Killer Nurse (9 page)

Pate was also one of the crime scene techs who had responded to the call to collect evidence at DaVita on the evening of April 28. Later, after she was told what was going on, her initial impression was what they were saying wasn't right—somehow they were missing something. It was just too outlandish to believe that a health care provider would inject her patients with bleach.

They'd collected all the sharps containers the night of April 28, a Monday. That night they stored them in the evidence room and Pate got a glimpse at the list of patients who'd died at DaVita, but they didn't begin to test the syringes until the next day. Because Saenz had told them she used a 10cc syringe to measure bleach, they were only checking the 10cc syringes. By Friday night, they had made their way through all of these syringes in the sharps containers, and had found a couple that tested positive for bleach.

That Friday, May 2, exactly one week after Ms. Opal Few died, and almost the same hour, Christy Pate returned to the evidence room by herself to recheck the sharps containers. For some reason she wasn't satisfied with what they'd done and wanted to go over it again. Pate said later that it must have been a sign.

On this morning, Pate picked up one of the containers and opened it. She could only stare. Right on top was a syringe with a patient's name on it—a name that flashed in Pate's memory. The detectives had been given a list of all the patients who had died of cardiac arrest while hooked up to the machines, and she recognized this name. Pate knew this syringe hadn't been tested, because it wasn't a 10cc syringe but a 3ml one. The 3ml syringes were way too small to use to measure bleach, and were only used at DaVita for small doses of a certain drug.

The patient's name on that syringe was Ms. Opal Few. With trembling hands Pate picked it up and tested it. What she discovered literally took her breath away. The test strip was positive for bleach. She grabbed the phone to call her boss, Sergeant Abbott. They now had a murder investigation on their hands.

CHAPTER
10

SIGNS OF VIOLENCE

The evening of April 28, 2008, the same day the two witnesses had accused her of injecting bleach into patients, a DaVita employee called Kimberly Saenz at home to tell her about the meeting that was to take place with all DaVita employees the next morning. Later, Saenz's friend and coworker Werlan Guillory called as well. He specifically asked her if she was coming to the meeting. She told him no. She was going to the Expo Center for her daughter's school field day. Guillory told her that they would fire her if she didn't show up.

The next morning, after the meeting at DaVita, which Saenz didn't show up for, and before she met with the police later that day, Guillory drove to the Expo Center to talk to Saenz and got a huge surprise. She was crying, her eyes were swollen, and her hair was disheveled. Besides that, she acted like she didn't recognize him even though he'd worked with her for almost eight months. When he asked her what was wrong, she told him she was having trouble with her husband and he'd accused her of hurting the patients.

When Saenz left the Expo Center, she returned home and received another call from DaVita, but this one was to tell her that she was fired. Saenz had accomplished one thing at DaVita—she'd worked there for eight months, longer than any of her other nursing jobs. However, her problems were far from over. That very afternoon, she'd had an interview with the Lufkin detectives that hadn't gone well at all.

Then around eight thirty that night, Bradley Baker, a Lufkin police officer, was called to a Tulane Drive address in Lufkin because of a dispute. When he arrived, he found Kim Saenz banging on the door of the house. The officer issued a criminal trespass warning, but since she appeared to be under the influence of something—her eyes were glassy and she was having trouble answering questions—he arrested her for public intoxication. Saenz spent the night in jail and was released on a $500 bond on April 30, 2008.

Kim Saenz had had trouble with depression for a long time, and according to her husband, when she went to work at DaVita, she not only was under a psychiatrist's care, she was also addicted to prescription drugs. He said that by that point in time, she was buying prescription drugs over the Internet, doctor hopping to get medications, and even stealing his medication.

During the time she worked for DaVita, Saenz's depression had worsened. She and her husband were having problems, and as before, it was highly likely that financial troubles were contributing to their marital strife. Prescription drugs on the Internet and at pharmacies aren't cheap, and neither are doctors who prescribe them. Besides that, she also had two children, who weren't cheap either.

When she got out of jail on April 30, Saenz came home to find that the problems with her husband had magnified. A week after Kevin Saenz had met with Corporal Shurley, he repeated his statements under oath. On May 6, in front of a county court at law judge, Kevin swore in an affidavit, “My wife is addicted to drugs and unable to function. She is violent at times and unable to drive a vehicle safely.” He went on to say, “My wife has been charged with public intoxication. I believe she is a danger to our daughter and to herself and should not be permitted to have possession or custody of our child at this time.”

