On the night of October 11, 1987, Gerolamo Kucich, a seventy-three-year-old visitor from Yugoslavia staying with family in Dix Hills, lay in a bed at Good Samaritan Hospital in West Islip, Long Island, when a male nurse came in and put something into his IV line. Almost at once he felt his body going numb and his breathing failing. He managed to press the call button, and when help came he said the man had put something in his tube. A nurse kept his urine sample. It contained Pavulon, a paralyzing drug used in anesthesia that no one had prescribed for him. The only person on the floor who matched his description was Richard Angelo, twenty-five, an intensive care nurse on the night shift.
Angelo was born on Long Island on August 29, 1962. His mother taught economics and his father was a guidance counselor in the Lindenhurst schools. He graduated from St. John the Baptist Diocesan High School in 1980, took the two-year nursing program at Farmingdale State College as a well-regarded honor student, and was known in Lindenhurst as an Eagle Scout and a volunteer fireman. He had only recently finished his training when he joined Good Samaritan's intensive care unit.
Suspended and then arrested, by most accounts on November 15, 1987, he admitted poisoning other patients with Pavulon and Anectine, both of which paralyze the muscles of breathing. He described feeling inadequate and wanting to prove himself: he would inject a patient, wait for the crisis, and then arrive to lead the resuscitation in front of his colleagues. A defense psychiatrist told the court that his actions grew out of a crushing sense of inadequacy; the prosecution's experts called it a calculated hunger for glory.
Investigators exhumed thirty-two recently dead patients and found Pavulon in six of them: John Stanley Fisher, seventy-five, of Amityville, who died on September 8; Milton Poultney, seventy-five, of Lindenhurst, on September 16; Joseph Francis O'Neill, seventy-nine, of West Islip, on September 21; Joan Hayes, fifty-three, on October 5; Frederick LaGois, sixty-five, of Babylon, on October 9; and Anthony Greene, fifty-seven, of North Babylon, on October 16, five days after Kucich raised the alarm. Suspicion reached further. Estimates of the patients he harmed during his months at the hospital run from about ten to more than thirty-five, but the medical examiner could not tie most of those deaths to the injections.
Unable to raise the $50,000 bail, or unwilling to, for fear for his safety, he spent more than a year in the Suffolk County jail awaiting trial. The trial lasted eight weeks, with thirty-two witnesses and more than a hundred exhibits. On December 14, 1989, the jury convicted him of second-degree murder in the deaths of Poultney and Greene, of second-degree manslaughter for Fisher and criminally negligent homicide for LaGois, and of six counts of assault, among them two of first-degree assault on Kucich. It acquitted him over O'Neill and Hayes, although both bodies held Pavulon.
On January 24, 1990, a Suffolk County judge sentenced him to sixty-one and a third years to life, which state law capped at fifty years to life. He has been reported at Sing Sing and at the Great Meadow Correctional Facility. He becomes eligible for parole in 2049, when he will be eighty-six or eighty-seven.