Genene Jones was a licensed vocational nurse in San Antonio, Texas, whose career in pediatric care ran from 1978 to 1982. In the pediatric intensive care unit at Bexar County Hospital, children on her 3 to 11 p.m. shift suffered so many sudden seizures, bleeding episodes and cardiac arrests that nurses called it the death shift. The hospital held several internal reviews, then replaced all of the unit's licensed vocational nurses with registered nurses and let her go with a good recommendation. It did not call the police.
In August 1982 she went to work for a pediatrician opening a new practice in Kerrville, a town in the Texas Hill Country that the Associated Press placed about 55 miles northwest of San Antonio. Within a month, children were being rushed from the clinic to the local hospital after they stopped breathing, and on September 17, 1982, Chelsea McClellan, 15 months old, died after injections Jones gave her. A test developed in Sweden found the paralyzing drug succinylcholine in the child's exhumed body. In February 1984 a jury in Georgetown convicted Jones of murder and sentenced her to 99 years. Later that year a San Antonio judge found her guilty of injuring a four-week-old boy with the blood thinner heparin.
The hospital deaths were not charged in the 1980s. More than three decades later, as a 1977 Texas law was about to free her, Bexar County prosecutors indicted her for murder in five children's deaths. In January 2020 she pleaded guilty to one of them, the 1981 death of 11-month-old Joshua Sawyer, and was sentenced to life in prison. The other four charges were dismissed. She stands convicted of two murders and one count of injury to a child.
Jones grew up in San Antonio. She was one of four children adopted by Richard Jefferson Jones, known as Dick, and his wife, Gladys, Peter Elkind reported in Texas Monthly in August 1983. Dick Jones ran a nightclub, the Kit Kat Swim Club, and owned billboards. Genene went to John Marshall High School, where a librarian remembered her as bossy. The family had more than its share of loss: one of her brothers died of cancer, another was killed by a bomb he had built, and her father died of cancer in January 1968, at 56.
Shortly after high school, and a month before her eighteenth birthday, she married her high school sweetheart, James Harvey DeLany Jr. Their son was born in January 1972 in Albany, Georgia. The marriage went through years of court fights, with divorce suits in 1972 and 1974, and the last suit was dropped in March 1977. A daughter was born in July 1977; Jones gave conflicting accounts of who the father was. She worked briefly as a beautician, then trained at the San Antonio school district's vocational nursing school and passed her licensing examination in October 1977.
Her first nursing jobs were short. Methodist Hospital let her go in April 1978 after a dispute with a doctor, Elkind wrote; KENS-TV's timeline of the case says she left after a dispute involving a patient. She then spent about three months on the obstetrics ward at Community Hospital before resigning.
On October 30, 1978, Jones began work in the pediatric intensive care unit of Bexar County Hospital, the county's charity hospital in San Antonio, and stayed 41 months. The unit had eight beds. According to Elkind's 1983 account, colleagues admired her skill at starting intravenous lines and her technical knowledge, but many found her loud and aggressive, and quick to challenge doctors. She volunteered for the sickest patients and was often present when a child went into crisis. Staff noticed how hard she grieved when a child died. Dr. James Robotham, who became the unit's medical director in March 1980, admired her aggressiveness, and some nurses regarded her as his favorite.
From 1981, children on her shift kept going into crisis. ProPublica, drawing on the later investigation, reported in 2017 that 42 children died in the unit between April 1981 and June 1982, that 34 of those deaths came on the 3 to 11 p.m. shift, and that Jones had cared for 20 of the children who died. A study by the federal Centers for Disease Control later found that a child in the unit was 25.5 times as likely to suffer a medical emergency, and 10.7 times as likely to die, while she was on duty. These are statistical associations. They do not show that any particular child was harmed by anyone.
Some of the children named in later reporting were very young. Christopher Hogeda, 15 months old, died on May 21, 1981. Jose Antonio Flores, six months, died on October 10, 1981, after bleeding and a cardiac arrest. Doraelia Rios, 25 months, died on December 22, 1981. None of these deaths was ever charged. Five others, set out below, were charged in 2017.
