Orville Lynn Majors was born in Linton, Indiana, on April 24, 1961, and worked as a licensed practical nurse in the intensive care unit at the Vermillion County Hospital in Clinton, a small facility in a rural county.
Between 1993 and 1995 the hospital's ICU recorded 147 deaths. In the two years before Majors was hired there had been about thirty in the same period. Nurses on the unit had begun to say among themselves that patients died when he was on, and one told a supervisor that she was afraid to leave a patient alone with him. He was suspended in 1995 when the state licensing board acted on complaints.
The Indiana State Police commissioned an epidemiological study. It found that a patient in that unit was forty-three times more likely to die when Majors was on duty than at any other time, and that he had been present at 130 of the 147 deaths. Bodies were exhumed and potassium chloride and epinephrine were found. A syringe and vials were recovered from a van and a house connected to him.
The six he was convicted of killing were Mary Ann Alderson, sixty-nine; Dorothea Hixon, eighty; Cecil Smith, seventy-four; Luella Hopkins, eighty-nine; Margaret Hornick, seventy-nine; and Freddie Wilson, fifty-six. A seventh, Derek Maxwell Sr, sixty-four, was also named in the case.
He was tried in Brazil, Indiana, in 1999 and convicted on October 17 of six counts of murder, and sentenced to 360 years. The prosecution's own estimate of the true figure was around 130. He died in prison of natural causes on September 24, 2017. The case is one of the earliest in which a formal statistical analysis of shift patterns was the thing that opened a healthcare killing investigation, and it is now cited in arguments about the limits of exactly that method.