Women Who Kill: Profiles of Female Serial Killers (11 page)

Aware that the net was closing in, Genene now took an overdose and told Kathleen that she’d done so. The clinic’s receptionist phoned the hospital and Genene promptly had her stomach pumped out.

A bewildered Kathleen sacked Genene and tried to keep her practice going, explaining to would-be patients about the recent fatalities. Suspicion inevitably fell on her as well as her LVN and she was subpoenaed by a Kerr County Grand Jury investigating the unexplained deaths.

Genene Jones was indicted for the deaths of two of her young charges by the Kerr County Grand Jury. (She was suspected of killing up to fifty.) That autumn she was also charged with endangering another baby’s life, that of Rolando, by injecting him with the anti-coagulant heparin.

She failed a lie detector test and appeared at last to recognise that she was facing a jail sentence. But she continued to refer to herself as a ‘good Christian woman’ and seemed increasingly steeped in denial. She insisted on protesting her innocence to the outside world, holding frequent press conferences that told journalists how wronged she had been. Her legal advisers were horrified at these acts of exhibitionism but Genene seemed determined to keep getting herself noticed, no matter what the ultimate cost.

But posing for local photographers wasn’t going to pay the bills so Genene started working at a nursing home, training nursing aides in basic patient care (Her
employers
made sure she had no contact with the actual patients at all.) One of the other aides was a nineteen-year-old youth, Garron Turk, who was clearly mesmerised by her strong personality. She could also be very sweet and loving and caring - and if he knew about her history he probably believed she’d been wrongly accused. Genene married him a month after meeting him and neither party informed most of their relatives that they’d wed.

He and Genene then disappeared for a few weeks and her best friend refused to tell anyone where she’d gone, including the authorities. When law enforcement personnel tracked the newlyweds down they had their van packed and looked ready to set off for a new part of the country presumably using her new surname, Turk.

The new Mrs Turk was taken into custody and was soon telling the prison staff that the shock had made her miscarry - but the blood she’d shed was really due to her menstrual period.

In January of the following year she was tried in Georgetown, Texas, for the murder of Chelsea McClellan. She had written in the child’s records that she would have given her life for her and had subsequently
attended the baby’s funeral. Chelsea’s parents had initially only seen her charming side.

But details of her strange temperament had subsequently come to light. Chelsea’s mother told of how she’d gone to her daughter’s grave and was amazed to see Genene Jones there, crying and rocking back and forward and saying ‘Chelsea.’ When the mother spoke to the nurse, Genene got up and wandered dazedly away.

Genene was charged with little Chelsea McClellan’s death and the trial began in January 1984. Acting on the advice of her counsel, Genene waived her right to testify. Her legal reps would later say that she was too easily upset, that she couldn’t be trusted to act in her own best interests whilst in court. As it was, she sat there eating sweets and glaring at witnesses, and generally making herself unsympathetic.

The jury were told that the prosecution didn’t have to prove why she’d killed the baby, only show that she had. They did, however, believe that the cause would be apparent. It was indeed clear that Genene had a massive inferiority complex and that reviving the children made her feel better about herself as it helped the rest of the hospital see her as a brilliant nurse. When she moved on
to work with Kathleen Holland she wanted the area to set up a special unit for critically ill children which she, Genene, and her new boss, Kathleen, would be the ideal people to run. Some medics suspected that she had deliberately caused critical illness in her patients in the hope that it would ensure such a unit was formed.

The prosecution also showed that the Code Blue emergencies had all occurred when Genene was around and that such levels of seizure hadn’t been seen before or since. They brought forth an expert who identified succinylcholine in the exhumed remains of Chelsea McClellan. They produced witnesses who testified that Genene would tell one person that she’d injected a young patient with one drug then contradict herself by immediately telling someone else that she’d used a different medicine.

Kathleen Holland testified that Genene had ordered succinylcholine then asked Kathleen to pretend she hadn’t. At this stage in the trial Genene wept. She had an odd attitude to her former boss, in many ways admiring her and wanting to emulate her yet at the same time feeling envious of her superior qualifications and success.

