Everybody in the two-stoplight town of Nocona, Texas, seemed to know Vickie Dawn Jackson, the soft-spoken licensed vocational nurse who worked nights at Nocona General Hospital. In the winter of 2000 and 2001 patients on her shifts began to die: elderly people, most of them admitted for problems that were not expected to kill them, who stopped breathing in the night. At one point eight died in eleven days, more than the hospital would normally see in months. When investigators later exhumed ten of them, every body held traces of mivacurium chloride, a paralytic drug used before a breathing tube is inserted, which stops the patient's breathing unless someone breathes for them.
Jackson was born Vickie Dawn Carson on February 13, 1966; most records place her birth in Montague County, though one account says she was born in Indiana and moved to Nocona, a town of about three thousand people, as a teenager. She began working in health care as a nurse's aide as a teenager and was licensed as a vocational nurse in 1989. She worked in nursing homes and hospitals in North Texas, much of it caring for elderly patients, before she took the night-shift job at Nocona General. She had married three times.
Her family had a different picture of her from the one Nocona knew. Her second husband, Leroy Carson, and their daughter, Jennifer Carson, told the Associated Press before the 2005 trial that at home she had been angry and verbally abusive, while to everyone else she seemed caring and compassionate. "I don't know if she did it or not, but she's perfectly capable of it," her daughter said.
The deaths ran from December 2000 to February 2001. The hospital administrator, Charles E. Norris, took a discrepancy to the pharmacist: vials of Mivacron, the brand name of mivacurium, were missing from the stock, a loss first put down to poor inventory; more than twenty would eventually be counted gone. When the deaths were traced to a single shift, he had the drug locked away for supervisors only and called the police. The drug was not a controlled substance, and vials taken from crash carts had been replaced without questions being asked. The hospital reported the losses and began its own investigation, and on February 20, 2001, Jackson and her husband were dismissed. A syringe with traces of the drug was later found in the trash at her home.
From June 2001 investigators exhumed ten of the patients who had died. The FBI had to develop a test to detect it in bodily fluids before the results could be read. All ten were positive, and the manner of death for each was changed to homicide. The ten were between their sixties and one hundred years old. Among them was the grandfather of Jackson's third husband. Their names were kept out of the court record under state privacy law, and published lists of them disagree. At least two other patients were injected and survived. Donnelly Reid, sixty-one, a polio patient, sued, saying Jackson had injected something into his IV line and another nurse had saved him; he died of pneumonia two months later. The children of Boyd Bruce Burnett, eighty-seven, who died on December 24, 2000, sued too, alleging she had injected him with a drug no one had prescribed. Exhumations of more than twenty patients ran across North Texas and into Oklahoma, in an investigation shared by local police, the Texas Rangers and the FBI.
Jackson was arrested on July 16, 2002, while working in the deli of a grocery store in Bowie, and charged in Montague County with capital murder covering four of the deaths; she was held on $2 million bond. In January 2004 six more deaths were charged and the bond went to $6 million.
Three days after her arrest she was indicted in a second county, for something much smaller. In Cooke County she was charged with stealing $5,000 in cash from her employer, Wal-Mart. She had confessed to the police and led them to the money in her home, and from her arraignment she told her court-appointed lawyer that she was guilty and wanted to plead. On August 23, 2002 she did, and was given a year in state jail. Her capital defense lawyers then tried to undo it. A felony conviction, they pointed out, meant she could never ask a jury in the murder case for probation, even if it convicted her only of a lesser murder charge. Her theft lawyer testified that he had not thought about the murder case at all, and the Montague County district attorney said that he would not have entered that plea himself. In June 2004 the Second Court of Appeals in Fort Worth held that the lawyer had failed her, but upheld the conviction, because she had never testified or put her own sworn account into evidence to show she would have gone to trial instead.
Her first trial, in February 2005, was on the capital charges for two of the deaths, and it ended in a mistrial in March after the prosecutor, Ralph Guerrero, told jurors in his opening that vials of Mivacron had been found at her home and suggested that failed marriages and the loss of custody of her children had pushed her to kill. Because nearly everyone in Nocona had been touched by the case, the retrial was moved first to neighboring Archer County and then almost three hundred miles away, to San Angelo. Many Nocona residents planned to drive out to hear the case at last.
They never heard it. On October 3, 2006, just before jury selection, Jackson told the judge that she wished to plead no contest. District Attorney Jack McGaughey, who had planned to call fifty-eight witnesses, said he had never been so surprised by a case in his life, and that the result was as good as he could have gotten. Because a no contest plea is not an admission of guilt, the state still put evidence before the judge, and at the brief sentencing hearing on October 5 FBI Special Agent David Burns suggested that the victims had been "the kind of patients who needed more care," and that this made Jackson angry. Prosecutors had not sought death, and District Judge Roger Towery sentenced her to life in prison, with parole eligibility after forty years. She waived her right to appeal.
Her lawyer, Bruce Martin, said she had entered the plea because her adult daughter was on the state's witness list. "She has never admitted guilt and she was never convicted by a jury," he said. "And her daughter never had to testify against her. Those things meant something to her." Through him she issued a statement asserting her innocence and expressing sympathy for the families. No motive was ever established; one theory, never proven, is that some of the patients were chosen because of slights she or her family had suffered in Nocona.
In a handwritten petition dated March 18, 2014, she asked the court to appoint a lawyer to help her seek further DNA testing of the syringe taken from her trash, which had been tested for the drug and for fingerprints and had since been destroyed. With the attorney Julia Bella representing her, she was back in a Montague County courtroom in July 2015 for an evidentiary hearing on a new trial. Seven witnesses testified, among them two of her former defense lawyers, the sheriff at the time of the murders, Nocona's police chief, a former investigator for the 97th District Court and a doctor who worked with the hospital. No new trial has been reported. Investigators have said she may have been responsible for as many as twenty-four deaths at the hospital; the conviction covers ten. As of 2021 she was held at the Christina Melton Crain Unit in Gatesville, Texas, with her earliest parole date in 2042.