Genene Jones killed infants and young children in her care in Texas between the late 1970s and 1982. She has two murder convictions and one for attempted murder. Estimates of the true number run past sixty. She is held at the Dr Lane Murray Unit and, following a plea in 2020, will not now be released.
She was born Genene Ann Jones in Texas on July 13, 1950 and was adopted as an infant. She married James DeLany in 1968 and divorced in 1974, and had two children. She qualified as a licensed vocational nurse in 1977 and from 1978 worked in the paediatric intensive care unit at the Bexar County Medical Center Hospital in San Antonio.
Infants on her shift began suffering unexplained seizures and cardiac arrests, and a number died. Emergencies on her three-to-eleven rota became frequent enough that the shift acquired a name among staff. The hospital noticed. It ran an internal review and then replaced the unit's licensed vocational nurses with registered nurses. A reorganisation that removed her without any allegation being recorded and without anything being said to a future employer.
That is the part of this case that has been written about most. The journalist Peter Elkind's assessment is that the hospital had every reason to notify the authorities and decided not to come forward with what it knew. No administrator was ever charged. The press called her the Angel of Death, the name attached to almost every medical killer since.
She went to work at a paediatric clinic in Kerrville run by Dr Kathleen Holland. Within two months seven children there suffered respiratory arrests. On September 17, 1982 fifteen-month-old Chelsea McClellan died in an ambulance on the way to hospital, having been given a fatal injection of succinylcholine, a muscle relaxant. A bottle of the drug that had been missing from the clinic was found with needle holes in the cap.
She was arrested for the last time on May 24, 1983. On May 14, 1984 she was convicted of murdering Chelsea McClellan and sentenced to ninety-nine years. On October 24 that year she received sixty years for the attempted murder of Rolando Santos, four weeks old, whom she had injected with a large dose of heparin, a blood thinner; he survived.
The San Antonio deaths were never charged at the time. Records from the hospital had been destroyed under a document retention policy, and the law as it then stood required more direct evidence than the cases could supply if a conviction were to survive appeal.
A Texas mandatory release law in force when she was sentenced, intended to relieve prison overcrowding, would have freed her in March 2018 whatever her sentence said. Relatives of the dead children learned of that date and pressed. District Attorney Nico LaHood set up a cold case task force, and in May 2017 she was charged with the murders of five babies who had died at the Bexar County hospital in the early 1980s.
She pleaded not guilty and moved to dismiss, arguing that the timing of the indictments showed they were brought only to keep her inside. A judge refused in April 2018. A month before the first trial she sought a deal. On January 16, 2020 she pleaded guilty to the murder of Joshua Earl Sawyer, eleven months old, who died on December 12, 1981 of an overdose of an anti-seizure drug, and was sentenced to life. The other four charges were dismissed on the condition that all five families could address her in court, and they did. Judge Frank Castro told her the sentence did not come close to what she had done.
The prosecutor Catherine Babbitt said the odds were that she would take her last breath in prison, and also said that no motive was ever established. Jones is eligible for parole in 2037, at eighty-seven. Two convictions and one attempted murder stand against a suspected count above sixty, and the reason the gap is that wide is a hospital that reorganised a nursing rota instead of calling the police.