by Peter Elkind
Intending to ask for probation, Genene’s attorneys needed to prove her eligible by offering testimony that she had never been convicted of a felony. A relative usually performed that task, but members of Genene’s family had been conspicuously absent throughout her trial. Gladys Jones had made only one brief appearance in the courtroom. Although she continued to care for Crystal, Gladys had virtually terminated communication with Genene by the time the trial ended. Angry about calls to her unlisted home number from members of the Christian group ministering to Genene, Gladys, on the day of her daughter’s conviction, had sent Genene a curt postcard, absent salutation or signature. It read, in full:
Maybe I didn’t make myself clear about my telephone # so I’ll write it down. I do not want this # given to anyone, church member or not and if I have more calls, I’ll have it changed again and will not give it to anyone. This is a private, unpublished restricted # + I intend to keep it that way.
The absence of a suitable character witness forced the defense to put Genene on the stand to testify that her record was clean. After the judge granted a defense motion severely limiting cross-examination, the defendant was summoned. Genene came forward stiffly, appearing numb with shock from the verdict. She wore a blue dress with white pinstripes. Her eyes, covered with blue-green makeup, were visibly puffy from crying. A gold cross hung from a chain around her neck. In a voice barely above a whisper, Genene answered four routine questions from Brookshire. Sutton declined to ask anything, and the defendant sat down after less than a minute. There were no other witnesses.
In his closing argument, Carnes issued a plea for mercy. He told the jurors that Genene had “no true intention to kill Chelsea McClellan.” The child’s death was an accident, he suggested, caused by her unusual susceptibility to succinylcholine. Once again, the defense asked the jurors to consider allocating a share of the blame to Kathy Holland, “who is practicing medicine today,” he noted, “and will go home and practice medicine tomorrow.” Carnes begged the jury to display compassion, not vengeance. “It is easy sometimes to forget that you are dealing with a human being,” he said softly. “I have learned on this side of the bar that everybody is truly human. I don’t want you to go back and think of Genene Jones as some object. I want you to think of her as a person, a mother, a daughter. She has feelings. She feels sorrow. She feels joy, just like all of us.”
“Where was the mercy for Chelsea McClellan?” thundered Sutton, when his turn before the jury came. “This was no accident,” he said, but a calculated murder, carried out for self-gratification. He asked the jurors to “provide society with a paid-up policy of insurance to prevent this defendant from committing these types of atrocious acts in the future.” Only the harshest possible sentence would end succinylcholine’s reputation as the perfect murder weapon, declared the prosecutor. Only the harshest sentence would deter others. Only the harshest sentence would be just.
“Let’s compare Chelsea’s fate to the defendant’s,” suggested Sutton. “The defendant sits here alive today. Mr. Carnes said a while ago that this defendant has feelings. This defendant suffers sorrow and joy. What about this little girl?” Sutton held aloft the photograph of Chelsea. The jurors looked away; several pulled out handkerchiefs. “You think today she has any feelings—any joy, any sorrow? No, not poor Chelsea. Today Chelsea is confined to a small little crypt—a dark, cold, lonesome crypt.” Sutton paused to let the jurors conjure up the image. “For how long? For eternity! For eternity, ladies and gentlemen—not five years, not twenty years, not fifty years, not seventy-five years, or ninety-nine. But for eternity.”
Sutton pointed his finger at the defendant. “She shed no tears for Chelsea, but only for herself. We should shed a tear for Chelsea—and tell those others around the world that no longer, because of what happened today in Georgetown, Texas, will anyone pick up a syringe and attack little children.”
At 11:30 A.M. on February 16, seven women and five men gathered for their final duty in a jury room at the Williamson County courthouse. “We’ve all found she’s guilty,” Edwards noted. “Now we have to decide: What should happen to someone who murders a baby?” With the stage set thus, there was little opening to argue for mercy. But there was little inclination to do so anyway. Almost all the jurors had noticed how Jones had glared at them after the verdict.
