Female Serial Killers

by Peter Vronsky

  Dr. Kathleen Holland, for whom Genene worked, had a somewhat unconventional career history of her own by the time she opened her pediatric clinic on August 22, 1982, in the small town of Kerrville, an hour’s drive from San Antonio. Dr. Holland already had a failed marriage behind her and was preparing to be a Ph.D. medical researcher when a conflict with her advisor forced her to rethink her options. She decided to become a practicing physician. She was older and more mature than the average medical resident and used to doing things her way. She had successfully completed her three-year pediatrics residency in June at San Antonio’s Bexar County Hospital, affiliated with the University of Texas’s Health Science Center medical school and research facility. Having previously carefully researched the availability of pediatric care in Texas, she picked the town of Kerrville to open her own private clinic. She had wanted to hire an RN for her clinic, but realized she could not afford the salary rate. A less trained LVN—a Licensed Vocational Nurse—was all her startup budget allowed.

  Residents were moved around a hospital every few weeks to different shifts and departments, but Dr. Holland recalled working with an LVN in the Pediatric Intensive Care Unit (PICU) by the name of Genene Jones a few times—a super nurse who she recalled was as take-charge and as competent as the RNs. She was a little bossy and outspoken, sometimes even ordering doctors around, it was said, and there were rumors of personality clashes in the PICU and a lot of strange gossip about Genene. Apparently, Genene had become so fed up with what she said was jealous backstabbing that she had quit. This made the slightly rebellious and unconventional Dr. Kathleen Holland even more interested in hiring Genene for her clinic. She wanted somebody who would be passionate about the practice she intended to build in Kerrville. In the spring of 1982, Kathleen contacted the personnel office at the hospital where Genene had worked and informed them she was considering hiring her—was there anything she should know about Nurse Jones’s past employment record at the hospital? Any problems or sanctions to report?

  Genene’s Childhood and Youth

  Genene Ann Jones was born on July 13, 1950, in San Antonio and was immediately given up for adoption. She was taken into a family of three other children adopted by Dick and Gladys Jones. Her father, Dick, made a fortune running the Kit Kat Club, a shady San Antonio nightclub with illegal gambling in the backrooms. The family lived just outside the city limits in a huge hilltop mansion with landscaped gardens, swimming pool, private tennis courts, and stables for horses. From their hilltop, the Jones family could see downtown San Antonio ten miles away. Genene’s mother and father lived an extravagant lifestyle—they took time to travel and both had acquired pilot licenses.

  By the time Genene was 13 years old, Dick Jones was having trouble with his business. The Kit Kat Club was failing, despite his attempts to turn it into a family-oriented restaurant. Jones converted part of the acreage at their house into a trailer park, but nothing could turn his declining fortunes. In the end, Dick Jones sold off the Kit Kat Club property and went into a new business—billboards. He sited, built, and maintained a string of billboards in the San Antonio area.

  The adopted children were paired by age: Genene’s older brother Wiley and older sister, Lisa, were respectively four and seven years older than Genene, while her brother Travis, with whom she was very close, was two years younger. Travis had a learning disability. Genene doted on him and was deeply attached to him.

  Genene reportedly was the cleverest of all the children and very assertive, often insisting on dominating conversations. She was skilled in sewing, crochet, and baking, and was a talented piano player. She liked to tell stories and be the center of attention. But Genene was very sensitive—the slightest criticism would send her to tears. She resented her older sister, Lisa, convinced that her parents favored her. There was constant conflict between the two sisters until Lisa married and moved away. After that, Genene battled her strong-willed mother. Home life was never tranquil, and Genene would later recall that her happiest moments were riding around with her father in the countryside as he maintained the billboards he had put up.

  Genene Jones entered high school in 1965. As a teenager she was no more attractive than she would be when she became an adult. At five foot four inches she was thirty pounds overweight and clumsy as a hippo. She did not walk anywhere, it was said, she rushed. Her lack of looks was only surpassed by her obnoxious and bossy personality. She worked a number of menial part-time jobs around the school and berated her fellow workers if she thought they were not doing their jobs correctly.

  Some classmates recall her claiming that she was ostracized because her father was a former gambler. She complained that her parents favored her older sister. Her lack of popularity bothered her. She was desperate for recognition and craved esteem.

  She told outlandish lies, claiming that she was related to Mickey Dolenz from the super pop group The Monkees, and that she would frequently chat with him on the telephone. She claimed that her parents never loved her enough to adopt her legally, unlike her other three siblings. She lied about anything and everything. “To her, lying was just like talking,” one classmate recalled.185

  To compensate for her lack of popularity, Genene developed a reputation for reckless driving, often challenging boys to drag race from behind the wheel of her father’s El Camino. She was reckless enough to often win the races.

  When Genene was sixteen, tragedy struck their home. Her younger brother was toying with a homemade pipe bomb when it detonated, sending metal shards into his head. He died later that day in hospital. Genene bought a flower wreath of her own for the funeral and shrieked, wept, and collapsed at the service. But her classmates recall that immediately after the morning burial service, Genene had returned to school and milked the sympathy and attention of her friends.

