Women Who Kill: Profiles of Female Serial Killers

by Carol Anne Davis

  It was whilst she was staying with the woman whom she called ‘Mama’ that her favourite younger brother assembled a home-made bomb in the garage and promptly blew himself up. Genene had been following her interest in medicine by helping out at the local private hospital and was there (leastways she told a friend she was) when they brought her dying sibling in.

  When Genene’s husband returned from his training course she told him that she wasn’t coming back. It’s possible that he didn’t appear sufficiently upset at the news - after all, she was still desperate for very public shows of affection. Whatever her motivation, she went around telling everyone that he’d been hitting her - charges she seems to have made up. Like most embryonic serial killers, Genene told tall tales to make herself look interesting and was capable of lying about many things.

  But after a couple of months she changed her mind and withdrew the charges of abuse then returned to her increasingly baffled husband. Investigators would later describe this first husband as gentle and sincere.

  He appeared to genuinely love her and didn’t want to speak badly of her even after her subsequent killing spree, but he did hint that there was something unusual about her sexuality. Given what we know of female serial killers it may be that she liked to experiment with other women or that she wanted to roleplay control games in the bedroom. Unfortunately she would later take this need for control into her workplace and push it to an ultimately fatal zenith.

  The single nurse

  Genene had never been particularly interested in her appearance but for some reason her mother paid for her to train as a beautician, after which she found work in a local beauty shop. Genene worked there for a few months but became bored with it and with her marriage and gave up on both, taking her son with her. She had complained of various aches and pains all her life and now told her mother that she wanted to follow her childhood dream of becoming a nurse.

  Still only in her early twenties, she did just that, again funded by her mother. She studied for the Licensed Vocational Nurse (LVN) qualification, a course that took a year and resulted in basic nursing skills.

  A second child

  At this stage Genene became pregnant by a male nurse she’d been dating and gave birth to a daughter, but the relationship soon ended. She went on to have other relationships, all of which failed. Many people enjoyed her raucous sense of humour and saw her as a no-nonsense nurse and a good mother - but others found her overbearing and histrionic and noted that she caused disruption wherever she went.

  Her hypochondria increased and she started to tell relatives that she had heart trouble, though medical reports didn’t support this. One friend noted that as Genene moved into her twenties she looked increasingly withdrawn and tired. She was briefly admitted to hospital with a bleeding ulcer but was otherwise given a clean bill of health. Genene refused to believe the diagnosis. Moreover, she continued to smoke too much and eat too much and generally failed to look after herself.

  Her very first child patient died, and the new nurse took the death very badly, drawing up a seat beside the tiny corpse and crying dramatically for half an hour. Nursing staff often feel sad when they lose a life, but Genene’s behaviour always seemed to be more about people noticing her than about her latest dead patient. She would show this level of emotion throughout her nursing career.

  Her strange behaviour continued apace. Her colleagues noted how she hated certain doctors (usually the ones who didn’t carry out her many medical suggestions) and said that she set out to make her enemies look bad. On one occasion when a doctor wouldn’t do as she demanded, she hyperventilated and had to be carried out of the room. Genene just had to get noticed, to be praised, on every occasion - without such external approval she felt so slighted that she wanted to hit back, to hurt her imagined enemies. She was starting to become dangerous.

  Hypochondria

  Genene’s psychosomatic illnesses continued to affect her career. She visited the emergency room approximately twice a month complaining of various ailments. At other times she was briefly hospitalised for bronchitis, asthma, severe constipation and a bowel obstruction. Half-way through some of her shifts she’d announce that she had some mysterious ailment and would take herself off to Outpatients, much to the chagrin of her more stable workmates. She was increasingly self-destructive, her smoking increasing the severity of her many asthma attacks.

  The killing starts

  Genene’s first four years were spent at various hospitals in San Antonio, Texas, her home town, before she accepted a post at the local Bexar County Medical Center Hospital, working in the PICU, the Pediatrics Intensive Care Unit. This brought her into contact with numerous babies and children - and these same children soon began to die.

  Between May and December 1981 an incredible twenty babies died in her care. Some died as a result of massive bleeding, others because their heartbeats stopped after suddenly becoming erratic. Yet others had seizures despite looking healthy only moments before. Children were going into the hospital in poor health, getting better under the direction of the medical staff - then suddenly dying when left for a short time in Genene’s sole care. The other nurses on her shift were suspicious but they were inexperienced graduates who were often afraid of her loud manner and domineering ways.

  She was on duty during May 1981 when a ten-month-old boy died unexpectedly of a cardiac arrest. Three days later she was tending a five-month-old child when he had a cardiopulmonary arrest. A fortnight later a two-month-old had two arrests within three days. These attacks were known as Code Blue emergencies, and the nearest doctors and other medics were expected to rush to the dying child with the crash cart and start resuscitation techniques.

  Genene was invariably the first to arrive and the last to leave. She would insert an intravenous tube, tell the doctor about the baby’s vital signs and hand over the required medications. Some saw her as the consummate professional - but others noted that she seemed to be enjoying the drama between life and death.

