In 1995 Dawn Stirek, a nursing supervisor at Vermillion County Hospital in Clinton, Indiana, north of Terre Haute, grew worried enough about the deaths on her wards to check the time cards. The fifty-six-bed hospital, with a four-bed intensive care unit, had averaged about twenty-six deaths a year; now it was over a hundred, nearly one in three patients admitted. Some died of erratic heartbeats after respiratory arrest, the reverse of the usual order, and some who had been doing well suddenly declined. Her colleagues had been joking about when the next patient would die. The cards showed that one licensed practical nurse, Orville Lynn Majors, had been on duty for 130 of the 147 deaths between 1993 and 1995. She told hospital officials, who called the Indiana State Police.
Majors was born in Linton, Indiana, on April 24, 1961. Caring for his elderly grandmother as a teenager led him into nursing, and he graduated from the Nashville Memorial School of Practical Nursing in 1989 and went to work at Vermillion County Hospital. After a spell in a better-paid job in Tennessee he came back in 1993. He was one of the most popular nurses there, especially with elderly patients, and his evaluations were glowing. After the investigation began he was suspended, the state nursing board suspended his license for five years for giving emergency drugs and working in intensive care without a doctor, and the hospital fired him.
Investigators found that when he was on duty a patient died every twenty-three hours, weekdays and weekends alike, and when he was off, one every 551 hours; a patient was forty-two times more likely to die on his shifts. Majors denied everything, ran a pet store in Linton, hired a lawyer and went on talk shows. His publicity brought calls from relatives who remembered their loved ones coding or dying within minutes of an injection from him, sometimes before he had left the room. The electrophysiologist Eric Prystowsky, asked to study the patients' widening heart patterns, said only a potassium overdose, a sudden heart attack or a large lung clot could explain them. In September 1995 fifteen patients who had been seen receiving injections were exhumed, and none showed a heart attack or clot. A former roommate remembered vials of potassium chloride and epinephrine in their house, and a search found vials traced to the hospital.
He was arrested in December 1997 and charged with seven murders, though investigators believed he had killed 100 to 130 people; prosecutors kept to seven so as not to overwhelm the jury. Seventy-nine witnesses testified at his 1999 trial, some saying he hated old people and thought they "should be gassed." On October 17, 1999, he was convicted of six murders, of Mary Ann Alderson, Dorothea Hixon, Cecil Smith, Luella Hopkins, Margaret Hornick and Freddie Wilson; the jury deadlocked on the seventh, Derek Maxwell Sr., because he had taken longer to die. Judge Ernest Yelton called the crimes "diabolical acts" and "a parallel of evil at its most wicked," said "the maximum sentence is the minimum sentence in this case," and imposed six consecutive terms of sixty years.
The families of eighty patients sued the hospital, and most settled through a state patients' fund; the hospital was fined $80,000, briefly shut when it lost its accreditation, and was later taken over by Union Hospital of Terre Haute. The Indiana Supreme Court upheld the verdict in 2002. Majors died of heart failure at Indiana State Prison in Michigan City on September 24, 2017, at fifty-six.