On March 12, 2002, in the Los Angeles courtroom of Judge Lance Ito, Efren Saldivar pleaded guilty to murdering six elderly patients at Glendale Adventist Medical Center and to attempting to murder a seventh, Jean Coyle. He admitted the two special circumstances, multiple murder and murder by poison, that could have sent him to death row, and in exchange the Los Angeles County District Attorney's Office agreed not to seek death. He was thirty-two. The deal spared a months-long trial that prosecutors said would have involved more than a hundred thousand documents and nearly a hundred prosecution witnesses. On April 17, 2002, he was sentenced to six consecutive terms of life without parole, plus fifteen years to life for the attempted murder. A count of receiving stolen property, for vials of the sedative Versed found at his home in Tujunga, was dropped.
He was born on September 30, 1969, in Brownsville, Texas. As a young man he saw a friend in hospital scrubs, liked the look, earned a high school equivalency certificate and took a one-year respiratory care course. He began work as a respiratory therapist at Glendale Adventist in 1989 and worked nights. He had earlier worked at other hospitals in the area, among them Glendale Memorial.
His method used two paralytic drugs that respiratory staff know well because they are given to stop a patient's breathing during intubation: Pavulon, whose chemical name is pancuronium bromide, and succinylcholine chloride. Injected into an IV line, either one stops the muscles of breathing. He also turned down the oxygen of patients on ventilators. He chose patients who were very ill and old, whose deaths would draw no attention, and he later told police he did it because he had too many patients.
Colleagues grew suspicious. Therapists who pried open his locker without permission found empty syringes, drugs respiratory therapists were not allowed to handle, and one of them, Ursula Anderson, told a man named Grant Brossus what they had seen. The word reached the police. On March 13, 1998, detectives questioned Saldivar and he confessed to killing between forty and fifty patients, calling himself the Angel of Death. A search of his home found no drugs, he was held for forty-eight hours and released for lack of evidence, and he later recanted. The hospital fired him and his license was suspended.
Detectives then spent about a year sifting the deaths that had occurred on his shifts, 1,050 of them, for the ones that looked most suspicious and whose bodies had not been cremated. Twenty were exhumed. Pavulon, unlike succinylcholine, stays identifiable in tissue for months, and testing that drew on the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory found lethal concentrations of it in six of the bodies. None of the six had been prescribed it. The first bodies tested showed nothing, and it was only near the end of the twenty exhumations that the case came together.
The six were patients who died in 1996 and 1997. Eleanora Schlegel, seventy-seven, who had multiple sclerosis, was admitted with pneumonia on December 30, 1996. Salbi Asatryan, seventy-five, an immigrant, had been admitted to critical care on December 27, 1996. The others were Jose Alfaro, eighty-two; Balbino Castro, eighty-seven; Luina Schidlowski, eighty-seven; and Myrtle Brower, eighty-four, of Van Nuys, who died in August 1997.
Saldivar, by then working in construction, was arrested at his job on January 10, 2001 (another account gives January 9), and charged with six counts of murder. Re-interviewed after his arrest, he gave a taped confession in which he said he had lost count after sixty, spoke of "maybe 10" killings at Glendale Memorial between 1991 and 1994, and said he might have contributed to the deaths of a hundred to two hundred people. An internal review by Adventist Health, led by Tom Malinowski of Loma Linda University, produced statistical estimates as high as 120. None of those figures has been proven. He was last reported held at California State Prison, Corcoran.