Efren Saldivar was born in 1969 and worked as a respiratory therapist at the Glendale Adventist Medical Center in Los Angeles County from 1989. He was popular with colleagues, who called him the Angel of Death as a joke about how often patients died on his shift, years before anyone meant it.
He killed patients on the night shift by injecting Pavulon or succinylcholine chloride, muscle relaxants that stop the diaphragm, and by reducing the oxygen supply to those on ventilators. He chose patients who were seriously ill and expected to die, and he told investigators he did it to lighten the workload on quiet nights.
He was interviewed in March 1998 after an anonymous tip and confessed to between forty and fifty killings, then retracted, and there was insufficient evidence to charge. He was allowed to go, and he surrendered his licence.
The six he was convicted of killing were Salbi Asatryan, seventy-five; Eleanora Schlegel, seventy-seven; Jose Alfaro, eighty-two; Luina Schidlowski, eighty-seven; Balbino Castro, eighty-seven; and Myrtle Brower, eighty-four.
The case was made afterwards by exhumation. Twenty bodies were disinterred and six were found to contain Pavulon. He was arrested in January 2001 and pleaded guilty in March 2002 to six counts of murder and one of attempted murder, receiving six consecutive terms of life without parole in exchange for the state not seeking death.
The six are the convictions. His own estimates over the years have ranged from around fifty to over two hundred, and the hospital's records for the period could not resolve it.