Nurses began to talk. In October 1981 a registered nurse, Suzanna Maldonado, took her concerns to the head nurse, Pat Belko, who passed them to Robotham. Maldonado later testified that she kept a list of 42 infants who died on Jones's shift between January 1981 and March 1982, and that Jones threatened her. After the unit was reorganized, Maldonado received anonymous notes reading "Your dead" and "Soon," Elkind reported.
Rolando Santos was four weeks old when he was admitted to the hospital on December 27, 1981, with pneumonia and breathing problems. Testimony at Jones's later trial showed that he had seizures from unknown causes on December 29, 1981, and January 1, 1982, and two episodes of heavy bleeding and cardiac arrest on January 6 and January 9, 1982. Jones was caring for him each time. A young doctor, Kenneth Copeland, had his blood tested and found heparin, a blood thinner, and on January 10, 1982, the boy was given protamine to counter it. Rolando survived. In 2017, as an adult, he appeared on television to oppose her release, ProPublica reported.
The hospital looked into the deaths several times without going to the authorities. An internal inquiry found ten child deaths between May and December 1981 at which Jones had been present, Elkind wrote in 1983, and its report said the link could be coincidence but that wrongdoing could not be ruled out. On January 19, 1982, Dr. Robert Franks wrote to the dean of the medical school that a heparin overdose had been documented but nothing tied it to any employee. Two days later a chest surgeon, Kent Trinkle, threatened to move his young patients elsewhere. On January 25, 1982, a malpractice lawyer, Paul Green, advised the hospital that firing Jones or calling the district attorney without proof carried legal risk.
On February 15, 1982, an outside panel of six specialists led by Dr. Alan Conn, a veteran of intensive care in Toronto, began a review. Its report criticized how the unit was run and recommended that Robotham and Belko be moved from their posts. On March 2, 1982, the hospital administrator, Virginia Mousseau, announced that the unit would be staffed only by registered nurses. All seven licensed vocational nurses were replaced, and Jones resigned on March 17. Hospital officials suspected what one internal document called "purposeful nursing misadventure," ProPublica reported in 2017, but they feared lawsuits and bad publicity, and they gave her a letter of recommendation describing her as "loyal, dependable, and trustworthy."
Vincent DiMaio, a former Bexar County medical examiner, said in a 2016 interview with Texas Public Radio that hospital staff saw the pattern and that the administration wanted to avoid bad publicity. "Unless they were awfully dumb, it was obvious what was going on," he said.
Dr. Kathleen Holland, a former Bexar County resident, opened a pediatric practice in Kerrville on August 23, 1982, and hired Jones as her nurse. Holland had heard the rumors and had been warned, Elkind reported, but she said she trusted Jones. Jones's vocational nursing license had expired on August 3, 1982, and the state did not receive her renewal fees until November 29, so she worked in Kerrville for weeks without a valid license.
The next day, August 24, Chelsea McClellan came to the clinic for the first time. She had been born on June 16, 1981, and her parents, Petti and Reid McClellan, had brought her in with a cold. Petti McClellan later testified that minutes after Jones took Chelsea into an examining room, the child had a seizure and was taken to the emergency room. Tests at the hospital found nothing wrong. Her parents credited Holland and Jones with saving her life.
Over the next few weeks other children were rushed from Holland's clinic to Sid Peterson Hospital in Kerrville after they stopped breathing or had seizures. Elkind counted seven patients and eight emergencies in 31 days; ProPublica later put it at six children in 31 days, and at eight children who stopped breathing in one month. One of them, 21-month-old M.R., had a crisis on September 3 after an intravenous line was started. About then a bottle of Anectine, the brand name of succinylcholine, went missing from the office, and a replacement was ordered on September 7, Elkind reported. A friend of Jones, the vocational nurse Hobbie Sultenfuss, later testified that she and Jones had looked up the uses and effects of the drug in San Antonio before moving to Kerrville.
