Killer Nurse (8 page)

PART II

SEARCH FOR JUSTICE

Neither evil tongues, rash judgements, nor the sneers of selfish men, nor greetings where no kindness is, nor all the dreary intercourse of daily life, shall e'er prevail against us.

—WILLIAM WORDSWORTH

CHAPTER
8

THE HAND GRENADE

Sergeant Steve Abbott, Corporal Mike Shurley, and the crime scene techs stayed at DaVita until around ten thirty that night collecting all the evidence, taking pictures, and speaking with members of DaVita's hierarchy—namely, Jerry McNeill and Amy Clinton.

After hearing what DaVita had to say, Sergeant Abbott called his immediate supervisor, a lieutenant who was off that day, and then the assistant and chief of police to inform them of what he had. His supervisors didn't offer him any advice or tell him how to proceed. After all, he was the one who cleaned up the messes, not them, and this kind of situation had never come up before. Sergeant Abbott said later, “That first day we didn't know enough to know what made sense or what didn't.”

But meanwhile at DaVita, Sergeant Abbott was still finding out plenty.

Sergeant Abbott had the CSU sit in Ms. Hall's and Ms. Hamilton's chairs and take pictures of people sitting in the alleged victims' chairs. These pictures along with the measurements offered valuable insight into what kind of sight lines the witnesses could have had.

While the CSU was taking the containers and making the chart, Sergeant Abbott decided to test what he'd been told about procedures by Clinton and McNeill. He stopped an employee at random to question about the process of getting the two pails of bleach water, and policies they had to follow. The employee, who turned out to be Yazmin Santana, a PCT, told him the same thing the DaVita administrators had. Abbott specifically asked her about the practice of using a syringe to measure bleach, and Santana responded that they always used a cup to measure the bleach. She was emphatic that it was never acceptable to use a syringe to measure bleach—though she did tell him that a week earlier in a meeting, a teammate, she couldn't remember who, had suggested using a syringe. However, no one agreed that this was a proper method, and they had all agreed to continue using the measuring cups.

Santana also emphasized using a syringe to measure bleach would require one to pour the bleach into something first before drawing it into a syringe. The best thing they had for that was the measuring cup they were supposed to use to start with. So what would be the point of using a syringe?

Before Sergeant Abbott left that night, state health officials gave him a report on the blood samples taken from Ms. Risinger and Ms. Rhone—the two patients whom the witnesses claimed Saenz had injected with bleach. The report confirmed that both patients had been exposed to bleach poisoning.

Sergeant Abbott also learned that Clinton had arrived on April 2 and brought several specialists with her to inspect all aspects of the clinic. In April, Clinton spent 90 percent of her time at the clinic. After the two patients died on April 1, DaVita didn't have another documented occurrence, one they kept bloodlines on, until April 16, when Mr. Kelley coded while on the machine—likely because of all the monitors and Clinton's near constant presence. At that point, even though DaVita investigators didn't believe reuse dialyzers were causing the problems, they stopped using reuse dialyzers.

Then Clinton passed along what two employees had said to Sandy Lawrence, who was the facility administrator prior to Clinton's arrival, that it had to be an employee who was harming the patients. As badly as Clinton didn't want to believe Ms. Hall's and Ms. Hamilton's stories, in the back of her mind, she realized they now had the answer they'd been searching for.

Before the detectives left that Monday night, Clinton confirmed what Yazmin Santana had already told them: at no time were the employees—or anyone else, for that matter—supposed to use a syringe to measure bleach. There was no reason for the syringes to come in contact with bleach at all. The bleach solutions DaVita used for cleaning and disinfecting were mixed in the back, not at the patient care stations, and with abundantly available measuring cups. It didn't make any sense to try to use a syringe.

* * *

The next morning, Tuesday, April 29, Sergeant Abbott and Corporal Shurley received a call from an unexpected source, an attorney by the name of Robert Flournoy, who at that time was also the attorney for the City of Lufkin. He had a client in his office who wanted to talk to them.

The client's name raised some eyebrows with the detectives. It was Mark Kevin Saenz, Kimberly Clark Saenz's husband.

Corporal Shurley left the police department and went to the attorney's office, where he met Kevin, who told Corporal Shurley that he was in the process of filing for a divorce. The reason he'd called the meeting was to inform the police that he'd seen some Internet searches on Kim's computer that had disturbed him. Kevin told the detectives that he had found records of searches done on bleach poisoning. He also told Corporal Shurley that he didn't want to see Kim get into trouble for something that she didn't do, and Shurley assured him if his wife hadn't done anything wrong, she wouldn't get into trouble. The detectives said that Saenz continued to completely cooperate with police after the initial interview, until he began to see all the evidence piling up against her, and then he refused to cooperate anymore.

