Orville Lynn Majors was a licensed practical nurse in the intensive care unit of Vermillion County Hospital in Clinton, a small city in west-central Indiana near the Illinois line. He worked there from 1993 to 1995. In those years deaths in the four-bed unit rose sharply. An internal check in early 1995 found that Majors had been present for more of the deaths than any other nurse, and the hospital called in the police.
The investigation that followed lasted almost three years. On December 29, 1997, Majors was arrested and charged with murder. At a trial in Brazil, Indiana, in the fall of 1999, a jury found him guilty of murdering six patients and could not agree on a seventh. Judge Ernest Yelton sentenced him to 360 years. Majors always denied that he had harmed anyone. He died at the Indiana State Prison in Michigan City on September 24, 2017, at the age of 56.
Majors came from Linton, Indiana. He graduated from Linton-Stockton High School. His father worked in the coal mines and lost a leg in an accident there, according to a Linton businessman who knew the family and spoke to the Greene County Daily World in 2009. Majors was later known in the Indiana press as Orville Lynn Majors Jr.
Little else about his early life has been reliably reported. He trained as a licensed practical nurse, and by 1993 he was working in the intensive care unit at the hospital in Clinton. In a 1998 opinion on his licensing case, a federal appeals court allowed that he "may have been a competent nurse."
People in Linton remembered him later as polite. The owner of a downtown restaurant told the Daily World that Majors had been a frequent customer and that he was friends with his parents; many of his patrons, he said, never believed the charges, while others were not surprised. A rural resident who knew Majors said the talk of an "Angel of Death," the name the press gave him during the investigation, "made the town crazy."
Vermillion County Hospital was a small county hospital with an intensive care unit of four beds. According to the federal appeals court, about 354 patients a year were admitted to the unit in the four years before 1994, and an average of 27 of them died each year. In 1994, 100 of the 351 patients admitted to the unit died. Many of them were elderly.
A 1997 newspaper report, summarized by the Daily World in 2009, put the yearly number of deaths in the unit at 24 to 31 in the early 1990s and at 101 in 1994, while admissions stayed about the same. Unusual deaths had first been noticed in 1993, soon after Majors was hired, the Daily World reported.
Co-workers later told investigators that Majors's personality changed in July 1994, that he became more irritable and that he criticized patients' families. A man inspecting the unit for safety in November 1994 recalled that Majors, alone on duty, told him he was waiting for a woman to die. Court documents described by the Daily World also pointed to drug use: a friend told police that Majors injected himself with methamphetamine. Two former friends said he had long disliked older people. One of them recalled him saying in the mid-1980s that they should all be gassed.
In early 1995 a registered nurse at the hospital set out to compare staff attendance charts with the patient deaths. Her analysis, done in two days and described by the federal appeals court as rough, found that Majors had been present for more deaths than any other nurse, almost twice as many as the next. On March 7, 1995, she showed it to the hospital's chief executive, John Ling. Two days later Ling suspended Majors with pay, without giving him a reason, and later asked the police to investigate.
Word of the suspension spread. Anonymous letters to a local newspaper accused Majors of being a "Dr. Krevorkian" (the spelling in the court's opinion) and accused the hospital of a cover-up, and a relative of one of the hospital's nurses wrote a similar letter.
The investigation formally began in March 1995, the Indiana Supreme Court later wrote.
The Indiana attorney general opened her own inquiry, found evidence of misconduct and asked the State Board of Nursing to consider suspending Majors's license. Indiana law allowed the board to suspend a license for 90 days without notice when a nurse's practice posed "a clear and immediate danger to the public health and safety."
On April 27, 1995, the board held a hearing on that basis. Majors was not notified, although the news media were. The board heard the attendance analysis, statistics, testimony from nurses and testimony from the relative of a patient who had died, and it voted to suspend his license for 90 days. Ling then made his suspension from the hospital unpaid.