William McCauley, a six-foot-four-inch, 220-pound former marine, broke into tears as he argued for the maximum sentence of ninety-nine years. Ruth Armstrong and Lillie Kipp, once again, were hesitant. “Doesn’t that seem like an awful lot?” one of them asked. “Yes,” responded another juror. “But it’s not as much as a thousand.” The jury foreman, among the majority who could not imagine too harsh a punishment, pitched in. “Do you want her to walk on the sidewalk with your daughter?” Edwards asked. The two women quickly came around.
The jury returned to the courtroom at 12:40 P.M.—only seventy minutes after departing for deliberations. In contrast to the day before, the defendant appeared composed as Judge Carter announced the sentence. Her lawyers had advised her the night before that she was likely to get the maximum. But as she sat down in her chair, Genene Jones began shaking.
In accordance with the judge’s suggestion, the jurors met briefly in the jury room with attorneys for both sides before returning to the outside world. Jim Brookshire and Burt Carnes had hoped these twelve people would heed their pleas to blame Kathy Holland—the doctor in charge—for what had happened and thus excuse their client. Now, chatting with the jurors, the defense attorneys wondered if any among the twelve had taken what they’d said to heart. Finally, the members of the panel were free to go. As the jurors walked out of the room, Petti and Reid McClellan embraced each and offered thanks. The microbiologist, Ann Bradley, was the last to step outside. She hugged Chelsea’s mother, then told her: “There wasn’t any doubt. She won’t be able to do it again.”
At the Georgetown Inn, a party was in full swing. Between glasses of Scotch, Sutton and Rothe took turns telling war stories about the past five weeks of combat. Sam Millsap slapped everyone on the back. Sutton’s legal assistant enlisted visitors to snap happy pictures of the winning team. They took photos of the DA’s staff, the investigators, the witnesses, and the lawmen. Even the regulars among the reporters were invited to pose. Petti and Reid were there, along with Petti’s sister and Reid’s parents.
After an hour, liquor and fatigue had mellowed the mood to one of quiet satisfaction. A Kerr County sheriff’s deputy, who had spent the trial ferrying witnesses back and forth, pulled out his guitar and began crooning a ballad he and Sutton had written about Genene Jones, titled “The IV Blues,” which they sang to the music of an old country-and-western song by Jimmie Rodgers called “In the Jailhouse Now.”
Well, I knew a nurse named Genene;
She was bad, ugly, and mean.
She had the fastest IV in town.
She took it out each day,
Just so she could play.
She liked to knock those little babies down.
She’s in the jailhouse now.
She’s in the jailhouse now.
She’ll never do it again;
Sutton’s sent her off to the pen.
She’s in the jailhouse now.
Thirty-Two
One week after a jury pronounced Genene Jones a murderer, B. H. Corum, whose San Antonio hospital had employed and sheltered her, tendered his resignation. Everyone involved insisted that Corum’s departure had nothing to do with the continuing investigation of the pediatric ICU at Medical Center Hospital. But the event that toppled the executive director of the Bexar County Hospital District was so trivial that few could doubt the baby-deaths scandal was truly his undoing.
The incident was an example of Corum’s tendency to regard the hospital as his personal fiefdom and its employees as his vassals. It began when his wife asked him to obtain a refill of her prescription for Phenergan, a non-narcotic drug used to combat nausea. Like all the institution’s emp
loyees, Corum was allowed to have his personal prescriptions filled at the hospital pharmacy. But instead of presenting his wife’s prescription to anyone, Corum phoned the director of hospital supplies and arranged for two bottles of Phenergan to be brought to him directly from the drug stockroom. For months after the incident, nothing happened. Then a stockroom employee, bitter about his harsh treatment by the supplies director, tipped off a superior.
Shortly after being hired, Corum had issued a memo reminding subordinates of hospital regulations on theft. Theft of “any monies or drugs” worth more than $20, it noted, constituted a “Group A” offense, punishable by dismissal. Corum’s misdeed put him $12 over the limit; the two bottles of Phenergan were worth $32. In an emergency session, the hospital board decided to suspend the administrator for three days, pending further investigation. Three days later, Corum resigned his post. Those who wondered why the combative retired colonel would leave without a fight could look to the generous terms of his departure. Although his employment contract contained a clause that voided severance compensation for conduct deemed “malfeasance or misfeasance,” Corum, after submitting his resignation, was awarded a full 120 days separation pay—twenty-five thousand dollars.