The defence tried to suggest that succinylcholine was found naturally in human tissue. They suggested that Kathleen Holland could have made clinical errors and used Genene to cover her tracks. (This, of course, failed to explain the numerous babies that had had
Code Blue emergencies under Genene’s care when she worked for Bexar - but she wasn’t on trial for the incidents at Bexar, only, at this stage, for the death of Chelsea at the Kerr County Clinic.) The defence tried to paint Jones as an intelligent and devoted professional and said that the charges against her hadn’t been proved.

But the jury recognised her continued danger to the public and in May 1984 she was sentenced to ninety-nine years in prison. Five months later she was charged with the attempted murder of Rolando, the child she’d injected with anti-coagulant, a crime for which she received sixty years. At thirty-three she started her sentence in a women’s correctional facility in her native Texas. Her second husband immediately filed for divorce.  

Shortly after her incarceration, prison officials asked her former employers if she was a suitable candidate to work for the prison’s hospital dispensary. Hopefully common sense made them say no.

Power seems to have been the strongest motive in this case, with witnesses to the babies deaths describing
Genene Jones as being almost sexually excited during a Code Blue emergency. It’s also clear that there was a Munchhausen’s element for this woman had often faked illness as a child and as a young woman before going on to use Munchhausen’s Syndrome By Proxy as her tool. With Munchhausen’s the patient invents or exaggerates her own symptoms in order to win the attention of the medics. With Munchhausen’s Syndrome By Proxy she causes or exaggerates the illnesses of her children and anyone else in her care.

This offender type has an overwhelming need for recognition. They also crave attention and have a strong desire to control others - nursing and half-killing little children satisfied Genene Jones’ many needs. She could tell the other medics what to do and then make Herculean efforts to save the dying infant. If she succeeded she was seen as a heroine and if she failed she could revel in the histrionics of rocking the dead baby in her arms whilst wailing loudly before finally carrying the little corpse to the mortuary. People who knew her said that she perpetually lusted for control.

It’s no accident, then, that Genene ended up working with an almost endless stream of helpless mute victims. Such offenders often take jobs in law enforcement and in nursing so that they can cause the frequent dramas they crave.

Such offenders are organised - Genene has asked for a lecture to be held on the uses of succinylcholine, the
powerful muscle relaxant that she would later administer to some of her patients. She learned about the paralysis it would cause to the muscles, the diaphragm and eventually the heart. She also knew that, appallingly, the patient remains conscious and knows that they’re becoming increasingly paralysed.

One of the themes that reverberates through this book is the fact that the murderesses invariably suffered as children before they went on to cause suffering as adults. Investigators didn’t look into Genene’s past too thoroughly as her widowed mother was ill by the time of her daughter’s trial and Genene said that the trial had almost killed the older woman. But investigators believed that there had been something strange in her childhood and Genene had told a friend she’d been abused.

Admittedly, she told many lies to make herself look more important. But her overwhelming need for control, her inability to identify with others and her huge swings between low self esteem and grandiosity are all the symptoms of a child who hasn’t been treated well. The authors of a book about the case,
Deadly
Medicine,
say that she may have acted out as a nurse what had been done to her as a child - that is, she’d been physically hurt and then consoled so that physical damage and love became unhealthily fused.

By the time she was forty-two Genene was eligible for parole but Chelsea’s parents and their supporters
campaigned
to keep her behind bars where she continues to complain about the inexperienced doctors and nurses she used to work with. She will next be eligible for parole in 2009.

7 Cold as ice

The merciless acts of Judith Ann Neelley

Judith was born on 7th June 1964 in Murfreesboro, Tennessee, to a Mr and Mrs Adams who already had a son and a daughter. After Judith’s birth, the couple would go on to have another two boys. Judith’s mother, Barbara, was a housewife and her father was a
construction
worker. He also did carpentry. All seven of them lived in an increasingly cramped mobile home in an impoverished part of the United States. They weren’t rich but they were reasonably fed and clothed and had access to a garden. There was also an adjoining wood filled with trees which the five children loved to climb.

