Vickie Dawn Jackson

Victims

1 conviction, on a NO-CONTEST plea to a single count of capital murder covering ten deaths, which is not an admission of guilt and which she entered while maintaining her innocence. Ten bodies were exhumed and all tested positive for mivacurium chloride. Nearly two dozen deaths were reported at the hospital in the period when five to ten would have been normal, and investigators have suggested she may be responsible for as many as twenty-four; none beyond the ten is established

Years active

2000 - 2001

Location

Nocona, Montague County, Texas, USA

Method

Poisoning (injecting with mivacurium chloride)

Status

Fired from Nocona General Hospital with her husband on February 20, 2001, after a missing vial of Mivacron triggered an internal investigation. Ten patients who had died there were exhumed in June 2001, and all ten tested positive for mivacurium chloride after the FBI devised a test to detect it in bodily fluids; the manner of death for all ten was changed to homicide. She was arrested on July 16, 2002 and indicted two days later over the ten deaths. Her first trial ended in a MISTRIAL on March 14, 2005 over a prosecutor’s remark in opening argument. As her second trial began she pleaded NO CONTEST to capital murder on October 3, 2006, and because a no-contest plea is not an admission of guilt the state still had to put its case to the judge; she was sentenced on October 5, 2006 to life with parole eligibility after forty years. She waived her right to appeal in open court. Her lawyer said she MAINTAINED HER INNOCENCE and pleaded to keep her adult daughter, who was on the state’s witness list, from testifying against her. In July 2015 she returned to the Montague County court seeking a NEW TRIAL, her lawyers challenging the syringe found in her household rubbish, which had since been destroyed; seven witnesses gave evidence. She is held at the Christina Melton Crain Unit in Gatesville, Texas. No motive has ever been established.

She was born Vickie Dawn Carson in Montague County, Texas, in 1966, and worked the night shift at Nocona General Hospital, a small rural hospital in a town of about three thousand people. Deaths there clustered between December 2000 and February 2001, at one point eight in eleven days, which even in a bad flu season the staff found difficult to explain.

In February 2001 the hospital pharmacist reported to the State Board of Pharmacy that at least ten vials of Mivacron had gone missing. Mivacurium chloride is not a controlled substance, and vials taken from the crash carts had been replaced without questions. Ten bodies were exhumed from June 2001; the FBI had to develop a test for the drug in body fluids before they could be read, and all ten came back positive. The manner of death for each was changed to homicide. Jackson and her husband had been dismissed from the hospital in February 2001, and she was arrested on July 16, 2002, working in the deli of a grocery store in Bowie.

Her first trial ended in a mistrial in March 2005 over a prosecutor's remark in the opening statement. On October 3, 2006, as the second was beginning, she pleaded no contest to capital murder. The state still had to prove its case, since a no contest plea admits nothing, and on October 5 she received the automatic life sentence, the prosecution not having sought death, with parole eligibility after forty years. She has never admitted the killings, and in 2015 sought a new trial on the ground that the syringe found in the rubbish at her house had since been destroyed.

Investigators have said publicly that as many as twenty-four deaths at the hospital may have been hers. Ten is the number the conviction covers. No motive was ever established, though several of the ten were people who had slighted her or her family, and one was her estranged husband's grandfather.