  In 1968, when Genene was seventeen, her father died from cancer. Genene would later claim that the day he died “her world went dark,” but, in fact, she was planning to get married about six weeks after her father’s death. Genene had met the one boy who paid attention to her—a high school dropout named Jimmy DeLany—and she was intent on marrying him. Her mother intensely disliked the dropout Jimmy and withheld her permission—required for the minor Genene—until Genene had graduated, hoping that by then Genene would think better of it.

  In June 1968, Genene graduated with a mediocre 78.61 percent—197th in a class of 274. Fourteen days later, almost as if to challenge her mother, Genene married the hapless Jimmy. Her mother paid for the wedding and the couple’s honeymoon. Her hated sister, Lisa, was the matron of honor. After the honeymoon, the couple moved into a guesthouse on the family estate.

  Jimmy was only interested in cars and partying. He sporadically worked at gas stations, enough to only earn gas and beer money. Genene and Jimmy argued and squabbled. Jimmy was upset to learn that Genene raced his cars while he was away at work. After seven months of partying, drinking beer, and racing cars, the marriage began to stall. Jimmy enlisted in the navy. While Jimmy was away in basic training, Genene found a new route to popularity: She had a string of sexual liaisons with other men. One was the recently married husband of Genene’s friend from high school.186

  Genene’s widowed mother sold off the estate on which Genene lived and moved into a house of her own. Genene was forced to find an apartment for herself, but her mother continued to pay her rent and support her. Nonetheless, she urged Genene to find herself some sort of employment. Genene enrolled in a beauty college to train as a beautician.

  Before long, Jimmy returned home after he was given an early discharge from his enlistment. He returned to live with Genene, working as a mechanic while she found work as a beautician. In January 1972, Genene gave birth to her first child, a son. Six months later she filed for divorce, but two months after that changed her mind and reconciled with Jimmy. In February 1974, she filed for divorce again and this time it was finalized in June 1974. Genene was 23 and a single mother. She returned to the use of her family name. />
  Genene Goes to Nursing School

  In 1976, Genene became pregnant again. She never clearly identified the father, but it might have been her ex-husband, Jimmy. Genene’s older brother, in the meantime, contracted testicular cancer and died. Genene became obsessed with the fear of developing cancer and submitted herself to tests every time she had a rash or a cough. Genene was working in a beauty shop in a hospital in San Antonio when she decided that medicine might be the career for her. When she developed a skin rash that she claimed was caused by beauty products she handled at work, she convinced her mother to pay her way through nursing school. Genene decided to take an LVN’s training program. LVNs were not paid as much as RNs, but the training was half as long and Genene wanted to go to work as soon as possible.

  Genene had a natural aptitude for nursing, scoring grades in the nineties. Unlike her experience in high school, Genene was popular in nursing school, often cutting and styling her classmates’ hair. But students recall she was not very serious. She did not study during her breaks, she made jokes with the instructors during lectures, and in anatomy class she drew caricatures of male genitalia. Nevertheless, Genene graduated in May 1977, one of sixteen students out of fifty-eight to earn honors with her diploma. She was seven months pregnant. In July she gave birth to her second child, a daughter.

  When Genene wrote her licensing exam, she scored 559—more than two hundred points bove the minimum passing grade. Genene’s mother did everything possible to help launch her youngest daughter’s career in nursing—helped her financially and took care of her kids.

  “Genene Could Start an IV in a Friggin’ Fly.”

  In September 1977, Genene Jones sufficiently recovered from the birth of her daughter to go to work in her first nursing job. She was hired at the Methodist hospital in San Antonio and assigned to the cardiac intensive care unit. She would last only seven months before being fired. At first Genene impressed her supervisors with her enthusiasm, her energy, and willingness to work additional shifts. But a five-month review warned, “Ms. Jones tends to make judgments that she has neither the experience nor authority to make.”

  In April 26, 1978, Genene was fired. A cardiac patient had complained that Genene treated her rudely and roughly. When informed of this, Genene asked the supervisor if she could speak with the patient. The supervisor told her absolutely not, but Genene immediately went and confronted the patient, making a scene that resulted in the heart patient requiring sedatives. Genene was dismissed for “improper or unprofessional conduct on duty.”

  With a desperate nationwide shortage of nurses, Genene Jones had no problems immediately finding another nursing position in the smaller, private Community Hospital on May 15. She lasted there until October 16, when without having accumulated sick leave she had to resign to take time off to have elective surgery. Genene had her tubes tied—she would not be able to have children from then on.

  Two weeks later, Genene found her third hospital job in thirteen months after answering an ad calling for nurses at the huge, recently rebuilt—and amalgamated with the University of Texas Medical School—Bexar County Hospital. It has been speculated that the shortage of nurses was so acute that, despite her lack of experience and spotty employment record, she was hired. Genene was assigned to one of the most sensitive areas in the hospital—the PICU. This was a small unit, specially fitted with emergency equipment and drugs, where the most gravely ill children were put in cubicles with glass windows where they could be observed around the clock by a team of nurses and doctors.

