by Peter Elkind
Millsap now knew they were about to investigate the unthinkable: that someone at the county hospital had been killing babies—and that those who ran the place had covered it up. Millsap assigned Vallejo to begin the inquiry and detached a pair of staff investigators to work with him. The DA ordered everyone working on the case to take extreme precautions to keep the investigation secret; they were forbidden to discuss their work even with colleagues in the office.
As he stood at the beginning of what was certain to be an extraordinary inquiry, Millsap felt a little bit overwhelmed—and a little bit thrilled as well. “This could be the biggest thing any DA has to tangle with,” he told Rothe. “This could be the biggest thing that’s ever happened in this community.”
Twenty-One
On Wednesday, February 16, viewers of the 6 P.M. broadcast of Eyewitness News, San Antonio’s top-rated local news show, received a jolt. As the snappy music introducing the program faded, a sober-faced anchorman announced: “One of the most incredible stories in the history of Texas medicine is unfolding right now in our community.” The camera then cut to a pale, reedy reporter named Ted Dracos, dressed in a dark suit and horn-rimmed glasses, and seated theatrically at a desk behind a typewriter.
“Eyewitness News has learned that two grand juries are investigating suspicious deaths of at least twelve infants in Kerr and Bexar counties,” intoned Dracos, as the words EYEWITNESS NEWS EXCLUSIVE flashed on the screen. “Right now they’re trying to determine whether those deaths are accidental, through negligence, or through the intentional administration of drugs.” The camera cut to film of sick infants in hospital beds. “According to a variety of highly reliable sources,” Dracos continued, “investigations are being focused on the pediatric intensive care unit of the Bexar County Hospital District. It is believed that as many as twelve children died there under suspicious circumstances during portions of 1981 and 1982. All the deaths were unexplained. All died from sudden cardiac arrest. Since then, the hospital has made major personnel changes and launched an internal investigation. Officials at the hospital district would not comment to Eyewitness News.”
Hospital public relations man Jeff Duffield appeared on camera, standing expressionless in a hospital hallway: “Ted, at this point in time, we have nothing to be ashamed of, and we’re very proud of our intensive care unit, but we, under advice of attorneys, are not making any comment.”
Dracos: “When will you be able to make comment on an investigation that’s ongoing?”
Duffield: “That would be difficult to say when we might be able to make a comment.”
Dracos: “Is there an investigation ongoing, Jeff?”
Duffield: “I cannot comment on that.”
“Our attempts to review death certificates were denied,” Dracos went on. “District Attorney Sam Millsap is just as terse.”
Millsap appeared onscreen. “At this time,” he said, “I can’t confirm or deny anything regarding any matter that may be pending before the grand jury.”
Dracos resumed his narration. “An investigation is also ongoing in Kerrville.” Film of the city appeared. “A grand jury has been convened in this Hill Country community. During a one-month period, sources told Eyewitness News, seven to eight infants had mysterious respiratory arrests. Investigators are looking into the possibility that an anesthetic drug may have been administered to the children. Ted Dracos, Channel 5, Eyewitness News.”
In the next several days, Dracos offered revelation after revelation about the secret investigation that Millsap had ordered his subordinates to protect. On February 17, Dracos reported that a Toronto doctor had led the hospital’s internal inquiry. On February 21, he spotlighted the suspicions of Vincent DiMaio, firing his questions at the medical examiner with pinpoint precision.
DRACOS: Did the hospital district report to you suspicious deaths, a group of suspicious deaths, in 1981 and 1982?
DIMAIO: No, sir, they did not.
DRACOS: Have they since reported those suspicious deaths to you?
DIMAIO: No, sir, they have not.
DRACOS: Do you know if there were any suspicious deaths over there?
DIMAIO: Yes, sir, there were. But I’m afraid I cannot comment any further than that.
On the 10 P.M. news that evening, Dracos struck again. The reporter identified succinylcholine as a suspected murder weapon, and even detailed the problems the drug presented investigators. “It’s called the doctor’s poison because it acts quickly and it’s extremely hard to trace once it’s entered the body,” explained Dracos. “…Whether or not there are any criminal indictments in this case may depend on whether any traces of this drug can be found in the victims.”
