would lead her to prison in handcuffs. She would instead turn herself in—confronting her fate like a martyr, not a murderer. Then it would be only days before a magistrate set her free. “If the judge doesn’t laugh it out of court,” said Genene, “he needs to have his head examined.”
Three days later, Cathy Ferguson was rushed by ambulance from the mobile home to a San Angelo hospital. She had gone into seizures shortly after starting to eat dinner with Genene. Cathy recovered quickly. But doctors were unable to determine what had caused her problem. Ron Sutton, who was receiving regular intelligence reports from San Angelo, suspected that Jones had poisoned Cathy’s food in an effort to keep the young woman from testifying against her. Sutton also knew that his chief suspect had begun identifying herself as Genene Jones Turk. The DA regarded the nurse’s marriage to the effeminate teenager as a sham, a clumsy attempt to disguise her identity.
On May 9, after one hour of work, Garron Turk quit his job at the Park Plaza Nursing Home. He told his boss that he needed to leave town for personal reasons. Garron and Genene then drove with Genene’s daughter, Crystal, to San Antonio, where they stayed with Gladys Jones. Genene’s son, Edward, remained behind with Debbie Sultenfuss. On May 13 in San Antonio, Genene gave a deposition in the civil suit filed by Chelsea McClellan’s parents, who were now requesting $7 million in damages. It was during this interrogation that Genene declared that Keith Martin was Crystal’s father—and that he was dead. Genene also told the attorneys questioning her that through the time when she worked in Kathy Holland’s clinic, she knew nothing about the use of succinylcholine.
A few days later, Ron Sutton received a letter from Genene’s attorney, Bill Chenault, who was offering his services “to avoid unnecessary efforts by your office.” Chenault informed the DA that he had retained doctors to review Chelsea McClellan’s medical records. They had not only found “absolutely no indication of wrongdoing” but concluded that the deceased child had received excellent medical care. Chenault volunteered to arrange similar reviews in the cases of other children. He would happily discuss sharing such information with the DA, with the “expectation of receiving favorable action or at least no unfavorable action” against his client by the grand jury.
On May 18, the call from Stockholm finally came: Dr. Holmstedt and Dr. Rieders had confirmed the presence of succinylcholine in the body of Chelsea McClellan. Sutton moved quickly. Kathy Holland’s attorney, Jack Leon, had continued lobbying the DA on behalf of his client, even sending Sutton the results of a private polygraph he had commissioned; this time Holland had passed. After months of equivocation, Sutton notified Leon that he was satisfied the doctor bore no criminal responsibility for what had happened; he was ready to deal. The DA gave his commitment that he would not seek Holland’s indictment; Leon agreed to have his client testify freely, doing whatever she could to put Genene Jones behind bars. Once Jones’s staunchest ally, Holland had agreed to serve as her chief accuser.
On Wednesday, May 25, Sutton convened his grand jury in Kerrville. After signing a routine waiver for Leon, who preferred that his clients never appear before a grand jury, Holland testified for more than three hours; Debbie Sultenfuss and Gwen Grantner also appeared. After eleven hours, the grand jury issued eight criminal indictments, all against Genene Jones. She stood charged with murder in the September 17 death of Chelsea McClellan. And she was charged with injury to a child in the nonfatal episodes experienced by Chelsea McClellan, Brandy Benites, Chris Parker, Jimmy Pearson, Misty Reichenau, Jacob Evans, and Rolinda Ruff. All eight indictments alleged that the nurse had “intentionally and knowingly” injured the children by injecting them with succinylcholine or some other drug. Each charge carried a maximum sentence of ninety-nine years.
More than a week before the grand jury session, Ron Sutton had also issued a subpoena for Genene Jones to testify. At this performance, however, Jones was the missing star. She had dropped out of sight after her deposition, and the subpoena had never been served. Chenault had written the grand jury foreman that his client did not know she had been subpoenaed. Genene had decided to take several weeks off to rest, Chenault explained, “in an attempt to get away from this whole matter as much as possible.” Chenault asked the grand jury to notify him if it still needed his client. Such notice would allow Chenault to orchestrate Jones’s voluntary surrender—the sort of dignified scene that the nurse had wished to arrange. But Sutton had no intention of requesting Jones’s appearance. The nurse was now under criminal indictment; that made her a fugitive. Sutton gave orders for the Texas Rangers to track her down.
A bulletin was dispatched immediately to law-enforcement agencies all over the state. They were advised to look for a late-model pickup truck, a 1983 silver-and-blue Ford Ranger. Advised that Garron Turk’s mother and stepfather lived in the West Texas oil town of Odessa, a pair of Rangers based in nearby Midland went to check out the address that evening. They soon learned that Jones and Turk, accompanied by Genene’s eleven-year-old son, Edward, were staying with other relatives in Odessa and planned to skip town the next morning.
When the Rangers arrived at 10:30 P.M. at the house on Beechwood Lane, they discovered the Ford pickup in the garage, loaded with a bed and several boxes of belongings. The two men knocked on the front door. A young woman answered. The Rangers identified themselves, then asked if Genene Jones was inside. “Yes,” the woman told them. “There is more tension in this house than you can imagine.” Just hours after the indictments, the Rangers entered the house and arrested Genene Jones for murder.