That did not stop hospital board chairman Thornton from declaring the episode an example of the institution’s refusal to brook misconduct. “We hold most sacred the policy that states there will be no violations regarding medications tolerated,” Thornton told the press. Bexar County DA Sam Millsap was amused to see the institution that had tolerated Genene Jones sounding so sanctimonious about a minor offense. He considered it a convenient excuse to get rid of Corum. “Thornton is a politician,” Millsap said later. “He understands there are times when you have to do things to change appearances. If you’ve got somebody real beat up, you need to replace him with somebody who’s not beat up.”
Corum’s unbattered replacement—appointed on an interim basis—was associate executive director John Andrew Guest. Only thirty-five, Guest already had worked at the county hospital for a decade. He had begun as an administrative resident, setting prices for the hospital cafeteria, and climbed steadily through the ranks. Guest advanced on his dedication, loyalty, and methodical attention to detail. A bearded, solidly built man from the Gulf Coast town of Galveston, Guest was a slice of American white bread—honest, earnest, and likable. But he also possessed the faults of a career bureaucrat; superiors found him unimaginative and slow to make decisions.
Since the first sign of trouble, Corum had punted to Guest the ugly chore of monitoring the pediatric ICU. While Corum occasionally had cut him out of meetings, Guest was intimately familiar with the allegations about Genene Jones. Characteristically, he had taken no independent action to deal with the problem, even though his duties included day-to-day management of Medical Center Hospital. Guest also had served on Dr. McFee’s Pediatric ICU Committee, the group that established the strategy of “judicious silence.” When the criminal investigation in San Antonio began, Corum handed Guest the task of dealing with members of the DA’s staff as well. He handled their endless requests for information without rancor or delay. Millsap and Nick Rothe had quickly come to dislike the abrasive Corum. Guest also knew plenty about what had happened, but his subordinate position and cordial manner made the prosecutors view him far less critically.
Nonetheless, suspicions remained high between the district attorney and his prey. With the Kerrville case closed (Sutton had announced plans to drop the remaining charges), attention once again focused on whether Millsap would seek new indictments—against Jones, the hospital and the medical school, or the individuals who ran them. Culpability was a theme of the report on the case by the ABC newsmagazine 20/20, filmed weeks before Jones’s trial in Georgetown but broadcast after the verdict. The piece traced the suspicions that had surrounded Jones at Medical Center Hospital, and included film of a Kerrville doctor blaming his counterparts in San Antonio for failing to warn anyone about her. Following the filmed report, host Hugh Downs pronounced the story perhaps “the most sinister situation we’ve ever reported on.”
Hostilities flared in March, when DA’s investigator Art Brogley discovered that Medical Center Hospital had recently ordered more than four tons of pharmacy records shredded. Claiming that the destroyed documents related to his investigation, Millsap said he was “shocked and angry” and threatened criminal charges. Overexcited by the controversy, one San Antonio paper even published a front-page profile of the junkmen who had shredded the records. But hospital officials insisted that nothing sinister had taken place—that they retained duplicates of everything important and that disposal of the papers was a routine bit of housecleaning. Still, in the flush of suspicion, Millsap then fielded a tip that the medical school had sent twenty-five tons of records for shredding. After obtaining a court order to bar their destruction, Millsap dispatched investigators to impound the papers at a San Antonio recycling center. A TV reporter who arrived first decided to help himself to several documents; confronted later by Brogley, he sheepishly coughed them up. After sifting through the records for days, Millsap’s staff discovered that nothing of significance had been lost—except their time.