Those on the DA’s staff who had labored to keep their probe confidential were astonished at how much the TV reporter knew. For a week, Sam Millsap declined all public comment. Then, on February 23, the DA called a press conference to confirm that he was investigating the possibility of “multiple infant homicides” at Medical Center Hospital.
Instantly, the case became a major national media event. While a baby murder is big news in any city, the prospect that a dozen or more babies had been murdered—in a hospital, of all places—was a sensation, fodder for the TV networks, and the front page of The New York Times. I was assigned to write about the case for Texas Monthly. The man who had broken the story basked in the glory of his scoop. In an interview for a local newspaper feature, Dracos attributed his success to old-fashioned sweat and worn shoe leather. It had begun back in October with a tip from Kerrville, he explained.
It was about 4 P.M., Dracos recalled, when the woman called. The mood in the Eyewitness Newsroom was frantic—the hectic pace that precedes deadline.
“They’re killing babies up here,” she shrieked.
“But it was 4 P.M. on deadline, and there was no way to check it out,” he said. “So I stashed it in the back of my memory.”
A week later, he received a note from co-reporter and 5 P.M. Eyewitness News anchorwoman Kelly Chapman. The note was from another Kerrville woman and said infants were suffering from respiratory problems.
“She felt something was going on with a specific nurse,” he said. “She didn’t have a name, and I stashed it away.”
“Kelly thought it was a good story, but it got caught in the rush of things. You know how that is.”
Then two and a half weeks ago, an attorney friend of Dracos called him about “problems at the hospital.”
In the past, the friend had provided Dracos with reliable information, and the reporter was convinced “there would be something there.”
Dracos began checking his sources, relying on information from three people from the medical community and two from the criminal justice system and interviewing a variety of individuals, between 60 and 100, for two weeks.
Each new lead got more bizarre. Dracos developed an insatiable appetite for the assignment, working weekends and after his normal shift. “I had never gone to this length before,” he said.
Publicly, Sam Millsap called the early revelation of his investigation “unfortunate.” Secretly, he was delighted—and for good reason. It was Millsap who had leaked the story in the first place.
“I was Dracos’s source,” Sam Millsap privately confided to his deputy Nick Rothe. “I told him everything.”
Public officials leak stories not because they are fond of reporters but because they want things to go their way. Such was the case with the new Bexar County district attorney. Less than a month into his investigation, Millsap had come to regard the county hospital and UT medical school as fortresslike institutions, populated by doctors and administrators who were protecting a terrible secret. As an outsider, the DA could seek to extract the truth by calling reluctant witnesses, one by one, before a grand jury. But that was already proving painstaking; the doctors and administrators he had summoned weren’t exactly rushing to cooperate. Millsap felt certain there were many more people who knew something—people whose names his i
nvestigators didn’t even know. By making the investigation public, Millsap reasoned, he could not only apply pressure to the institutions but encourage those with valuable information to come forward. The DA told a skeptical Rothe of his plans. “We need to have the tree shook,” Millsap explained. “If we’re sitting here and thinking something horrible is happening, and there are dozens of people who have pieces of the puzzle, how do we get those people to talk to us? It seems to me one way to do it is through the press.”
Millsap, who had ordered his subordinates to keep the existence of the investigation secret, had decided to leak it himself. Now he had to pick an accomplice, a vehicle for his disclosure. Ever the pragmatist, he selected the star reporter for the TV broadcast with the largest audience in town. Ted Dracos was the classic local television investigative reporter—smart, confrontational, self-righteous, and vain. He would later submit to painful hair transplants to recarpet his balding scalp. Dracos had grabbed Millsap’s attention just days into his four-year term, with a report on the DA’s decision to lock the front doors to his office. The reporter had made the move sound like a body blow against democracy.
“Locked doors and escorts to some reporters are like waving a red flag in front of a bull,” railed Dracos in his report. “But that’s just what’s greeting all the media at DA Sam Millsap’s office…If you need information or an interview in the DA’s office, you cool your heels until somebody gets time to come and escort you.” Dracos embarrassed the DA, catching him off balance with a classic how-long-are-you-going-to-keep-beating-your-wife question.
