On September 17, 1982, fifteen-month-old Chelsea McClellan was brought to a new pediatric clinic in Kerrville, Texas. The nurse gave her two injections, and within minutes she was convulsing and could not breathe. In the ambulance to San Antonio the nurse, who rode along to watch her vital signs, gave her another, and Chelsea died at a small medical facility on the way. The cause of death was left undetermined, and her parents took out an advertisement in the Kerrville paper thanking the doctor and the nurse for their sensitivity in Chelsea's final moments. A month earlier, on August 24, the same nurse had taken Chelsea from her parents to play while they talked to the doctor and come back within five minutes to say the girl was having a seizure. The nurse was Genene Jones. In the two months the clinic had been open, seven children there had suffered respiratory arrests. A bottle of succinylcholine, a paralyzing muscle relaxant, had gone missing from the clinic and was found with needle holes in its cap.
Genene Ann Jones was born in Texas on July 13, 1950, and adopted by Richard Jefferson Jones, known as Dick, a San Antonio businessman who ran the Kit Kat Swim Club on Fredericksburg Road, and his wife, Gladys. She went to John Marshall High School, where she worked in the library, and was known from childhood for inventing illnesses. Shortly before her eighteenth birthday she lost two brothers, one killed by a homemade bomb that went off in his hands, and her father died of a short illness in January 1968. That June she married a classmate, James Harvey DeLany Jr., and trained as a beautician; their son was born in January 1972, and after one divorce suit accusing him of violence and a reconciliation she divorced him in 1974 and fought him in court for nearly three years over support and visitation. A daughter, Heather, followed a brief reconciliation. In 1977 she trained as a vocational nurse and scored more than two hundred points above the pass mark on her licensing exam; she was asked to resign from her first job, at Methodist Hospital, after a conflict with a doctor, and left a second, in an obstetric unit, after three months.
Jones was thirty-two, a licensed vocational nurse. Dr. Kathleen Holland had hired her when she opened the practice that August. What Holland did not know, and what the hospital in San Antonio where Jones had worked for four years had never told anyone, was that the same pattern had followed her there.
In October 1978 she was hired to work in the pediatric intensive care unit at Bexar County Medical Center Hospital. Doctors found her a constant challenge, questioning their doses and prescriptions, and colleagues remembered that she wept over dying children and called them hers. Children on her shift began suffering unexplained seizures and cardiac arrests, and a number of them died. Emergencies on her three-to-eleven shift became so frequent that staff gave it a name, the death shift. Christopher James Hogeda, fifteen months old, died of cardiac arrest on May 21, 1981. Rosemary Vega, two, was sitting on her mother's lap on September 16 when Jones came in and injected her with something she said would help her rest; within minutes the girl was in shock, and she died. Jose Antonio Flores, six months, bled uncontrollably and died on October 10, with no autopsy. Doraelia Rios, twenty-five months, died on December 22, recovering from surgery, and Jones wrote her a note in the nursing book wishing her a merry Christmas. That October a registered nurse, Suzanna Maldonado, went to the head nurse with the unit's census book and the shift on which the children had died. An internal review found ten deaths on Jones's watch and called them possibly coincidence. Rolando Santos, four weeks old, had a near-fatal seizure on December 30; a young endocrinologist, Ken Copeland, ordered a blood test for the blood thinner heparin and found abnormal levels, and when the boy crashed again on January 10, 1982, doctors reversed it with protamine and he recovered. After Patrick Zavala died on January 17 following a successful operation, the chest surgeon Kent Trinkle called an urgent meeting and the heparin was locked away. On February 15 a medical committee agreed that Jones was the focus of its suspicion but divided on whether to fire her, and it was later reported that administrators feared a lawsuit. It held an internal review and then replaced the unit's licensed vocational nurses with registered nurses, a reorganization that removed her without any allegation being recorded and without a word to any future employer. The journalist Peter Elkind, who wrote the first book on the case, concluded that the hospital had every reason to go to the authorities and chose not to. No administrator was ever charged. Offered work elsewhere in the hospital, she resigned in March 1982.
