Female Serial Killers

by Peter Vronsky

  After the meeting, with only Genene remaining, as Kathleen put the vials into the fridge, she said, “How am I going to explain those holes, Genene?”

  To her surprise, Genene replied, in what Holland later characterized as a coolly defensive tone, “I don’t think you should explain them at all. I think you should just throw it out. Tell them we lost it. We won’t be lying if we say we lost it. We did lose it. I know we found it again, but they don’t have to know we found it. Just throw it away.”

  Holland was horrified. She told Genene that she could not do that ethically or legally. The conversation was interrupted by the arrival of a mother and her child for an appointment.

  About an hour later, Genene walked up to Holland and said, “I did a stupid thing at lunch. I took a bunch of doxepin.”

  Doxepin was a powerful anti-anxiety drug. Looking for the first time that day into Genene’s face, Holland saw that her eyes were glazed and her eyelids were drooping. After checking among Genene’s belongings, she found an empty bottle of the drug. The label showed it contained as many as thirty pills.

  Dr. Holland rushed over to the doctor next-door and told him that her nurse had just overdosed on doxepin and that, “Number one, I am not an adult doctor, and number two, I wash my hands of this woman.”

  While an ambulance took Genene away to the hospital, Holland called the chairman of the committee at the hospital and told him that she had just fired Genene Jones because she had attempted to commit suicide at the clinic. She asked him to come over. When he arrived with some of his colleagues, Holland told them everything she had learned and turned over the vials of succinylcholine to them. Together, while going through the drug requisition forms, they also discovered that, in fact, three vials had been ordered, not two, and one was still missing. Two of the deliveries were signed for by Genene.

  Trial

  On October 12, 1982, a grand jury in Kerr County began looking into the death of Chelsea McClellan and the eight other cardiac or pulmonary arrests that children suffered at the clinic and hospital. Chelsea’s body was exhumed and the presence of succinylcholine was confirmed. But it was not going to be easy. Nobody had seen Genene actually inject the child with the drug.

  In the meantime, in San Antonio, a grand jury there began investigating an extraordinary total of forty-seven suspicious deaths linked to Genene Jones’s four-year employment at the three hospitals in that city.

  Genene first went on trial on January 15, 1984, for the murder of Chelsea McClellan and injury to the other children. On February 15, 1984, Jones was convicted of murder after the jury deliberated for only three hours. She was given the maximum sentence of ninety-nine years. Later that year, in October, she went on trial in San Antonio and was found guilty on one count of injuring a patient there by an injection of heparin. The two sentences totaled 159 years, but with the possibility of parole.

  Although Genene Jones was suspected in the deaths of forty-seven other children, the New York Times reported that the administration of Bexar County Medical Center and University of Texas Medical School shredded nine thousand pounds of pharmaceutical records from the period when Jones was employed there, thus destroying potential evidence that was under the grand jury’s subpoena. Despite the hospital’s protestations that the destruction was “routine” and “a coincidence,” the district attorney, acting on a tip from an informant, intervened on the eve of a further attempt to destroy an additional fifty thousand pounds of hospital documents, salvaging forty boxes of material that could have been relevant. The dean of the medical school at Bexar was cited for contempt of court when it was discovered that versions of the hospital’s reports from the investigation of Genene Jones while she was employed there were withheld from the grand jury.187

  Jones became eligible for parole after serving ten years, but Chelsea’s family recently lobbied to keep Jones in prison. She comes up for her next hearing in 2009.

  MUNCHAUSEN SYNDROME BY PROXY (MSP OR MSBP)

  What was going on in Genene Jones’s head? Just about the time Genene was committing her acts, her condition was being given its name: Munchausen syndrome by proxy (MSP or MSBP).

  Karl Friedrich Hieronymous von Münchhausen was an eighteenth-century German baron and mercenary officer in the Russian cavalry. On his return from the Russo-Turkish wars, the baron entertained friends and neighbors with stories of his many exploits. Over time, his stories grew more and more expansive, and finally quite outlandish. Münchhausen became somewhat famous after a collection of his tales was published.