  In early July one of her patients, a six-month-old boy, had a cardiac arrest. The next day Genene was his assigned nurse again when he had a second arrest that proved fatal. That same day a four-week-old infant suffered a massive bleeding episode and died. (Genene would later be found guilty of causing another baby to haemorrhage massively by injecting the child with the anti-coagulant heparin.)

  The deaths of Genene’s little patients continued throughout the year - but stopped for a month when she herself was admitted to hospital for minor abdominal surgery. During her absence, from the first week in November to the first week in December, the PICU didn’t have a single Code Blue emergency or unexpected death. The two children who expired during this period were terminal cases who had been admitted to die.

  Three days after Genene’s return, the Unit heeded a Code Blue signal again. An eighteen-month-old boy was admitted with a severe viral infection, but seemed to be responding well to treatment until Genene came on duty. A doctor saw her in another part of the hospital and asked how the child was doing. Genene shrugged and said he seemed fine but the doctor went to check for himself.

  He found the little boy blue and flatlining. The medic yelled for help and Genene quickly appeared with her crash cart and positioned an airbag over the infant’s mouth. Three quarters of an hour later, despite heroic attempts to resuscitate him, the child was officially pronounced dead.

  As the death toll mounted, another nurse heard Genene telling two parents that their son wasn’t expected to survive. This was untrue, and anyway it wasn’t Genene’s remit to say such things to relatives. The nurse also noted that Genene had left the wrong bottles of solution lying at a bedside - if they’d been used they could have damaged the child.

  The nurse plucked up her courage and complained to Jones’ supervisors but was told to stop picking on Jones. Rumours about the number of Genene’s patients who were dying continued to spread round the ward, but the hospital authorities put it down to personality clashes betwe
en the aggressive Jones and more easygoing newer members of staff.

  Babies continued to die in Genene’s care - at one stage there were seven deaths in fourteen days. Genene continued to exhibit strange behaviour. She wrote on her patients medical notes that she loved them and started to sing to their corpses. And she gave the doctors a possible diagnosis for one case, naming a medical syndrome about which little was known.

  Some of the medics were impressed by a Licensed Vocational Nurse having such detailed knowledge and urged her to study for the superior Registered Nurse qualification, but Genene said that with two of her own children to care for this was impossible. In truth she spent so long at the hospital that her son sometimes called in to ask when she was coming home. It may be that she secretly questioned her ability to pass the more demanding course as she clearly had doubts about herself.

  She may also have started to abuse alcohol by this stage. Leastways she turned up for work drunk on at least one occasion and had to be sent home. Like the Thrill Killer Carol Bundy, also a nurse and profiled later, she was failing in her romantic relationships and acting so oddly that she alienated her colleagues. And she was so obsessed with work that she was even failing her daughter and her son.

  The killing continues

  Babies continued to die on her 3pm - 11pm shift and it became known as The Death Shift. One nurse drew up a chart showing the number of mortalities on the late shift and took it to her superior, but the superior decided the death rate was not unreasonable. After all, it was an intensive care ward. Some of the nurses who directly or indirectly challenged Genene would later find threatening anonymous notes in their lockers at the hospital - Genene was known as a formidable enemy.

  Then a three-week-old baby, Rolando, was admitted with possible pneumonia. Within six days of Genene’s care he had two heart attacks, two seizures and episodes where he urinated uncontrollably. The doctors stabilised him and for three days he grew stronger. Then Genene took over his care again and within hours he was bleeding from various injection sites. This bleeding would start, then stop, then start again, to the other nurses dismay.

  A doctor sent the child’s blood for analysis and it came back saying that the blood contained heparin, an anti-coagulant. Shocked and bewildered, the man spoke to various nurses, trying to find out if this was an accident.

  They again stabilised the baby but the next day, on Genene’s shift, he started to bleed from his eyes, mouth, nose, ears, rectum and even his penis. Fearing that heparin was implicated again, the doctor injected its antidote. Genene left the room looking displeased. The doctor persevered with his hunch but found he had to inject even more antidote as the baby had been contaminated with a colossal amount of heparin, well over a hundred times the safe dose. The doctor then had Rolando removed to a different part of the hospital where he rallied within four days and was allowed to go home.

  Another child died in Genene’s care and she baptised it with water from a syringe. (She told her colleagues that she placed great value on running a good Christian household.) Other nurses noted that Genene insisted on carrying each dead baby in her arms to the mortuary, wailing the entire time.

  By now the hospital authorities were conducting an internal investigation. When yet another of her patients died unexpectedly a new member of the medical team withdrew blood, intending to send it for toxicology reports. A nurse fitting Genene’s description offered to take the blood to the lab for him. Needless to say, it never arrived.

  As babies continued to die, the hospital admitted to themselves that they had a staffing problem but decided they didn’t have enough evidence to implicate any one person. They therefore decided to get rid of all of their Licenced Vocational Nurses and instead employ only more qualified Registered Nurses in the PICU.

  Genene was let go - but given a good reference. Some doctors had found her histrionic and said that both she and her family had problems of instability, but this information wasn’t passed on to her new employer.

