The Death Shift

by Peter Elkind

  Joe Grady Tuck had never had a more exasperating client. Shortly after being assigned to the case, the defense lawyer met Genene’s new husband. Shocked at his youth and effeminate appearance—“it made her look like a lunatic,” the attorney said later—Tuck instructed Jones to keep Garron under wraps. “The presence of your husband is going to hurt,” Tuck delicately told Genene. She ignored the advice; Garron had showed up for the bond-reduction hearing, allowing Sutton the opportunity to point him out in court. Tuck cautioned Jones not to argue with the DA on the witness stand; Genene had tried to put him down anyway. And when Jones made bail, she became even more troublesome. She was constantly calling or stopping by Tuck’s office unannounced; when she walked in the door, she seemed to expect all other business to cease. Most of all, Genene refused to obey her attorneys’ orders to stop talking to the press. “I have a right to do it,” she told her lawyers. “What you have a right to do and what it’s smart to do are two different things,” they responded. “She thrived on crisis like a vampire,” Tuck said later.

  In September, the ABC television news program 20/20 began preparing a report on her case. Genene told the Kerrville paper that she wanted a court order to bar the 20/20 crew from coming near her. Just days later, she let the network fly her to New York City, where she granted an extensive filmed interview. Accommodating the TV cameras further, Genene fetched her children, who were visiting their grandmother, to stage a family stroll through the Kerrville countryside.

  On September 15, Tuck took advantage of the change of venue to ask Judge Jordan to replace him with an attorney from Georgetown. Genene had frustrated Tuck at every turn. If he could not even stop her from chattering to reporters, how could he control what she said on the witness stand? The judge granted Tuck’s request. The defense lawyer felt like a newly freed man.

  On the morning of October 17, Dale Moreau appeared in the office of Kerr County chief deputy sheriff Ed Slater. Leonard Dale Moreau, thirty-one, was the owner of Hill Country Bonding Service, which had written the bond that freed Genene from jail. He was Edd Hodges’s boss. Although the deputy sheriff did not know it, Moreau was also a felon and a con man; in 1979, he had received five years’ probation after pleading guilty to bank fraud. Moreau and Hodges had begun their Kerrville bond firm in early 1983. When Genene was arrested, they had attached themselves to her in the correct expectation that it would garner publicity for them. Now Moreau claimed that Hodges had misappropriated the $10,000 premium Genene’s mother had paid. He informed Slater that Hodges no longer worked for his firm. Explaining that he could not guarantee Jones’s appearance, Moreau announced that he wanted to revoke her bond.

  The Texas Rangers arrested Genene later that afternoon and returned her to the Kerr County jail. Although it was the squabble between the bondsmen that had cost Genene her freedom, Moreau filed court papers stating that he was unaware of Jones’s whereabouts. Bill Chenault saw more than a little irony in the claim; he had been trying to persuade his client to be more difficult to find. “Every reporter in the state knew where Genene was,” noted Chenault.

  With Genene’s rearrest, Gladys Jones worried about her grandchildren, abruptly left in Garron’s care. She asked a state social services caseworker to check on them. Livid about the inquiry, Genene wrote to accuse her sickly mother of scheming to claim custody of Crystal. Gone was the sweet talk of family she had offered when begging Gladys to post her bond; now Genene was issuing threats.

  Mother,

  I should of known that you’d pull some under-handed trick to get my daughter.

  Maybe you think of me as a wimp but when it comes to my children your sadly mistaken.

  If you in any way try to take my daughter away from me or Garron, if you continue to interfere in my life, I will make sure that your entire sordid, drunken past is spread from coast to coast. I’ll get T.V. interviews from San Antonio to New York. Don’t push me lady. I’m dead serious. I’ll make sure you can never hold your head up in public again.

  As far as I’m concerned, my mother is dead. Don’t try to dig her up. You’ll regret it…

  Mr. Hodges will be in touch with you if your assistance is required in obtaining a new bond. You will do so. I don’t think you’d enjoy being [in] the headlines.