The attorney general filed a complaint seeking to revoke the license permanently. It accused Majors of responsibility for patient deaths and, in the alternative, of performing tasks "without direction or supervision from a registered nurse or doctor." A hearing in September 1995 renewed the suspension for another 90 days; the board's official reason was what it called his "unsupervised working habits." After that hearing the attorney general dropped the allegations about patient deaths.
Majors fought back in federal court. In November 1995, days after the board set a revocation hearing for December 18, he filed a civil rights suit against the attorney general, the board, Ling and the hospital's trustees, claiming bias and challenging the summary suspension law. On December 18, 1995, a federal judge refused to block the board. Later that day the board, with two members dissenting, took away his license indefinitely, for at least five years, essentially for working without proper supervision. Majors asked a state court in Marion County to reverse the order. The federal courts dismissed his suit, and on July 23, 1998, the United States Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit upheld the dismissal, finding the evidence of bias "essentially nonexistent."
The hospital had fired him in 1995. While the investigation went on he ran a pet shop in downtown Linton, and he later ran a small floral business, the Daily World reported.
Majors did not hide from the publicity. He said he could never kill anyone, and he went on the Montel Williams and Phil Donahue talk shows, where he faced families who accused him.
The criminal inquiry ran for about 33 months, examined 165 deaths at the hospital from 1993 to 1995 and cost the state more than $2 million, according to the Daily World; the federal appeals court, writing in 1998, put it at 34 months and more than a million dollars. Investigators estimated it at 90,000 hours of work. About 15 bodies were exhumed. The exhumations were carried out to test drug levels, a 2017 news report said.
An epidemiologist, Steven Lamm, studied the figures and found that a patient in the unit was nearly 43 times more likely to die when Majors was on duty than when he was not. Court records showed one death for every 23.1 hours of his shifts, against one for every 551.6 hours when he was off, the Daily World reported.
Police interviewed a former roommate of Majors. He testified at trial that Majors often said the elderly "should be gassed," and that he had seen a vial of potassium chloride in the garage they shared. The roommate had an immunity agreement with the state, which was conditioned on a polygraph test; the result supported his denial that he was involved. Search warrants were served on the house where Majors had lived and on a van he drove, and police found bottles of potassium chloride in both places, the Indiana Supreme Court recorded.
The investigation found that Majors was present at the sudden and unexpected deaths of seven patients, and that no one else was present at all seven. Investigators concluded that he had killed them by injecting potassium chloride.
Majors was arrested on December 29, 1997, and charged in Indiana state court with six counts of murder, the Seventh Circuit noted in its 1998 opinion. He pleaded not guilty and was held without bail, NPR reported. By the time of trial the state had charged seven counts.
The prosecutor, Mark Greenwell, said Majors had "played God." His defense lawyer, I. Marshall Pinkus, argued that the case against him was circumstantial. In an affidavit filed in the case, the Indiana State Police detective Frank Turchi recorded the account of a woman who said she had watched Majors give her mother, Dorothea Hixon, an injection shortly before she died.
The trial was moved out of Vermillion County to Brazil, in Clay County, and was heard by Judge Ernest Yelton of the Clay Circuit Court. The jurors were brought in from Miami County and were sequestered. Testimony lasted about six weeks. As opening statements were about to begin, the defense argued that Majors was being made a scapegoat, Indiana Public Radio reported.
The Indiana Supreme Court later wrote that the strongest evidence against Majors came from medical staff, experts and the patients' own families, who established that six of the patients died unnatural deaths from potassium chloride poisoning and that Majors was the only common link. A witness testified that Majors had admitted killing patients at the hospital. The defense called medical experts who said the patients had died naturally, of the illnesses that brought them to the hospital. Majors did not testify. Statistical studies linking him to many more deaths were kept out of the trial by the judge.