Chelsea returned with her mother on September 17. Holland decided she needed routine immunizations. Petti McClellan held her daughter while Jones gave the first of two injections, one in each thigh. Moments later, Petti McClellan testified, Chelsea's arms began flopping around and her eyes "got all strange looking." The child stopped breathing and had a seizure.
She was taken to Sid Peterson Hospital, where she appeared to stabilize. An emergency room doctor, Richard Mason, later testified that she showed signs of a powerful muscle relaxant, and a nurse saw two injection marks on her legs. When the nurse asked, Jones said the child had been given "baby shots." Chelsea was then sent by ambulance toward a hospital in San Antonio, with Jones riding along. About 15 miles out, the ambulance driver, Steve Brown, testified, Jones shouted at him to pull over and said the child's heart had stopped. The ambulance went to Comfort Community Hospital, where resuscitation went on for about twenty minutes before Chelsea was declared dead. Prosecutors argued that she was given a second injection in the ambulance; an attendant, Tommy James, testified that he never saw Jones give her one.
Holland's death certificate gave the cause as cardiac arrest from a seizure of undetermined cause. An autopsy by a San Antonio pathologist attributed the death to sudden infant death syndrome. Grieving and unaware, the McClellans placed a notice in the local newspaper thanking Holland and Jones for their care. In the office records Jones wrote, "I would have given my life for her. Goodbye, Chelsea."
The local doctors were less sure. On September 22 a senior physician, Duan Packard, met the hospital administrator, Tony Hall, and other doctors to discuss the run of emergencies from the new clinic. The next day a five-month-old girl collapsed after Holland sent her to the hospital, and an anesthesiologist, Frank Bradley, thought her movements looked like the effects of succinylcholine. That evening a surgeon, Joe Vinas, reported to an emergency meeting of the hospital's executive committee that he had called a resident in San Antonio about the nurse. The resident's reply, as Vinas reported it, was "You've got a baby killer on your hands."
On September 24, eleven doctors questioned Holland. She told them she kept succinylcholine in her office but had never used it, and she defended Jones. The committee concluded there was "far too much smoke" and moved to take away her admitting privileges. The Texas Rangers were contacted for the first time that day, according to KENS-TV's timeline. On September 27, Holland found evidence that the drug had been tampered with and asked Jones not to come back. At the trial Holland testified that Jones had shown her a vial of succinylcholine with two needle holes in it.
Three hours after Chelsea's death, Elkind reported, a mother had brought in her five-month-old son for crying spells; Jones wanted to start an intravenous line in case he had a seizure, and he went silent and spent six days in hospital, where tests found nothing to explain it. Holland's clinic later closed, and she faced lawsuits. She was never charged and became the prosecution's key witness.
Suspicion now ran in two counties. Doctors' reports to the Texas Rangers led to parallel inquiries in Kerrville and San Antonio, ProPublica reported. On the day of Chelsea's death, a three-member committee at the San Antonio hospital, led by Dr. John Mangos, had begun reviewing the records of 94 children treated in the pediatric intensive care unit in 1981 and early 1982. Its draft report looked closely at 13 patients who had sudden arrests, seizures or bleeding, ten of whom died, and noted that Jones had been present for the final events in all of the cases on her shift. It offered three possible explanations: coincidence, her habit of volunteering for the sickest patients, or negligence or wrongdoing. The Bexar County district attorney's office seized copies of the draft in February 1983.
According to KENS-TV's timeline, the district attorney in San Antonio was notified on January 12, 1983, and the next day a hospital committee recommended saying nothing publicly and did not refer the matter to law enforcement. KENS-TV aired its first story on the deaths on February 16, 1983. The Bexar County district attorney, Sam Millsap, put the inquiry in the news, and The New York Times reported a "Texas inquiry on 47 baby deaths," ProPublica wrote in 2017.