  Almost a century later, an unusual behavior pattern among young men gained recognition in the writings of nineteenth-century pioneering neurologist Jean Martin Charcot. In 1877, he described adults who, through self-inflicted injuries or bogus medical documents, attempted to gain hospitalization and treatment. Charcot called this condition mania operativa passiva.

  Seventy-four years later, in 1951, psychiatrist Richard Asher described a similar pattern of self-abuse, where individuals fabricated histories of illness. These fabrications invariably led to complex medical investigations, hospitalizations, and at times, needless surgery. Remembering Baron von Münchhausen and his apocryphal tales, Asher named this condition Munchausen syndrome.189

  The term Munchausen syndrome by proxy was coined by British pediatrician Roy Meadow in 1977, just around the time that Genene was graduating from nursing school. Meadow described the mothers of two children in his practice who were engaging in deception that put their children in the role of patients of their own illnesses; they were using the children as proxies.190 Subsequently, Meadow collected data on a number of similar cases, noting that often doctors responding to the mothers’ convincing complaints harmed the child as a result of unnecessary tests and treatments.

  Originally, Meadow identified the mother as a perpetrator and the child as a simple victim, arguing in 1982 that only children up to age six were used as proxies because a child older than that would likely reveal the deception.191 After two more years of study, however, he discovered cases where an older child could act as an accomplice in its own victimization, feigning the requisite symptoms, with the two involved in a sort of folie à deux.192 Meadow warned that this was a pattern that might be perpetuated even after the child reached adulthood. He described the case of a 22-year-old victim confined to a wheelchair because he was brought up to believe he had spinal bifida and could not walk, despite the fact that medical examinations showed his back and legs to be completely normal.

  Meadow found that often the mothers appeared normal on psychological tests, with no disorder apparent to the psychiatrist. He added that the psychiatrists frequently reported that they did not believe the mother could have been practicing the kinds of deception that had been discovered. It is often difficult for professionals to reconcile the incongruity between how caring the MSP mother appears to be and what she is really doing: for example, scratching the child’s skin to induce a rash, overdosing the child on medications, or suffocating the child to induce seizures, etc.

  Kathryn A. Hanon, an investigator with the Orlando Police Department and a specialist in Munchausen syndrome by proxy abuse cases, writes: “[MSP] offenders are uncharacteristically calm in view of the victims’ baffling medical symptoms, and they welcome medical tests that are painful to the children. They also maintain a high degree of involvement in the care of their children during treatment and will excessively praise the medical staff. They seem very knowledgeable of the victims’ illnesses, which may indicate some medical study or training. They may also have a history of the same illnesses being exhibited by their victims.”193

  The motivations for MSP appear to be varied. Meadow identified various individual “reinforcers,” such as increased social status, improved family relationships, and direct or indirect financial benefit. Another study focused on the acting out of sadistic impulses in MSP, while another motivation frequently found is the attention and sympathy the adult caretaker gains by presenting their chi
ld in the “victim” role. Additionally, the adult’s dependency needs may be met through the symbiotic bond with the child that is reinforced by the production of fictitious symptoms.194

  Frequently, the mother blurs the boundary between her and the child by “donating” her own symptoms to the child. The mother may borrow from her own medical history and insist that her child has the same condition. The mother may even reenact her symptoms through the child. A case was reported where a bulimic mother induced vomiting and failure to thrive in her infant through illicit doses of ipecac, apparently administered to make the child conform to her ideals of thinness.195

  In cases of MSP the mother is inevitably in an enmeshed, symbiotic, mutually anxious, and overprotective relationship with her victimized child. The mother relies on the child to meet her needs, and typical of the role reversal noted in other forms of child abuse, the child serves the purpose for the parent to deal with their own psychological or medical obsessions. A case is described where a mother was so depressed by her deteriorating marriage that she needed to express her sense of being “sick” by making her child sick. Her own depression lifted as a result.196

  MSP is not necessarily confined to mothers. Everyone has heard of firefighters who committed arson and heroically responded to the fire long before the term MSP came into being. It is not a new story. Nurses like Genene Jones can be susceptible to the same complex.

