In November 1984 twelve patients died in two weeks at North Horizon Health Care Center, a fifty-bed nursing home in St. Petersburg, Florida, five of them in a single twenty-four-hour stretch beginning November 26. The deaths came in the night shift, between eleven at night and seven in the morning, or close to the change of shift. The night supervisor, a registered nurse named Bobbie Sue Dudley, had started work there on October 2. On November 27 she told police she had been stabbed in the stomach by a prowler who had broken into the secure building, and a bloody nine-inch butcher knife was found at the scene. She said the attacker had caught her in a closet. North Horizon fired her, and she later admitted to the state Board of Nursing that she had stabbed herself. When she left, the deaths stopped.
She was born Bobbie Sue Robinson on October 16, 1952, in southern Illinois, in Woodlawn by one account and Mount Vernon by another, and began as a nurse's aide at Good Samaritan Hospital in Mount Vernon in the mid-1970s. She worked at nursing homes in Mount Vernon and Centralia, and in July 1983 was hired at Hillview Manor in Greenville. There she needed surgery for wounds she had inflicted on herself, and the home told her to get psychiatric care; Illinois authorities reviewed her fitness to practice and suspended her license. Her psychiatric history was long; doctors diagnosed Munchausen syndrome, in which a person feigns or induces illness, and records described repeated self-harm. After her arrest her former husband, Danny Lynn Dudley, gave a statement accusing her of nearly killing their son in 1979 by feeding him prescription medication. In July 1984 she moved to St. Petersburg and obtained a Florida license without disclosing what had happened in Illinois. She worked briefly at at least six nursing homes in the city, leaving most of the jobs because of illness.
Nurses' notes that logged who was on duty for each shift showed one nurse present for every one of the dozen deaths. Investigators turned to Anna Larson, ninety-four, who had been rushed to hospital during the run of deaths and survived; tests showed an insulin overdose, though she was not diabetic. Insulin was missing from a locked cabinet, and Dudley held the key. In January 1985 the authorities obtained orders to exhume nine patients, and bodies were ultimately dug up from cemeteries in Florida, Wisconsin, Texas and Pennsylvania. Police later found under her mattress five pages of notes listing patient deaths by bed number, with the time each died. Her psychiatrist, Dr. Arthur J. Forman, said that after five patients died in one day she told him she was very upset because thirteen people had died of insulin overdoses.
The breakthrough in the autopsies came from Stella Bradham. Her hyoid, the small U-shaped bone in the throat, had been broken, which takes pressure on the neck; investigators theorized that when insulin did not kill her quickly enough, she was strangled. "At that moment, we knew we had a homicide," one of them said later. The police set up a war room with medical and forensic experts, and the investigation required what the Tampa Bay Times later called a laborious search of medical records; in 1992 the St. Petersburg Times still described it as the only Pinellas homicide case with a comparable workload. While it went on, other employees told a detective that after the deaths Dudley had been hysterical and in tears, saying she could not believe the patients had died, and she told a St. Petersburg Times reporter that the patients were "not going to go home" and that it was up to Jesus when He took them.
By then she had married a man named Ron Terrell, in February 1985, and taken his name. Detective Robert Engelke swore in an affidavit that the deaths began shortly after she started at North Horizon and ended when she quit. On March 17, 1986, she was arrested and charged with the attempted murder of Anna Larson, who had died of natural causes two months after the overdose, and held in the Pinellas County jail on $75,000 bond. She denied any part in the deaths. "I haven't hurt any of my patients," she had told the nursing board. "The problems I have mentally ... I need to work on. But I am not harmful to myself or to anyone else." The company that owned North Horizon, Unicare Health Facilities, had found no fault in her work. "A damned good nurse," its spokesman, Michael Mervis, said. "We had no idea she went off in other realms." In April 1986 she was indicted on four counts of first-degree murder. Illinois officials opened their own inquiry into deaths at the three nursing homes where she had worked there and found nothing they considered suspicious.
The four women named in the indictment were Aggie Marsh, ninety-seven, who died on November 14, 1984; Leathy McKnight, eighty-five, who died two days later; and Mary Rae Carter, seventy-nine, and Stella Bradham, eighty-five, who both died four days after Marsh. The state's case was that Marsh and Bradham had been strangled and that McKnight and Carter had been injected with fatal amounts of insulin. Accounts of the exact dates differ by a day or two.
There was no trial. On February 23, 1988, before Circuit Judge James R. Case in Clearwater, she pleaded guilty to four counts of second-degree murder and one of attempted murder in the Larson case, and was sentenced to sixty-five years. She showed no emotion. Assistant State Attorney Bruce Bartlett said the charges had been reduced from first degree, which could have carried death, because of her history of mental illness and because so many of the witnesses were elderly and incapacitated patients. She never said why she did it. The other eight deaths on her shifts were never charged.
She died on August 27, 2007, at fifty-four, in St. Petersburg, still serving the sentence by most accounts; a brief death notice in the Tampa Bay Times described her only as a registered nurse and a Baptist. The case came before there was any national registry of nursing licenses, which is how a nurse who had lost her license in one state could pass from home to home in another.
October 16, 1952: Bobbie Sue Robinson is born in southern Illinois.
July 1983: she is hired at Hillview Manor in Greenville, Illinois.
July 1984: she moves to St. Petersburg, Florida, and obtains a Florida nursing license.
October 2, 1984: she starts work at North Horizon Health Care Center.
November 14, 1984: Aggie Marsh, ninety-seven, dies.
November 1984: Leathy McKnight, eighty-five, dies two days after Marsh, and Mary Rae Carter, seventy-nine, and Stella Bradham, eighty-five, four days after Marsh.
November 26, 1984: a twenty-four-hour stretch begins in which five patients die.
November 27, 1984: she tells police a prowler stabbed her; she later admits she stabbed herself.
January 1985: the authorities obtain orders to exhume nine patients.
February 1985: she marries Ron Terrell.
March 17, 1986: arrested and charged with the attempted murder of Anna Larson.
April 1986: indicted on four counts of first-degree murder.
February 23, 1988: she pleads guilty to four counts of second-degree murder and one of attempted murder and is sentenced to sixty-five years.
August 27, 2007: she dies in St. Petersburg, at fifty-four.