DRACOS: How long is there going to be a closed-door policy—a locked door?
MILLSAP: We, we, we, the policy will exist for as long as it’s felt to be needed. Uh, you know, that may, it may well be that we’ll sit down in a group, in, in the next day or two and decide that we’re comfortable enough with the circumstances that exist, that we know what we need to know about the evidence vault, for example, and how it’s secured, to be comfortable having people in the office.
Dracos ended his report by rattling the locked door. “So where do things stand?” he asked rhetorically. “Well, right now they stand with the doors still locked. [Rattle, rattle.] Sam Millsap hasn’t said when—or if—the doors to the DA’s office will be unlocked.”
“Part of it was that I wanted to get him off my ass,” Millsap said later, explaining his selection of Dracos. “The main reason was that he was the guy people paid attention to back then.” The DA called the TV reporter and invited him to stop by for a chat. The two men ended up spending the entire evening at Dracos’s apartment; Millsap not only fed Dracos the story but dictated how he could use it. Reporter and public official thus consummated a classic symbiotic transaction: Dracos had the biggest story of his life; Millsap had enlisted a powerful ally for the prosecution.
With Millsap’s information to guide him, Dracos conducted some quick and aggressive reporting in both San Antonio and Kerrville. He stopped by Kathy Holland’s office, but the pediatrician—mortified by the visit—refused to grant Dracos an interview. A few days later, he called Medical Center Hospital and asked for B. H. Corum. John Guest took the call; Corum was out of town, Guest explained, but he would be glad to answer any questions.
“I don’t want to talk on the phone,” said Dracos. “It’s better if we’re not seen anywhere around the hospital.”
Guest agreed to stop by Dracos’s TV station, less than a mile from the medical center. When he arrived, the reporter sat him down in a conference room and shut the door. It was time to play hardball, Dracos decided. Jones was still at large; lives might still be at stake.
“We’ve got the goods,” Dracos declared, striding back and forth across the room. “We know it all. I know about the number of deaths. I know about heparin. I know about succinylcholine. Heads are going to roll. Lives are going to be ruined. It’s time for you to come clean. If you stonewall this, your credibility and the hospital’s credibility are blown. If your family can bear to watch your integrity getting annihilated, I wish you luck.”
Guest sat stolidly during Dracos’s speech. Then he smiled and politely declined to comment.
Dracos’s TV reports began airing a few days later—about two weeks after his night-long meeting with Millsap.
The DA took pains to avoid being fingered as Dracos’s source. To keep his own staff guessing, he made a point of having Dr. DiMaio present at several sessions where the case was discussed. The medical examiner was his cover. He involved DiMaio in meetings to create one other person who could have leaked to the press. When Dracos began airing his stories, courthouse reporters suspected the DA because Dracos’s information was so good. Millsap needed something to throw the other newshounds off the trail. “The reporters are after me because they think I’m your source,” Millsap told Dracos. “You’re going to have to make a horrible mistake—immediately. Or I’m not going to tell you anything else.” Millsap had raised his media manipulation to an unprecedented level. He was no longer merely leaking secret information; he was urging a journalist, a man paid to report facts, to deliberately present wrong information. Would any reporter go that far?
On February 23, Dracos profiled Genene Jones, the “central figure” under investigation in the case of the mysterious baby deaths. To illustrate his report, Dracos showed film of a heavyset nurse shielding her face as she rushed from the office of her San Antonio attorney.
“Genene, could you tell us if your kids are having problems in school because of this whole situation?” Dracos shouted.
“No comment,” responded the woman.
Dracos went on to reveal that Jones had worked in the pediatric ICU between 1978 and 1982, had two children, and was divorced. There was just one problem with his report: The woman on film was not Genene Jones but her friend Debbie Sultenfuss.
