Bobbie Sue Terrell, born Bobbie Sue Dudley in 1955, trained as a nurse in Illinois. Her adopted infant son died in 1982 in circumstances that were not investigated at the time and were later attributed to her, and she had a history of self-harm, staged burglaries and reported assaults on herself that turned out to be invented.
In 1984 she was working the night shift at a nursing home in St Petersburg, Florida. Over about a month, twelve residents died. She gave several of them fatal doses of insulin and smothered at least one, and she also injected an ointment into a resident's eye and set small fires on the ward.
The rate on one shift in one month was what exposed it. She was arrested in 1985.
She was convicted of one murder and a series of related offences and sentenced to sixty-five years on February 23, 1988, in a plea arrangement that avoided a capital trial. Twelve deaths are attributed to her and two were charged.
She was diagnosed with liver disease and died in prison on August 21, 1995, aged forty. The case is one of the earlier American nursing-home killings and predates most of the reporting requirements that later cases produced.