In Kerrville, Chelsea's body was exhumed on May 7, 1983. A Kerr County grand jury under District Attorney Ron Sutton indicted Jones for Chelsea's murder and for injury to other children; Elkind counted seven injury counts in August 1983, and United Press International reported six in February 1984. Her bond was set at $225,000. In May 1983, before the trial, Jones told Elkind, "I haven't killed a damn soul."
Succinylcholine was hard to find in a body. It acts quickly and breaks down fast, and Sultenfuss testified that Jones knew it would disappear "within a few hours." Fredric Rieders, who ran an independent toxicology laboratory in Pennsylvania, helped exhume Chelsea's body about eight months after her death and flew tissue samples to Stockholm, Sweden. There Bo Holmstedt had developed a sensitive test for the drug. Rieders testified that he "detected, identified and measured succinylcholine" in samples from Chelsea's thigh muscles and organs. Holmstedt described to the jury how the drug paralyzes muscles, causes small twitches under the skin, slows the heart and stops breathing.
Because of publicity, the trial was moved from Kerr County to Georgetown, in Williamson County near Austin. It opened in January 1984. Sutton, the Kerr County district attorney, told the jury in a five-minute opening statement that the motive would become clear as the story unfolded. Jones was 33 and the mother of two. Her lawyers included Burt Carnes. Another defense lawyer, Brookshire, suggested on cross-examination that succinylcholine could form naturally in human tissue and that the Swedish test was not precise enough for tiny amounts.
The state called 44 witnesses. They included the emergency doctor and nurse, the ambulance crew, Holland and the scientists. Prosecutors argued that Jones had created emergencies among Kerrville children to show that Sid Peterson Hospital needed a pediatric intensive care unit. Hospital administrators testified that no such unit was planned. Sultenfuss, called by the defense, said Holland and Jones had told her one was being planned. She also disputed Holland's account of M.R.'s emergency, saying that it was Holland who had asked for a succinylcholine injection to help place a breathing tube; Holland testified that Jones had suggested the drug.
Petti McClellan's testimony was one of the most powerful moments of the trial, recalled Scott Monroe, who helped try the case and was the Kerr County district attorney in 2017. "The judge was crying. The jury was crying. The lawyers were crying," he told KSAT. "Except for Genene Jones. She did not shed a tear." Monroe described it as a circumstantial case: "There wasn't anyone else around to witness these events." Jones did not testify. Carnes argued that Holland's incompetence had caused the child's death.
After a five-week trial, the jury of seven women and five men deliberated for four and a half hours and found Jones guilty of murder, UPI reported in The Battalion on February 16, 1984. She clenched her teeth and wept as the verdict was read. "We can finally bury her and they can dig her up no more," said Chelsea's grandmother, Robin Alexander. The prosecutor Nick Rothe said Jones had "left a trail of rag dolls behind her."
The next day the jury rejected defense pleas for mercy and probation and, in a little more than an hour, gave her 99 years in prison, which UPI called the maximum punishment. The foreman, Edwin Edwards of Georgetown, said the facts were "so overwhelming we could not ignore them." Under the law then in force, she had to serve at least 20 years before she could be considered for parole. Her lawyers said they would appeal, arguing that testimony about the other Kerrville children should not have been allowed and that heavy press coverage had created a "circus atmosphere." After her conviction Jones said, "I'm not afraid of jail, because I'm innocent."
The Bexar County case came to trial in San Antonio in October 1984. Jones waived a jury, and State District Judge Pat Priest heard the evidence. The charge was injury to a child, not attempted murder. Rothe and Assistant District Attorney Ray Fuchs presented Rolando Santos's four emergencies as part of a pattern of abuse in the intensive care unit. "But for the intervention of Dr. (Kenneth) Copeland, Santos would have been added to that list," Rothe told the court, referring to Maldonado's list of children who had died. The defense lawyer, Royal Griffin, said the state had produced no evidence linking Jones to the boy's crises and called the Centers for Disease Control study "a totally worthless enterprise."