After Corporal Shurley returned to the station, the two detectives made arrangements to speak with the two eyewitnesses. The first one was Ms. Hall, the sixty-four-year-old mother of three who had worked at Memorial Hospital as a nurse's assistant for seven and a half years prior to becoming ill. She told them that she always took a book to read and sat in the same place, a corner seat in Bay B with a machine between her and Ms. Hamilton. On April 28, LVN Kim Saenz was the nurse for both Ms. Hall and Ms. Hamilton. Ms. Hall told the detectives that Saenz was always a nice person. They laughed and talked together, and they'd even discussed the Lord that day.

What caught her attention and made her stop reading was the way Saenz was acting. “She was fidgety—not acting like herself,” Ms. Hall recalled. She watched as Saenz went to the drawer of the desk at the nurses' station and took out some syringes and dropped some paper in the trash. Saenz glanced all around as if she was checking to see if anyone was observing her, then set the bleach pail on the floor. Before squatting next to it, Kim again looked around as if making sure that no one was watching her.

Ms. Hall told them that Kim then stuck the syringe in the bleach water and drew some of it up. She stood at the station a minute looking around and then walked to Ms. Marva Rhone's station and injected the bleach into her saline port. Just as Ms. Hall was wondering if she was really seeing what she thought she saw, Ms. Hamilton became very upset. She heard Ms. Hamilton say she saw something, and Ms. Hall responded, “Lord, I did, too.”

Ms. Hall told the detectives that she begged the nurses not to let Kim touch her.

Ms. Hamilton's statement was similar to Ms. Hall's. There were some minor variations because they were sitting in different places, at different distances, and had different angles. Ms. Hamilton echoed Ms. Hall's description of Kim's unusual behavior. This was what had originally captured the attention of both of them.

When Kim put the pail on the floor, Ms. Hamilton said to herself, “What is she doing?” Ms. Hall had been a dialysis patient for a year, but Ms. Hamilton had been one for eight years. She was by far more experienced than Ms. Hall, and she knew they never put anything on the floor.

In a deposition later, Ms. Hamilton related how she saw Kim pour the bleach from a Clorox bottle and she'd smelled the bleach. Both witnesses had seen her inject the bleach not only into Ms. Rhone's lines, but also into Ms. Carolyn Risinger's.

Every detective has that aha moment. For Corporal Mike Shurley, that moment came when they interviewed those two women. He said that he had an open mind going into an investigation and, as always, would let the evidence and not his preconceptions lead to guilt or innocence. He'd interviewed thousands of people by the time they talked to Ms. Hall and Ms. Hamilton, and he was leery of eyewitnesses, but what the witnesses said matched up to everything the detectives had seen and found.

Besides that, the detectives had spent an inordinate amount of time investigating the witnesses themselves—they looked to see if either Ms. Hall or Ms. Hamilton might've had an ax to grind with Saenz, if either had ever complained about her before, or said or did anything that would make them report false allegations about her. But investigators found that not only did neither of the women have any reason to lie, until this incident, they had both really liked Saenz. Far from being vindictive, Ms. Hall and Ms. Hamilton were simply stunned and scared to death to think that Saenz could've done something like that.

Another thing that helped seal the deal for Shurley: both witnesses had similar but not identical stories, which spoke volumes for their validity. Most of the time, if people collude on a story, there aren't any differences. Also, the women were absolutely positive of what they'd seen and there wasn't anything or anyone that would ever sway them from it.

Next up for the investigators was their most illuminating interview yet—Kimberly Clark Saenz.

CHAPTER
9

TELL NO LIES

In any investigation, it is imperative that investigators speak with potential suspects as soon as possible, especially when the crimes are of a serious nature. The sooner suspects are interviewed, the more likely they will speak, even with their rights read to them. In many cases, suspects—whether innocent or guilty—
want
to tell their side of the story. Often, guilty suspects believe they can spin a story in their favor, explain away things that might be incriminating, actually learn what the police have, and in some cases mislead or divert the investigators.

And in this case, the two witnesses' poor health made it even more imperative to get the suspect talking. Young, healthy witnesses don't always do well on a stand in the courtroom, but it would be a lot easier to confuse or discredit the accuracy of elderly, ill witnesses.

In any investigation there are two kinds of evidence: direct and circumstantial. TV has spent years creating misunderstandings about this. Far from being untrustworthy, “circumstantial evidence” can and usually is the most important evidence in a case. DNA, fingerprints, and other scientific evidence are all considered circumstantial evidence, and lead to the circumstances of the crime.

Say a suspect tells police he's never been in a house where someone committed a murder, but his fingerprints are inside that house and on the murder weapon. This is powerful circumstantial evidence that would lead someone to draw an inference that the suspect was actually in that house and had held the murder weapon.