  Prosecutors argued that Genene Jones suffered from a hero complex, basking in the acclaim she received every time she successfully predicted a child was going to have a crisis or every time she brought a child back to life. Or it might have been a simple matter of excitement, being the center of attention—getting the doctor’s attention by making her patients sick: classic Munchausen syndrome by proxy symptoms. There might have been some kind of symbiotic transfer of Genene’s own fears for her health to that of her patients. Genene was constantly going to clinics and emergency wards with a litany of apparently imagined complaints that were never successfully diagnosed.

  But as always with female serial killers, motive is never clear-cut. Genene Jones might simply have been punishing those doctors and nurses she did not like. Doctors who did not follow Genene’s advice often found that their patients would code. When the nurse in Kerrville told Genene to move her patient from a bed being prepared for an incoming cardiac patient, the nurse shortly found herself dealing with an arrested child—just as Genene had warned: “Well, I hope to hell this baby doesn’t go into cardiac arrest.”

  Marybeth Tinning—the Killer Mom

  In an extreme case of MSP, Marybeth Tinning, a housewife and former school bus driver in Schenectady, New York, is believed to have murdered nine of her own children, including one adopted child, one by one in a period between 1972 and 1985.

  Marybeth Roe was born in the small town of Duanesburg, New York, just outside of Schenectady on September 11, 1942. Very little is known about her childhood. In the early years of her life, her father was away fighting in World War Two while her mother was working. Marybeth was shunted around to her relatives, one of whom tactlessly told her that she was an unplanned baby. When her baby brother later became old enough to understand, Marybeth used to tell him, “You were the one they wanted, not me.”

  Marybeth was said to have had a tendency to throw tantrums. Her father would chase her up to her room with a flyswatter or a ruler and order her to remain there until she got over her “crying spell.” Is this abuse? Marybeth refuted it, saying that he had to use a flyswatter because his hands were becoming arthritic, and was, overall, defensive about her father during her trial. Again, the disciplinary culture of the times makes it hard to judge precisely the degree of physical abuse Marybeth experienced as a child.

  Her former schoolmates remember her as a lonely, tiresome child, constantly clamoring for attention. Once, when she was appointed school bus monitor, she handled the authority very poorly, screaming abusively at the little children and attempting to boss around those much older than she. She alienated every child on the bus.

  As a teenager, almost nobody can remember her. One former schoolteacher said after her arrest, “I cannot recall anything good or bad about her. So far as I am concerned, she was almost a nonentity.”197

  She was remembered as a plain girl who dressed plainly. A member of no clique who caused no trouble. Not despised and not popular. Ignored. A few students recalled that she was moody and tended to lie and tell exaggerated stories to make herself look more important. She was an average student who graduated high school in 1961 with only one comment next to her name: “Temper.”

  She had wanted to go to college, but her marks were too mediocre. She ended up doing a series of menial jobs, ending up working as a nurse’s aide in a hospital in Schenectady. She married Joe Tinning, a worker in the General Electric plant in Schenectady, just like her father.

  In the first five years of her marriage, the couple had two children, Barbara and Joseph. Witnesses recalled that they lived in a duplex house near the plant and that while they struggled to make ends meet, they appeared to be a happy family. Despite the fact that she was described as inexplicably “strange” by her friends and neighbors, most felt that Marybeth “cherished” the children. They were always clean and well-dressed and appeared to have the content demeanor of children who felt loved and secure.