Judith’s father was often away from the trailer, working hard. Even when he was home he seemed remote, but she loved him and would later say that he never hit her. When she was nine he started his own construction company, so the family income increased markedly.

Judith was a bright child who did well at school, and was confident of her academic abilities. She had
prominent
front teeth and was big boned, but her large eyes and long dark hair helped compensate for this, though she thought of herself as ugly. She liked playing with
dolls and when she grew up she hoped to become a nurse.

But when she was three months short of her tenth birthday, a tragedy happened that would change her life. Her father, who occasionally drank to excess, had a few drinks then went out on his motorbike and lost control of it. The bike veered to one side of the road and he was catapulted onto the pavement and killed instantly. Nine-year-old Judith was distraught to hear of his death, as was all her family. She had always been a quiet child but now seemed to retreat even further inside herself.

The Adams were now in financial trouble, for her father’s pension wasn’t enough to support six of them. For a while her mother, Barbara, found work in a
factory
, but then she had a car accident and had to give the job up.

Judith’s mother didn’t cope well with being alone. She started a relationship with a teenage boy and the courts charged her with contributing to the
delinquency
of a minor. She then bought a CB radio and began to make contact with many male strangers, calling
herself
the Indian Princess. (She was apparently half Cherokee.) Soon the men were turning up at the trailer at all hours of the day and night and they weren’t there to talk…

There was only a blanket dividing Judith’s sleeping quarters from that of her mum, so she could hear her
having sex with various men. Soon Barbara became a full time prostitute. Young Judith was disgusted. She often left the trailer and climbed her favourite tree, spending the rest of the night there dreaming more grandiose dreams.

She was equally unimpressed by her siblings, who now began playing truant and watching mindless programmes on TV all day long. The older ones also took to beer drinking. Judith rightly saw education as her way of escaping a life as trailer trash. She had the IQ and energy to achieve this and the world would have been a safer place if she had remained on the scholastic path.

The next six years passed in this way, with Judith fighting off her mother’s clients sexual advances. Rage understandably built in her. She’d come home from school and have to do most of the chores in the trailer then do her schoolwork, then listen to her mother having sex with yet another man. Determined to aim higher than this for herself, Judith rarely dated the boys in her class and defiantly remained a virgin. Still, she was desperately lonely and wished that her Prince would come.

Then, when she was fifteen she convinced herself that he’d appeared in the unlikely guise of Alvin Neelley, ten years her senior. He was a friend of one of her mother’s client’s, an overweight twenty-five year old and an obsessive user of prostitutes. He was
married with three children and had a criminal record. He had also abused his wife, Jo Ann.

Alvin got by on jokes and compliments. His IQ was much lower than Judith’s and he had no apparent ambition. But as history shows, if a person is desperate enough they will see almost anyone as their love object or their saviour, so Judith decided that Alvin had a nice smile, handsome blue eyes and that she was in love with him. She would say that they were so close that they were virtually telepathic. As Alvin wasn’t the most articulate man in trailer park land, it presumably didn’t take long to read his mind.

Judith’s day to day life involved endless chores. Alvin, with time on his hands and ownership of a car, represented fun and freedom. She was also impressed at his cleanliness as many of her mother’s clients were lorry drivers who hadn’t always had access to a bath. At five foot ten and strongly built, Judith was a frightening prospect for some of her mother’s male callers, but Alvin found her attractive and the sex was good.

He left his wife and fifteen-year-old Judith ran away to live with him. But life didn’t get much better than it had been in the trailer as they were reduced to sleeping in his car. The increasingly unkempt Judith soon became pregnant but miscarried. In a bid to find some kind of happiness, they started driving around taking casual work for a few days or weeks at a time. The would-be nurse now worked in convenience stores
alongside her lover and they made extra money by ringing up the wrong sale price and other illegal scams.  

They married in the summer of 1980 as by then Judith was sixteen and their relationship was legal. By this time she was pregnant again, and money was getting short.