Five Women Serial Killer Profiles (7 page)

On Thursday September 23
rd
,
,
Clarabelle Ruff took her daughter Rolinda to Dr. Holland’s clinic. The five-month-old girl had been suffering from diarrhea for two weeks. Dr. Holland said that Rolinda was suffering from dehydration, and she needed to be put on an IV line to replace lost fluids. Dr. Holland asked her nurse Genene to set one up. Genene then took Rolinda into the treatment room. Ten minutes later, Rolinda had stopped breathing. Gwen Grantner telephoned for an ambulance and warned the hospital that a code blue was on its way.

Word quickly spread around the Sid Peterson Hospital that there was yet another code blue coming from Dr. Holland’s clinic. This was the eighth
code blue in thirty-one days. This time when Genene and Dr. Holland arrived at the ICU with Rolinda, there were a number of other doctors there as well. An anesthesiologist, Dr. Frank Bradley, observed closely. He almost immediately recognized that Rolinda was coming out of the effects of a drug called
Anecitne. Anecitne, also known as
succinylcholine chloride, is a short-acting powerful muscle relaxant for intravenous (IV) administration that can debilitate a person’s normal breathing response.

Dr. Bradley confided his opinion quietly to the other doctors and reported to Tony Hall, Sid Peterson’s administrator. In the meantime, another doctor had heard about the large number of baby deaths at the ICU where Genene had previously worked. This was also reported to Tony Hall. An emergency meeting was called for the following day after the interview with Dr. Holland.

On Friday, September 24
th
, Dr. Holland found herself being interviewed by the top doctors at the hospital and the
administrator Tony Hall. She was asked why she thought so many children were getting sick at her clinic. Kathy Hall went through her notes one by one explaining each of the children’s symptoms and the treatments she had performed. She was asked if she ever used
Anectine
. She said no. She was asked if she had any in the clinic. Kathy said yes, but she never used it. She was then asked about Genene Jones and did she know about the incidents at the pediatric ICU in San Antonio. She told the doctors that the hospital had given Genene a glowing reference. As the doctors fired their questions at her, Kathy began to feel sick. Had she made a dreadful mistake in hiring Genene?

Following the interview with Kathy Holland, the doctors held their meeting. They decided a proper investigation needed to be carried out and that in the meantime Dr. Holland was not to be allowed to treat any more patients at the Sid Peterson’s hospital. They also decided that the law enforcement agents needed to be notified.

When Kathy Holland returned to her clinic on Monday September 27
th
, while Genene was out on her lunch break, she conducted an inventory of the drugs in the clinic. She examined the two bottles of Anectine; one of them had pinprick holes in the rubber stopper. Yet again, Kathy felt sick. When Genene returned from her lunch break, Kathy told her about her inquisition at the hospital and asked her to explain the pinpricks in the rubber stopper. Genene said the pinpricks had nothing to do with her.

Genene Jones

When the bottle of
Anectine
was later analyzed, the contents were found to have been replaced with a saline solution. Kathy fired Genene Jones
thirty odd days after opening her practice. Dr. Holland offered all the help she could give to the hospital investigation. She realized she had been naïve and stupid to trust Genene.

A grand jury in Kerr County on October 12, 1982 indicted Genene Jones on one count of murder and injury to seven other children
. Genene was arrested and held in Kerr County jail.

Chelsea's parents, Reid and Petti McClellan
, named Dr. Kathy Holland and Genene Jones in a wrongful death suit.

Another grand jury in San Antonio was assembled to look into a total of forty-seven children’s suspicious deaths at Bexar County Medical Center Hospital. They had all occurred over a four year period that coincided with Genene Jones's time at the hospital. In November
, the grand jury indicted Genene Jones for injuring Rolando Santos with a deliberate injection of heparin. She was suspected in the deaths of other infants, but the administrating staff at the hospital had destroyed pharmaceutical records, destroying the evidence needed to indict her and thus avoiding lawsuits that could potentially have been brought against the hospital.