  Genene Turk

  Frightened by the letter, Gladys Jones gave a copy to her attorney. A few weeks later, she visited the lawyer again to cut Genene out of her will.

  Now estranged even from her mother, Genene would remain in jail until her murder trial, scheduled for January. The change of venue meant that both the prisoner and all future legal proceedings would move to Georgetown.

  Genene’s final court appearance in Kerrville took place one week after her rearrest. Explaining that he could not afford the time required for Genene’s defense, Bill Chenault won permission to withdraw from the case; he was replaced by a second Williamson County lawyer.

  But the news that day was once again generated by the defendant. In a telephone interview from jail with a Light reporter, Genene announced that she was pregnant. Garron Turk—who would soon voluntarily return Crystal and Edward to Gladys—told the paper that he was “pleased deep down inside.” Genene’s attorneys diplomatically expressed their surprise. Ron Sutton labeled the story “bullshit.” In 1978, the DA noted, Genene had undergone a tubal ligation, a procedure that rendered her incapable of bearing children.

  Twenty-Six

  Genene Jones’s arrest had sparked fresh life into the investigation in San Antonio. For months, Sam Millsap had been taking it on the chin from those who proclaimed that his long and costly probe would come up with nothing. But the charges in Kerrville—against the nurse who was Millsap’s prime suspect—made the allegations in San Antonio impossible to dismiss.

  Bill Thornton, the hospital district board chairman, continued to insist that his institution’s internal investigations had uncovered nothing more than leadership and morale problems—and that the probes were merely part of an effort to better the ICU. “There was never anything suggesting criminal activity,” Thornton told a Dallas newspaper. But media leaks were offering a different impression.

  GRAND JURY PROBE FOCUSES ON BABY DEATHS COVER-UP

  Some at Bexar Hospital “did nothing,” source says

  Quoting anonymous officials—including “one high-level source close to the probe”—the San Antonio Light revealed that the DA’s office was investigating “the possibility of a cover-up by hospital administrators and staff.” Four days later, Ron Sutton joined the attack. The Kerr County prosecutor complained—correctly—that doctors at Medical Center Hospital knew about his grand jury investigation of Genene Jones but never attempted to notify him of their own suspicions about her. “It’s a pretty poor way to run a railroad,” snapped Sutton. Asked why hospital officials did nothing, he responded: “I think it’s obvious. They didn’t want anybody to know they had an investigation going.”

  The question now being raised openly—what did the hospital know and when did it know it?—flushed out a new account of what had happened. In a written statement to the press, the hospital attorney, Paul Green, acknowledged that “allegations of criminal conduct” had indeed been raised—during a meeting between top hospital and medical school officials on January 25, 1982. Green was referring to the critical summit session that had led to the decision to bring in Dr. Conn. “I advised officials of the administrative and medical staff of Bexar County Hospital District that there was insufficient evidence indicating any specific wrongdoing in the pediatric intensive care unit,” stated Green. The attorney added a perhaps unintentionally revealing explanation of why he had counseled against saying anything to law-enforcement authorities. “Unfounded allegations of criminal conduct are serious business and could well result in a suit for substantial damages.” The counterpoint to such reasoning was inescapable: Criminal conduct was also a serious business; it could well result in death.

  Fresh headlines notwithstanding, Millsap’s investig
ators had been exploring the culpability of the hospital district and the medical school for months. The DA’s criminal probe had split onto two tracks. The first involved building individual cases against Genene Jones. The second focused on the question of a cover-up; Millsap was contemplating charges against those who had failed to stop her. The officials under scrutiny, having at last acknowledged publicly their early discussion of criminal conduct, pointed to the Conn and Mangos investigations as evidence of their determination to probe the ICU’s problems. In the failure of their own inquiries to find proof of wrongdoing, they saw justification for their decision to keep their suspicions to themselves.