The TV news the next day showed Jones in handcuffs, tears streaming down her face as she was hauled off to jail. It was precisely the scene that the nurse had been so confident she would avoid—one way or another. And it was precisely the kind of scene that Ron Sutton had sought. After eight months of investigation, his waiting was over.
Two days after her arrest, Genene Jones was arraigned in Junction, where she pleaded not guilty to all eight charges against her. The nurse declared that she was indigent, and District Judge V. Murray Jordan appointed Bill Chenault to represent her at taxpayer expense. Sheriff’s deputies then took Jones back to Kerrville, where she was locked up in the Kerr County Jail, adjacent to the courthouse. On her second night there, Genene complained of severe stomach pains while in her cell. She was rushed across the street for treatment at Sid Peterson Memorial Hospital—to the distress of those who worked there. Jones remained for two days, then was returned to jail.
The circumstances of Jones’s arrest had peeved her attorney. The Texas Rangers had found Genene while Chenault was attending a real estate seminar in Houston; he’d had to leave two days early and rush back to San Antonio. Chenault had long ago informed Sutton that he would surrender his client voluntarily; yet the DA hadn’t made even the slightest effort to contact him. Chenault wondered if it was because of the comments that he’d been making to the press. He had ridiculed the succinylcholine test and called Sutton a “country DA” who hadn’t done his “homework.” Now Chenault had to figure out a way to spring Genene from jail. Her bond had been set at the lofty sum of $225,000—$50,000 for the murder charge, $25,000 for each of the seven other charges.
The problem was th
at Chenault knew little about criminal law. When Jones had testified before the Bexar County grand jury, for example, Chenault had been unaware that such hearings were closed to witnesses’ attorneys. Now, after studying a handful of newly purchased criminal-law books, Chenault began filing all the motions he could dream up; he’d have preferred handling a real estate case. Recognizing Chenault’s limitations, Judge Jordan appointed Joe Grady Tuck, a former Kerr County DA who now practiced in Kerrville, to aid Jones’s defense.
At a pretrial hearing on June 16, the judge provided the defense lawyers with $4,000 for investigative expenses. Jordan also granted their request for a gag order prohibiting everyone involved with the case from discussing it with the press. Dressed in a pink polyester smock and white slacks, Genene sat expressionless as the hearing dragged on. Also in the courtroom were Petti and Reid McClellan. When interviewed by reporters, Petti noted that were Chelsea alive, she would be two years old that day. “We have to go out to the cemetery to wish her happy birthday,” Petti said.
Jones’s bid for release came at a second hearing, twelve days later. Her lawyers wanted her bond cut to $45,000, an amount they said her family could produce. The purpose of a criminal bond is to ensure that a defendant shows up for trial. Failure to do so results in forfeiture of the money. A high bond also serves to keep someone considered dangerous in jail. So to persuade the judge to reduce Genene’s bond, the defense lawyers needed to convince the judge that she wouldn’t run—and that she wouldn’t harm anyone while she was free.
Tuck began his pitch by calling the accused murderer to the stand. An experienced criminal-trial lawyer, Tuck knew that Sutton would make much of Genene’s disappearance during the week prior to her arrest. Tuck led his client through an explanation of where she had been. Jones testified that she had spent much of the week with Garron in the Hill Country town of Brady, living with her new husband’s grandmother and fixing up a house where they planned to live. She had then gone to Odessa, she explained, to attend Garron’s high school graduation. Until shortly before her arrest, she had no idea that anyone was trying to find her; after learning of the indictments, she had planned to turn herself in.
Ron Sutton was licking his chops. The DA relished the courtroom clash of wills, and he despised this woman as much as she despised him. Sutton also was armed with a shocking piece of information; he would spring it on the nurse at a suitable time. The defense lawyers had called their client Genene Jones; intent on highlighting the defendant’s unusual marriage, Sutton opened his cross-examination by pointedly addressing her as “Mrs. Turk.”
“Mrs. Turk, you forgot to tell us about going to Colorado, didn’t you? About your whereabouts?”
“We went on a honeymoon for—”
“Went on a honeymoon?” Sutton interrupted. “Did you take Debbie Sultenfuss with you on that honeymoon?”
“Sure did,” said Genene.
Sutton suggested that after learning the DA had discovered a test for succinylcholine—no longer the perfect murder weapon—Genene had laid plans to flee the state. “Now, isn’t it a fact, Mrs. Jones Turk, that you married Garron Turk so that you could seek some kind of anonymity—so that you could disappear into Colorado under the name of Turk and nobody would know where you are?”
Genene denied it, saying she was only considering moving to Colorado in “the far future.”
Sutton asked how long Genene had gone without dating anyone before suddenly marrying Garron, who was sitting in the courtroom. Tuck objected, calling the question irrelevant.
“Your Honor,” responded Sutton, “this goes right to the heart of it that she married this boy”—Sutton spat out the word—“just to seek anonymity and get to Colorado.”