  Nurses in the PICU are a particular breed. The work requires a high degree of concentration through hours of focused monitoring and care of patients combined with a decisive, steely cool when a patient “codes”—when they go into a respiratory or cardiac arrest and a Code Blue is called on the hospital communications system. Nurses and doctors rush to the patient, wheeling a “crash cart” with emergency medicine and equipment in a desperate bid to revive them. The most experienced PICU nurses have an uncanny ability to spot an oncoming problem in a patient and intervene before they code. They are the SWAT teams of nursing, proud and aggressive.

  Immediately upon her arrival at the PICU, Genene became a source of concern. One of the RNs who gave Genene her orientation was disturbed by her behavior from the very beginning. Genene was put in charge very briefly of a 6-day-old infant with a fatal intestinal disease. He died very quickly after his arrival in the PICU. Genene had hardly any contact with the infant, but the nurse recalls that Genene “went berserk” at his death. She broke into deep, dramatic sobs, moved a stool into the dead baby’s cubicle, and sat weeping over the baby for hours. This was not normal.

  Despite the misgivings, Genene impressed her supervisors. Assigned to the 3–11 p.m. shift—the busiest—she impressed the RNs, who normally looked down at the LVNs, with her enthusiasm, knowledge, and technical skills. She knew a lot more about anatomy and physiology than the average LVN, and if she did not understand something, she would be seen looking it up in medical textbooks.

  What distinguished Genene the most was her extraordinary talent for putting in intravenous lines. Never an easy task with an adult patient with veins that move and shift under a person’s skin, it was even harder with children and infants—their veins as thin as a thread, some nurses never managed to master inserting an IV line. Genene was a master, never missing a vein, and soon was called by other nurses to help them start an IV with their patients. The saying went around the PICU that “Genene could start an IV in a friggin’ fly.”

  Genene had her champions, among them the chief nurse at the hospital and the doctor in charge of the PICU. Impressed by Genene’s technical skills and knowledge, they both encouraged Genene to go back to nursing school and become an RN. The only problem with Genene, the chief nurse noted in her evaluation, was that she needed to maintain “better control of her emotionalism.”

  One thing that doctors did not like about Genene was that she constantly called them to attend to patients with problems she thought they were having. She had a tendency to page weary doctors four times more often than the other nurses. This was particularly irritating to interns, who often worked straight thirty-hour shifts and would try to catch a few minutes of sleep between calls. Not when Genene was on duty.

  But as time went by, Genene developed a reputation for that uncanny ability to recognize a patient about to code. When Genene told you that a patient was on the brink of a seizure or arrest, even if they appeared to be calmly sleeping, she was frequently correct. Strangely enough, despite this developing skill, Genene began to accumulate an increasing collection of serious errors in her record—eight in the first year. She failed to obey a doctor’s order to give a child a drug. She did not notice a malfunctioning IV on one of her patients. She set an IV solution at an improperly high rate on another. She overdosed another patient by ten times the normal dosage. When Genene was called into “informal guidance” to discuss these errors, she denied she had made them or submitted elaborate explanations for her error. After her fourth medication error in twelve months, Genene was ordered to repeat a special class on drug administration. She twice failed to show up to the class.

  Genene began attaching herself to certain patients and staying with them beyond her shift. She was told with one patient, a ten-month girl with heart trouble, to go home at the end of her shift, but refused. A higher-level nursing administrator was called to the ward to order her to go home, but Genene argued that the patient needed her. She wrote in her response to the complaint, “I felt that seeing her through this crisis, her biggest, was very important, not only to me but for her.” She was placed on notice that a similar failure to obey orders would result in her suspension and probable dismissal.

  Two months later, after completing her previous shift, Genene showed up at 5:00 a.m. in the PICU unexpectedly and went to the bedside of another child patient she was assigned to on her own shift, fetched a syringe, and began to tinker with the child’s IV lin
e. Smelling alcohol on her breath, doctors and nurses on the floor ordered Genene out. Genene was cited for “very poor judgment,” but allowed to return to work.

  In her personnel file, along with the reports of errors and misconduct, were commendations for “meritorious contributions.” According to the report, “Over the last four months when the PICU was going through a severe staffing shortage, Ms. Jones worked in excess of twelve extra shifts to help cover the unit; these extra shifts often involved sacrificing days off…Ms. Jones is to be commended for her support and dedication to the PICU.”

  “It Was Like She Knew What Was Going to Happen.”

  The PICU became divided over Genene Jones. She had her champions and supporters and she had her detractors. She maintained a close rapport with the patient’s parents and often was there to console them when their children died. Among fellow staff she was crude and coarse, often telling dirty jokes or cursing loudly. She was free with her opinions of other doctors and nurses.

  As in high school, Genene liked to be in the center of attention and told exaggerated stories about herself—that she had been in a coma after a car accident; that she had shot her brother-in-law in the groin after he had beaten her sister.

  It is remarkable how similar the personalities of Genene Jones and Jane Toppan are over the gulf of one hundred years—the exaggerated stories, the hostility, and the division of opinion between those who supervised her and those who had to work with her all day.