After more than a year on the case, Sam Millsap was losing his fervor for waging war on the hospital district and the medical school. Although appeals courts had yet to rule on whether it was legal under Texas statutes to charge such institutions with a crime, Nick Rothe had been telling his boss for months that he couldn’t make indictments stick. Besides, it wasn’t the institutions that were evil, just some of the people that ran them. The DA decided to limit his targets. Millsap contacted the U.S. Attorney’s office and provided its agents with a briefing and documentation on the case. He would leave it to the feds—with their power to cut grants, impose fines, and investigate civil rights violations—to take on the institutions. Millsap would set his own sights on individuals—on Genene Jones, in hope of producing an indictment for murder, and on those who supervised her, for tolerating her misdeeds and covering them up.
Jones’s trial on the one Bexar County charge that was pending—for injury to a child in the heparin-induced bleeding of Rolando Santos—would not begin until fall. In late March, Nick Rothe resigned his post as deputy DA and returned to private practice. Rothe, however, retained responsibility for the investigation and trial through a part-time appointment as special prosecutor. His departure left one attorney and two investigators, including Art Brogley, working full time on the case.
Charging Jones with murder was virtually a prerequisite to seeking indictments in the cover-up. If the nurse hadn’t obviously killed a child, how could they hope to prosecute anyone for failing to stop her? For the next six months, the investigators concentrated on the best prospects they had, a handful of Jones’s patients who had died unexpectedly in the ICU. Several had undergone autopsies; where the pathologist had removed and preserved body organs, the investigators sent tissue to toxicologists to test for the presence of improper drugs. The investigators were hoping for the sort of evidence that had convicted Genene Jones once—evidence that would provide more than a purely circumstantial case. But their task in San Antonio was far more complex. The kids at Medical Center Hospital had developed a baffling array of problems: seizures, bleeding, limpness, sudden urine output, breathing trouble, and irregular heartbeat. This meant the toxicologists had to test for an assortment of different drugs: Dilantin, Valium, potassium, heparin, and succinylcholine were just some of the suspects.
July brought a potential breakthrough, when Dr. Holmstedt’s collaborator, Fredric Rieders, reported finding signs of succinylcholine in the brain tissue of two children. The problem was that the evidence was tentative, too weak to stand up in court. To confirm the results, the toxicologist would need tissue from the internal organs of the children. Millsap decided to order exhumation of the bodies, buried two and a half years earlier.
The early-morning gathering on August 7 represented a macabre reunion. Am
ong the group were Nick Rothe, Art Brogley, Fredric Rieders, and Vincent DiMaio—all participants in the exhumation of Chelsea McClellan fifteen months earlier. But this setting was different: San Fernando Cemetery Number Two, the final resting ground for the families of San Antonio’s Catholic West Side barrio. All around were the graves of dirt-poor Mexican-Americans who had died young—victims of stabbings, or tuberculosis, or childhood diseases for which they had never received inoculations. And this time, the bodies that were dug up bore no resemblance to china dolls. Each had rotted down to the skeleton; the flesh had turned to dust. Rieders returned to his lab in Pennsylvania empty-handed.
Unwilling to rely on the criminal-justice system, some parents of children who had died in the pediatric ICU were seeking their own form of redress. On August 16, survivors of thirteen children filed wrongful-death suits against Medical Center Hospital. All were represented by the brothers William and Tom Stolhandske.
Tom was a former All-American end for the University of Texas. He had been the most valuable player in the 1953 Hula Bowl, and went on to play four years of professional football. During more than two decades in San Antonio, both Stolhandskes had become actively involved in Democratic courthouse politics. Tom had recently left his elected post as a Bexar County commissioner. After learning early about the investigation, the Stolhandskes fed tidbits to eager reporters, shrewdly positioning themselves publicly as the lawyers for parents to call. All told, the Stolhandskes eventually would file eighteen lawsuits against Medical Center Hospital, each alleging that a child had died wrongfully in the pediatric ICU. Most of the babies were among those whom investigators suspected Genene Jones had harmed—including Chris Hogeda, whose parents had finally turned on the nurse. But the child of one set of plaintiffs had never been treated by Jones; another had never entered the ICU at all.