At Kerrville, Jimmy Pearson, seven, who could not speak, had seizures on August 30, 1982, the same day a four-month-old, Christopher Parker, collapsed at the clinic; Parker survived, and Pearson died of the complications on October 21. On September 23 a five-month-old, Rolinda Ruff, was paralyzed after an injection of succinylcholine she had not been prescribed, and an anesthesiologist recognized the signs. A surgeon, Joe Vinas, called a resident in San Antonio to ask about the nurse; when he asked whether her name was Genene Jones, the resident told him he had a baby killer on his hands. Holland asked Jones about the punctured cap and a pharmacy order for a third bottle; on September 24 Jones came to work saying she had overdosed on the antidepressant doxepin, and after she failed a polygraph in Austin, Holland fired her. She moved to a mobile home on a ranch near San Angelo, was briefly arrested in November 1982 and released, and in April 1983 married a nineteen-year-old nursing aide, Garron Ray Turk. She was arrested for the last time at San Angelo on May 24, 1983, held in Williamson County on a $225,000 bond, and tried in Georgetown on a change of venue before Judge John Carter, who said in 2013 that he had known she would be released early but the jurors had not. On May 14, 1984, she was convicted of murdering Chelsea McClellan and sentenced to ninety-nine years. That year she was also convicted of, and on October 24 given a concurrent sixty years for, for the attempted murder of Rolando Santos, four weeks old, whom she had injected with heparin at the San Antonio hospital on at least three occasions; he survived. She was held at the Dr. Lane Murray Unit in Gatesville. In 1987 she told Peter Elkind she had never harmed anyone. At a parole hearing in 1998 she admitted injecting babies and her guilt in Chelsea's death, and in a 2011 letter to the parole board she called what she had done heinous and said she had not been of sound mind before she found God in 1994. Prosecutors at the 1984 trial argued that she had endangered children at Kerrville to show the need for a pediatric intensive care unit at a nearby hospital. Others believed she wanted to rescue them and be seen as the one who had. No motive was ever established.
The San Antonio deaths were not charged then. Hospital records had been destroyed under a document retention policy, and the evidence that survived was not direct enough to be sure of a conviction that would stand on appeal.
It should have ended there, and it nearly ended the other way. A Texas law meant to relieve prison overcrowding, in force when she was sentenced, would have released her in March 2018 whatever her sentence said, after she had served about a third of it. Chelsea's mother, Petti McClellan, with the Houston victims' advocate Andy Kahan, campaigned to have her charged with something new. The parole board denied her in August 2014 and said it would not look at her case again before 2018. District Attorney Nico LaHood opened a secret investigation in November 2014, and in 2017 Jones was indicted for the murders of five children who had died at the San Antonio hospital: Richard Nelson, known as Ricky, eight months old, on July 3, 1981; Rosemary Vega, two, on September 16, 1981; Paul Villarreal, three months, on September 24, 1981; Joshua Sawyer, eleven months, on December 12, 1981; and Patrick Zavala, four months, on January 17, 1982. Court records said they had been injected with an overdose of a muscle relaxant or an unknown substance.
She pleaded not guilty and argued that the indictments had been brought only to keep her in prison; a judge rejected that in April 2018. Judge Andrew Carruthers ordered a psychological evaluation that June, and in February 2019 doctors found her competent despite her claim that recent strokes had diminished her; she dropped the insanity defense that September. Petti McClellan died in June 2019, before the case was resolved. Prosecutors Catherine Babbitt and Samantha DiMaio chose the Sawyer case as their strongest. Their witness list ran to 267 names, and their notice of other crimes the state was prepared to prove included claims that she had murdered twenty-four children. A month before trial, her lawyer called Babbitt: Jones wanted a deal. She would plead guilty to Joshua Sawyer's murder and take life, the other four charges would be dismissed, all five families would be allowed to speak to her in court, and she would get back the belongings taken from her cell as evidence.
On January 16, 2020, Jones, sixty-nine, was brought into court in a wheelchair and stood with a walker, in a light blue prison uniform, broken glasses and a surgical mask, confirmed her plea in a whisper, and sat without expression for the rest of it. It was over in thirteen minutes. "I hope you live a long and miserable life behind bars," Joshua's mother, Connie Weeks, told her. Rosemary Vega's mother, Rosemary Vega Cantu, said: "I waited thirty-eight years of my life to tell you I will never forgive you. I trusted you. I trusted you with my daughter." Judge Frank Castro told Jones that the sentence did not come close to what she had done.
"With this plea," Babbitt said, "the odds are she will take her last breath in prison." She was sentenced to life with no parole for twenty years and given two years' credit; as of 2026 she was held at the Dr. Lane Murray Unit in Gatesville and eligible for parole in 2037, at eighty-seven. She stands convicted of two murders and one attempted murder. The number of children suspected runs past sixty, and the distance between those figures began with a hospital that changed the staffing on a ward instead of calling the police.