Genene Jones had two separate trials. The first trial was for the killing of Chelsea McClellan and injury to seven other children. The prosecution claimed that Genene suffered from a hero complex
; that she needed to make the children severely ill so that she could be seen as their savior by bringing them back to health; that she craved the excitement and attention the emergency she had created brought. On the other hand, her defense team tried to prove that Genene was a competent, devoted, and responsible nurse. The jury was only out for three hours before they returned on February 15
th
, 1984 with a guilty verdict. Genene cried as the verdict was read out. The judge sentenced Genene Jones to ninety-nine years in prison.

The trial cost Kerr County a big part of its annual court budget.

Much of the same evidence was repeated in her second trial for injuring Rolando Santos in October of 1984. In this trial, Genene, who was age thirty-three, was also found guilty and sentenced to a concurrent term of sixty years in prison; the two sentences totaling 159 years in all.

Genene Jones came up for a parole hearing in 1994
; it was denied. Since then, she has applied for parole six times; all of them have been denied. She is set to be released in 2017 at the age of sixty six.

Dr. Kathy Holland still runs a pediatrician clinic in Kerrville. The parents of Chris Parker and Brandy Benites continued to use her clinic after Genene’s conviction.

Chelsea’s parents, Reid and Petti McClellan, were furious and incredulous at the administrators of Bexar County Medical Center Hospital not warning anyone about their suspicions of Genene and their total irresponsibility at giving Genene a reference thus allowing her to continue killing babies. They remain unconvinced that Dr. Holland was unaware of what Genene was up to.

Genene Jones was portrayed in a television movie Deadly Medicine (1991) by the actress Susan Ruttan. It is rumored that she inspired the character Annie Wilkes in Stephen King's book
Misery
.

Like Reid and Petti McClellan, I am astounded at the actions of the Bexar County Medical Center Hospital. More important to them than protecting the public and innocent babies from a serial killer
was their reputation and fear of law suits.

Aileen Carol Wuornos was born on February 29th, 1956 and is probably one of the most notorious women serial killers of our time. Much has been written about Aileen
; some of what has been written is true, and some of it is wrong.

What makes her stand out from most other women serial killers is that
Aileen killed with a gun, and her victims were strangers. The majority of women serial killers normally use poison and their victims are usually (but not always) acquaintances or family members.

Aileen was born to Diane Pittman, nee Wuornos, and Leo Dale Pittman in Rochester, Michigan. Diane Wuornos had eloped and married Leo Pittman when she was fifteen-years-old on June 3rd, 1954. Her parents had not approved of Leo. In February of 1955, Diane had a son named Keith. In June of 1955, Diane became pregnant for the second time with Aileen. By this time, Dianne was deathly afraid of her husband Leo. Just months before Aileen was born, he was arrested and imprisoned for raping and attempting to murder a young girl of seven. Diane divorced him shortly before Aileen was born.

The Author Terry Manners says of Leo Pittman, in his book
Deadlier than the Male:

Leo Pitman

Leo, who never met Aileen, was thought to be a schizophrenic and hung himself in 1969 while in prison.

In January
of 1960, Diane, unable to and not wanting to cope with two children on her own dumped five-year-old Keith and four-year-old Aileen on her parents, Britta and Lauri Wuornos, in Troy, twenty-four miles north of Detroit, Michigan.

Four-year-old Aileen

Six-year-old Keith

The Wuornos family had immigrated to the US from Finland. Their house was an unattractive, one-story, ranch-style home, situated among a cluster of trees on Cadmus Street, in a neighborhood of dirt roads. Lauri worked at the Ford auto plant in Detroit. Lauri and Britta formally adopted the children on the 18th of March in 1960 and changed their surname to Wuornos. They raised the children alongside their own: Barry and Lori. The children only found out their true identities when Keith was thirteen and Aileen twelve. They were both emotionally disturbed and distraught at the revelation
.

The Wuornos Home

When Aileen was six, while playing with her brother Keith and firelighters, she became badly burned and received permanent scarring to her face. Aileen, as a child, suffered from violent temper tantrums that would come seemingly out of nowhere.

Lauri Wuornos

According to Aileen, her grandfather, Lauri, abused her sexually and physically from an exceptionally young age and whipped her with a willow branch right up to the time he kicked her out of his house, and her grandmother, Britta, was an abusive alcoholic. The young Aileen quickly learned to blank out any emotions. During her time at junior high school, Aileen began showing signs of poor hearing and vision problems. The school recorded her IQ as 81, which is in the range of low dull-normal. The school wanted Aileen to receive counseling and tried to improve her behavior by giving her a mild tranquilizer to control her fits of temper.