Priest ruled immediately after closing arguments. "I find that child received a massive dose of heparin during the 3 to 11 (p.m.) shift Jan. 9, 1982, and that Genene Jones did it," he said. He sentenced her to 60 years, to run at the same time as her 99-year term, UPI reported on October 25, 1984. Jones was 34.
That October Millsap announced that he would bring no more cases. "There will be no additional indictments of Genene Jones," he said. "No useful purpose will be served." Rothe testified in 2018 that in the 1980s prosecutors "couldn't find any cases at the time where we had direct evidence." Bexar County prosecutors suspected her in other deaths, Elkind later reported, but thought them hard to prove and believed the 99-year sentence would keep her in prison for life.
The hospital's records were a further problem. DiMaio said in 2016 that the medical center's records were shredded in March 1984 even though they were considered evidence and were under grand jury subpoena. Millsap told KSAT in 2013 that records at the hospital had been "accidently destroyed," the Associated Press reported. In 2017, ProPublica found that most of the 1980s medical records were missing from both the district attorney's files and the hospital. Art Brogley, who investigated the hospital deaths in the 1980s, had recommended charges against seven hospital and medical school administrators; several later resigned, but none was charged. The Kerr County injury counts were not tried, and how they were disposed of is not on record.
Jones appealed the McClellan conviction to the Court of Appeals of Texas in Austin. Her lawyer, Laura M. Little, raised nine grounds of error, among them the judge's refusal to instruct the jury on the lesser offense of involuntary manslaughter and the denial of a motion to suppress the results of tests on Chelsea's body. Ron Sutton argued for the state. On August 13, 1986, a panel of Chief Justice Shannon and Justices Earl W. Smith and Gammage, in an opinion by Smith, decided the appeal (Jones v. State, 716 S.W.2d 142). She lost, as Elkind later reported. The Board of Vocational Nurse Examiners had suspended her nursing license that January.
Jones went to the state prison for women in Gatesville. In 1987 Elkind interviewed her there for his book, The Death Shift, published in 1989. She told him that she had been given time to understand the Lord, that she was leaning toward the Jewish religion and had replaced her cross with a Star of David, and that the story of her conviction was "about big money." She said she had no doubts about her innocence, and she left standing instructions with prison officials to refuse requests from the press. A prison official asked the county hospital district in 1984 about Jones working in the prison hospital's dispensary; a spokesman later said she would be given non-medical work. In 2011 she was at a prison medical unit in South Texas, ProPublica reported.
Over the years, according to evidence prosecutors later presented, she made statements that came close to admissions. A parole officer, Marcy Ferguson, said that in an October 1998 parole interview Jones told her, "I really did kill those babies," and added, "You won't find them in there." In a memo of a May 20, 2011, meeting with a parole commissioner, Lynn Ruzicka, Jones was recorded as saying, "I was not a sane person. I did inject the little girl." A fellow prisoner opposed her parole in a letter that quoted her as saying the voices in her head had killed the babies. These accounts came out at a pretrial hearing in April 2018 and were never tested at trial.
In 2011, after a Huffington Post story about her possible release, the Texas Board of Nursing began proceedings to revoke her license. Jones wrote back from prison apologizing "for the damage I did to all because of my crime." She told the board that she now agreed with its description of what she had done, and of herself. "My only defense is that I was not of sound mind then or any time before 1994," she wrote. "That is not an excuse just a fact." She said she had no plans to nurse again. The board revoked her license on June 10, 2011. Petti McClellan, told of the letter in 2017, said, "I don't think there was anything sincere about it."
Jones was repeatedly denied parole, the Associated Press reported. But she had been sentenced under a 1977 Texas law, meant to ease prison crowding, that gave inmates about two days of good-time credit for each day served, so that she was due for release after serving about a third of her sentence. Texas changed the law in 1987 to exclude violent offenders and abolished mandatory release in 1996, but the changes were not applied to her. Her mandatory release date was March 1, 2018, after 34 years and eight months in prison.
