Former Nurse Orville Lynn Majors, Convicted of Six Patient Killings, Dies in Indiana State Prison
The former Vermillion County Hospital nurse, serving 360 years for lethal injections of heart-stopping drugs, died of heart problems, prison officials said.
Published
Orville Lynn Majors died on Sunday, September 24, 2017, at the age of 56, eighteen years into a 360-year sentence. He had been having trouble breathing and became unresponsive at Indiana State Prison in Michigan City, the Indiana Department of Correction said, and he was pronounced dead at a nearby hospital. Preliminary autopsy results, the department's spokesman Douglas Garrison and other officials said, showed heart problems and a death from natural causes.
The man who died of a failing heart had been convicted of stopping other people's. Majors was a nurse at the former Vermillion County Hospital in Clinton, a small town near the Illinois line about 60 miles west of Indianapolis, and in 1999 a jury found him guilty of killing six patients there with lethal injections of heart-stopping drugs. They had come to the hospital ill and in his care. The press called him the Angel of Death.
What this story covers. It draws on the Associated Press report of September 26, 2017, as carried by 95.3 MNC, which quotes the Indiana Department of Correction's statement. The prison system's statement itself and the court record of the 1999 trial were not available to us. The cause of death given here is the preliminary finding officials announced at the time.
Sources
- "Angel of Death" dies in Indiana State Prison in Michigan City, 95.3 MNC (Associated Press)