The judge issued a temporary restraining order against Kimberly Saenz—the second one her husband had taken out against her. In that order, the judge listed thirty-two separate restraints. In many cases the wording of restraints in a protective order are standard, but one protective order does not fit all. The judge compiles the specific restraints to the cause of action that brought it before his court. In this case, the judge personalized the restraints by using Kevin's name. According to the order, Kimberly Saenz was:

• −
  Restrained from communicating with Kevin in person, by telephone, or in writing in a vulgar, profane, obscene, or indecent language or in a coarse or profane manner.
  
• −
  Restrained from threatening Kevin in person, by telephone, or in writing to take unlawful action against any person.
  
• −
  Restrained from placing one or more telephone calls, anonymously, at any unreasonable hour, in an offensive and repetitious manner, or without a legitimate purpose of communication.
  
• −
  Restrained from causing bodily injury to Kevin or to a child of either party.
  
• −
  Restrained from threatening Kevin or a child of either party with imminent bodily injury.
  
• −
  Restrained from visiting with a child in an unsupervised manner.
  

From the affidavit and the restraining order, it was clear to see that Kevin Saenz feared his wife. However, at the time the detectives didn't know that Kim had also told her former DaVita coworker Werlan Guillory that her husband had accused her of harming the patients at DaVita.

Kimberly Saenz was about to receive yet another blow. For almost three years, she had skirted the suspension of her nursing license in spite of her poor track record. From August 2005, when Woodland Heights filed the charges against Saenz's nursing license for stealing Demerol, she had worked as a nurse at Wright Choice Home Health, The Lufkin State School, The Children's Clinic of Lufkin, and the DaVita Lufkin Dialysis Center without those charges ever appearing on her nursing license.

Finally, on May 14, 2008, the Texas State Board of Nursing suspended Saenz's license.

* * *

Sergeant Steve Abbott realized that he needed help with this investigation, so he sought out Clyde Herrington, the Angelina County district attorney.

The DA's office worked well with the Lufkin Police Department and its detectives. Herrington knew Sergeant Abbott, and the fact that the detective supervisor who didn't usually handle a caseload was now investigating a case surprised him—but not nearly as much as the tale Sergeant Abbott told him. Herrington had been in the DA's office at the time for twenty-eight years, eighteen as district attorney, and though he thought he had seen and heard just about everything, never before had he encountered a crime like this one. After Sergeant Abbott finished telling him everything they'd found out so far, Herrington's first coherent utterance was, “Holy cow, that can't be true.”

It was the same reaction from everyone who heard the story. It was almost unbelievable anywhere, but especially in Lufkin. Things like this just didn't happen here.

What neither Sergeant Abbott nor Herrington knew at that moment was that things like this had never happened
anywhere
.

Herrington knew he would need every ounce of his experience for this case. He and Abbott were facing some serious problems with the investigation. As soon as Herrington began to look into instances of doctors, nurses, EMTs, or other medical people being accused or indicted and put on trial for killing or causing harm to patients, he found there were far more cases than he'd anticipated. Even so, however, these individuals were hardly ever convicted, owing to a lack of evidence.

As Herrington pondered what evidence they had and what to do with it, he began calling people to ask their opinions—medical and legal professionals, anyone who might help him. His apprehension about the case grew as he discovered that no one—or at least no one anyone had ever heard of—had used bleach as a weapon before. And there was still worse news for the prosecution. Herrington discovered that bleach doesn't act like other solubles in the blood: it rapidly mixes in and attaches itself to all the different components of blood and becomes undetectable.

At this point in the investigation, Herrington and Abbott were looking at two cases of aggravated assault on Ms. Risinger and Ms. Rhone, but Herrington also recognized another looming problem. Both his witnesses were getting on in age and were obviously not in the best of health to begin with. After talking to Dr. Nazeer, the medical director of DaVita, Herrington found out that the average dialysis patient lived only three or four years after starting treatment. From a legal standpoint, this was a problem because if the case was as extensive as it appeared to be, it could take several years before it came to trial. Without the witnesses, Herrington knew he might not have a case. He took advantage of a new law that allowed prosecutors to video a witness's deposition if there was reason to believe that health reasons might prevent that witness from testifying at a later date. He had Dr. Nazeer put the patients' medical conditions and the average life expectancy of dialysis patients in a document to him, and then used that as a basis to get video depositions of the two witnesses. This decision proved crucial in the long run—the case ultimately took four years to come to trial, by which time one of his witnesses had indeed passed away.