Families of children who died at the hospital set out to stop it. In 2013 they formed a Facebook group, Victims of Genene Anne Jones, and pressed the district attorney for a new murder charge. Andy Kahan, the Houston crime victims' advocate, coordinated a media campaign. Petti McClellan, who later used the name McClellan-Wiese, became the most active of them. "This is my mission now," she said in 2013.
The Bexar County district attorney, Susan Reed, began reviewing the hospital deaths and invited tips as the release date approached. Her investigator, Larry DeHaven, a former San Antonio police officer, took over the case. Brogley had died in 2012, and his widow gave DeHaven his files, including a seven-foot color-coded chart of suspected victims. Nicholas "Nico" LaHood defeated Reed in November 2014. In December 2016 an assistant district attorney, Jason Goss, decided to pursue a new case, working on it after hours with LaHood's approval.
The case he chose was Joshua Sawyer's. Joshua, 11 months old, was admitted to the hospital on December 8, 1981, after a house fire, and died at 9:22 p.m. on December 12 while Jones was caring for him. A blood test taken before his death showed a level of the anti-seizure drug Dilantin far above the normal range, and the result was printed into his chart, where it went unnoticed for more than a year, ProPublica reported. His mother, Connie Weeks, had kept his three-inch-thick medical record for 30 years. Goss and DeHaven found witnesses, including the laboratory technician.
On May 25, 2017, a Bexar County grand jury indicted Jones for Joshua Sawyer's murder after a single day of testimony. She was served with the warrant in prison and was "emotional," LaHood said. "She's been suspected in dozens of infant deaths and she's only been held accountable in one," he told reporters, adding that investigators believed she may have killed up to 60 children. "We have every reason to believe that she fully expected to get out next year." Bond was set at $1 million.
Four more indictments followed, each with a $1 million bond:
Rosemary Vega, 2, indicted June 21, 2017. She had been admitted on September 13, 1981, for an operation on a heart defect that her records said went without difficulty, and died in the intensive care unit on September 16, 1981. The indictment alleged an injection of "a substance unknown." Her mother, Rosemary Cantu, who was 18 at the time and worked in the hospital's housekeeping department, told ProPublica that she saw Jones put something into her daughter's IV line shortly before the first arrest, saying it would help the child rest. A later hospital review recorded that "Nurse G. Jones was in attendance during the final events."
Richard "Ricky" Nelson, 8 months, who died in July 1981, and Patrick Zavala, 4 months, who died in January 1982, both indicted June 29, 2017, on allegations of injection with "a substance unknown."
Paul Villarreal, 3 months, who died on September 24, 1981, indicted October 31, 2017. LaHood said his office's aim was "to hold Genene Jones accountable for as many children's deaths as the evidence will support." Petti McClellan-Wiese said, "I got some justice for Chelsea. The babies here got nothing. Absolutely nothing."
These were charges of murder, not capital murder, because the death penalty was not available for such cases at the time of the deaths, KENS-TV reported. Jones was moved to the Bexar County jail in December 2017 and pleaded not guilty to all five charges. Her court-appointed lawyer was Cornelius Cox. On March 1, 2018, her mandatory release date passed and she stayed in custody.
Cox argued that bringing the charges decades after the deaths, a year before her release, violated her rights to a speedy trial and to due process. The state answered that Texas has no statute of limitations for murder. At the April 18, 2018, hearing where the old statements were aired, Judge Frank Castro rejected the speedy trial claim and said he would rule on due process later; the motion to dismiss was denied, according to a later report by KFYO. Prosecutors had offered a plea deal with a January 31, 2018, deadline that passed without an answer. LaHood lost his primary election that spring, and the case passed to his successor, Joe Gonzales, whose major crimes chief, Catherine Babbitt, took over the prosecution.