  Millsap considered that reasoning irresponsible. The hospital’s internal detective work had been scattershot and sloppy. Dr. Mangos’s committee had conducted the most intensive chart review. That panel had divided up the patient records for initial screening, and two of its three members were not even doctors. Millsap’s staff and medical consultants were finding countless suspicious episodes that had eluded their scrutiny. (The remarks on Joshua Sawyer, for example, made no mention of the lab test showing a toxic level of Dilantin in his blood.) Throughout the entire debacle, residents and nurses had made specific allegations of wrongdoing that hospital supervisors had failed to pursue. And in deciding for fear of litigation that Jones could not be fired, administrators had not even bothered to look at the record of misconduct—everything from drunkenness to rank insubordination—that was documented in her personnel file. “We have our roles,” said Millsap. “My criminal investigators, hopefully, would have the good sense not to practice medicine. By the same token, I hope members of the medical community would have the good sense not to conduct criminal investigations.”

  But Dr. Alan Conn believed the hospital’s failure to find evidence was proof that there was none. During a telephone interview in July with a reporter from the San Antonio Express—TOT DEATH EXPERT SLAMS NEW PROBE, the headline read—Conn branded the entire investigation “a waste of taxpayers’ money.” “You’ll never disprove or prove anything,” Conn said. “If there’s any reasonable chance of finding such a thing, they would have found it by now.” Saying once again that he had discovered nothing worse than “growing pains,” Conn described his committee’s inquiry as merely a routine quality-control review. Before he began his investigation, Conn insisted, allegations of possible infant homicides “were not broached.”

  By publicly declaring that San Antonio administrators had kept him in the dark, Conn was enhancing the impression that his internal investigation had been a whitewash. Marvin Dunn, the medical school dean, was not pleased. “I have been concerned at the report in the press that Dr. Alan Conn was unaware of the background problems in the Medical Center Hospital Pediatric Intensive Care Unit before the review team first met,” wrote Dunn, in an August letter to a medical school attorney. “I do not know if these press reports are accurate…However, Dr. Conn did indeed know of the background problems of the PICU.” Dunn detailed how he informed Conn of “essentially everything I had heard at the meetings on January 25,” how Conn had insisted on a full committee of doctors and nurses because of “the seriousness and complexity” of the allegations, and how Conn had asked for a meeting room at the medical school because “he felt psychologically people would feel more freedom to speak frankly and openly outside the hospital, away from the PICU…If one who did not know these facts views the actions by Dr. Conn, I believe it would be difficult to explain them assuming that he felt this was some kind of a casual routine review.” Dunn added: “As you well know this has angered me to no end, and except for your strong advice to the contrary I would have called Dr. Conn and told him so.”

  Sam Millsap was less interested in what Dunn had told Conn than he was in the question of what Conn had told Dunn. In March 1983, at the outset of the DA’s investigation, the grand jury had issued a subpoena to Dunn for “all files, notes, memos, and documents” concerning the pediatric ICU. Among the materials Dunn had surrendered was his copy of the final Conn committee report, which recommended the removal of all LVNs from the ICU. In late October, hospital administrator B. H. Corum informed one of the DA’s investigators that Dr. Conn’s committee had submitted a preliminary report—a report the DA’s office knew nothing about. Furious that the document had not been turned over eight months earlier, Millsap hauled Dunn before the grand jury on October 31 to demand an explanation. The dean showed up with not only the preliminary Conn report but also a set of handwritten notes that he had taken during the exit interview he and Corum had conducted with Conn and his committee.

  The preliminary Conn report contained a single important recommendation that was deleted from the final document: It urged the “immediate removal” from the pediatric ICU of nurses Genene Jones and Pat Alberti. Dunn’s handwritten notes described the most sensitive problems Conn and his committee had identified. They included the comment: “Nurses—either malignant intent or gross neglect.” To Millsap, the documents proved that Dunn and Corum harbored potent suspicions about Jones in early 1982. (The DA regarded Alberti’s suggested removal as an attempt to oust a capable nurse for complaining vigorously about Jones.) By October 1983, that information was not news to Millsap. But in March—when the documents should have been turned over—the records would have advanced the investigators’ knowledge greatly.