Direct evidence is eyewitness testimony, and law enforcement and prosecutors actually hold less value in this type of evidence. For example, in the same scenario as above, imagine a witness saw a man enter the house where a murder occurred, and then a little later leave it. However, this time there are no fingerprints from him in the house or on the murder weapon.

In the first scenario, if the case goes to trial, it will be almost impossible for the defense to explain how the suspect's fingerprints got into a house he claims he's never been in and equally difficult to offer any legitimate reason the suspect's fingerprints are on that murder weapon.

In the second scenario, the witness saw the suspect enter and leave the house, but he never saw a crime committed, and in thousands of cases witnesses have turned out to be wrong about who or what they think they saw. Eyewitnesses are extremely susceptible to defense attorneys on cross-examinations. In many instances, witnesses can be made to look wrong or even incompetent, even when they aren't. It's a lot easier for a defense attorney to challenge a witness than it is to challenge forensic evidence.

So far in the DaVita case, Sergeant Steve Abbott and Corporal Mike Shurley had direct eyewitness testimony, but while they'd collected bloodlines and syringes that might produce some circumstantial evidence, at that point they didn't even know what to do with it, and didn't have a clue where to send it. None of the forensic labs in the United States were equipped to handle the tubing and needles and tell the investigators if what they had contained bleach.

All the two detectives really had at that point was the testimony of two elderly dialysis patients. Corporal Shurley believed the witnesses and was starting to become convinced of Saenz's guilt of the two aggravated assaults. However, Sergeant Abbott hadn't reached his aha point yet.

The detectives needed to talk to Kimberly Clark Saenz, and the sooner the better. They got her address from DaVita and found out that she lived way out deep in the piney woods of Angelina County at 2203 Green Sanders Road in a double-wide trailer that sat close to her parents' house.

On this trip to Saenz's house, the two detective supervisors began playing what Corporal Shurley termed “Devil's Advocate.” He was usually the Devil. Although he now believed in Saenz's guilt, he played the other hand. Whatever excuses Sergeant Abbott came up with, Corporal Shurley made him prove them with facts. This would go on for months and would be a key factor in revealing the investigation's strong and weak points.

On the afternoon of April 29, the detectives, aware that DaVita had fired Saenz that day, found her at home. They told her that they needed to talk with her at the police station. Whenever possible, detectives always conduct interviews with suspects at the police station, which not only gives them the benefit of videotaping what happens inside that interrogation room but keeps the suspect from getting too comfortable. People's words and actions sometimes come back to haunt them in those little interrogation rooms, and it helps to have it all on tape. The investigators didn't know it at the time but they had a perfect suspect in Saenz—one who thought she could talk her way out of things.

Sergeant Abbott and Corporal Shurley emphasized that Saenz wasn't under arrest, and even gave her the opportunity to drive her own vehicle to the station, but she decided to ride with them. She was very agreeable, and all she asked for was a couple of minutes to get her purse and arrange for someone to pick her daughter up from school.

Sergeant Abbott and Corporal Shurley went outside to wait for her in their car. No matter what the outcome of a case, there is never a perfect investigation. Every detective can look back and see things that they could have done better, or should have done differently. But if they are good, they don't make the same mistakes again.

Sergeant Abbott on hindsight said he wished he'd handled this part differently. It was taking Saenz too long to make a phone call and get her purse. Corporal Shurley even commented, “What's taking her so long?”

Sergeant Abbott and Corporal Shurley came to believe that Saenz took drugs while they were waiting in the car for her. They said that when they first approached her in Pollok, she was fine—coherent, alert, not a thing wrong with her demeanor. On the way to the station, they chatted and she even showed them a shortcut to get back to the main road that took them to Lufkin.

Corporal Shurley, the one who conducted the interview, said, “Everything was fine and then she took a nosedive.” They believe it took a while for whatever substance she'd ingested to take effect. These two veteran police supervisors had come into contact with hundreds of people who were intoxicated by alcohol and/or on drugs. They knew what they were seeing. Sergeant Abbott said, “The longer the interview went, the more rambling she became and she couldn't maintain a coherent thought.” Because of Saenz's obvious impairment, they were left with no choice but to terminate the interview. Corporal Shurley said the fact that she'd taken something to try to relax herself was a huge red flag for him—an indicator to him of her guilt. Innocent people seldom have to take drugs to relax themselves.

The interview lasted fifty minutes, and by the time they walked her out to her waiting ride, Saenz didn't know who or where she was. Unfortunately, it was the last chance they got to talk to her.

