The Infamous Mass Baby Killer Nurse Murdered 60 Infants in the 1970s and 1980s
Genene Jones, the infamous mass baby killer nurse, was finally, and for the last time, brought to Justice in 2020 after a long chain of events leading to her conviction, release, and re-imprisonment. She is known for 2 confirmed, and likely up to 60 unconfirmed, murders of infants in her care throughout the 1970s and 1980s.
A Slippery Slope:
Jones was born in 1950 in Texas and was adopted by the owner of a nightclub and his wife. She worked as a beautician for some time, before attending nursing school in the 1970s. From 1968 to 1974 she was married to her high school sweetheart with whom she had a child during this time. The two divorced but had another child together after they reconciled. She was married a second time, to a young nurse assistant, shortly before her indictment. He filed for divorce not long after.
During her tenure as a licensed vocational nurse in the pediatric intensive care unit at what is now the University Hospital of San Antonio, an improbable number of children under her care died. The hospital, in an effort not to get sued, had all of its LVNs resign, to be replaced with exclusively registered nurses. After that, the hospital did not pursue any more investigations into the matter. Proving murder in a setting where children were already severely ill was too hard a task for prosecutors at the time. The surgeon presiding over the hospital’s internal investigation made an excuse for the hospital’s failure to alert authorities, saying that if the kids were sick enough to be in pediatric intensive care, they were sick enough to die.
Jones moved on to take a position at a pediatric clinic in Kerrville. While there, she was charged with poisoning 6 children. The office’s doctor found a succinylcholine bottle with two puncture marks in the drug storage, to which only she and Joes were allowed access. The bottle, which looked full, turned out on further investigation to be heavily diluted with water; only approximately 20% of the contents were succinylcholine. But what exactly is succinylcholine? Succinylcholine is a powerful, short-acting paralytic, which paralyzes all skeletal and respiratory muscles. In small children, this chemical will without fail cause cardiac arrest due to deoxygenation from lack of breathing.
When questioned about this in court, Jones’s excuse for this was attempting to speed up the creation of a pediatric intensive care unit in Kerrville. In fact, she denied ever killing any of the children in her care and pleaded innocent to the murder of Chelsea McClellan, for which she was ultimately sentenced to 99 years in prison.
Conviction:
Jones was sentenced to 99 years in prison in 1985 for the killing of 15 month-old Chelsea McClellan by means of succinylcholine. She was sentenced to an additional 60 years, later that year for almost killing Rolando Santos with heparin.
Five years later, when up for her first parole review, she was required to admit guilt before the Texas Board of Pardons and Paroles considered her release. She refused to do so, maintaining her statement of innocence. Jones was denied parole, as well as every three years since, until 2014. All the while, Jones insisted that she was imprisoned unlawfully, at least, to varying degrees. Her first admission of guilt came in 1998 during an interview with state parole officer Marcy Ferguson. During this interview, she confessed to killing both McClellan and Santos. Then, as she was about to leave the interview, she came back and sat down, asking that it be stated for the record that ‘she really killed those babies’. Ferguson began to look through the files when Jones stopped her to tell her she wouldn’t find their records there. Jones had in fact confessed to the murder of children for whose deaths she hadn’t been charged.
She, and many others, expected her to spend her life in prison. However, in 2018, she was scheduled to be released because of a Texas Law passed in 1977, which prevented overcrowding of prisons. To avoid this release, Jones was arrested in 2017 for the murder of 11 month-old Joshua Sawyer. If she were released based on the overcrowding law’s coverage of her original conviction, she would only have served one-third of her original sentence. In 2020, she pleaded guilty to the murder of Joshua Sawyer and was sentenced to life in prison. She is expected to stay there until she is at least 87.
Final Thoughts:
It’s amazing and appalling that Jones managed to get away with so many unconfirmed murders when she was already charged with one in the same incident. For the hospital itself to be the source of the cover-up, and over their greed, is unthinkable. These are the people we entrust our sick and injured to and they are just as likely to hide the injustices of their employees as to fulfill their commitment to medicine. Hopefully, Jones faces the full force of Justice, and no more state laws or individuals conspire to set her free.