Eighteen-years for Missouri nurse who killed two patients

A medic suspected of murdering nine Missouri patients more than 20 years ago has been jailed after admitting the manslaughter of two people.

Respiratory assistant Jennifer Anne Hall, 42, was sentenced to 18 years on Friday for killing Fern Franco, 75, David Wesley Harper, 37, at the Hedrick Medical Center in Chillicothe.

The court heard that both were condemned to a ‘ghastly death’after they were injected with a drug that stopped them breathing during a wave of unexplained deaths during her five months at the hospital.

From December 2001, when Hall started working at the hospital, until she was placed on administrative leave the following May, there were 18 cardiac arrests or ‘Code Blue’ events, up from an average of one a year previously.

‘A sentence 20 years in the making,’ Livingston County Prosecuting Attorney Adam Warren said in a statement.

‘For now, we all sleep better knowing she is behind bars.’

Hall, who will be eligible for parole in 18 years time, served a year in jail for an arson attack on another hospital where she previously worked, a conviction that was later struck out.

She was always the prime suspect over the suspicious deaths because she was with the victims at the time and had access to lethal pharmaceuticals.

But in 2015 she told the Kansas City Star she wanted her name cleared, over the hospital deaths.

‘My name is just thrown out there, and it’s for horrifying reasons, I don’t want my character destroyed,’ she told the paper.

The case was revived in 2017 after an analysis of Franco´s tissue samples found morphine and a powerful muscle relaxant used in anesthesia in her system.

Neither drug was prescribed or ordered for her by her doctors, investigators said.

‘Hall’s victim was a sick, defenseless, elderly woman who was depending on Hall to care for her physical ailment within a medical facility,’ a Chillicothe police officer testified in the document asserting probable cause for Hall’s arrest.

‘The substance Hall used to brutally take Fern Franco’s life, succinylcholin, paralyzes the victim’s muscles, including the diaphragm, causing the victim to suffer a ghastly death from suffocation while still maintaining full consciousness and awareness that they are unable to breath.

‘Morphine also acts to suppress respiration and is not given to pneumonia patients for that reason,’ the officer wrote.

Harper was dead just three days after he was admitted to the medical center with bronchitis.

Police said the nurse told colleagues she found him seated on the edge of his bed when she entered his room, and that he complained about feeling ill before going into ‘complete respiratory arrest’.

Hall was found with a vial of succinylcholine in her pocket even though she was not certified to administer the drug.

‘Because of Hall’s singular proximity to stricken patients, her access to pharmaceuticals which are deadly if misused, and her discovery and method of notifying staff of every patient’s cardiac emergency, nursing staff believed Hall was responsible for the patient deaths,’ Chillicothe Police Officer Brian Schmidt wrote.

Hospital chiefs eventually put Hall was on administrative leave on May 18, 2002 – two days after the death of Franco, whom cops contend was the last of her victims.

She was arrested by Jefferson County police in Kansas in May last year, wearing a hoodie that pictured a ‘Care Bear’ and the motto ‘I just don’t f***ing care’.

Hall was initially charged with two counts of first-degree murder, but pleaded guilty in April to reduced first-degree involuntary manslaughter counts in the deaths of Franco and Harper, along with one count of attempted second-degree assault.

The investigation found ‘that Hall is exceptionally computer literate, capable of locating anyone’s personal information, and efficient at masking her on-line identity.’

The criminal complaint against Hall listed 34 state witnesses, all of them identified only by their initials.

Schmidt’s probable cause statement said the witnesses ‘expressed fear for their lives and the safety of their families if Hall were to discover their names and personal information.’

Aprille Franco, the granddaughter of deceased Fern, said she hopes the surviving relatives of Hall’s other alleged victims obtain some sense of closure.

‘I don’t want this to happen to anybody else,’ she said after Hall’s arrest.

She said her late father, Fern’s son, had long hoped for his mother’s death to be explained.

‘I’m doing this for him, and the families,’ she added.

‘They deserve justice.’

In 2010 a wrongful-death lawsuit was launched by relatives of five patients who died against St Luke’s Health System, a company which took over the hospital a year after the deaths.

But the Missouri Supreme Court struck out the lawsuit in 2019 citing the statute of limitations.

‘We, too, are only interested in the truth, and look forward to a final resolution of the investigation,’ St Lukes said in a statement.