Blonde, brown-eyed Aileen was sexually promiscuous at a young age. By the age of ten
, she and her brother Keith, who was her closest companion, experimented sexually with each other. Aileen was a happy and willing participant in these activities. Aileen’s attention then moved on, and she would sneak out of her parent’s house and make her way to a meeting spot the neighborhood kids called “the pits.” Here, at the age of only eleven and having just entered puberty, Aileen exchanged sex with the older students at Troy High School for cigarettes, drugs, and money. The boys treated Aileen with no respect and would call her names and ignore her in public. One of her friends from the “pit days” was Dawn Botkins, who ended up being the one true friend Aileen ever had. Dawn’s older brother was the best friend of Aileen’s brother Keith. When she was fourteen, Aileen found herself pregnant. She claimed an older man raped her. It is speculated now that a man in the neighborhood, known as “the chief,” may have been the culprit.

The Chief

Her grandparents sent her to a home for unmarried mothers in Detroit. Here, she gave birth on the 23rd of March in 1971 to a baby boy who was immediately given up for adoption. Aileen was resentful for years afterwards that she had never even been allowed to embrace her son before he was taken from her forever.

When Aileen returned home, she dropped out of school and spent her days hanging around the streets, drinking
, and taking drugs. It was the time of the ending of the Vietnam War, and drugs such as marijuana, LSD, mescaline, and assorted pills were easily accessible. Her favorite music was Led Zeppelin, Pink Floyd, and the Moody Blues. In July of 1971, her grandmother Britta died of liver failure. Aileen’s grandfather, no longer able to cope with Aileen or her brother, threw them out of the house. Aileen, now fifteen, took to prostitution to support herself through a bitterly cold winter in Michigan. She spent many nights sleeping rough in the woods in the snow near her home with a local cross dressing teenage transvestite. Other nights she would sleep in old abandoned cars and on, occasion, in a friend’s house. Occasionally, she would get lucky, and a client in exchange for sex would put her up for the night in a sleazy motel but for most of the time, it would be the woods. Troy’s climate during the summer is warm with temperatures tending to be in the 80s but during the winter it becomes extremely cold. She described this period of her life as a living hell. One wonders where the social workers where or why the close-knit community of Troy were allowing a fifteen-year-old child to live like this. This was supposedly a modern democracy, a caring Christian society, and not a third world country.

After two years
of living like this, she eventually began hitch-hiking around the country, supporting herself with petty crime and prostitution, trying to find a place to call home. She didn’t dress like a prostitute in high heels or leather skirts but wore more casual attire such as jeans or shorts and T-shirts. In Aileen’s mind, prostitution was the best that she could do, that is what she was adept at, and that’s what she could earn a living at.

Hitchhiking and
Prostitution

When she was seventeen and hitching, she stumbled across a headless, limbless b
ody of a woman. An image, she said, that constantly haunted her as she plied her trade along the United States highways. Treated as criminals in the United States, prostitutes if they disappear are far less likely than other people to be searched for by law enforcement officers, making them a favored target of predators.

On May 27th, 1974, Aileen was
jailed in Jefferson County, Colorado for drunken driving, disorderly conduct, and firing a .22-caliber pistol from a vehicle.

Following her release from jail, Aileen, now twenty
, hitchhiked down to Florida, seeking some warmth. Here, she was picked up by sixty-nine-year-old Lewis Gratz Fell, a blue blood Philadelphian wealthy yacht club president. Lewis fell head over heels in love with the young, strawberry haired, brown-eyed, buxom, 5’4’’ Aileen and proposed to her. He placed an announcement of their nuptials in the local newspaper society pages. They married in March of 1976; the marriage did not last long as Aileen, unable to restrain her temper, continually got into drunken fights in Lewis’s local bar and demanded money off him. Aileen also hit Lewis with his walking stick, which led him to take out a restraining order against her and to have the marriage annulled on July 21
st
of 1976.