Sutton asked Jones why the Rangers in Odessa had found her with a pickup truck filled with belongings. Genene said she was taking them to the house in Brady.
“If you were released on some kind of bond, what would you do?” Sutton asked.
“I would get ready to fight you in court,” Genene responded.
“You wouldn’t take on any type of employment?”
“I probably couldn’t, thanks to the publicity.”
“So you would just take a full-time job on me, is that right?” demanded Sutton.
“That’s right,” said Genene.
A few minutes later, Sutton decided the time had come. The DA asked Jones whether she had ever met a friend of Cathy Ferguson whose name he announced in court. When Genene acknowledged that the man had visited the trailer in San Angelo, the prosecutor dropped his bombshell.
“You made a statement a while ago that you wanted to get out of jail so you could fight me,” he began. “Isn’t it a fact, Mrs. Turk, that you are aware of arrangements to be made with [this man] to kill me as a result of this prosecution?”
“No, sir,” said Genene, looking stunned. “You are unbelievable.”
Tuck jumped to his feet. “I think it’s obvious to the court that this is an attempt to make some kind of an inflammatory courtroom dramatic statement,” he objected. The judge cut Sutton off, but it was too late. The DA had painted Jones as a woman with a continuing propensity for violence. From that point on, nothing the defense tried seemed to work.
Tuck called Chenault to the stand to buttress Genene’s claim that she had planned to turn herself in. But Chenault acknowledged that he and Jones had at least contemplated an alternative. “We had had prior discussions some time back,” testified Chenault. “It was our feeling—myself and several of the lawyers in the office—that probably they [the authorities] would be coming after her at some point anyway, so we discussed the percentage of trying to run…we felt it was a much more forthright proposition to go on and appear just like you should and fight it that way versus trying to run.”
Tuck called Jones back to the stand to rebut Sutton’s insinuation of a murder plot. “Do you have any idea what he’s talking about other than an attempt to sensationalize this already sensational case?”
“No, sir,” said Genene.
With another crack at Jones, Sutton asked her once again about Garron Ray Turk. “You had your husband out running around over in Brady interviewing people, trying to dig up something on me, that you were going to get me one way or the other, isn’t that right?”
“No, sir, he was looking up information that would benefit my case,” said Genene.
“The best way to benefit it would be to get me out of it?”
“No, sir.”
Sutton took advantage of the opportunity to put Garron on display. “As a matter of fact, the husband we’re talking about”—you could practically hear Sutton snicker, as he turned toward the back of the courtroom—“is this him right here in the light blue suit, [the] blond-headed boy?”
Genene allowed as how it was.
After brief arguments by both sides, the judge decided to leave Jones’s bond at $225,000.
When the hearing was over, reporters rushed to question Sutton. But the prosecutor declined to elaborate on the death plot, citing the judge’s gag order. In fact, Ron Sutton knew virtually nothing more than he had said in court. The information was unsubstantiated, and it had come from Cathy Ferguson.
Since early June, the befuddling young woman had engaged in a fresh round of conversations with Art Brogley. Ferguson had left San Angelo by bus shortly after Genene’s arrest, then taken up residence with her parents in San Antonio. From there, she called the DA’s investigator almost daily with fresh revelations, each more sensational than the last. Yet she told Brogley that she was afraid to take the stand.
In fact, both Sutton and Millsap doubted that they would ever call Ferguson as a witness. Cathy’s mother had given Brogley an account of her daughter’s troubled past—her history as a runaway, her placement in foster homes, her stints in private and state psychiatric hospitals. Cathy, she said, had a tendency to fantasize. Brogley knew Ferguson probably was useless as a witness, but he was reluctant to dismiss everything she said; too much of it h
ad the ring of truth. One day, Cathy told him that while she was living in San Angelo, Genene had instructed her to have her friend locate someone who would be willing to “bury” Ron Sutton. Brogley had passed the information on to the DA, who had received a similar report from a state social worker who also had spoken to Ferguson. Sutton had revealed the information in open court before the investigator could check it out.
The purported hit man turned out to be a retired San Antonio resident who had once worked at a facility where Ferguson had lived. There was neither evidence of violence in his past nor any indication that he was plotting Sutton’s demise. A few days after Brogley told Sutton of the purported bid to do him in, Cathy was committed to the San Antonio State Hospital for the mentally ill.
Despite its dubious foundation, the murder-plot story had served the useful purpose of helping keep Genene behind bars. Or so Ron Sutton thought. Just hours after the bond hearing was over, the DA received a call from the Kerr County jail. Genene Jones’s family had posted the $225,000 bond she said she could not afford. The Death Nurse had been set free.
Twenty-Five
It was Genene Jones’s mother who had come to her rescue. At the time she fled Kerrville, Genene had warned Gladys that there might be trouble. But nothing could prepare her for this. At seventy-two, Gladys Jones was in failing health, stooped from a hard life, and wheezy from bad lungs. Breathing problems had forced her into the hospital only a few months earlier. Now she required intermittent mist treatments to ward off bronchial spasms; the medication she was taking had left her face moon-shaped and puffy.