  Dunn told the grand jury that the preliminary Conn report had been misfiled. As for the handwritten notes of the exit interview, Dunn testified that he had given them to UT attorneys in 1982 because they contained references to Dr. Robotham, then making noises about filing suit over his removal from the ICU. Nick Rothe asked the dean why he had not turned over his notes in response to the March summons. Dunn said the UT lawyers had advised him that notes in their possession were not subject to the subpoena.

  The dean was nonplussed at being in the middle of such a mess. After all, he was not responsible for what happened in the pediatric ICU. In a letter to two of his attorneys, the dean said he had acted merely as “a volunteer firefighter in a conflagration that rightfully belongs to the Hospital District.” Nonetheless, during a break in Dunn’s testimony, the grand jury unanimously decided to cite him for contempt. In filing the necessary legal papers later that week, Millsap acknowledged that Dunn’s documents provided little new information, but said that he suspected other records were still being withheld. “How many other caches of documents are there that have not been surrendered to us?” asked the DA. To those who might have such materials, said Millsap, the contempt charge would serve as a warning. A district judge eventually found Dunn—the top administrator of the state medical school—guilty of contempt for withholding the documents. “It is my feeling that Dr. Dunn’s conduct, whether it is based on the advice of his attorneys, correctly or incorrectly, is still such an act that it puts the grand jury in such a position where the investigation could not continue,” the judge said, in announcing his ruling. Dunn was fined $100.

  The flurry of activity came as speculation was growing that Millsap might file charges against the hospital district and the medical school. The DA had recently filed a brief with a Texas appeals court supporting the legal theory that corporations and governmental entities could be held responsible for crimes such as murder. Millsap said he believed that governments could be charged if prosecutors proved that a ranking official “recklessly tolerated a dangerous situation to continue.” Millsap was also exploring the possibility of charging individual administrators for their failure to intervene. But to pursue either course, the DA first had to prove that “a dangerous situation” had existed.

  On November 9, 1983, in northwest San Antonio, Medical Center Hospital celebrated its fifteenth anniversary. At a gathering of dignitaries outside the building, William Thornton, chairman of the hospital district board, spoke eloquently about how the institution would continue to serve the health needs of Bexar County. That same day, in downtown San Antonio, chief deputy DA Nick Rothe summoned the members of
his investigative task force and several trusted senior attorneys from the DA’s staff. There they decided, after ten months of investigation, to proceed with their first criminal charge—to allege that a nurse at the county hospital, an institution committed to saving lives, had pushed a child to the brink of death.

  On November 21, the special Bexar County grand jury investigating the pediatric ICU charged Genene Jones with injury to a child in the case of Rolando Santos. Santos was the infant whose repeated bleeding problems in January 1982 had been diagnosed as a heparin overdose; only Dr. Copeland’s daring decision to administer protamine had saved the baby’s life. One week later, the grand jury held its final meeting. The jurors engaged in a long discussion about indicting the Bexar County Hospital District. In the end, the jurors accepted Nick Rothe’s advice that they could not yet make such a charge stick. It was agreed that the DA’s office, on its own, would continue to investigate additional charges against Jones, as well as indictments against the hospital, the medical school, and the officials who ran them.

  Sam Millsap told reporters that he was not concerned that after ten months, his special task force had produced but one indictment—and that only for injury to a child. The DA noted that additional indictments could be issued by a regular grand jury; he pledged that his baby-deaths investigation would plug on. But privately, Millsap was skeptical that he would ever file more charges—at least against Genene Jones. He knew the best chance to convict the nurse of murder lay not in San Antonio but in Georgetown, where she was soon to go on trial for the death of Chelsea McClellan.

  PART FIVE

  Judgment

  …provide out of all the people able men, such as fear God, men of truth, hating covetousness;