In May 2018 a judge granted competency and sanity evaluations. In February 2019 a psychiatric evaluation found her competent to stand trial; her lawyers disagreed and won a second evaluation. In September 2019 they dropped their request for a jury to decide competency, and Castro set a November deadline for pretrial motions. Babbitt said the five cases would be tried one at a time, beginning with Joshua Sawyer's, and trial was set for February 10, 2020.
Petti McClellan-Wiese died in June 2019. Juanita Villarreal, Paul's mother, died about six months later.
On January 16, 2020, in the 399th State District Court in San Antonio, Jones, 69, changed her plea and pleaded guilty to murdering Joshua Sawyer. She came to court in a blue prison outfit and large taped glasses, with short white hair, and used a walker; ProPublica's reporter saw her stay silent and expressionless and wheel herself out a side door afterward. Castro accepted the agreement and sentenced her to life in prison. The other four murder charges were dismissed under the deal. She must serve 20 years before she is first eligible for parole, with credit for about two years in jail awaiting trial; the Associated Press quoted Babbitt as saying she would be eligible in 18 years, when she would be about 87. The deal let each of the five families speak to her in court, and it returned to her a Bible that prosecutors had seized as evidence.
The families spoke. "I hope for you to live a long and miserable life behind bars," said Connie Weeks, Joshua's mother. Rosemary Vega's mother, Rosemary Vega Cantu, said she had waited 38 years to tell Jones that she would never forgive her, and that she had trusted her with her daughter. Melissa Luna, Paul Villarreal's sister, also spoke for the family of Ricky Nelson. Kylie McClellan, Chelsea's sister, spoke for their late mother and said she did not wish Jones dead but wanted her locked up for the rest of her days.
"You took God's most precious gift, babies," Castro told Jones. He said the sentence "doesn't come close to what you did to these families," and that he believed her "ultimate judgement is in the next life." Babbitt said afterward, "With this plea, the odds are she will take her last breath in prison." She said that while preparing for trial prosecutors had estimated about 20 deaths, and that they never established a motive: "I can only speculate." Andy Kahan said, "She will never breathe free air again."
Jones and her lawyers had appealed the denial of her motion to dismiss, arguing that the 2017 indictments violated her rights to a speedy trial and due process. A Texas appeals court dismissed the appeal on August 25, 2021, according to KFYO, a Lubbock news radio station. No court record of that decision has been published.
In November 2023 KSAT reported that the case had been re-examined in a new episode of the series The Evidence Room. No later change in her custody, parole decision or death has been reported.
As of the latest reports, from 2021, Jones was serving her sentences in the Texas prison system: life for the murder of Joshua Sawyer, 99 years for the murder of Chelsea McClellan and 60 years for injury to Rolando Santos. Her current unit and her parole review dates have not been publicly confirmed.
No court ever settled why. At the 1984 trial, prosecutors argued that she created emergencies in Kerrville children to show that the town's hospital needed a pediatric intensive care unit, and UPI described their theory as that of a thrill-seeking nurse. Others in the prosecution believed she wanted to rescue children and be seen as a miracle worker. Investigators in Millsap's office, Elkind reported in 1983, considered mercy killing, a craving for excitement and contempt for inexperienced doctors. DiMaio said in 2016 that she injected children so that she could be seen saving them. Babbitt said in 2020 that she could only speculate.
Proven by final judgment: the murder of Chelsea McClellan (jury, 1984, affirmed 1986); injury to a child, Rolando Santos (bench verdict, 1984); the murder of Joshua Sawyer (guilty plea, 2020).
Charged but never tried, and dismissed under the 2020 plea deal: the deaths of Rosemary Vega, Ricky Nelson, Paul Villarreal and Patrick Zavala. Jones is not convicted of those deaths.
Suspected only: other deaths and emergencies at the San Antonio hospital and the Kerrville clinic. Estimates vary widely and were never tested in court: "more than a dozen" (ProPublica), "about 20" deaths (Babbitt, 2020), "at least 46" (Texas Public Radio's introduction to a 2016 interview with DiMaio) and "up to 60" (LaHood, 2017). The Centers for Disease Control study showed that children were far more likely to die or collapse on her shifts; it did not prove that she harmed any particular child.