By this time, Christy Pate from the Lufkin crime scene unit had discovered Ms. Few's bleach-laden 3ml syringe, and the investigation tilted from aggravated assault to murder. However, the main question was if someone had murdered Ms. Few using bleach, what about the others on the list? Abbott had syringes and biohazard bags with other patients' names on them.

Herrington joined Abbott in searching for a lab that could handle their specialized kind of evidence. They needed to find a crime lab that could accept the bloodlines and syringes the police had confiscated from DaVita, test them, and tell investigators definitively that bleach was present in them.

At first blush, if Kimberly Saenz had indeed killed the DaVita patients, it appeared that she might have found the perfect weapon.

This lack of crime lab left Herrington with a dilemma. He might be able to convict Saenz on the first two aggravated assaults. They had two very good and credible eyewitnesses who would not be swayed from their testimony. They also had the CSU testing with the positive bleach results of the syringes found in the sharps containers, but since that testing hadn't been done in a laboratory setting with scientific equipment, and with trained personnel, it could be challenged in court.

They couldn't convict Saenz of Ms. Few's murder or any of them on the list—if she was guilty of them—without valid, scientific evidence. Herrington continued looking for someone to handle the testing. Finally, in the middle of May, just about the time Saenz's nursing license was suspended, Herrington uncovered a possibility that he'd never previously considered: the FDA, the Food and Drug Administration. The FDA had the only lab that thought they might be able to test the bloodlines and syringes to determine if a chlorinating agent were present. However, they weren't
certain
they could do it, and even if their labs did reveal a “chlorinating agent,” that would not be good enough in trial. They needed to be able to say that the lines and syringes held
bleach
. Herrington followed up with the CDC, the Centers for Disease Control, who said they thought they could handle the delicate medical analysis to determine whether the patients had been injected with bleach, and if so, what effect the bleach had on the ones injected.

Still, Sergeant Abbott exercised caution. Because of the unknowns in whether the FDA and the CDC could handle the tests on the possible evidence, Sergeant Abbott only sent the FDA Ms. Rhone's bloodlines and syringe. When the FDA was through with the evidence, they would in turn ship the evidence to the CDC to see if they could handle their part.

Abbott and Herrington had witness testimony of Ms. Rhone's aggravated assault, as she was one of the two patients whom witnesses claimed to have seen Saenz inject. (For some reason, DaVita had not kept the bloodlines of Ms. Risinger, the other patient.)

The report he got back from the CDC and the FDA on Ms. Rhone's bloodlines and syringe took some pressure off Sergeant Abbott and Herrington. These agencies found traces of bleach not only in the bloodlines, but also in a syringe that had Ms. Rhone's name on it. After these results came back, Abbott sent them the rest of the evidence to test, but he did it in a way that would be crucial. He sent the evidence as a part of a “blind study.” He sent fifty-one samples with no identifying marks except numbers marked from 1 to 51. Among the fifty-one was the evidence, and the lab technicians had no idea which samples belonged to the victims.

However, before they received the test results, Herrington discovered some other problems. After studying what other agencies had done with incidents of medical professionals accused of hurting their patients, one thing was clear: most of the convictions came not from a jury, but with a confession. Their best chance in this case would be to get Saenz to confess. By that point, there was little doubt in any of the investigators' minds that she was at least guilty of the first two aggravated assaults.

Fortunately they also had Sergeant Abbott's quick wits to rely on. Early in the investigation, using information obtained from Kevin Saenz, Abbott had obtained search warrants for Kimberly Saenz's home computer as well as her parents' computer. Her husband was the one who'd told investigators that his wife sometimes used her parents' computer—a habit that came back to haunt her. After retrieving the computers, investigators stored them until they could be examined by computer forensic experts. The results of the computer analysis chilled them. At 4:14 in the morning on April 2, 2008, the morning after the deaths of Ms. Strange and Ms. Metcalf, someone had done a Yahoo! search on bleach poisoning. This search was followed up on May 5, by “Can bleach be detected in dialysis lines,” and “Dialysis patient's symptoms of bleach poisoning.”