Because the jury was kept together for weeks, the judge and the sheriff arranged outings for it. During the second week of trial the jurors asked to go fishing one evening, and the Clay County sheriff hosted them, with officers and bailiffs present; a second picnic followed two weeks later. One juror's birthday fell on the day of the first outing, and the judge arranged for a cake. These arrangements later became the heart of Majors's appeal.
On October 17, 1999, after more than three days of deliberation, the jury found Majors guilty on six counts of murder. It deadlocked on the seventh, and the court declared a mistrial on that count. The verdict came on his mother's 61st birthday, the Daily World noted ten years later. Reporting for Indiana Public Radio, Tom Scheck said the judge dismissed the seventh count.
Judge Yelton sentenced Majors on November 15, 1999, in a hearing that lasted less than an hour. Three relatives of the patients asked for the longest possible sentence as Majors sat a few feet from the witness stand. The wife of Derek Maxwell spoke to him directly. "Mr. Majors, if you don't want the fruit of sin, then stay out of the devil's orchard," she said.
His lawyer, Carolyn Rader, offered no evidence in mitigation, saying she did not think it would make any difference. The judge called the crimes diabolical because the patients had come to the hospital to be cured. "It is the judgment of this court that the maximum penalty is the minimally reasonable sentence in this case," he said. He imposed the maximum, a 60-year term on each count, to be served one after another, for 360 years in all. He then read the names of the six patients: Mary Ann Alderson, Dorothea Hixon (whose name the AP report spelled Dixon), Luella Hopkins, Freddie Dale Wilson, Derek Maxwell and Cecil Smith, and wished them peace.
With six murder convictions, the AP reported, Majors became the most prolific killer held in Indiana's prison system.
Little is known about the six patients as people. They were patients of a small county hospital, most of them elderly. The Daily World gave the ages of the patients in the case as ranging from 56 to 89 and said they had been in stable condition before they died suddenly. Three relatives spoke at the sentencing. The granddaughter of Cecil Smith told WTHR that she was sad because she could not imagine how a human being, a nurse or anyone else, could do such a thing. The husband of another patient, Ethel Rozsa, told WTHR that "closure is just around the corner and that finally we could close the door on all that suffering."
For many other families there was no verdict at all. "It's been five years of hell," the son of a patient who died at the hospital said in 1999; his father was one of dozens of patients whose deaths were never resolved. "There's 165 of us who don't know, probably never will know why or the reason behind their family members death," he told WTHR.
Majors appealed directly to the Indiana Supreme Court, represented by the state public defender's office. His lawyers did not challenge the medical evidence. They argued that the jury had been mismanaged and that jurors had misbehaved.
They pointed to a message the judge had passed to one juror, through a bailiff, cautioning her about her facial expressions; to a juror who drank two beers, delivered to her hotel room by a bailiff, after a day of deliberations; to the fishing trip and picnics with the sheriff and his officers, and to the birthday cake and a bottle or two of wine a juror received; and to jurors' comments about the lawyers' looks and questioning. They also asked to question the jurors, the alternates and the bailiffs under oath, and challenged the polygraph testimony about the roommate.
On August 14, 2002, the court affirmed the convictions in an opinion by Chief Justice Shepard, with all four other justices concurring. It found no error in the caution to the juror. There was no sign that the juror who drank the beers was affected when deliberations resumed the next morning, and nothing showed that the outings with law enforcement had prejudiced the jury. The comments about the lawyers were an improper attempt to attack the verdict from inside the jury room. The trial court was right to refuse juror depositions, which threaten the finality of verdicts and risk harassing jurors; the state had collected affidavits from the other jurors, and none reported drinking during deliberations, outside information or outside influence. The defense had opened the door to the polygraph testimony when it brought out the roommate's immunity deal, the court held, and in any event that testimony likely had little effect, given the medical evidence and the testimony of the families. The opinion begins: "A jury found nurse Orville Lynn Majors guilty of murdering six patients in his care."