  In 1971, Marybeth was expecting her third child. When she was in her seventh month, her father died of a sudden heart attack while at work in the GE plant. Marybeth took the death of her father very badly, weeping uncontrollably at the funeral. Ten weeks later, her third child was born, on December 26, a daughter the couple named Jennifer. The child died a week later from meningitis. Nurses recall Marybeth’s reaction as “bizarre.” Still in bed, Marybeth cradled the child while pulling a sheet over the two of them. Her entire demeanor was passive. Although the nurses noted that she was behaving in a highly disturbed way, no therapy was routinely given in those times as it would have been today. At the funeral, Marybeth looked dazed and did not cry.

  It is believed that the outpouring of sympathy and support for Marybeth was so addicting to her that she then began to kill off her other children. Fifteen days after the baby’s death, Marybeth Tinning brought her 2-year-old son, Joseph, to a hospital, stating that he had stopped breathing during a “seizure” of some sort. Suspecting a viral infection, the hospital kept the boy for ten days before sending him home. The same day he went home, Tinning rushed back to the hospital with the boy, claiming she had found him tangled in his sheets, his body blue. This time he was dead. Death was certified as “cause unknown,” but cardio-respiratory arrest was suspected.

  In March 1973, Tinning took her 4-year-old daughter to the hospital, claiming that she was having convulsions. The doctors wanted to keep the child overnight, but Tinning insisted on taking her home. She returned several hours later with the child, who was unconscious. Her daughter died several hours later. Death was believed to have been from sudden infant death syndrome (SIDS), although the doctors could not definitively certify it as such.

  Despite the fact that three of her children had died in a very short span of time, in November 1973, Tinning gave birth to a fourth child, a baby boy. Three weeks later he was returned to the hospital dead. Marybeth claimed she had found him lifeless in his crib. The doctors could not find anything wrong with the child and certified the death as SIDS.

  In March 1975, Tinning gave birth to a baby boy, her fifth child, who three weeks later was brought into the hospital by Marybeth, with breathing difficulties and severe bleeding from the mouth and nose. Pneumonia was diagnosed, and a month later the infant was returned to the Tinnings. On September 2, Marybeth showed up in the emergency ward with the lifeless child in her arms. She said she had been driving with the child in the front seat when she noticed he had stopped breathing. The cause of death was declared acute pulmonary edema.

  By then the emergency room hospital staff was divided. Half of them deeply sympa
thized with Marybeth and grieved for her extraordinary, tragic loss of five children in so short a span of time; the other half hated her and dreaded her every appearance at the hospital. Why didn’t she just stop having children, for God’s sake?

  Marybeth began theorizing, some say bragging, that there was a genetic defect that was causing the death of her children. In her latest pregnancies, her fellow workers began to grumble, “Marybeth’s pregnant, and she’s going to kill another baby!”

  The Tinnings applied to an adoption agency, which sympathized with Marybeth’s “genetic” history and hurried through an adoption of a baby boy—Michael—whom they received in August 1978. But by then Marybeth had already been pregnant for seven months.

  In October 1978, a girl was born. They named her Mary Frances, and in January 1979 she survived her first “medical emergency.” A month later, on February 20, Marybeth went into the hospital with the dead infant cradled in her arms, claiming she had found her unresponsive in her crib. Cause of death was declared as SIDS.

  Marybeth lost no time getting pregnant again. On November 19, 1979, she gave birth to a boy, Jonathan. In March 1980, she brought him into the hospital because he had “breathing problems.” The doctors could not find anything wrong with him and sent him home. A few days later, she brought the child back, this time unconscious. The child was found to have no brain function and died on March 24.

  Marybeth responded to all these deaths with a round of dramatic funeral announcements and a gathering of all her friends and relatives. Both her birth and death announcements put her in the center of attention. One relative said, “Every funeral was a party for her, with hardly a tear shed.”

  On March 2, 1981, Marybeth showed up at her pediatrician’s office with her adopted son, Michael, wrapped in a blanket. He was dead. Marybeth explained that she had found him unconscious that morning. The death of the adopted child broke the “genetic” explanation and began to make people think the unthinkable: Could this mother actually be murdering her own children?