The Most Infamous Serial Killer Nurses

It's safe to say that there are not many people who enjoy going to the hospital. There are not many who look forward to retirement in a nursing home or assisted living facility, either, and there are definitely not many who want to spend their final days in a clinical environment surrounded by strangers taking care of their most basic biological functions. That's a super depressing way to start, and it's only going to get worse.

Patricia Pearson is the author of "When She Was Bad: How and Why Women Get Away with Murder," and she estimates (via The Walrus) that in the decades since 1970, more than 2,600 nursing home and hospital deaths can be associated with the work of a serial killer. Those same decades have seen the arrest and conviction of around 90 of these killers, and that's more than a few each year.

Some kill because they like it, some because they can, and some believe they're doing the patient a favor by putting an end to their suffering. Regardless of motive, it can be incredibly hard to prove a nurse (or doctor) is killing by giving the wrong meds, incorrect dosing, or even just sort of administering a lethal dose of something seemingly harmless — like insulin. She says: "Like the red-light district and the lonely highway, institutional care settings are prime hunting grounds for the modern serial killer." Serial killers like these.

Texas Monthly says that it was 1981 when a pediatric nurse named Suzanna Maldonado went to her bosses at the Bexar County Hospital with concerns that had been circulating for a while. Children in the ICU weren't just dying, they were dying when one nurse in particular was working — and there were so many that it started to be known as the Death Shift.

When investigations finally started in earnest, it was found that there was no explanation for the high number of fatalities on Genene Jones's shift — but there was no proof that she was to blame, either, and it was possible to argue that children were just succumbing to bizarre complications. A lot. Amid the upheaval at Bexar, Jones quit and went to work with a pediatrician in another part of Texas. The high death rate went with her, and when a small-town pediatrician's office was suddenly seeing one sick and dying child after the other, it was a red flag that couldn't be overlooked anymore.

Jones's conviction for the death of one child and the attempted murder of another came in 1984, and according to USA Today, there was — at the time — a mandatory release law that very nearly saw her walk free in 2018. New evidence was brought, and five new murder charges were filed, though, and she was given another life sentence. It's unknown how many children she killed, but the Bexar County District Attorney's office suspects the number is somewhere around 60.

Jane Toppan, says the New England Historical Society, had a horrible start to life. Born to a poor immigrant family sometime in the mid-1850s, she wasn't yet a teen when she was dropped off at an orphanage. After, that is, her mother succumbed to tuberculosis, and her father — driven mad with grief — sewed his own eyes shut.

Raised in a well-to-do home as an indentured servant, she eventually ended up at the Cambridge Hospital, where she trained to become a nurse. Known as "Jolly Jane" for her bubbly nature, it was early on in her career that her supervisors became concerned by the fact that she seemed to like autopsies a little too much. That's about the same time she started experimenting with drugging patients and then getting in bed with them as they fell unconscious, a pastime that escalated into murder.

Victims included multiple landlords, friends, a foster sister, housekeepers, would-be lovers who scorned her... it's a long list. Her go-to method was poisoning with morphine, strychnine, or atropine, and after she was arrested, law enforcement found that her motives were just as varied. Sometimes people annoyed her, sometimes it was for the money, and when she killed her patients, she laid next to them for a "sexual thrill." In 1902, she confessed that she'd killed somewhere between 31 and 100 people. Declared insane, she spent the next 36 years at the Taunton State Hospital and died in 1938.

It happens a lot: Someone is arrested for a series of crimes, and those closest to them say they suspected nothing. It's kind of a trope at this point, but according to The New York Times, it doesn't apply to Charles Cullen. Cullen's life was described as "a trail of signal flares," including his four stays in psychiatric facilities, and his tendency to spend his nights chasing cats.

Still, after graduating from nursing school in 1987, he got his first job in the field — and then, over the following decades, he went from job to job. The reasons for his terminations were always a little iffy, and it wasn't until 1993 that he was accused of murder for the first time. The accuser was the son of the victim, a woman who died after a nurse gave her a lethal dose of a chemical called digoxin. Cullen was pointed out as the nurse in question, but when the victim's autopsy didn't find anything suspicious, he was allowed to keep doing what he was doing.