Majors served his sentence at the Indiana State Prison in Michigan City. In 2009 the Daily World gave his earliest possible release date as July 1, 2177. He continued to maintain that he was innocent. In the month before his death he declined a WTHR reporter's request for an interview.
On Sunday, September 24, 2017, correctional officers were escorting him to a medical appointment when he began breathing heavily and became unresponsive. Prison staff gave him CPR and used a defibrillator, and LaPorte County emergency crews took him to a hospital in Michigan City, where he was pronounced dead at 5:11 p.m., the county coroner said. He was 56. Preliminary autopsy results showed heart problems, and the Indiana Department of Correction said he died of natural causes.
Survivors of about 80 patients who died while Majors worked at the hospital filed wrongful-death lawsuits, and most of them were settled through a state compensation fund, the AP reported. After the case the hospital was renamed West Central Community Hospital.
At Majors's death in 2017, Judge Yelton told WTHR that the effect on the families in Vermillion County had been "very devastating" and was still vivid. In Linton, a businessman told the Daily World in 2009 that Majors's family fell apart after the charges and moved to Kentucky.
The six convictions are the only findings of guilt. Investigators believed that Majors may have been responsible for many more deaths at the hospital, more than 100 between 1993 and 1995 by some estimates. Statistical studies linked him to as many as 130 of the 147 intensive care deaths from May 1993 to March 1995, but those studies were never tested before a jury, and no other deaths were charged. Majors denied every accusation until his death.
The record is also not consistent about which patients the verdicts covered. In the AP report of the sentencing, the judge named Mary Ann Alderson, Dorothea Hixon, Luella Hopkins, Freddie Dale Wilson, Derek Maxwell and Cecil Smith. A 2009 Greene County Daily World article listed the six patients in the case as Ethel Rozsa, Margaret Hornick, Mary Ann Alderson, Cecil Ivan Smith, Luella A. Hopkins and Freddie Dale Wilson, and a 2017 WTHR report said the jury deadlocked on the death of Cecil Smith. The Indiana Supreme Court's opinion does not name the patients. Which patient was the subject of the deadlocked count is therefore unclear.
The figures for the investigation also vary: 33 months and more than $2 million in the Daily World, 34 months and more than a million dollars in the Seventh Circuit's 1998 opinion, and "almost three years" in NPR's report at his arrest.
1993: Majors, a licensed practical nurse from Linton, is working in the intensive care unit at Vermillion County Hospital in Clinton; unusual deaths are noticed that year.
1994: 100 of 351 patients admitted to the four-bed unit die, against an average of 27 a year in the four years before.
July 1994: co-workers later say his personality changed around this time.
March 7, 1995: a registered nurse shows the chief executive her comparison of attendance charts and deaths.
March 1995: two days later Majors is suspended with pay; the police are asked to investigate.
April 27, 1995: the State Board of Nursing suspends his license for 90 days at a hearing held without notice to him.
September 1995: the suspension is renewed; the attorney general later drops the patient-death allegations from the license case.
November 1995: Majors files a federal civil rights suit.
December 18, 1995: the board takes away his license indefinitely, for at least five years.
1995 to 1997: investigators review 165 deaths; about 15 bodies are exhumed.
December 29, 1997: Majors is arrested and charged with murder; he pleads not guilty and is held without bail.
July 23, 1998: the Seventh Circuit upholds the dismissal of his federal suit.
1999: his trial is held in Brazil, Clay County, before jurors from Miami County.
October 17, 1999: the jury finds him guilty of six murders and deadlocks on a seventh count; a mistrial is declared on that count.
November 15, 1999: Judge Ernest Yelton sentences him to six consecutive 60-year terms, 360 years.
August 14, 2002: the Indiana Supreme Court affirms the convictions.
October 2009: the Daily World reports him at the Indiana State Prison, earliest possible release July 1, 2177.
September 24, 2017: Majors becomes unresponsive at the Indiana State Prison and is pronounced dead at a Michigan City hospital, aged 56; the Department of Correction gives natural causes.