Statements: the 1998 and 2011 remarks to parole officials and the fellow prisoner's letter are known only from prosecutors' accounts at a 2018 hearing. Her 2011 letter to the nursing board did not name any child.
Still unsettled: the number of Kerr County injury counts (seven or six) and what became of them; the exact day of her 1983 arrest; and whether her first parole eligibility on the life sentence falls in 2037 or 2038 (ProPublica wrote "around 2038"; other reports say 2037).
January 1968: her father, Dick Jones, dies.
Shortly after high school (year not recorded): marries James Harvey DeLany Jr.
January 1972: her son is born.
October 1977: passes her vocational nursing licensing exam; a daughter is born in July 1977.
April 1978: let go by Methodist Hospital; then about three months at Community Hospital.
October 30, 1978: starts in the pediatric intensive care unit at Bexar County Hospital.
May 21, 1981: Christopher Hogeda, 15 months, dies in the unit.
July 1981: Ricky Nelson, 8 months, dies (charged 2017; dismissed 2020).
September 16, 1981: Rosemary Vega, 2, dies (charged 2017; dismissed 2020).
September 24, 1981: Paul Villarreal, 3 months, dies (charged 2017; dismissed 2020).
October 1981: nurse Suzanna Maldonado reports her concerns.
December 12, 1981: Joshua Sawyer, 11 months, dies (guilty plea 2020).
January 1982: Rolando Santos survives heparin overdoses; Patrick Zavala, 4 months, dies (charged 2017; dismissed 2020).
February 15, 1982: outside review led by Dr. Alan Conn begins.
March 2 and 17, 1982: the unit moves to all registered nurses; Jones resigns.
August 23, 1982: Dr. Kathleen Holland's Kerrville clinic opens with Jones as nurse.
August 24, 1982: Chelsea McClellan's first emergency at the clinic.
September 17, 1982: Chelsea McClellan, 15 months, dies after injections; the San Antonio hospital's Mangos review begins the same day.
September 24 and 27, 1982: Texas Rangers contacted; Holland tells Jones not to return.
February 1983: Bexar County prosecutors seize the hospital's draft review; KENS-TV airs its first story.
May 7, 1983: Chelsea's body is exhumed; tissue tested in Stockholm.
1983: indicted in Kerr County for murder and injury to a child.
January 1984: trial opens in Georgetown.
February 1984: convicted of murder and sentenced to 99 years.
March 1984: hospital records shredded, according to DiMaio.
October 1984: convicted by Judge Pat Priest of injury to a child (Rolando Santos); 60 years, concurrent. Millsap says there will be no more indictments.
January 1986: nursing license suspended.
August 13, 1986: Court of Appeals in Austin decides her appeal; she loses.
1987: Elkind interviews her at Gatesville; the mandatory release law is changed for violent offenders, but not for her.
1989: Elkind's book The Death Shift is published.
October 1998: parole interview at which, a parole officer said, she admitted killing babies.
2011: writes to the nursing board; license revoked June 10, 2011.
2013: families form a group to oppose her release.
December 2016: Assistant District Attorney Jason Goss begins the Sawyer case.
May 25, 2017: indicted for the murder of Joshua Sawyer.
June 21, June 29 and October 31, 2017: indicted for the murders of Rosemary Vega, Ricky Nelson, Patrick Zavala and Paul Villarreal.
December 2017: moved to the Bexar County jail; pleads not guilty.
March 1, 2018: mandatory release date passes; she stays in custody.
April 18, 2018: Judge Frank Castro rejects the speedy trial claim.
February 2019: found competent to stand trial.
June 2019: Petti McClellan-Wiese dies.
January 16, 2020: pleads guilty to murdering Joshua Sawyer; life in prison; four other charges dismissed.
August 25, 2021: an appeal is dismissed (KFYO).