  A new start

  Genene’s new boss was called Kathleen Holland. The two women had worked together very briefly in a hospital environment before and Kathleen had been impressed at how well the LVN responded to a Code Blue emergency, fighting to save each dying baby. Now Kathleen was setting up her own private pediatric clinic in Kerrville, Texas and asked Genene to be her nurse.

  The move to Kerr County Clinic also involved Genene moving house and Kathleen offered to rent her house space. Genene and Kathleen were joined by Genene’s two children, now aged nine and five, and by a pregnant friend of Genene’s who babysat full time. The nurse spent her few leisure hours trying to make the place look homely and seemed full of admiration for Kathleen, a qualified pediatrician. Kathleen had the credentials and the authority that Genene herself pretended to have and clearly craved.

  Genene was now given a badge that said Pediatric Clinician and revelled in this grandiose title. She would later act so self-assured during an emergency that the paramedics assisting her believed she was a Registered Nurse rather than the basic Licenced Nurse she actually was. Genene now had even fewer witnesses around her than she’d had on The Death Shift - and soon Kathleen’s healthy young child patients began to collapse.

  An eight-month-old girl, Chelsea, was brought in with a cold and Genene took her away to the play area whilst Kathleen talked with the mother. Moments later Genene reported that the child had stopped breathing and put an oxygen mask over the baby’s face. She was rushed to hospital and soon recovered. Though baffled as to what had made their child collapse, the parents assumed that the fast-acting Genene had saved her. Nine months later they’d bring her back to the clinic - and this time she’d die at Genene’s hands.

  Meanwhile a severely disabled seven-year-old boy, Jimmy, was brought in suffering from seizures. Kathleen decided to send him to hospital in the air ambulance and instructed Genene to accompany the experienced paramedics in the helicopter. Genene immediately packed her medical bag.

  She gave the impression that she was a trained and flight-practiced medic so the paramedics merely reminded her that it’s impossible to listen to a patients heart or lungs through a stethoscope whilst a helicopter is in flight - but once the flight started Genene insisted on trying to do just that. She was then seen to inject something into the child’s intravenous tube. She said it was to assist his breathing, but until now he had been stable. Within minutes he turned blue and went into cardiac arrest.

  Genene then began to hyperventilate or to have an orgasm - she sweated, gasped and looked strangely high. The enraged army medics kept her to one side whilst they stabilised their child patient. Later she would lie to colleagues, saying that the paramedics didn’t have a clue what they were doing and that she’d had to save the day. By now she’d also changed her story about what she’d injected and said it was Valium. She described the experience as one of the most exciting days of her life.

  Strange things continued to happen at the clinic when Genene was around. A twenty-one-month-old girl was brought in with suspected meningitis and Genene set up the IV. Thirty seconds later the child went limp. Her mother would later report that the baby’s eyes looked terrified, as if aware of what was going on. The mother pleaded with the LVN to do something but Genene said the child was just having a temper tantrum and holding her breath. Her boss, Kathleen Holland, revived the little girl and sent her to the largest local hospital. The baby survived.

  Then Chelsea, who Genene had ‘revived’ before, was brought back in by her mother to have her inoculations. By now Chelsea was fifteen months old. Genene injected the child whilst she lay happily in her mothers arms. Chelsea soon started to whimper and her eyes became strange. Her mother asked Genene to do something but Genene said that Chelsea was just breath-holding and gave the baby a second shot. By now Chelsea was having difficulty breathing. Kathleen and a wide-eyed Genene did what they could then rushed the child to the emergency room, where she quickly died. She was the eighth baby to die in this wa
y within a few months.

  At this stage the local hospital started to investigate the new clinic, wondering why so many infants were dying after being treated there. Kathleen spoke with them then made sure that her drug consignment was in order. To her horror she found a bottle of the muscle relaxant succinylcholine - which could cause respiratory failure - was missing. She asked Genene about it and Genene admitted it had disappeared.

  Later she said that the drug had turned up and was in the fridge. Kathleen investigated and found one full vial - and one with holes in the cap which had clearly been tampered with. Tests showed that most of the succinylcholine had gone, replaced with a saline solution. Further investigation showed that Genene had been ordering and signing for this drug. At this stage Genene asked Kathleen to pretend to the authorities that the vials had remained missing but the pediatrician explained that ethically and legally she could not do this.

  A suicide attempt

  Aware that the net was closing in, Genene now took an overdose and told Kathleen that she’d done so. The clinic’s receptionist phoned the hospital and Genene promptly had her stomach pumped out.

  A bewildered Kathleen sacked Genene and tried to keep her practice going, explaining to would-be patients about the recent fatalities. Suspicion inevitably fell on her as well as her LVN and she was subpoenaed by a Kerr County Grand Jury investigating the unexplained deaths.

  Genene Jones was indicted for the deaths of two of her young charges by the Kerr County Grand Jury. (She was suspected of killing up to fifty.) That autumn she was also charged with endangering another baby’s life, that of Rolando, by injecting him with the anti-coagulant heparin.