Dracos refused to comment on Millsap’s admission that he leaked the story, saying only that he had “a multiplicity of sources” for his reports. But he recalls no demand for a mistake from Millsap, and insists that he would never accede to such a request. The misidentification was a simple, egregious goof, says Dracos; he had only a general description of Jones, had been informed that she was inside the attorney’s office, and simply assumed that it was Jones who was leaving. “It’s impossible for me to make that mistake on purpose. It’s too pregnant with litigious circumstances. Here I am, libeling this woman, saying she’s a suspected baby-killer? That’s beyond the realm of possible. I would never take that kind of risk.”
Sam Millsap never spoke to Ted Dracos about what had happened. The DA was satisfied that he had the mistake he needed.
While the story of the mysterious baby deaths made front pages across the country, in San Antonio the investigation became a civic obsession. The tale Millsap had leaked fed a peculiar Alamo City appetite for municipal hysteria. Part of it was demographics: the product of a huge population of predominantly Mexican-American poor, much of it illiterate and ill-educated, susceptible to demagoguery and superstition. But the appetite for civic turmoil ran deeper than lack of schooling; even many of the educated comfortable possessed a cranky, hidebound outlook, a raging paranoia that someone—usually someone associated with government—was conspiring to screw them. Civic improvements quietly accepted elsewhere met rejection in San Antonio. This was a town that refused to put fluoride in its water for fear it would damage the gene pool.
San Antonio’s media both reflected and fed this fear-and-loathing mentality. The local TV stations crammed their news broadcasts with carnage, usually opening with film of a sheet-draped corpse or a mangled automobile. “If it bleeds, it leads,” was the unspoken slogan. The city’s top radio talk-show host was a reactionary old coot who painted himself a populist heading a little people’s call to arms; mostly, he led the charge against anything that resembled progress. Yet when out-of-towners shook their heads about the San Antonio media, they were usually talking about the newspapers.
Outside of New York,
San Antonio was the only American city with three major dailies. Australian press baron Rupert Murdoch owned two, the morning Express and the evening News, which published joint editions on weekends. The third paper, the Light, belonged to the heirs of William Randolph Hearst. The Light had for years ranked as the most sensationalist daily in Texas, but Murdoch’s 1973 purchase of the Express and News immediately lowered the standards. The two sides joined in a sewer fight for readers and advertising. Their weapons were screaming headlines, preposterous stories, self-promotion, and cash giveaway games with improbable names like Wingo. The national press labeled the combat the “sleazepaper war.”
The shrillest voice belonged to Murdoch’s News, whose red ink and glut of apocalyptic nonsense made it resemble a supermarket tabloid. Day after day, the News greeted its readers with headlines like ARMIES OF INSECTS MARCHING ON S.A. and UNCLE TORTURES TOT WITH HOT FORK. Its sister paper, the Express, was a bit calmer, though given to similar foolishness, as in a 1983 headline, TRUE LOVE CONQUERS 30 TONS OF GARBAGE. By then the Light seemed almost respectable—as much by comparison with the competition as by virtue of a new editor’s first improvements. But local violence, political squabbling, and giant headlines still dominated the paper.
The baby-deaths story was precisely the kind of horror that San Antonio’s newspapers loved. Loath to credit the competition, the papers rushed to outdo Dracos. GRAND JURIES PROBE TOT DEATHS, LVN’S ROLE, announced the jointly published editions of the Saturday, February 19, Express-News. The paper’s medical writer reported that the Bexar County grand jury was investigating the death “of at least a dozen babies”—about the number that Dracos had cited. But by the following Wednesday, the purported death toll had multiplied. GRAND JURY PROBING DEATHS OF 42 INFANTS, screamed the double banner headline in the Express. “The Bexar County grand jury is investigating the sudden deaths of as many as 42 infants at Medical Center Hospital,” its story began. “The babies are believed to have died by injection of drugs which brought on cardiac arrest, sources said.” The afternoon News shrieked in agreement: TOT DEATH PROBE SHAKES HOSPITAL. An overline added: 42 DEATHS INVESTIGATED BY JURY. The Light came up with its own number, attributing to an anonymous source the report that the grand jury was “looking at as many as 35 infant deaths.”