By the time Cullen was finally arrested, he had been working as a nurse for an almost unthinkable 16 years. He confessed to killing between 10 and 20 people at each one of his many, many jobs, and CNN says that when the judge gave victims' families the chance to confront him in court, it took four hours. He was given 11 life sentences and ruled eligible for parole after serving 397 years.

It's unknown how many people Orville Lynn Majors killed, but according to the BBC, he was convicted of the murders of six, but was believed to have killed up to 130. (To stress just how devastating that number is, 147 total people died at the hospital during the time he worked there — and only 17 weren't thought to be associated with him.) The murders that were definitively connected to him occurred at the Vermillion County Hospital in Illinois, where he worked from 1993 to 1995. During that period, The New York Times says the death rate in Majors' unit increased from 31 or fewer per year to 120 per year, so needless to say, it was pretty obvious that something was up. Especially, they note, when four patients died suddenly on the same day.

Investigations found that patients seemed to die when Majors was with them, and it was later found that he used a cocktail of potassium chloride and epinephrine to stop patients' hearts. Victims' family members testified that sometimes, he even administered the injections while they were standing there, leaving their loved ones to die before them.

Majors was found guilty and sentenced to 360 years in jail, but he would serve only a fraction of that time. He died in 2017 after suffering from undisclosed heart issues.

Beverley Allitt is one of a number of serial killers to be given the moniker "Angel of Death," and according to Biography, she has the dubious honor of being one of the UK's most infamous killers.

After starting off going from doctor to doctor and hospital to hospital for her own treatment — most of which was unnecessary and done because she liked the attention she got after surgery — Allitt quickly became well-known throughout local medical circles for what was believed to be her Munchausen's syndrome. (That, says the NHS, is when a person makes themselves sick or pretends to be sick in order to get the attention they crave.) When looking for medical treatment for herself wasn't gratifying enough anymore, she decided to become a nurse.

After struggling through her nursing courses, she was taken on by an outrageously understaffed hospital in 1991. It was there that she claimed her first victim, a 7-month-old who was hospitalized with a chest infection. Her second — an 11-year-old with cerebral palsy — died within weeks, and other suspicious deaths followed. Autopsies and causes of death raised no alarms, though, and by the time she was charged in late 1991, it was for four deaths and 11 attempted murders. She was ultimately convicted and sentenced to 13 life terms (via the Independent).

In 2018, there was a major problem at Lufkin, Texas's DaVita Dialysis Center. Patients were going in for their regular dialysis treatment, and then, they were suffering massive heart attacks and dying. The scale was unprecedented, and according to Oxygen, they saw 30 incidents in the month of April alone.

They knew early that something was horribly wrong, and consultants were sent in on April 2 to investigate the two deaths that had already happened. It wasn't until April 28, though, that two patients reported seeing a nurse named Kimberly Saenz prepping a bleach cleaning solution, and then not sanitizing the floors, but injecting that solution into patients' running dialysis machines.

Saenz initially said that she was just cleaning the lines, but she was first fired and then arrested. CNN says that she was ultimately found guilty of killing five patients, and that the jury didn't believe the defense that claimed she was just being blamed for deaths that weren't her fault at all. The murder charges — along with other counts of aggravated assault — resulted in a life sentence with no chance of getting out on parole.

Kristen Gilbert, says The Boston Globe, wasn't just a nurse at the Northampton Department of Veterans Affairs Medical Center, she was one of the most popular nurses. But it was only after her arrest that authorities realized that she had been present for around half of the 350 deaths that had occurred at the hospital in her seven years of working there. Unlikely to be a coincidence? They thought so, too, especially in the case of Kenneth Cutting. Cutting was one of her patients in February of 1996, and according to the Associated Press, all kinds of alarm bells went off when she asked her bosses to leave work early if he were to die. And then — he died. And yes, she left early.

That was about the time that officials started looking into what they were realizing was a high number of suspicious deaths, and although Gilbert left her position at about the same time, fellow nurse Kathy Rix had already figured out — and would later testify, says The New York Times — that Gilbert had been using epinephrine to kill.

Gilbert went to trial, and according to CBS News, she narrowly avoided the death penalty in conjunction with her convictions for three counts of first-degree murder, one count of second-degree murder, and two counts of attempted murder. Instead, she was given a life sentence.