However, this is exactly the reason detectives want to record what goes on in the interview rooms. Saenz's deterioration was obvious for all to see. She was lucid at the beginning of the interview, although very talkative. Then later her words began to slur and sentences began to run-on to each other. While the interrogation went on, her cell phone began to ring, and it continued to ring throughout. She received at least twenty calls during the fifty-minute interview. At the end, she didn't seem to know what to do with the phone—turn it off, answer it, or just take it out and see who was calling.

Despite having to end the interview after fifty minutes, it was hardly a total loss. The first rule of interviewing a suspect is that if the person is talking, shut up and let her talk. A talkative guilty suspect will usually say things she shouldn't if she's just given the uninterrupted opportunity to talk, and Kim Saenz talked quite a bit.

Many young detectives are too eager and not patient enough to sit and listen, but Corporal Shurley and Sergeant Abbott sat back like the veteran police officers they were and simply let Saenz stick her foot in her mouth. One of the things she said in the interview was that she'd used a 10cc syringe to measure the bleach for the bleach pail. She said when she used a syringe, she'd pour the bleach into a cup then fill the syringe. She told them that the reason she'd done that was because with all the monitors watching at the clinic, she wanted to make sure that she measured it perfectly.

This surprised the investigators, who'd already been told by DaVita that this was something that was never done. So why, if Saenz wanted to make sure she was doing everything correctly, would she use a method to measure bleach that was not taught by DaVita and was, in fact, taboo?

Even more alarming was that, since the weapon used to injure the two patients was bleach, Saenz had just put a smoking syringe in her own hand.

She rambled on about things like loving her job, which they later heard from other sources was just the opposite, and without provocation, she even volunteered the fact that she had not used a computer to research bleach in dialysis lines or anything like that. That got the detectives' attention quickly, because it was that very morning that Kevin Saenz had told them about the Internet searches on bleach poisoning he had found on Kim's computer.

There were still other things in that interview that caught their attention. Saenz stated positively that two employees had to verify the testing of the dialysis machines when they were tested for bleach, and they always did. She had her opportunity to say right then that they didn't always do this, a position her defense attorney later tried to take, but of course, she didn't think that far ahead at the time. Another thing she told them that came back to bite her was that there weren't any measuring cups at the clinic that day—that the clinic was often out of supplies. Sergeant Abbott and Corporal Shurley knew this last statement was just plain false; everyone else they'd spoken to had said there was always an abundance of measuring cups on hand, and besides that, they'd been at the clinic the day before and knew DaVita had them on hand.

Saenz also informed them that she was taking a prescription drug for depression and had been on it for six weeks.

As she rambled on, she said other odd things—for example, that she thought the problems the patients at DaVita were having had to do with blood pressure.

It really left them scratching their heads when she couldn't remember the last day she worked, or the patients she'd treated, even though it had been the day before.

After Saenz left the station, both detectives now strongly suspected that she was guilty of two aggravated assaults. But both detectives were determined, despite their suspicions, to keep an open mind. They also realized they would have to dot their
i
's and cross their
t
's on this one, sensing that it was going to turn into a high-profile case.

Not that they had any idea, at that moment, just how big it would become.

For now, they focused on the great deal of work ahead of them. Besides the two witnesses they interviewed, they also interviewed all 130 DaVita patients to see if anyone else had seen Saenz, or anyone else for that matter, doing anything they shouldn't. But the hardest part of what they had to do was take care of the evidence they'd collected at DaVita. Besides the bloodlines that DaVita had stored in their evidence freezer, the detectives also took every vial of the clinic's heparin, a drug that helps prevent blood from clotting. Sergeant Abbott wanted to leave no stone unturned, as the old cliché goes. He didn't want a defense attorney to come back later and blame him for not collecting it, or to blame the heparin itself for the problems. That left those thirty sharps containers they had collected. The biohazard people only came around to DaVita every so often to empty the containers, and when Sergeant Abbott collected all of them on the night of April 28, they hadn't been emptied in a while. Most of the approximately thirty containers were at least half full, and Sergeant Abbott believed that they would need to test all the syringes.

Because of the sheer volume of needles the crime scene techs had to test and the equipment they had to wear to protect themselves from the jumble of uncapped dirty needles—they knew that some patients at DaVita had the AIDS virus—the process took days. The techs used small test strips, the kind most people use to test pools or spas. Sergeant Abbott's decision to test all those syringes no matter how long it took became the single most important part of the investigation.

One person Sergeant Abbott rightfully deflected credit to was Christy Pate, a crime scene tech who took part in testing the syringes. Pate was an attractive woman with blond hair and blue eyes, and born and raised in Lufkin. She'd graduated from Lufkin High School in 1990 and started work at LPD when she was nineteen years old. As a crime scene tech, her main jobs were to collect and maintain evidence, and maintain the custody of evidence—a vital role in an investigation. In April 2008, she'd worked for the police department for almost nine years.